Bone Saw's axe caught Malvick's already-cracked ribs, the same ones from twenty minutes ago, and this time he didn't just hit them. He found the fracture line with the axe's edge and dragged it, slow, watching Malvick's whole body lock up around the pain. The red fire in his eye sockets didn't flicker with the usual delighted rhythm during it. It held steady, fixed, the stillness of something watching rather than enjoying.
"There it is," he said. "Same spot as before. Getting tender?"
Malvick's answering swing was wild, uncontrolled, and Bone Saw let it connect against his own forearm just to laugh through the impact.
"HAHAHAHA. Come on. That's not even trying."
"Careful," Malvick said, voice raw. "Wouldn't want you to get bored."
"Oh, I'm not bored." Bone Saw's tone dropped, losing the last of its performance, and for a moment the cheerful lilt vanished from his voice entirely, leaving something flat and cold underneath it. "I'm just getting started."
He circled, unhurried now, red fire tracking every place Malvick's guard had already failed once tonight. He'd stopped moving like a man testing an opponent's limits and started moving like a man conducting an inventory.
"Left shoulder," he said, almost to himself. "Ribs, right side, twice now. That gash on the thigh's still weeping through the seal." He tilted the skull mask. "You've got a lot of open accounts tonight, General."
"Keep talking. Gives me time to breathe."
"No it doesn't."
He came in again, and this time the axe found the shoulder Malvick had dislocated earlier, still weak, still healing slower than the rest of him. The blow landed square on the joint and Malvick's arm went useless at his side, greatsword nearly slipping from fingers that had stopped responding correctly.
"Funny how that works," Bone Saw said, watching him struggle to reset his grip. "Body remembers every place it already broke. Makes my job easier."
"You're targeting old wounds."
"I'm targeting you." He tilted the skull mask, red fire flaring bright enough to throw shadows across the churned earth between them. "There's a difference, and you're about to learn it."
Malvick forced the arm back into use through sheer will, ignoring what it cost him, and drove forward with a strike aimed at the crack across Bone Saw's chest plate. It connected. The obsidian split further, black ichor welling up around the new fracture.
Bone Saw looked down at it and smiled.
"Good. Hit it again."
"Gladly."
Malvick did, and Bone Saw let the second strike land clean, absorbing it without defense, the plate cracking wide enough now that Malvick could see something pulsing underneath, dark red and alive.
"You're not even blocking."
"Don't need to." Bone Saw's laugh had teeth in it now. "I want you thinking you're winning. Makes what comes after land better."
"You won't get an after out of this. I'll make sure of it."
"There's always an after." He said it fondly, almost tenderly, the tone completely at odds with what came next. "You just don't know what shape it's going to take yet."
Malvick tried to press forward, to close the distance before Bone Saw could finish whatever he was building toward, but his wounded leg buckled under the effort and cost him the half second he needed.
Bone Saw noticed. Of course he noticed.
"See, that's the problem with fighting hurt." He circled once, unhurried, savoring the observation. "You keep making decisions like you're still whole. Your body disagrees with you more than you're willing to admit."
"I've fought worse than this."
"Have you?" The question came out genuinely curious on the surface, but his grip on the axe haft had tightened enough to creak against the obsidian fingers wrapped around it. "I don't think you have. I think you've fought people who respected the rules of a fair engagement. I don't respect those rules tonight."
He surged forward before Malvick could process the warning, axe reversing into a strike that opened a line across Malvick's thigh, deep enough to buckle the leg entirely. Malvick went down hard, catching himself on the greatsword, blood already spreading dark across the churned earth beneath him.
He got the leg back under him through raw force of will, the wound still open, his War Deity Physique fighting to close it faster than the strain of standing could reopen it. Bone Saw stood over him without finishing it, letting him take the seconds he needed.
"That's the thing about hope," Bone Saw said, almost gentle. "It's heavier when you take it away after. You should've stayed down."
"I don't stay down."
"I know. That's what makes this fun."
He drove a boot into Malvick's already-wounded ribs, sending him tumbling through the wreckage of a fallen tree, and this time the crack in his armor pulsed brighter, feeding on something that had nothing to do with the Blood Debt or any wound taken tonight. The obsidian plate seemed to drink the satisfaction of the moment itself, the red glow in his eye sockets flaring in sync with each new wound Malvick took, as though hatred alone had found its own way to run through the same channel as the domain.
Malvick came up spitting blood, one arm barely functional, blood running from a dozen places at once. He looked at the thing standing over him and felt something in himself shift, understanding, finally, that this had stopped being a contest of strength somewhere in the last several minutes and become something else entirely.
"You're enjoying this."
"Every second," Bone Saw agreed, and the cheerfulness in his voice thinned to something with an edge in it. "You took something from me once. I'm allowed to enjoy taking my time back."
"I ordered a retaliation. That's all it ever was."
"Say that again after tonight," Bone Saw said, and the red fire in his sockets burned low and dark for a moment, nothing cheerful left in it at all, "and see if it still sounds true coming out of your mouth."
Malvick opened his mouth to answer.
"FATHER!" Bone Saw's shout.
It cracked across the clearing, and Malvick barely had time to register the change in the air before Ren snapped his fingers.
The forest disappeared.
Malvick's vision reassembled itself around a space he knew intimately: Azareth's central command building, his own office visible through a shattered wall, marble floors he'd walked ten thousand times underfoot now. But the building sat off in every way that mattered, the air itself carrying a weight these halls had never held before tonight.
Hundreds of people filled the atrium.
He recognized every face. Officers he'd promoted. Aides who'd brought him coffee at three in the morning during crisis briefings. Guards who'd stood outside his door for years, close enough to know his moods, his habits, the specific way he took his tea. All of them stood in loose formation, hands clasped in prayer, robes replacing the uniforms he'd last seen them wearing, and as Malvick watched, every mouth opened at once in perfect unison.
"Namo Bhagavate Eon Tathāgatāya Arhate Samyaksaṃbuddhāya."
The chant rolled through the atrium with real weight, physical almost, and Malvick's stomach dropped through the floor as he understood what he was looking at. This wasn't hostages. This wasn't prisoners.
Converts.
His chief logistics officer, a woman who'd served him for eleven years, turned her head toward him with a smile too warm to belong to anyone under duress.
"General," she said, and her voice had a second voice underneath it, layered, patient. "Won't you join us? The suffering ends the moment you stop refusing it."
Malvick's legs wouldn't move.
Behind the officer, more faces turned toward him at once, dozens, then hundreds, the entire atrium reorienting like a single organism noticing the same thing in the same instant. His personal guard captain smiled at him from the second row. His communications chief, hands folded, nodded once in greeting like they were passing in a hallway rather than standing in the middle of everything Malvick had spent his life building.
Then the crowd parted.
Four figures stepped forward from the center of the mass, and Malvick's body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with blood loss or exhaustion.
His father. His mother. His wife.
They stood there in clothes he recognized, faces he'd known his entire life, and every one of them wore the same warm, patient smile the logistics officer had worn. His father's hands were clasped exactly as Malvick remembered him praying at dinner, decades ago, before any of this. His mother's hair was pinned in the same style she'd worn every day of his childhood. His wife stood with her chin slightly lifted, the posture she used when she wanted him to know she wasn't afraid, except now the fearlessness belonged to something else entirely.
"What did you do," Malvick said, and his voice came apart on the last word. "What did you DO, you bastard."
He saw red. He didn't remember deciding to move. He was simply moving, charging across the atrium toward the enormous figure suspended in the air above the crowd, the Knight of Madness watching everything unfold with black, endless eyes and a stillness that made the horror worse rather than better.
"Amitabha," said a hundred voices from the crowd at once, Eon's greeting threading through the collective chant like a single note held under a chorus.
Beside the Knight of Madness, Bone Saw's laughter carried across the atrium, delighted and merciless.
"I'm simply giving you a taste of your own medicine, General."
Malvick's father spoke first.
"Glory to the World-Honored One."
His mother's voice joined, perfectly synchronized.
"Glory to the World-Honored One."
His wife's voice completed it, three voices merging into one chord of devotion aimed at something Malvick would have burned to the ground with his bare hands if he'd had even a second more.
He didn't get the second.
All three heads came apart at once, a single wet detonation that painted the marble floor red, and the sound of it was the last thing Malvick heard with any real clarity before something in his mind simply broke, quietly, underneath everything else that was still screaming.
He screamed too.
It wasn't a word. It wasn't anything that resembled language at all, just raw sound tearing out of him with everything he had left, and he kept running, kept closing the distance toward the Knight of Madness even as his legs buckled and his vision blurred and his own blood ran freely down every wound Bone Saw had spent the last twenty minutes opening.
Behind him, Bone Saw's laughter rolled through the atrium, delighted, mocking, utterly without mercy.
"HAHAHAHAHA. Oh, that's the face I wanted. THAT'S the one. You should see yourself, old man."
Malvick was already past hearing anything at all.