The world folded inward.
Distance wasn't traversed; it was liquidated. Greed's golden claw didn't travel through the cold air so much as it demanded ownership of the space Kiron occupied, claiming the inches between them like a landlord enforcing a debt.
The static vacuum around the Primordial pulled at Kiron's lungs, threatening to rip the breath straight out of his throat before the blow even landed.
Clang.
Lament met the claw in a shower of dead spark and fractured gravity.
The impact carried no sound—the silent peak absorbed the thunder—but the shockwave rippled through the obsidian beneath their feet, spiderwebbing the ancient rock. Kiron's basalt boots dug deep into the stone, his muscles groaning under the sheer, absolute weight of Greed's pressure. It felt like holding back a falling mountain carved entirely of avarice.
"A simple blade," Greed hissed, his face inches from Kiron's, those tarnished gold teeth gleaming in the starlight that the throne was drinking. "Forged of grief and heavy stone. A miserable thing. Give it to me."
"It's not for sale," Kiron gritted out.
With a roar, Kiron shifted his center of gravity and drove his stone eye into the absolute focus of his soul-core. Basalt armor surged up his forearm, calcifying his flesh as he shoved Lament upward, forcing the golden claw off course.
Asha didn't hesitate. Behind them, her violet-veined wings unleashed a resonant hum that vibrated through the silent air, cutting through the void-like vacuum Greed produced.
"Kiron, don't let him touch your skin! He doesn't just cut—he takes!"
"I hear her, Grave-Son!" Greed laughed, a rasping, horrific sound that echoed inside Kiron's skull rather than through the air.
The golden staff in his left hand swept low, leaving a trailing wake of molten gold light that burned lines into the void.
"She speaks of taking! But what is taking, if not the truest form of devotion?"
The staff struck Kiron across the ribs.
It didn't break bone. It did something far worse. Where the golden wood hit Kiron's side, he felt a sharp, hollow *pull*.
The basalt armor plating on his ribs turned instantly from deep, dull grey to a sickening, lustrous gold—and then it dissolved, flaking off toward Greed's outstretched palm like iron filings to a magnet. A fragment of Kiron's very stamina, his physical density, was stripped away in an instant.
Kiron stumbled back, gasping, his side feeling light and strangely hollow, as if the meat and bone there had been replaced with air.
"Kiron!" Asha cried. She raised both hands, her silver-filmed eyes bleeding tears of brilliant, bioluminescent fluid as she tapped into her lineage.
A barrier of shimmering, fractured light snapped into existence between Kiron and the Sin, distorting the spatial tether Greed held over them.
"He feeds on acquisition! Every moment you fight him in his domain, you give him something to desire!"
Greed turned his skull-like head slowly toward Asha. His yellow eyes narrowed, fixed on the radiant aura spilling from her trembling hands.
"A remnant of the ancient blood," Greed whispered, his voice dripping with an insatiable, sickening awe.
"A blind bird with silver eyes and wings of forbidden hue. I do not have a bird like you in my cage."
"Keep your eyes on the King," Kiron snarled.
He didn't use speed. Speed was a spatial concept, and Greed owned the space around them. Instead, Kiron used weight.
He allowed the heavy, suffocating silence of the Throne of the First Age to flood his spirit. He dropped his guard, leaning fully into the crushing density that the Ferryman had warned him about—the cold stillness of the obsidian peak. His skin darkened to a pitch-black, dull obsidian tone.
Lament grew impossibly heavy, dragging Kiron's shoulder down, but as it dipped, the edge of the blade began to eat the ambient light just as the chair did.
Greed's claw whipped out to seize Asha, but Kiron swung Lament from below—a slow, brutal arc that carried the inertia of a collapsing cavern.
CRACK.
The blade didn't hit Greed; it hit the *concept* of the space Greed was claiming. The spatial tether snapped. The golden claw recoiled, the gold tarnishing instantly where Kiron's gravity-dense aura scraped against it.
Greed stumbled back two steps, his salt-crusted rags fluttering wildly as the absolute silence of the mountain rushed back into the gap Kiron had carved. The Sin looked down at his golden palm, where a deep, void-black notch had been carved into his metal flesh.
"You..." Greed's voice lost its dry, mocking rasp. For the first time, it sounded heavy. Metallic. Ancient. "You are using the Stilling against me. You are making yourself worthless to take."
"You want to collect everything?" Kiron stepped forward, his basalt boots leaving black, lifeless footprints in the rock.
His stone eye stared straight through the Primordial entity, void of emotion, void of warmth, void of anything a collector could ever desire. "Try claiming a grave."