Malvick's fist came around in a full swing aimed at Eon, close enough now that the monk's prayer beads should have been within reach.
Eon smiled, warm and unbothered, and simply wasn't there anymore.
The teleport left nothing behind, not even displaced air. Malvick's fist tore through empty space and kept going, momentum carrying him three full steps before he could arrest it. He stood in the wreckage of what had been his central command atrium, chest heaving, blood from a dozen wounds running down his face and arms, and something in him that had been holding on by pure discipline finally let go entirely.
If I can't reach the source, I remove everything standing between me and it.
He raised both hands.
"Battlefield Dominion."
The declaration tore outward from him in a shockwave of gold, and this time it didn't stop at the atrium's walls. It kept going, pushing out through the shattered building, through the streets beyond, expanding across the capital of Azareth in a ring that swallowed everything it touched.
Ten thousand soldiers stationed across the city felt it hit them at once.
"Every soldier of Azareth," Malvick said, and his voice carried through the declaration itself, reaching every barracks, every guard post, every checkpoint at the same instant. "You are conscripted. This is your battlefield now."
Something answered in ten thousand chests simultaneously.
Malvick felt them arrive, the connection Commander's Rally had always given him, except now stretched across an entire garrison instead of a company, the borrowed strength of ten thousand soldiers flooding into his own body in a single overwhelming surge. His wounds didn't close. But the pain of them receded somewhere he could ignore, replaced by something colder and infinitely larger than himself.
Bone Saw, standing across the ruined atrium, tilted his skull mask.
"Oh, that's not good."
"For you," Malvick said. "Not for me."
He didn't wait for a response.
He crossed the atrium fast, faster than his wounds should have allowed, ten thousand borrowed hearts beating in time with his own, and the axe came up to meet him.
They collided in the center of the ruined hall, and this time neither of them held anything back.
Malvick's fist caught the crack in the chest plate and drove through it, obsidian shattering outward, and for one instant he felt something underneath give way entirely. Bone Saw's axe found the same rib he'd already broken twice tonight and finished the job, the crack widening into something that ground audibly with every breath Malvick took after.
Neither of them slowed.
"You feel that?" Bone Saw's voice had lost every trace of its earlier performance. "That's real damage. That's not a scratch."
"I don't care."
"I know. That's the problem."
Malvick swung again, wild, uncontrolled, a strike that left his whole side open in exchange for driving his knuckles into Bone Saw's skull hard enough to crack the mask itself. He took the axe across his ribs in return, felt something in his chest genuinely tear this time, and kept moving anyway, kept closing distance, kept driving forward with a hatred that had stopped calculating anything at all.
Outside the shattered walls, the city began to answer his declaration.
Ten thousand soldiers converged on the atrium from every direction at once, boots pounding through streets that had never seen this kind of chaos, and behind them came civilians too, caught in the edge of the Dominion's radius, their fear and confusion bent by the Law into something that marched instead of fled. Malvick's Battlefield Dominion didn't distinguish between combatant and bystander once the declaration went out wide enough. It only recognized bodies that could be pointed at a threat.
Bone Saw felt the approaching mass through the domain the same way he felt everything: as fuel.
"HAHAHAHAHA. You want to bring the whole city? Fine." He raised his free hand, and the ambient red pressure in the atrium doubled, then tripled, spreading outward to meet Malvick's expanding Dominion at the edges. "First Sin," he said. "Throne of Endless Slaughter."
The mist thickened through every street ten thousand soldiers were currently running down.
The first deaths came within seconds.
A soldier at the front of the converging mass, caught between Malvick's compulsion to advance and something in Bone Saw's domain that turned proximity itself into a weapon, simply dropped where he stood, blood pooling from a wound that hadn't been there a moment before. Crimson Dominion claimed it instantly, the blood answering to Bone Saw rather than gravity, rising in a thin thread back toward the atrium.
Bone Saw's axe felt heavier in his hand. Better balanced. Hungrier.
"Every one of them feeds me now," he said. "You just turned your whole city into my domain."
Malvick didn't answer with words.
He answered by grabbing the axe head bare-handed, ignoring what it did to his palm, and using the grip to pull Bone Saw off balance long enough to drive a headbutt into the cracked mask. It shattered further. Bone Saw staggered, laughed through it, and used the stagger's momentum to bring his knee up into Malvick's already-ruined ribs.
Something cracked that shouldn't have cracked twice.
Malvick felt it and didn't care. He grabbed the front of Bone Saw's armor with both hands and slammed his forehead forward a second time, a third. Blood from his own split scalp ran into his eyes. Bone Saw let every single hit land, absorbing damage he could have avoided, because the exchange was pulling Malvick closer, and closer was exactly what he wanted.
Outside, the death toll climbed past a hundred.
Then past three hundred, as soldiers and civilians alike were caught in the widening collision between one man's compulsion to fight and another's authority over every drop of blood spilled trying to reach him. Buildings that had stood through decades of Azareth's history came down as the Throne of Endless Slaughter's domain physically reshaped itself around the mounting body count, streets buckling, the mist rolling thick enough now to blot out the moon.
Malvick felt every death through the Dominion, a small cold weight added to a total he had stopped being able to track accurately.
He didn't stop.
"You're killing your own city," Bone Saw said, delighted, driving an elbow into Malvick's jaw hard enough to snap his head sideways. "For me. Isn't that funny?"
Malvick spat blood and answered with a strike that opened the crack in the chest plate wider still.
"I don't care what it costs."
"I know." Bone Saw's laugh had gone quiet, almost fond. "Neither do I. That's why this is going to be fun."
He drove the axe down in a strike meant to end it, and Malvick didn't dodge. He caught it on his forearm, felt the bone give way entirely under the impact, and used the half-second of contact to drive his other fist, the one still functional, straight through what remained of the shattered mask.
Bone Saw's head snapped back.
For one full second, neither of them moved.
Then, somewhere beneath the mist and the screaming and the ten thousand soldiers still converging on a battle that had already killed more of Azareth's people than any war in the empire's history, Malvick understood with total clarity that he had stopped fighting to win a long time ago.
He was only fighting to make sure Bone Saw died with him.