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Moonlight struck the endless black glass and did not return. It slid across Henry's rising body and pooled in the fur that poured over him. Paws the size of market squares touched the plain with careful weight. When he drew a breath, the sound came back from far away. He was a mountain of white with silver eyes. The plain understood what stood on it.
The obsidian god avatar refused to be small. It reached both arms into the glass. The plain darkened under its grasp. The smooth black turned bone-deep, as if someone had poured night into stone. Slabs stood, tilted, and then flowed like cold lava into the giant's frame. A spine rose. Columns fused into legs.
The avatar drew a huge section of the plain into itself and grew until it was a rival peak, shoulder to Henry's shoulder, head to head. When it moved, the light inside its chest glowed red through thick plates. When it set a foot, the ground hummed a deep, felt note, not sound.
Irene stared up at the two of them and had to take a second breath before she could speak. "Old Hans," she said without taking her eyes off the wolves' shadow,
"if that thing falls in our direction, what do we do?"
"Make him fall the other way," Hans said attempt at humor. It was the only plan that fit.
Henry took a step forward. The plain answered with a ring of force, gentle and wide. It pushed outward from his paw and staggered the avatar long enough to show scale: even gods lose balance when a mountain steps near them.
"Moonfall Step."
He placed a second paw, then a third, then rose into a run. Each stride sent a shock ring across the glass. They expanded until they hit the obsidian mass and made it shudder at the joints. The brand he had laid earlier brightened inside the Wolf of Artemis domain and became a constellation mark, a clear star pinned in the avatar's chest. He could feel it even when the giant ducked a shoulder or turned to hide.
The avatar met him with pillars, with walls, with serrated planes pulled up out of the plain and slammed into his path. It carved the field with fast geometry: triangles that closed, teeth that caught, nets that seemed to hang from nothing. The domain washed them clear for a breath, showing seams for him to cut and gaps to step through.
The first impact was like a mountain meeting a mountain. Henry hit the avatar full in the chest. The shock lifted a veil of dust a hundred meters high and dropped it back in a slow curtain. He drove the avatar two steps, carved his claws down a plate, and felt the satisfying catch of a deep scratch. The giant gave ground. It did not give space. It brought both arms up and hammered them together against the side of his head.
Stone met bone. Half of Henry's world went black. The left side of his wolf face split from muzzle to ear. Teeth showed. Bone flashed white. One silver eye went cloudy and then cleared to a slit. He staggered three paces and set his weight before he could fall.
A groan ran through his skull. He tasted iron. He planted his front leg and felt something in the ankle grind wrong. He tried to step again and the joint refused. Pain ran hot, then cold. He stood.
"Artemis' Aegis."
Moonlight curved around his head like a new helm. It did not knit flesh. It took the bite out of the exposed nerve. It gave the cold in his open cheek a smaller place to live. He turned that calm toward the work.
The avatar pressed its advantage. It dropped its whole torso like a falling block. The edge caught Henry's injured foreleg. The leg snapped. The sound was short and ugly, a wet stick broken on a knee. Fur and white hide crushed flat. He went down on one shoulder, braced with his other foreleg, and his claws plowed four long trenches in the glass as he slid.
Irene flinched and took a half step forward.
"Stay," Hans said, and touched her elbow. It was the closest thing to a plea he allowed himself. He had watched men die on tables. He had never watched mountains break each other.
Henry tasted the ground. It tasted cold, like distance, like his own blood. The avatar lifted a leg as tall as towers and brought it down toward his spine. He twisted with everything he had left in the forequarters, rolled under the strike, and caught the leg with both hind paws. Tendons screamed. He shoved sideways. The leg's own weight became its problem. It slipped.
"Moonfall Step."
He stepped with his good foreleg and sent a shock ring into the giant's planted foot. The ring met the bone of the plain inside the obsidian and turned the footing slick. The second planted foot skidded. The avatar compensated with extra support a third leg pulled out of the plain, a thick brace grown in a blink. It set that brace wrong. The ring hit just as it touched down. The new leg cracked near the knee, clean and deep.
Henry lunged from his roll and bit down at the seam. His jaw closed on black glass that groaned like ice on a lake. His exposed teeth rang. The leg split. The avatar went down on one side, catching itself with both arms, and the plain trembled so hard that a spiderweb of hairline cracks ran across the surface and stopped just short of the low bank where Hans and Irene stood.
"Good," Irene breathed, and set her feet deeper.
The avatar answered by becoming less like a body and more like a storm. Plates slid and overlapped. Edges telescoped. A spiral of knives grew around its torso and spun like a slow saw blade. It rolled its weight sideways and slashed a long cut across Henry's chest. White fur blew away in a sheet. Beneath, the hide parted and showed red. Heat met cold and made a sting that tried to empty his lungs.
He did not let it. He kept breath, kept timing, kept the quiet in his head that hunting needed. He saw the giant's second leg plant, saw the crack he had made in the first leg widen with the shift.
"Sovereign Howl."
He raised his head and let a voice made for valleys pour across the plain. The howl struck the avatar like a truck. The red heartbeat in its chest stuttered and dropped a beat. One of the spells it had been holding a rule that told the plain to lean faded into a thin echo and then vanished. Henry let the howl end on a clean line. He stepped.
"Argent Beam."
He opened his mouth and breathed a spear of white light that cut a long, straight wound through plates and pride. It burned as it went and left a bright scar in the air that refused healing and polite tricks for a few heartbeats. The beam did not care about reflected planes or shield angles or the way the avatar tried to hide the constellation mark behind two thick plates. It found the mark. It marked deeper.
The avatar reeled a small motion on a giant frame, but human eyes still widened to see it. It answered in kind. A pane unfolded from its forearm and snapped forward, a straight cut across Henry's face that found the wound it had made and tore it wider. The left half of his wolf muzzle peeled away. Teeth showed in a clean rim. Bone breathed the night air. For an instant, sound vanished for him on that side. When it returned, it came with a high ringing from deep in his skull.
Hans whispered a short prayer without god or name.
Nox who wake up sometime ago, focused for one hard second and said
"Don't you dare lose…Henry"
Irene pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and tasted copper. She did not know if it was fear or the dust.
Henry stood on three legs and refused to be less. The broken foreleg hung, and every quiver sent a fresh line of pain into his chest. He planted the other foreleg and moved, not like a wounded thing, but like something that had decided the rules. He stepped, and each step sang.
"Moonfall Step."
Shock rings layered the ground and found the weaknesses he had cut earlier. The avatar tried to lift one leg and found there was no longer a leg to lift. The cracked brace gave way. Obsidian split into two broken stakes. The giant fell a full body length and caught itself with both arms. The catch drove cracks up through its shoulders and into the neck. Plates shifted. A seam gaped at the abdomen. Black blood, thick and glassy, poured out and smoked where it touched the plain.
Henry pushed his advantage. He did not jump. He could not. He walked through the wide danger, paw after paw, each step making the ground under the avatar's arms worse.
"Moonfall Step. Moonfall Step."
Shock rings rolled over shock rings, and the plain turned treacherous. The avatar's left arm slipped. Its right held, then slipped as well. It went down onto its chest, plates groaning against their own weight. The seam at the abdomen opened into a true wound. The red glow under the chest dimmed for the first time since the meteor. The black blood ran.
The avatar made a decision Henry could not see but could feel. It chose not to meet him as a body. It tried to bury him. The plain around Henry rose in segments, tilted, and fell inward like concentric doors closing. Each slab carried weight enough to ruin a city.
"Artemis' Aegis."
Moonlight curved around his back. The first falling plate hit the shield and slid, then shattered on the plain in a ring of shards the size of houses. He turned, shield still up, and walked a slow circle while the outer rings fell.
He kept the pressure on the avatar by stepping each time the shield took a hit. The rings found the lunar tethers he had laid in the last chapter his old Phantom Lattice had upscaled into cables of pale light and the tethers multiplied his shock waves. Every slab that hit echoed out and came back as another nudge at the avatar's balance.
The giant could not keep all of itself under control and still crush him. It chose to keep itself. The last ring of plates fell and left him standing in a crater of smooth edges and dust. The shield faded. His broken foreleg trembled. He lifted it off the ground and set it down again because the habit of balance refused to break.
The avatar crawled up on three limbs, one leg gone, the other brace cracked, both arms jittering under the load. It raised the right arm and extended a blade as long as a ridge. It left the blade where he would need to pass. It waited for him to make the wrong choice.
He made the hard one instead.
"Argent Beam."
He sent the lance of moonlight not for the arm that threatened, but for the thigh that held the weight. The beam bit deep and left a pale line through obsidian. The leg twitched and then gave. The avatar toppled to the side and lost its second leg to the wrong angle and its own mass.
For a long, strange second the world went very quiet. Both giants held still in the aftermath of motion. Black blood poured from the new gap in the abdomen. It steamed. It smelled like minerals and knives. The plain drank it and showed no stain.
Henry's breath sawed. His face was half gone. His foreleg was wrong and would not be right in time. The domain still held, but the price of holding it grew. He felt the weight of the form inside his bones, and the weight felt heavier now that victory leaned toward him. He understood what came next. The body he wore would not carry him any farther in this shape. The avatar had lost legs. He had lost a face and a limb. They had each spent the easiest part of this war.
He stopped.
The white fur shimmered. The light that had filled it went out the way a tide goes out: softened edges first, then the heart. The huge shape flowed down and in. The world climbed up him until it was human size again. He knelt on the plain as Henry, breath hard, skin white with dust and the cold the god had pressed into him.
Blood had dried in maps across his jaw and chest. Where his left arm should have been, there was a smooth, torn socket crusted in black at the edge and red at the center. The arm lay a dozen meters away, fingers curled as if holding a bow that wasn't there.
The obsidian avatar did not stay a mountain either. The mass it had stolen from the plain slid back into shapes near the ground, then into sheets, then sank like hard water. The giant drew itself inward. Plates compacted. It returned to the size it had been when Henry first met it, but thinner now, less sure. A huge, open wound yawned across its abdomen, and black blood poured out in a steady sheet. When it tried to pull the wound closed, the edges stuttered and stuck. The dull red light in its chest flickered. It reached for the plain for support, and the plain gave less than before.
Hans saw Henry's missing arm and curse.
Irene swallowed and dragged Nox back into a deeper shadow by his collar. She did it gently but quickly, without asking.
Henry pushed himself upright and steadied his breath. He reached across his body, drew a nightglass dagger from his inventory, and set it in his right hand, point down. Then he bent, picked up the second dagger, and took the handle between his teeth. He did not trust numb fingers. Leather and the taste of his own blood filled his mouth.
He spoke around the grip, voice rough but clear. "I can't lose yet." His gaze moved to the god. "My friend is behind me!!!!"
The avatar limped a step closer. Its center was off. A great wound gaped across its abdomen, pouring black blood that rippled a few meters and died. The smell dulled. The pressure in the air eased. Even a human eye could see it had grown smaller inside its shape.
Henry spat a red thread of blood, bit down harder, and lifted both blades one steady in his right hand, the other held in his mouth like a second edge waiting for its turn. On the glass, three figures stood in the reflection: a maimed hunter with twin knives, a god with a hole where its strength should be. None of them looked away.