In the wake of the Archon’s arrival, the Cathedral of Kaedmon shuddered.

  It was about to endure a battle the likes of which the people of Argwyll had never seen.

  Manus struck first. His raven form became intangible and then a new torso gushed forth, spreading six sinuous tentacles over Ethan’s throat as it landed with a wet thud on his head. The man had employed the ancient art known only to his people: [Totem Shifting], this time into the form of a Landsquid.

  The air popped as a forest of suckered limbs snapped tight around Ethan’s torso and wings, the suction sealing even through shadow, the cable-thick coils trying to drag the angel down and pin him to shattered marble.

  “Now!” Manus roared.

  Tangeon obliged. He didn’t run so much as he arrived, a living landslide, four eyes burning, pillar-turned-club already arcing down. Stone screamed. Air buckled. The blow would have caved a fortress wall.

  But it hit nothing.

  A mirror-sheen flashed across the Archon’s silhouette and the world rang like a bell. The pillar rebounded as if it had struck the heart of a star, a shockwave rippling outward, hurling broken pews across the nave. The giant’s wrists jolted numb; the club splintered in his hands. Repulsed. Refused. Denied. Ethan stood within a shrinking dome of refracted violet—the miracle that had rendered a thousand spells meaningless now turning raw force aside by habit alone.

  The warriors recognized the Skill – [Ethereal form]. S Grade…

  Manus heaved, trying to crush. Suckers tore at angelic light. Tendons creaked. Ethan’s reply was a murmur that somehow cut through gale and ruin.

  “Cute.”

  He blinked out of existence.

  There one instant—gone the next—reappearing ten meters away in the same breath, squid-limbs snapping back into empty air with a slap that echoed like laughter off the vaulted bones of the ceiling. He flowed through shattered pillars and tumbling chapels like smoke, teleporting clean through what remained of the apse; the cathedral’s ribs groaned, and a flurry of frescoes came down in a powdered avalanche.

  “GREYCLOAKS—TO ME! Let your fallen spirits cleave this demon!” Garviel’s voice tore itself raw as he charged, spirit-sword in both hands, the air around its edge silvering into something you couldn’t look at straight. Twenty more blades flared into being around him—giant, weightless points of pure will that shrieked at Ethan from every angle. [Arms of the Vigil]—the Church’s answer to demons and kings alike. Spirit strikes couldn’t be blocked. Everyone knew that.

  But Ethan didn’t have to block.

  A ring of translucent blades spun into orbit around him, ghost-steel interceptors screaming as they met Garviel’s conjured onslaught midflight. Spirit clashed with spirit in a shrill, bright cyclone, ricocheting in showers of faultless light as the ring expanded, parried, deflected. The Greycloak commander’s eyes widened—just a fraction—as his own heaven-forged swords were turned aside by a Skill that should not have been used against him: [Blade Barrier]. The only thing the Church had ever written down that could bend spirit without breaking. Ethan wore it like a crown.

  “Impossible…” Garviel hissed.

  The angel flicked two fingers. His barrier blurred—and then his justice answered. Ten tracking points of light flared over his shoulders and screamed away into the dark: the Vigil’s blades sung back by a truer choir. [Arms of the Vigil]—but in his hands now, each sword snapping from target to target, carving at wrists reaching for sigils, staking ankles mid-step, pinning cloaks to stone like butterflies behind glass. The howls that followed were the first honest sounds the Council had made in years.

  Tangeon roared and swelled.

  Stone-flesh went from fortress to mountain, shoulders ramming the ruined vault, four eyes flaring as his skin shifted into a sheen beyond iron. The giant was activating his greatest weapons: [Adamantine Flesh] and [Enlarge]. The cathedral moaned under the weight of him; outside, the city finally began to scream in answer—the wail of a hundred thousand throats rising as dust geysered through shattered transepts and the bell-towers listed like dying ships.

  He stepped—one stride, two—and punched.

  Ethan met the world-cracking blow with one wing. Feather became guillotine. The cut sheared through the giant’s wrist, bit to elbow, and would have finished the arm—if arm were just meat. The giant’s armored flesh was superior in terms of defense – and in the hands of the strongest beast in all of Argwyll in terms of raw damage output, the King of Giants could just as easily use it offensively.

  Tangeon laughed through pain, distraught and delighted, and backhanded the angel, cracking a nave pillar into teeth.

  Ethan bounced, righted midair, and exhaled a cloud of winter from his mouth. Tangeon’s fist froze mid-swing; the frost raced up his forearm in crystalline veins. Far above, a smear of flame launched from a Garviel’s blade guttered out as the cone swept it—and turned to cold fire under Ethan’s command, the heat becoming his weapon, no longer theirs.

  “Your tricks—” the giant grated, flexing until ice exploded from him in glittering shrapnel. “—are nothing but winds nipping at a mountain!”

  “Then listen for the avalanche.”

  Shadow bled from Ethan’s cross-blades again. The gale roared, targeting, choosing—ten at once. Every chain of darkness found a heart that had prayed for this order to hold. Every mind that had said we and meant me buckled under the weight of confusion. Cardinals stabbed cardinals. Greycloaks hacked at failing shadows that were their own. And Manus—already in motion—twisted as he fell, totem-ink boiling as raven collapsed into a wolf the size of a horse.

  Claws raked at Ethan’s back. White fur flashed, fangs closing on a wing-joint—

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  —and closed on air. Ethan turned intangible in the space between heartbeats, the wolf’s bite passing through him like breath through a dream, divine silhouette flickering into unreality. The blow that followed came from under Manus, not above—an upward sweep of a sword that wasn’t there until it was, catching the wolf’s chest and hurling him in a whirling tumble across the rubble.

  In the moment of impact, Ethan had channeled [Blink] and [Ethereal Form] in a deadly combination – one that simply nullified the Shapeshifter’s attack and sent more power than he held within his spirit right back at him.

  “Get up,” Manus snarled at himself, tattoos crawling to spider-black under torn fur. Now his Spider Form answered—eight legs punching into stone, abdomen flexing. He spat a skein of web that would have pinned a colossus.

  (Manus tries all status ailments and fails due to Ethan’s passive)

  Ethan’s wings snapped once. That was all it took.

  [Wing Buffet]

  The gust hit like a siege engine. Webs shredded; sthe limbs of Manus’s bloated spider were torn from his bulbous body like an ant being ripped apart by a sociopathic child.

  The Greycloak Commander then cut through the chaos like a spear. He had closed the distance while the world screamed—and he did not aim at head or heart. He cut for hands. He had seen the way the angel conducted reality with his fingers, and he struck to sever the orchestra.

  Wrath of the Righteous (Grade S)

  Effect: You sever any limb your blade touches – without allowing an enemy the chance to resist due to armor, status resistance, or speed.

  Ethan’s shields flared—too slow. The Greycloak’s spirit-edge shaved blood and light from the knuckles of the left hand. Pain bloomed. Ethan’s answer was not a scream.

  It was a verdict.

  A single blade dipped. A single word fell:

  “Silence!”

  The sigil on Garviel’s sword guttered. The commander felt it—like a tendon snapping in the soul—as a signature technique went dead in his grip. One skill deactivated. Five minutes.

  The light of his most powerful offensive measure simply guttered and died along his blade. Even Tangeon saw it, felt it – the Skill that had led to his capture had just simply been switched off like a light.

  He corrected without thinking, shifting stance, guarding close—but the confidence that had seen him through a hundred fights was suddenly, fleetingly mortal.

  Manus reared again—his form sputtering into a giant cave mole now, the floor roiling as he tunneled beneath Ethan in a blur, annunciation circling to ambush from below. The angel’s blade whistled through air, then vanished from his fingers entirely, whirling away like a hurled discus—then curving, homing, hunting—tracked not by sight but by the certainty of a bond that distance could not break. It plunged into flagstones, pursued the burrower like a shark beneath waves, and found him—bursting from the floor in a geyser of cracked tile and soil as Manus screamed and erupted back into raven, then man, then— squid again, desperate to smother the inevitable.

  Ethan opened his palm. The thrown blade sang back to it like a falcon returning to the glove.

  He uses Blade Magnetism, Garviel thought with a lurch of pain. The Skills of the Sword Saint obey him…without question.

  “THIEF!” The Greycloak spat. “How dare you turn the Skills of our Lord against us! The Allfather will see you burn tonight for your heresy!”

  Ethan simply regarded him with cold, cool detachment, the blood of three Elder beings splattered across his wings and face.

  “Kaedmon isn’t here,” he said. “Your Lord isn’t listening.”

  In response, it was Tangeon who let loose another roar of defiance. He was enormous now, a living bastion, his Adamantine skin laughing at steel. He raised a leg the size of a tower and stomped. The cathedral jumped. Buttresses cracked outward. Outside, Camoran’s streets erupted with new screams as dust-pillars broke through rose windows and sent saints tumbling into the gutters.

  Ethan sliced a sigil through the air. Ten phantom swords flocked around him once more—not to throw, not to parry, but to wheel a wall into existence as the stomp’s shockwave hit. Spirit met force, held, sang—and then the wall dissolved on his command, its points flicking outward to harry eyes and joints, to herd the giant’s attention where the angel wanted it.

  “Why do you toy with us!?” Tangeon thundered. “Just BLOODY DIE!”

  Light fell—sudden, invasive, and surgical. A beam of straight-line divinity lanced from Ethan’s free hand, carving through pew and fresco and the far transept, searing a perfect corridor through shadow and fog. The edge skimmed Tangeon’s cheek—by choice—and burned a trench into the city beyond, a quarter mile long. You couldn’t block the sun. You could only move out of its way.

  “Move!” Garviel rasped, yanking the giant by an elbow thicker than his torso. For one stunned second, Tangeon listened to a human—and the beam missed his eyes.

  He blinked, stunned by the betrayal of his own reflex. He looked at the tiny man whose sword had branded his mind with fear outside Westerweald. He looked back at the angel who burned their world into new lines.

  “I never thought,” the giant said hoarsely, “I’d stand beside a manling… let alone a Greycloak. Let alone you.”

  Garviel regarded the giant with a bloodied face of determination that spoke of nothing but a suicidal drive to win this, at any cost.

  “You aren’t allowed to die,” he told the flailing giant. “None of us are. Not yet.”

  “A rare thing,” the giant huffed, cracking his neck as he got right back into the fray. “A human who admits he’s fucked.”

  The roar that then issued from Tangeon’s gullet shook what remained of the rose window. He charged again, laughing and weeping, and Manus met him on the left—wolf once more, limping, blood in teeth and ink ablaze. Garviel cut right, spirit-edge returning as another gift of training lit up in his bones. The three of them struck together.

  Ethan’s answer was cold, clinical, and detached. His wings curled and then let fly a miasma of burning divine light, coated in the threads of violet corruption that pulsed through his plundered Host:

  [Shield of Aegis]

  A hush fell across a circle of ruin. For five perfect seconds, everything that touched the angel’s light simply… wasn’t. Marble dust froze mid-flight and fell as soft as snow. Spirit-swords that would have skewered gods flattened into harmless lines and winked out. The giant’s charge slid sideways, the wolf’s bite snapped on nothing, and even the gale muted to a sullen whirl. When the bubble popped, the world’s noise crashed back in with a meaning it hadn’t had a moment before: you cannot touch me, unless I let you.

  “ENOUGH!”

  Garviel flung his hand wide. Time hiccuped.

  And even the Archon seemed surprised to see the effects of Garviel’s secret weapon.

  Timestop (Grade S)

  Reality bends to the will of Kaedmon’s Greycloak Commander of the East, where the peace of the Allfather shall stop the feet of all heretics.

  Effect: All creatures in a 60ft sphere around the User's immediate vicinity are [Chrono-Frozen] for 60 seconds.

  This does not affect the User.

  This Skill has a recharge time of 1 hour.

  The crackle of flame became a held note. Dust motes hung like stars in a new sky. Every scream outside the cathedral clipped and collapsed into silence, as if a knife had cut the city’s throat and left the sound in its wake suspended. Tangeon’s next footfall froze an inch above shattered stone. Manus’s heartbeat tolled once—and waited for permission to beat again.

  Only the Greycloak commander moved, face drawn, eyes bloodshot, veins in his temples standing out like cords as he forced the world to obey a rule it had not agreed to. He stepped through the locked tableau, sword dragging a comet-tail of stillness in the still air, and leveled it at Ethan’s throat.

  “You’re right,” Garviel whispered, breath fogging in the motionless dust. “Perhaps Kaedmon isn’t listening.”

  He sprinted for his foe. In this moment of absolute stillness, there was no longer any hesitation.

  “But I think he shall hear you scream, demon. Now, my blade will finish you.”