He ignored it.
He had one more thing to test.
He turned his attention down to his boots.
The polished black imperial leather absorbed the rising blood-energy along its surfaces, the mist cohering into a thin red gauntlet over each boot.
The blood did not stain the leather but instead armored it.
He took a step forward.
The first step left a dark red imprint in the cathedral hollow's crimson floor that did not fade, a small territorial marker, the element claiming the ground his foot had occupied as sovereign.
He summersaulted and swung his right leg.
The kick travelled in a long horizontal arc that cut through empty air, and from the arc itself, two long red blade-shaped crescents of solidified blood-energy launched with paired cracks like rifle reports stacked across each other — the crescents extruded from the kick's vector at the precise moment of full extension.
The crescents cleft the blood-field.
They reached the next frozen tree-line.
