He stood in the center of the crushing void, his blood spraying into the darkness, looking less like a man dying and more like a man who had finally found a reason to truly live.
He was delighted. He was ecstatic.
He was, in the most beautiful and brutal sense, experiencing the time of his life. "I want more! Hahahahahaha!!!"
"You're laughing?!" Cassandra's voice broke, a high-pitched, jagged sound that tore through the vacuum of the void. "You're standing there, bleeding out, and you have the audacity to laugh at me?!"
Her rage was no longer a simmer; it was a volcanic eruption. His sheer disrespect, treating his own near death as a delightful novelty, sent her into a state of pure, unmitigated frenzy.
She didn't just want to win anymore; she wanted to erase the smugness from his face. She wanted to grind his laughter into the dust of the shattered chamber.
"Then let's see how much you can laugh when there's nothing left of you to feel!" she shrieked.
