Damon stepped off the wooden rail of the prow and walked straight toward the column of iron slats. The moment his leather boots touched the floating iron map that served as the floor, the Sovereign of Tactics engaged its matrix. The slats on its body turned with a furious, metallic click, and the hundred alternative panels around the ship began to converge upon Damon’s position. The predictive outcomes didn't wait for him to strike; they attempted to enforce their results simultaneously, trying to force his Level 138 vessel to accept the damage of a hundred different ambushes that hadn't happened yet. An invisible blade tore through his obsidian shroud, leaving a jagged gash across his right shoulder. A second, unseen force hit his thigh, trying to crack the porcelain plates of his right side through pure, simulated kinetic mom

Damon’s hand did not break. The war-eater iron of his arm did not split under the immense momentum of the general’s ultimate weapon. The silver-violet light-breaker runes on his skin flared with a binding luminescence, completely ignoring the slaughter-mana that poured from the blade. He stood on the broken basalt step, his boots locked into the stone, his left fingers clamped around the grey steel with a force that caused the rusted rivets on the general’s gauntlet to pop and fly into the air like gravel. "The strike... has no remainder," the Sovereign of Slaughter spoke, its wet voice stuttering as its internal martial circuits failed to find the leverage to push Damon back an inch. The red glare behind its slitted visor wavered, the heavy executioner’s sword trembling in its grip. "The ledger of carnage states that the flesh must accept the cut when the weight of a