"Oh."

"My grandparent likes their games, I suppose."

"He's kind of mad at Chaos for making things complicated," Zag explains in a stage whisper to Other Zag. "And he's having some emotions about the existence of two Zags and what he'll do about that."

"One Zag is enough. One Zag is too much, sometimes."

"That's fair enough," says Other Zag. "I don't mean to get between you two or anything."

"I'm not worried about that."

"No? What were you worried about then?"

"Doesn't matter. Shall we?"

"He means 'let's go kill some shades'," This Zag translates again.

"Sounds good to me," he says, grinning. "Be warned, I'm not nearly as good at it."

"By the way we share the kill counts," he tells Thanatos.

"—wait, no—"

But his handle on time had already begun to slip and once it resumes passing at its normal speed the shades start appearing and he can no longer protest.

Violence time? Violence time.

Thanatos's violence takes the form of "slow but certain". He sometimes dooms individual shades, and a few seconds after that they just die of no apparent cause; other times he dooms an entire area and then everything in it dies instead.

Zag steals kills, though, and in fact goes out of his way to kill one of Thanatos's targets so the kill will count in his favour instead.

It's not a very efficient murder method, overall, but he seems to be having loads of fun.

This Zag mostly leaves that sort of thing to the other Zag and just runs around doing normal murder instead, but occasionally he'll snipe a doomed shade if one crosses his path. It is fun.

The whole thing is less efficient than it could be but the addition of Thanatos does still make it more effective, and they're soon done with this wave of the dead.

"We win," Zagreus singsongs.

"You cheated." But he lands on his feet and produces two copies of the familiar heart-shaped enchanted jewel to offer the two Zags.

This Zag is not entirely sure he earned this, but he's hardly about to turn it down. "Thanks."

"I'll see you later."

Poof and he's gone.

"That's Thanatos all right. Not sure if it's the same Thanatos, but he sure rhymes."

"Damnation," he says without heat. "I'd hoped it would be more obvious if you met him. Oh, well." He brings the Centaur Heart closer to his own to absorb its vitality.

Zag does the same.

"If I had to guess I'd say he's a rhyme and not a - copy, but I don't know if that's just because we rhyme so it feels like that's normal."

"We don't know that it's not, maybe everyone just rhymes. Although our history is a bit too similar for that, hmm..."

"Yeah. Maybe we should be looking to see if we can find places where our history is different?"

"Short high level overview, thought Nyx was my mother, was taught how to fight by Achilles at Father's instruction, befriended Thanatos, Father had Meg 'make me into a man'," accompanied by a flash of anger crossing his face, "I trampled all over her feelings and she broke up with me, Father tried to instill a sense of discipline and responsibility in me by subjecting the poor shades in archiving to being managed by me, Nyx and Hypnos helped me find out about my mother Persephone, I confronted Father about her and he pretended not to know what I was talking about, I started trying to escape. Anything stand out?"