The Left Executioner lunged across the trench, its jagged black iron arm transforming into a long, serrated hook that caught Damon’s right shoulder. The metal tore through his obsidian shroud, burying its teeth into the glass graft. At the same time, the Right Executioner drove its hook into his thigh, the two constructs attempting to pull him apart, to use the physical leverage to centrifuge the human core out of his divine vessel."Melt the anomaly!" they roared, the gears in their chests throwing out clouds of red-hot shrapnel. "Return the porter to the base slag!"Damon did not pull back. He did not use the space-skip. He let the hooks stay in his flesh, his boots sinking an inch into the blackened deck timbers as he accepted the full weight of their leverage."Abyssal Shinen-ryu: Abyssal Friction!" Damon growled, his voice a heavy choral that froze the liquid steel in the trenches below.He didn't use his mana to fight the pain. He used his exhaustion. He reached deep into the re

The Warmaster’s Shadow did not wait for the unweaving. It advanced with the perfect, mechanical precision of a veteran general, its heavy black iron boots leaving burning red impressions on the stone apron. It held the twelve-foot spear with both hands, its body low, its center of gravity perfectly balanced according to the high-tier forms of the War-God's manual.It struck. The spear did not travel with the high speed of the ballista lance; it moved with an absolute, unyielding authority. The bronze point targeted the center of Damon’s chest, the strike carrying the collective weight of every legal execution that had ever been carried out beneath the walls of the fortress. Because of the Duel of Honor restriction, the spear created a conceptual certainty. The law of the domain stated that the strike must find its mark unless it was pa