The Spear of Longinus didn't just pierce the Titan's chest; it unmade it.
The "dead metal" tip, stripped of all atomic vibration, acted like a hole in reality. As I drove the shaft deep into the fusion of necrotic flesh and hydraulic steel, there was no resistance. The metal didn't bend; it simply ceased to cohere.
A shockwave of absolute silence exploded outward from the wound.
The Titan's grinding roar cut off instantly. The massive pistons in its legs locked up. The sawblade head spun down with a dying whine. The creature, this cathedral of violence, shuddered.
I yanked the spear free, black ichor spraying across my face, and looked up.
The Lord was staring at me. His green fire eyes were wide, not with fear, but with a sudden, violent curiosity.
Interesting, his voice echoed in my skull, no longer booming, but intimate. A whisper in a dark room.
He moved. Fast. Too fast.
His hand, cold as the grave and hard as iron, closed around my throat.
You carry dead things, he mused, lifting me effortlessly off the Titan's heaving chest. A dead spear. A dead soul.
I kicked, driving my boot into his wrist. It was like kicking a mountain. My vision blurred as he squeezed.
"Spatial... Compression," I choked out.
I didn't try to teleport away. I teleported him.
Or rather, I compressed the space inside his grip.
For a split second, his fingers overlapped with my neck in the same physical location. The universe hated paradoxes. It reacted with violent repulsion.
A blast of kinetic force blew us apart. I went flying off the Titan, tumbling through the air toward the hard earth. He was thrown back onto the creature's shoulder.
I slammed into the ground fifty feet below.
CRACK.
My left arm snapped. Ribs screamed. The taste of copper flooded my mouth.
But I didn't stop.
"Ryan!" I screamed, the sound gargling in my throat. "NOW!"
My son was crying, but he wasn't frozen. He saw his mother fall. He saw the monster rising.
Rage was a better fuel than fear.
Ryan unleashed everything he had. Not a beam, not a ball—a torrent. A waterfall of white fire poured from the wall, engulfing the staggering Titan.
Without its animating force, the dead metal reacted to the heat. The superstructure softened. The meat cooked and popped.
The Titan fell.
It collapsed like a demolished building, crashing into the barrier wall, shaking the valley. The Lord, caught in the inferno and the collapse, dissolved into a cloud of green mist, fleeing the wreckage before he was crushed.
Silence fell, broken only by the crackle of burning meat and my own ragged breathing.
You have wounded me, Little Gardener, the voice drifted on the wind, faint and retreating. You have made this... personal.
Then he was gone.
I lay in the dirt, staring at the grey sky, clutching my broken arm.
We had survived.
But the war had just begun.