Ren snapped his fingers.
A book appeared above his open palm, hovering there without support, its cover bound in cracked black leather that seemed to absorb the forest's dim light rather than reflect it. Gold script crawled across the surface, rearranging itself every time Malvick tried to focus on a single word.
"Descend into madness and depravity," Ren said.
The book fell open on its own.
The transformation started at his mask. The smooth white oval split down the center like a fault line, and beneath it his skin didn't tear so much as unmake itself, flesh drawing back from bone in patterns too deliberate to be damage. His black hair lengthened, curling wild around a face that stopped being a face at all: a crown of thorns punched itself up through his scalp, black iron fused directly into skull, each spike catching light and swallowing it.
His body kept growing after that. The tailored coat became a high ruffled collar, gold-trimmed and vast, framing a torso that had gone the color of old ivory, seams of black thread crossing his chest like surgical stitching holding something together that wanted very badly to come apart. Ten crimson tentacles unfurled from his back, each one longer than Malvick was tall, each one tipped with an instrument that had no business belonging to any surgery a living patient would survive.
Malvick's stomach dropped somewhere below his boots.
The Knight of Madness stood at nearly nine feet, robes pooling around him like something out of a cathedral built to worship an entity that had never once been merciful, and when he finally opened his eyes, there were no eyes there at all. Just black, endless and total, the kind of black that made looking directly at it feel like an act of trespass.
Book of Blasphemy. Chapter Four. Descending into Madness and Depravity.
The words didn't arrive through Malvick's ears. They arrived directly into the part of his mind that processed threat, bypassing language entirely, and something in that direct contact made his thoughts stutter, one coherent idea trying to survive contact with a concept his brain had never been built to hold.
He staggered.
Not from any physical blow. From the pure pressure of proximity, the specific vertigo of standing near something whose existence argued with the existence of everything around it.
Get up, he told himself. You are the Apex Warlord. Fear does not touch you.
His Battlefield Instinct fired, cutting through the haze, superhuman clarity flooding back into a mind that had, for one full second, forgotten how to be a mind at all. He forced himself upright, brass knuckles already sliding onto both hands.
But the Knight of Madness wasn't advancing.
He stood in the churned earth where he'd landed, ten tentacles coiling slow around him, and raised one hand toward the sky, a conductor's motion before the first note.
"Apostle of Wrath," he said.
One tentacle drove into the ground.
The earth split open along a seam of red light, and something came up through it that had never intended to arrive quietly: obsidian bone armor, a skull helmet with red fire burning where eyes should have been, an axe whose head alone was wider than a man's torso.
Bone Saw rose out of the ground laughing before he'd fully cleared it.
"HAHAHAHA. Oh, this is a good forest. Nobody around for ten thousand kilometers. Father, you shouldn't have."
"Try not to level the whole thing," the Knight of Madness said, and stepped back, folding his arms, ten tentacles settling into stillness behind him like something choosing to become furniture.
Malvick's eyes moved between the two of them. "You're not fighting me yourself."
"I already know what I do to you." The Knight's voice carried genuine, almost bored certainty. "I want to see what he does."
Bone Saw rolled his neck, obsidian vertebrae grinding audibly, and looked at Malvick with the specific delight of a man unwrapping a gift he'd been promised for a long time.
"Apex Warlord," he said, tasting the title. "Never fought a demigod class before. HAHAHAHA. Let's see what that's worth."
He crossed the distance before Malvick's Battlefield Instinct finished processing the first step.
The axe came down in a vertical arc that carried the full weight of a nine-foot Mythical-rank frame behind it, and Malvick caught it on crossed forearms out of pure reflex, the impact driving him a full meter into the churned earth. His bones didn't break. His War Deity Physique made sure of that. But the force traveled up through both arms and into his spine, and he understood in that single moment of contact that this was not going to be a fight decided by raw strength alone.
Heavier than anything I've traded blows with in years.
He shoved upward, redirecting the axe's momentum off to one side rather than trying to stop it outright, and used the half-second opening to drive an uppercut into Bone Saw's exposed ribs.
The obsidian plate cracked.
Bone Saw looked down at the crack with open delight.
"OH. That's got some weight behind it." He didn't retreat from it. He leaned into the next exchange instead, swinging the axe in a low sweep that Malvick had to leap to avoid, landing hard and immediately rolling clear of the follow-up strike that split the ground where he'd have landed otherwise. "Come on. Show me why they call you Apex."
"Law of War," Malvick said, forcing steadiness into his voice despite everything his body was reporting. "No healing."
The declaration pulsed outward in a ring of gold, sinking into the trees, the ground, the axe-wielding thing in front of him.
Bone Saw tilted his skull, red fire flickering in a pattern that might have been amusement.
"Ooh. Fancy." He raised the axe again. "Doesn't matter much to me right now. Haven't taken a wound worth healing yet."
He came in again, faster this time, and Malvick's Battlefield Instinct screamed a half second before impact, giving him just enough time to summon his War Manifest, a greatsword condensing out of pure battle aura, six feet of gold-edged steel meeting Bone Saw's axe head-on.
The collision flattened a hundred meters of forest in every direction.
Malvick's boots carved two furrows through the dirt as he held the line, the greatsword shrieking against the axe head, and for one full second neither of them gave an inch.
Then Bone Saw grinned behind the skull mask, red fire flaring, and shoved forward with enough sudden force to break the stalemate entirely, sending Malvick skidding backward through three fallen trees before he managed to dig his heels in and stop.
He came up spitting blood, forcing his ribs back into alignment through sheer application of his class's rapid recovery.
Stronger than anything I've faced below Legendary rank. Faster than his size should allow. Malvick ran the numbers with cold precision. But the axe telegraphs. Every swing commits fully. If I can bait one committed strike and get inside the recovery window, I have an opening.
Bone Saw was already crossing the distance again, axe held loose and low.
"Commander's Rally," Malvick said, and the aura pulsed outward from him alone, strengthening the only body it had left to strengthen. His stamina, bleeding steadily since the fight began, steadied under the borrowed endurance. It wouldn't last. It bought him time to think, which right now was worth more than the raw output.
He waited for the swing.
Bone Saw obliged him, the axe coming around in a full horizontal arc aimed at taking his head off, and Malvick dropped under it at the last possible instant, feeling the wind of the blade lift the hair on the back of his neck, and drove the greatsword up into the gap where the swing's momentum had carried Bone Saw's guard wide open.
The blade caught him under the ribs and punched clean through.
For one full second, Bone Saw stood there with six feet of steel through his torso, and said nothing at all.
Then he started laughing.
"Oh, THAT'S the stuff." He reached down with one hand and gripped the blade where it protruded from his back, and Malvick felt something through the steel that had no business belonging to a wound this severe: something closer to satisfaction than pain. "You know how long it's been since something actually got THROUGH? HAHAHAHA. Father's spoiling me."
He pulled himself forward along the blade, closing the distance the sword should have been keeping open, and swung the axe one-handed in a short brutal arc that caught Malvick across the shoulder and sent him tumbling.
The greatsword tore free of Bone Saw's body as he moved, ripped loose by his own advance, and hit the ground several meters away.
Malvick rolled up into a crouch, blood running from a gash on his shoulder, watching the wound in Bone Saw's torso close from the inside out, obsidian bone knitting back together in real time, the exposed flesh beneath sealing with a speed that made his own War Deity Physique look sluggish by comparison.
The Law isn't stopping that. It's slowing it, maybe. I can't tell from here. He filed the observation, cold and immediate. Either way, that's not a wound that's going to keep him down long enough to matter.
Bone Saw rolled his shoulder, testing it, apparently satisfied with the reconstruction.
"Alright." He hefted the axe again, red fire burning brighter than it had at the start of the fight. "My turn to actually try."
Somewhere behind them, arms folded, robes settling in the wreckage of the opening exchange, the Knight of Madness watched without moving, black eyes tracking every motion with the patient attention of something that had nowhere else it needed to be.