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The transformation took five minutes.
Ren felt the process work backward through him, the vastness collapsing inward, the sky closing behind his face until he stood on the ground again, mask cool against his skin, coat settling around his shoulders in its familiar weight. He rolled one shoulder. Checked the other.
A furrow pressed itself into the smooth white oval of his mask, the expression settling onto its blank surface as naturally as it would have settled onto skin.
He rubbed his chin and let the thought finish assembling itself.
So every Apostle of Sin gets distorted by their own Sin.
That much had been obvious for a while now, watching Bone Saw's cheerful relationship with violence, watching Retractor's calm certainty that consuming ten thousand people was an act of love. What he was getting in exchange was Legendary rank power in every one of them, which was not nothing.
But the logic each of them arrived at was extreme past any reasonable stopping point.
It's kind of creepy, Ren thought.
He shrugged.
Fuck it. At least they'll never betray me.
Bone Saw had gone quiet during the walk back, red eye sockets fixed on some middle distance, arms loose at his sides in a way that looked, for him, unusually still. Then something shifted. His head came up.
"OH." He started clapping, slow, deliberate, each impact of one armored palm against the other loud enough to echo off the rubble. "That makes sense, Retractor."
Retractor inclined his head, six arms folding in something that might have been a bow.
A twitch crossed the smooth white surface of Ren's mask, an expression that had no business appearing on a face with no features to make it.
Don't you dare agree with him. Are none of you right in the head? Behave.
He sighed out loud.
"Let's try to catch him," Ren said. "He transferred into one of the other Knights. We chase him down before he gets far enough that the trail goes cold."
Bone Saw and Retractor both nodded, immediate, no argument, the kind of instant compliance that would have been comforting from anyone else and was, from these two specifically, its own separate problem to worry about later.
. . .
Two streets over, Suture and the dragon had the Knight of the Moon locked into a losing position.
The Knight fought with visibly depleting reserves, blade work still sharp but the footwork starting to slip, small corrections that hadn't been necessary an hour ago. The dragon absorbed a strike meant for Suture's shoulder, bone cracking under the impact and knitting immediately back together, and Suture came in low with a construct blade drawn from the pooled blood in the street.
Beside her, Needle was finishing his own fight.
The Knight of the Star had been fast. Faster than her partner, better trained, and she forced Needle to actually work for the first thirty seconds instead of coasting on his third eye's read. He'd let her land two glancing strikes, tracking the pattern of her aggression, and then he'd found the gap in it: a half-second hesitation before every overhead swing, the specific tell of someone whose reflexes had been drilled by a teacher she still, on some level, respected.
He fed her a memory during that half-second. Not a construction. A real one, pulled from the Kong Shi's Eye's read of her own mind and pushed back into it at the worst possible moment: her teacher's disappointed face, some failure from years ago that she had spent a long time trying not to think about.
The hesitation stretched from a half-second to a full one.
Needle's hand went through the front of her helmet.
She stopped moving before her body finished registering that it should.
He withdrew his hand, wiped it once against his robe, and turned to check on Suture's fight.
That was when the Knight of the Moon went still.
Not dead-still. Suture's blade had been an inch from his throat and he wasn't reacting to it, wasn't reacting to anything, standing in the middle of the street with his sword arm slack at his side. The Knight of the Star's death had landed a few meters away, a Legendary-rank kill executed in under a second, and whatever was dormant inside the Moon Knight's body flinched at the proximity of it, a sleeper startled by a sound too close to ignore. Then his free hand came up and tore the helmet off.
He clutched his skull with both hands.
The pain hit him visibly, a full-body flinch that dropped him to one knee, and when he looked up his eyes had gone gold, the exact gold Gregory Hood's eyes had carried through Armand's body, unmistakable even at this distance.
He looked at Needle.
He looked at Suture.
His face went the color of old paper.
Then he ran.
He was fast, faster than the fight had shown him being a minute ago, sprinting away down the ruined street driven by something he had just remembered about the people chasing him, something that made every other priority secondary.
Suture and Needle turned to look at each other.
"That's a Gregory possession," Suture said. "Right."
"It appears so." Needle's third eye had already opened, tracking the fleeing Knight's mana signature through the rubble ahead.
Suture watched the Knight disappear around a collapsed building corner.
"Why did he look so afraid of us," she said. "He fought us like he had something to prove and ran the second he recognized who was standing in front of him."
Needle laughed, short and dry.
"Father appears to have left a lasting impression."
"Should we take that personally."
"I intend to."
Suture climbed back onto the dragon's shoulder. The bone structure shifted under her, patient, already oriented toward the direction the Knight had fled.
"Let's go catch that bastard," she said.
"Agreed."