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Gregory opened with the chains.
Divine Chains tore from empty space before Bone Saw's second step landed, gold links arrowing for every joint in the obsidian armor: wrist, ankle, throat, axe hand. Four targets, simultaneous. Three hit.
The fourth, Bone Saw shed with his free arm before the links could close.
"HAHAHAHA."
Then the axe was already inside Gregory's guard.
He got the divine staff up.
The impact drove through the staff, through Armand's arms, through the roof they were standing on. The crack ran eighteen meters in both directions and Gregory went through it, through the floor below, through the floor below that.
Three stories down in a warehouse. Dust everywhere. The taste of Armand's blood in a mouth that was not his.
"Be Bound."
He spoke it before the roof finished falling, Divine Decree pushing outward, pressing the weight of authority against Bone Saw's momentum. At Legendary rank it did not stop him. It compressed the air, made every step cost more than it should.
For half a second, the footsteps above slowed.
The roof split and Bone Saw dropped through it.
"Oh, that's a suppression effect! That's very smart, old man. I felt that!" He was still laughing. "I don't care but I felt it!"
The axe hit the warehouse floor where Gregory had been, driving a crater through concrete and the pipes beneath. The shockwave hit Gregory in the chest as he was already moving, deploying Scripture Armament mid-sprint: a chain-barbed spear, a greatsword for severing enchantments, a homing arrow locked onto Bone Saw's existence rather than his position.
The arrow crossed the warehouse in under a second.
It found the gap between pauldron and gorget.
Bone Saw looked at it.
He reached up and pulled it out.
"INTERESTING. Was that following my soul? Not my body, my SOUL?" He held the arrow up and inspected the tip. "HAHAHAHAHA. Do it again."
The wound's blood reversed direction. Rose. Collected. Sharpened into a spike and launched back at twice the original velocity.
Gregory caught it on the chain-spear. The spike detonated, punching both of them through opposite walls and into the street.
. . .
Bone Saw hit the cobblestones first, on his feet, bouncing once.
"BEAUTIFUL. Two walls! You sent me through two walls with that! HAHAHAHA."
Gregory landed rolling, already up. Three ribs in Armand's body were tracking differently. He set Golden Covenant while moving, filling the air with the judgment field. Every swing Bone Saw threw would build stacks. Gregory wanted seventeen.
Bone Saw came in immediately, no pause, driving Gregory backward through a market stall, through a wall, into an open street.
Each swing built the count. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Gregory blocked, deflected, took what couldn't be avoided, tracked the number.
"How many before you drop it on me?" Bone Saw asked, mid-swing, the voice cheerful enough to belong to someone watching a sporting event.
"Seventeen."
"I am at eleven. Twelve. Thirteen."
"Yes."
"You know what I love about you, Gregory Hood?" He came in again, driving the axe into the street beside Gregory's head hard enough to split it, wrenching it free and swinging from the other side without pausing. "You're honest. You told me the number. You're keeping count out loud. That's a man who respects his opponent. I respect that. I'm going to break your ribs for it, but I respect it."
Fourteen. Fifteen.
Bone Saw drove the axe into the street, not at Gregory. The cobblestones tore upward, a twenty-meter section lifted by Crimson Dominion, swung sideways through three buildings simultaneously.
Gregory moved. The debris took Armand's left arm at the shoulder.
The arm regenerated. Sixteen stacks.
Close enough.
Final Verdict released all at once, accumulated judgment collapsing into divine retribution that hit Bone Saw center-mass.
The shockwave peeled every remaining wall off three adjacent buildings. Bone Saw went through the city block, through the street beyond, through the building beyond that, trailing a line of destruction that took several seconds to finish settling.
Gregory stood in the silence and waited.
The dust cleared.
Bone Saw was standing.
Torn in half at the waist, lower body separated, obsidian ribs exposed, both eye sockets blazing. The blood that had left him hung suspended in the air in a perfect sphere.
"HAHAHAHAHA." The laugh came from the upper half, which was already moving. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
The sphere collapsed inward. Crimson Dominion pulled each piece of him toward the other, knitting frame to frame, the whole structure locking with the sound of stone grinding home.
"I felt EVERY SINGLE STACK." He rolled his neck, each vertebra producing a crack. "Gregory Hood, do you know what it feels like to have divine judgment compressed into your bones and detonated? It feels EXTRAORDINARY. I want you to do that again. After I kill you, obviously. But before that."
Gregory had needed that to work harder than it did.
"Good one," Bone Saw added, as an afterthought.
. . .
Gregory had been managing the geometry. Keep moving, deny Bone Saw long enough in any space to anchor Blood Debt chains. It was barely working. Armand's body was accumulating damage faster than the divine restoration could clear it.
Then Bone Saw picked up a building.
Not a piece of a building. The entire east corner of the guild district: forty-seven floors, reinforced to survive gate breaks and S-rank combat. Crimson Dominion had reached into the blood in its foundations, three hundred years of small wounds, spilled wine, burst pipes. The building came up from its footprint with the sound of a city tearing.
"HAHAHAHA. HAHAHAHA." Bone Saw held it above his head with both hands, the axe hanging from one fist, the other spread across forty meters of exterior wall. "Gregory Hood, look at this. LOOK AT THIS."
He threw it.
Gregory invoked Axiom Breaker targeting spatial abilities. The building could not teleport. It fell. He was already moving, deploying a Scripture Armament barrier that bought half a second before it shattered, and the building hit the street at the angle of something aimed rather than dropped.
KRRRAAAAABOOOOM.
The ground wave launched Gregory four hundred meters.
He came down in a market square. He stood up. Three ribs pressing against the lung now. The divine restoration was managing it slowly, with the strained effort of something pushed past its designed throughput.
The blood mist was denser than when the fight started. Eleven minutes of Throne of Slaughter. Every death feeding it. The obsidian armor had grown with each one, pressing against its own joints.
He invoked Heaven's Execution.
Two hundred meters of divine sword formed above the city, scripture rings extending across three city blocks. The targeting locked onto Bone Saw's existence.
Bone Saw looked up at it.
He went quiet for exactly one second.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
He raised both arms. Blood responded from everywhere: from wounds in cobblestones, from drainage channels, from collapsed foundations, rising in sheets, and Bone Saw shaped it into a dome three stories high over the entire block.
The divine sword descended.
KRAKOOOM.
The dome held one second. The sword drove through it. The impact crater was seventy meters across, deep enough to expose the sewers.
Gregory walked to the edge and looked down.
Bone Saw was on one knee in the center. Armor fractured across the left half, multiple plates gone, ribs showing, one eye socket dark.
The dark eye socket relit.
He stood.
Blood rose from the crater, rebuilding the plates.
"THAT," Bone Saw said, louder than he had been at any point in the fight, "WAS BEAUTIFUL." He spread his arms wide, addressing the ruined district around him, the frenzied hunters in the streets, the mist. "DO YOU SEE THIS? DO ALL OF YOU SEE THIS? A DIVINE HIEROPHANT IS TRYING TO EXECUTE ME. A LEGENDARY RANK DIVINE HIEROPHANT. WITH A SWORD FROM THE SKY." He was shaking with laughter. "I LOVE THIS JOB. I LOVE THIS JOB SO MUCH."
The pressure rolling off him was measurably heavier than sixty seconds ago.
Gregory ran the causality chain. Three Scripture Armament weapons remaining. Armand's body losing the regeneration contest. The Throne of Slaughter had been scaling through the entire fight and every death in the district had compounded the margin.
He reached into the district geometry and picked up what remained of the forty-seven floor building.
He threw it.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
Bone Saw caught it.
Gregory had not expected that to work. He had wanted to see what Bone Saw would do.
He had not expected Bone Saw to throw it back.
The building hit Gregory at an angle that bypassed three active scripture defenses simultaneously and drove him through the market square, through the market beneath it, through the drainage level, into bedrock.
He lay in the bedrock.
Armand's lung had stopped working on one side. His left arm was regenerating for the second time. The divine restoration was in emergency throughput.
From somewhere above, through several meters of rubble:
"DO YOU NEED A MINUTE? I CAN WAIT. THIS IS THE MOST FUN I'VE HAD IN YEARS. TAKE YOUR TIME. FATHER SAID TO KEEP YOU BUSY AND I AM ABSOLUTELY KEEPING YOU BUSY. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
Gregory ran the forward paths.
They were worse than twelve minutes ago. Substantially worse than six. Not improving.
. . .
Two streets north, Needle stood with his third eye open, fingers moving through continuous calculation.
"Give me something I can use," Suture said, from above. The dragon took three simultaneous impacts from frenzied hunters, absorbed them, dispatched two.
Needle's fingers moved.
"He shows no restraint at all," Suture said.
"No," Needle agreed.
"Needle."
"Two more minutes. I can see the string's structure."
Suture looked at the origin and then at Needle.
"Two minutes," she said flatly.
"Yes."
She turned back to the incoming wave. Dispatched three. The dragon held position, patient, dead, unhurried.
"Bone Saw," she said, to no one in particular, "shows no restraint whatsoever."
Needle's fingers stopped.
He had found the seam.