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The convention hall was quiet now.
Everyone else was gone: the hunters, the court, the thousands of undead that had filled the space since the first day. The cracks Lu's finger-snap had opened in reality had sealed behind them and left the hall to these two alone. The bone throne sat where it had sat since the Overlord arrived, the cold that had been building in this space for two days settled into the floor like sediment. A hundred meters of open floor between them, and what had been a convention space three days ago was now a domain boundary.
Lu felt both domains the moment the last tear closed.
Blood and soul, he thought. Every death inside this space feeds him. Every wound feeds him. If this runs long, I lose regardless of what I accomplish.
Malachar the Pale Sovereign stood from the throne and came down the steps. He was not as tall as the Death Knight had been. His presence filled the room differently, not aimed at one point but spreading into every corner.
His robes moved without wind. The blood on the floor, the old blood from two days of occupation, had begun to creep toward him in thin lines.
They had spoken twice already. Terms discussed. Terms refused. Both of them knew what this was.
"This Lord expected no less," Malachar said.
Lu looked at the hall: the floor where Veyra had fallen, the indentation the throne had pressed into the stone, the walls still cold.
"Then let's not make it longer than it needs to be," he said.
He deployed the Spatial Domain.
The hall inverted. Not visibly: the floor stayed below, the ceiling above, the convention hall's structure unchanged. But spatially, everything inside Lu's range became subject to his reading. He felt every inch of the chamber: where Malachar stood, where the Blood Domain had thickened, where the souls embedded in the walls leaned toward him.
The Overlord raised the staff.
A Blood Spear formed from ambient moisture, three meters long and dark red, spinning at its tip. No blood on the floor yet to draw from. The Overlord threw it.
Lu moved the space between them.
The spear traveled thirty meters and arrived at seventy, its velocity bled by the added distance. He stepped aside. It passed close enough to brush his sleeve.
He compensates fast, Lu noted. The second one will be different.
The second was already coming. Seven this time, fan formation, covering a wider arc with no gap between them large enough to step through.
Lu compressed the space in front of himself.
The spears entered the compressed zone and slowed, velocity robbed by the spatial density.
He stepped sideways through the gap and sent a Space Blade back along the same vector, invisible, arriving at Malachar's left side from the direction of the wall.
The Overlord turned and caught it on the staff.
The blade cut the staff, not through but deep enough to leave a groove. The staff has limits.
"Space Law," Malachar said. The voice was neither surprised nor alarmed. "This Lord has not fought a Law practitioner in some time."
"What happened to him."
"Tedious."
The Blood River came from the far wall in a wave, corrupted and dark, spreading fast across the floor. The air above it went acidic. Lu felt it on his skin before it reached him, the domain already pulling at his vitality.
He went through the ceiling.
Void Walk through the ceiling, emerging above the blood wave and thirty meters ahead of where it was moving. He fired three Space Blades from above: downward, into the top of the Overlord's skull, the angle that armor and staff geometry covered least.
Malachar triggered Phantom Form.
Two of the three blades passed through him. The third caught something partially solid at the shoulder, tearing the robe, drawing something dark from the Overlord's shoulder that was not quite blood and not quite not.
The Overlord looked at his shoulder.
"First blood. Thou art fast."
"You're slower than I expected."
"This Lord was being courteous."
He stopped being courteous.
The Wailing Legion erupted from the walls simultaneously: hundreds of ghost soldiers, intangible, passing through solid matter, converging from every direction. They could not be cut. They could not be blocked. They produced fear as a physical force that pressed against the chest and throat.
Lu deployed Spatial Prison.
A cube of sealed space, fifteen meters to a side. Inside it, spatial law took precedence over the physics that made ghosts intangible, and those mechanics now answered to Lu.
They could not leave. They howled.
He held the Prison with one hand's worth of focus.
Expensive, he thought. Can't hold this and fight at full capacity.
Malachar sent the Soul Chains.
They came from the floor, from the old blood, from the souls in the stone. The chains were not physical: they wrapped around the Law pathways in his arm and began to close.
Lu felt them lock around his left arm.
The arm slowed. He felt the Law in that arm go quiet, the connection dulled, distant. His left hand's spatial sense dropped to thirty percent.
He released the Prison.
The ghost soldiers poured through the walls and dispersed, losing coherence without the sealed space to hold them. Acceptable cost.
Prioritize, he thought. The chains first.
He compressed the space inside his own arm.
He compressed the space inside his own arm. He had never used it this way in a fight: folding space inside living tissue carried risks he had only theorized about. The chains, built from soul-material, could not hold against space existing in two configurations at once.
They shattered.
His arm came back. He paid for it in a surge of pain that ran from wrist to shoulder, the spatial distortion leaving a bruise through the bone.
That was a mistake, he thought. One I won't repeat.
Malachar was already inside his range.
Two meters. The staff already descending. Too close for the domain to redirect the blow cleanly. Lu took the impact on both arms, the Void Walk carrying him backward thirty meters before the force could fully transfer.
His arms held. The bone at his left forearm felt wrong when he flexed. Not broken, but close.
"Thou art good," Malachar said. "This Lord acknowledges it."
"I don't need it."
"Pride."
"Confidence."
He deployed the Nine Heavens Spatial Kingdom.
He poured everything in.
Every spatial sense, every ounce of Law mastery, extended simultaneously into the hall. The space became part of his body. He felt it all: air, stone, blood, the positions of every living and dead thing inside the boundary.
And Malachar's Realm of Endless Blood and Ghosts fully activated in response.
The floor became blood. Actual blood, the stone transmuted by domain authority, the entire surface turning dark red. The ceiling darkened and ghosts pressed against it from above, hundreds, thousands, drawn in by the domain's call. The air thickened with fear-effect, a weight that pushed against rational thought.
Two domains in the same space. The intersection tore at both of them.
Where spatial law met blood-ghost law, the floor buckled in patches, the air shimmered and cracked. Blood rose from the floor at the domain boundary, caught between two competing claims, and stayed there, suspended.
Lu moved first.
Void Walk, nine rapid steps, nine positions around the Overlord in under a second, a Space Blade from each angle simultaneously. Nine cuts from nine directions.
Malachar triggered the Throne technique.
The throne erupted outward, blood and soul material expanding in every direction at once. A wave of pressure hit Lu mid-step with enough force to throw him backward through the wall.
He went through the convention hall wall.
The corridor beyond was dark and narrow, service access, and he caught himself against the far side with his left arm taking the main force.
The bone broke.
He heard it before he felt it. A sharp, final crack, and then the pain arrived with the full assessment: clean transverse fracture, two centimeters of displacement. His left arm below the elbow was gone from the fight.
He stepped back through the wall with a Void Walk before Malachar could follow through.
The hall had changed. The floor was knee-deep in blood now, the ghost domain fully manifested, shapes moving through the walls. Malachar stood at the throne's base, and his lower half was gone.
The Void Severance had fired at the moment of impact, automatic, executing from the momentum of the nine-position assault. It had cut through both domains and found something beneath.
Malachar looked at where his lower body had been.
The Scarlet Regeneration activated. Blood pooled from the floor and pulled back toward him, the lower half beginning to reconstruct: bones forming from blood-essence, flesh following, the process steady and unhurried.
Lu pulled the healing pill from his spatial storage and swallowed it.
The fracture resolved in twelve seconds. He felt the bone close, the pain recede to a manageable signal, his left hand coming back online with about seventy percent response.
They stood across the hall from each other.
Malachar's regeneration completed. He straightened, testing the rebuilt limb, and reached for the staff he had dropped. He picked it up.
Lu worked his left wrist. Seventy percent response.
"Thou art wounded," Malachar said.
"You were in pieces thirty seconds ago."
A silence settled between them. Not the silence of two people with nothing to say. The silence of two people doing the same arithmetic.
I cannot kill him without the soul core, Lu thought. Something smaller than a grain of sand, somewhere in that body. Every hit I land feeds him.
Two options: destroy everything so completely that the core is collateral, or find it. I can't do either right now.
Malachar was doing the same arithmetic.
"Space Law at this level," he said. "This Lord has not encountered it since the last age."
"Was the last practitioner worth remembering?"
"He died." A pause. "Eventually."
"How long did it take."
"Three centuries."
Lu looked at him.
"I don't have three centuries."
"No," Malachar agreed. "Thou hast until solar peak tomorrow. This Lord is aware."
They stood in the hall, two domains intersecting and tearing at the space between them, neither moving. The blood on the floor moved in slow orbits. The ghosts in the walls had gone quiet.
The clock on Lu's side was running. They both knew it.
Neither of them moved.
The blood continued to orbit between them, patient and cold.