Malvick realized he was falling from a very high altitude, face down, roughly two seconds before the ground would have made the realization for him.
He adjusted his body on reflex, thirty years of combat instinct running ahead of conscious thought: feet down, knees bent, weight distributed through his core, the same distribution every landing since his first gate break had drilled into muscle memory. The wind tore past his ears loud enough to swallow every other sound. The ground came up fast, a canopy of green blurring into individual leaves in the last half second, and the impact hit a heartbeat later. He absorbed it through his legs, driving a perfect circle of caved earth into the ground beneath him, dust and displaced soil rising in a ring around his boots.
He stayed crouched a moment, breathing, before he straightened.
"Where am I?"
Dense forest surrounded him in every direction, the canopy thick enough that only fragments of sky came through. No roads. No structures. No sound beyond wind moving through leaves and something small skittering away from the crater he'd just made. He turned once, slow, cataloguing the terrain with the same discipline thirty years of field command had trained into him: elevation, sightlines, nothing that told him a single useful thing about how far he'd been thrown or from where.
Something hit him from above.
The kick landed square against his shoulder, and Malvick caught the foot on reflex, both hands closing around it before the momentum could throw him. He crushed down, hard, and the ground around them detonated outward in a ring, dirt and shattered stone scattering into the trees.
The figure that had kicked him flipped backward out of the blast, landing clean on both feet a dozen meters away: a knight in obsidian-red armor, a helmet shaped like a skull with red light burning in the sockets.
"Never expected to fight you, old man." The voice was cheerful, delighted, badly mismatched to the violence that had just happened. "Didn't think this day would come."
Malvick's eyes narrowed.
"Who are you."
The knight reached up and pulled the helmet off.
"Do you remember me now?"
Malvick's mouth twitched.
"I don't remember any of my soldiers being a skeleton."
"Ah." The knight looked at the helmet in his hand, turning it over, something clicking behind whatever passed for his expression. "Right. Forgot about the other layer."
He reached up again and removed a second piece, a mask shaped exactly like the skull beneath it, revealing the actual obsidian bone underneath.
"Do you remember now?"
Malvick said nothing. His jaw worked once, twice, the specific silence of a man recalibrating an entire situation in real time.
"Why the fuck are you wearing a mask that looks exactly like your face." He rubbed the back of his neck. "No. Your skull. Why does your mask look like your own skull."
"Ah." The knight looked down at the mask again, then at his own bare hands, then seemed to genuinely register the fact for the first time. "Fucking hell. I'm a skeleton now. Huh."
Behind him, a figure that hadn't been there a moment ago pressed a hand over his own mouth, shoulders shaking with the effort of not laughing out loud.
"Do you remember me." Ren's voice climbed with delight, the composure he'd been holding onto finally slipping. "Pfft. Take off the mask. Pfft."
"Not funny, Father." The knight sighed, long and put-upon.
"Okay. Okay." Ren cleared his throat, composing himself with visible effort. "Serious now."
He stepped forward.
"Hello, Malvick."
Malvick reached into his coat pocket and drew out a pair of brass knuckles, sliding them onto both hands with unhurried precision, a motion his muscles had performed a thousand times before.
"Why did you betray me, Greg." He stopped. Shook his head once. "No. I shouldn't be asking you that."
He looked at the knight instead.
"You skull-fucker. What did you do to my friend. Brainwash him? Mind control?"
"Father," the knight said. "He needs an answer."
"He's asking you, Bone Saw." Ren's grin didn't move an inch. "You're the one he pointed at."
"How am I supposed to answer that? I don't even know why he's asking."
"You could try honesty. It's novel. You might like it."
"I don't have honesty for this. I have confusion and mild offense."
"Hahaha." Ren wiped at one eye. "You're genuinely funny, you know that?"
He turned to Malvick, and something in his posture shifted, the last trace of comedy folding away.
He snapped his fingers.
The Replace effect canceled.
Malvick's stance broke instantly, brass knuckles still half-raised, his whole body freezing for one full second as the man in front of him stopped being Gregory Hood and became something else entirely.
"Who the fuck are you." His voice had dropped an octave, gone flat and dangerous. "What kind of brain-fuck thing is this."
Ren smiled.
"Wouldn't you like to know."
"Stop with the games and answer me."
"Hahaha. Well, well. General Malvick Siven." Ren spread his hands, palms up, the gesture of a man about to give a gift. "What I used is a skill. It replaces a person's existence and becomes them. My own ability. Legendary rank."
Malvick's brow furrowed, a hint of grief arriving before the fear could fully take hold.
"So Gregory is."
"I already killed him. Obviously."
"Why." Malvick's jaw tightened. "Why do this kind of thing at all. I don't recall we've ever met, you and I."
"You're right. We haven't. Not as strangers usually count meeting." Ren tilted his head, something almost fond crossing whatever passed for his expression. "But you've met one of mine before. Extensively."
Malvick's grip tightened on the brass knuckles.
Ren smiled wider.
"Perhaps this will fix your memory."
The white oval mask began to twitch, the smooth featureless surface warping, reshaping itself into a black plague doctor's mask with a long, curved beak. The suit beneath it darkened, the tailored black replaced by something rougher, older in style, a coat that sat awkwardly on a body that had never quite belonged in ordinary clothing. The fabric itself seemed to remember an older shape, settling into creases and wear patterns that hadn't existed on the suit a moment ago.
Ten thick red tentacles unfurled from his back, each one tipped with a surgical instrument, spreading in a slow arc that filled the space around him. They moved with an independent, unhurried patience, a spider testing the edges of a web it already knew would hold.
Malvick's eyes went wide.
"Nice to meet you again, soldier boy." The voice underneath the mask had changed too, colder now, carrying a weight the previous register hadn't. "I'm the Hollow Doctor. You can call me Ren."
He gestured, one tentacle pointing lazily toward the knight beside him.
"And this one. His real name is Major General Axel Krane."
Malvick's face came apart.
It wasn't rage exactly, not at first. It moved through several things in the span of a breath: recognition, disbelief, something that looked almost like hope before the hope died on arrival, and then, underneath all of it, settling in like something that had found permanent residence, the specific horror of a man realizing the subordinate he'd filed away as an acceptable loss was real, was aware, and had just spent the last several minutes calling him "old man" with genuine affection.
"Axel," Malvick said, and the name came out flat, steadier than anything he'd used with Gregory an hour ago. "Axel Krane. You were arrested. Interrogated. Central Command wanted every scrap of intelligence you had on the Doctor, and you gave up nothing, which told me everything I needed to know about where your loyalty actually sat." His jaw stayed set, still, giving nothing away. "Then the mantra hit the prison. Whole facility went dark. I wrote the report as a loss and moved on to the next problem."
"You wrote it as a loss," Ren agreed, pleasant as ever. "Efficient. And the retaliation?"
"What about it."
"His family," Ren said, nodding once toward Bone Saw. "Steven's family. Signed off in the same window."
"They were the family of a soldier who chose an unknown entity over his own Empire." Malvick's voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "That's not a tragedy. That's consequence."
Bone Saw had gone very still.
The obsidian bone that had been creaking with small, restless shifts a moment ago stopped creaking entirely.
"Old man." His voice had lost every trace of the earlier warmth. "Say that again."
"You heard me the first time." Malvick looked at him without flinching, without the smallest concession toward taking it back. "You made your choice in that district. I made mine in that office. Neither of us gets to pretend the other one made a mistake now."
"They were children."
"They were leverage the moment you decided loyalty was optional." Malvick's tone stayed level, administrative, the exact register he used for signing supply requisitions. "I don't apologize for protecting the chain of command. I never have. Ask anyone who's served under me."
"I am someone who served under you."
"Then you already know the answer."
Malvick's shoulders were square. His voice had held steady through all of it, a full register removed from the man Ren had spent the last hour watching mourn a friend with something that had looked like genuine warmth. This was a different man entirely, the one he apparently kept in reserve for subordinates he'd already decided didn't warrant the warmth.
He looked at the skull where a face used to be, at the red light where eyes used to sit, and offered nothing further. Nothing that looked like a man reconsidering. Just the flat finality of a decision he'd made a long time ago and had never revisited since.
Bone Saw looked at him a long moment.
Then something in his posture settled, the last of whatever had been holding out hope for a different answer finally letting go.
"Right," he said, quiet. "That's who you are, then."
He turned away, the red light in his eye sockets fixing on some middle distance instead, done asking a question he now understood had never had a chance of a different answer.