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Gregory Hood was airborne and confused.
Both of those conditions were new. The confusion was the more concerning one. He had not been confused since his twenty-third year, when he had invoked a causality chain without first understanding its full scope and spent four days untangling the consequences. Since then he had developed the habit of knowing things before acting on them, and the habit had served him well for three decades.
He had a fresh body. He had a Fated String in motion. He had launched himself through six floors of the Blinding Light Guild at a velocity that placed him somewhere above the guild district roofline.
And there was a mist.
It had come from above him, which was where things rarely came from, because he was almost always the highest thing in the area. The mist was black with a gold undertone and a red thread running through it that he did not have a reference for. It was spreading outward across the capital district at a rate that suggested either a large mana reserve or a very efficient deployment mechanism.
He had felt it coming before it arrived. Below the level of sensory input, at the register his connection to the Goddess used to process the world's deeper conditions. She had screamed.
A scream, not a signal or a carefully communicated threat assessment. The last time she had screamed like that was when the Apocalypse-rank entity descended forty years ago and half of humanity's population had been reduced to a number smaller than the one preceding it.
Gregory pressed his hand over his ear.
Blood.
"What," he said quietly, "is the source of this."
He conjured the staff. Light coalesced in Armand's hand, or the hand that was Armand's by biology and his by occupation, a shaft of concentrated divine authority that hummed with the Goddess's frequency. He held it across his body and scanned the mist.
The mist scanned back.
That was new too.
He became aware of the direction of the largest source approximately one third of a second before something hit his face.
It hit his face very hard.
The impact drove him backward through the air, his head snapping to the side. He felt Armand's nose break. He felt the cheekbone crack. He felt himself flying in a direction he had not chosen.
He hit the first building.
He went through the first building.
He hit the second building, which was made of better material than the first and resisted him briefly, and then he went through that one too.
He stopped inside the third building, in what had recently been an office, amid what had recently been a wall.
He lay there.
That was a punch, Gregory thought.
He had been hit by things that exceeded punching. He had been hit by Legendary-rank output before. This had been delivered by a fist, specifically, a fist in armor, at a velocity that suggested no suppression at all.
His face was already healing. The divine restoration trickled through Armand's biology, knitting the cheekbone, reconstituting the cartilage of the nose. He chanted the acceleration quietly, putting more throughput into it, and then pushed himself upright amid the rubble.
He looked for his attacker.
His attacker was standing on top of the second building he had gone through, which had apparently survived being hit by a Legendary-rank entity, and was looking down at him. The figure was large, armored in obsidian plate spiked at the shoulders and joints, and was carrying an axe whose head alone was approximately a meter across. The helmet was a skull. The eye sockets held a red light that had no natural source.
Even from here Gregory could see the blood-red mist rolling off the armor in sheets, thicker than the black-gold mist spreading from above.
"What the fuck is that," Gregory said.
Bang.
The fist again. He had tracked it this time, seen the figure move, and had still not been fast enough. It hit the reconstructed nose at the same angle as the first one.
Bang.
He was through the wall again.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
He stopped counting after the third building. He stopped being surprised after the fifth. He was in a street somewhere, surrounded by rubble and the emergency alarm cycle, and the figure in obsidian armor was standing over him with the axe at its side, the red light in the skull sockets burning bright.
Gregory lay on the ground and breathed.
"Kill," the figure said, with the cheerful enthusiasm of someone introducing a menu. "Slaughter. Tear. Blood. Rend. Shatter. Cleave. Burn. Break. Devour. Desecrate. Boil. Rip. Carve. Reduce to component parts."
A pause.
"HAHAHAHA."
Gregory sat up. His face had healed again, imperfectly, the divine restoration working around whatever this mist was doing to the local mana distribution. He looked at the figure.
"Who are you," he said. "Are you with the betrayer."
"HAHAHAHA." It bent slightly at the waist, which was not a fighting stance, and looked at him with the red-lit skull tilted at an angle. "HAHAHAHAHA."
Gregory waited.
The laughter subsided.
The figure straightened. It took a wide stance. It raised both arms slightly from the sides, the axe held loosely in one hand.
"I AM." A pause for weight.
The figure pointed the axe skyward.
"SON OF THE DOCTOR OF THE RUIN GOSPEL!"
It posed. Both arms out, axe raised, the obsidian armor catching the black-gold mist overhead and returning it as something genuinely dramatic.
"APOSTLE OF WRATH!"
Another pose. Different angle. The skull helmet turned toward Gregory as if checking whether this was landing correctly.
"BONE SAW!"
A third pose. This one involved the axe being held horizontally above the head.
Gregory sat in the rubble and looked at the figure posing in front of him. He had not been posed at in thirty years of operating at Legendary rank.
"You," Gregory said.
He looked at the axe. He looked at the skull helmet. He looked at the eye sockets blazing red. He ran a causality read on the being in front of him and the chain gave him the information in the order he was least prepared to receive it.
Legendary rank.
Heretic. Blasphemer. Madness World Parasite (must be eliminated).
Origin: @฿)&-&฿
"You are one of them," Gregory said.
The origin field had returned corrupted. His causality read had never returned corrupted before. In thirty years of reading chains, every entity, every cause, every thread he had ever pulled had resolved into legible data.
This one had not.
"HAHAHA." The red light in the sockets was steady and very bright, the Blessed Madness sitting in him like a furnace. "Father said to keep you busy."
He raised the axe.
"HAHAHAHA."
"Gregory Hood."
The axe came up to his shoulder.
"You killed good men and called it order."
He took a step forward.
"You built power on the assumption that your read was correct and everyone who died for it was the fair price."
Another step.
"I've been wanting to say that to you for a long time."
Gregory stood. The divine staff settled in his hand, the Goddess's frequency running through it, and he let Armand's body find the posture Armand had spent twenty years building.
He looked at the Legendary-rank Abomination Apostle stepping toward him with the axe raised, the blood mist rolling off it in sheets, the eye sockets burning with a light that had been listing atrocities thirty seconds ago.
He looked at the mist above, the source of the screaming, the thing that had sent blood running from Armand's ears before the first punch landed.
"HAHAHA," Bone Saw said. "Father will be here soon. I suggest you focus on me."
The axe came down.
Gregory moved.
Above them both, the black-gold mist continued spreading across the capital, and something above the roofline continued descending.