The fist landed.
He drove everything he had left into the convergence point at the Stormhorn's forehead, Luton's surface discharging against the skull with the particular force of stored essence returned to its source. Not Damien's power alone. The power the Stormhorn had been building in those horns for decades, collected across the fight in everything that had discharged against his reinforcement, held in Luton's surface and released now at the one point where the creature's own accumulated essence was most concentrated.
The impact was different from anything in the fight before it.
Not louder. Deeper. A resonance that traveled through the Stormhorn's skull and into the structure below it, the bone and the dense tissue carrying the disruption inward the way the captain's body had carried it inward, the creature's own power finding the systems it had come from and interfering with them at the root.
The Stormhorn's legs buckled.
