Craving.
That was the only word that existed in the space between heartbeats, the only truth that mattered as Emma watched Nastrod's fingers tighten around the living artifact's haft. The man catcher pulsed with a sickly dark light, its veined teeth writhing like the legs of a dying spider. The weapon was not merely a tool—it was a vessel, a conduit, a mouth that hungered.
And it was feeding.
Its teethy prongs expanded, snapping like ravenous jaws as Nastrod met the two Saints head-on. As the weapon flared with a sickening, dark purple light, its terrifying core function unlocked: Sensation Siphon.
Emma's Flow Perception flickered, tracking the invisible threads that stretched from Craving to the frenzied revolutionists scattered across the sanctuary. Each was a thrall, a node in a grotesque network, their pain, their fear, their very life-force siphoned through the veined tendrils and into the weapon's core.
The revolutionists fought like men and women possessed—because they were. A woman with a shattered arm swung a rusted cleaver with what remained of her hand, her face blank, her eyes glassy. A man with a sword wound through his gut kept advancing, his entrails threatening to spill, yet he showed no sign of slowing. They should have been incapacitated. They should have been screaming. Instead, they fought with the mechanical precision of puppets, their suffering devoured by the weapon that commanded them.
The siphoned pain and agony was then converted into raw, impossibly dense Flow for Nastrod. It was how a mere Votary could stand toe-to-toe with two Saints: he was channeling the collective pain and spiritual output of dozens of fanatical thralls directly into his baseline output.
"They can't feel pain," Emma muttered, his voice tight as he looked over his shoulder to observe how his men were faring.
Pihla, standing beside him, nodded grimly.
"They literally cannot feel agony. That's what the drug and whatever weapon he's using seems to have done to them."
"Which means they'll fight until they physically can't." Emma finished.
"Tch." Emma's jaw tightened
CLANG!
He brought his crystalized Grosse Messer down in a blinding overhead arc, but Nastrod raised Craving. The impact sent a shockwave through Emma's arms. He gritted his teeth, pushing forward, but Nastrod held firm.
The veined prongs snapped shut around the Messer's heavy blade, the weapons veiny teeth bit down hard against it and Emma felt something wrong, a pull, a drain as his internal energy was forcibly suppressed and disrupted, the living weapon actively stealing his Flow, as if the weapon were drinking his strength through the blade.
At the same time, Nastrod's left iris flared into the silver Celtic Five-Fold Knot—the Arcane Eye of Abatement.
The Eye of Abatement perceived every wound, every scar, and every trauma as taint on the soul's original blueprint. With focused intent, Nastrod could revert these blemishes to zero, unmaking a wound as if it had never existed. Bones knit in seconds; severed flesh reattached without a seam; disease was purged. And thus the wound of the revolutionists healed and they continued to fight as if they were never injured in the fiorst place.
But the unmade suffering did not vanish into thin air—it flowed entirely into Nastrod himself.
He experienced the compressed, agonizing physical pain of every wound he erased. He felt the emotional weight of every trauma, the despair of every dying soul settling in his heart like cold lead. He did not merely witness suffering; he became it. And that vast, terrifying well of lived experience was precisely why his combat instincts were so impossibly sharp—because he instinctively possessed the muscle memory and battle mistakes of every wounded soul he had ever healed.
Emma knew this, having fought alongside him all those years ago and with a grunt wrenched his sword free and jumped back.
"Pihla!"
"Already on it!" he replied having read his mind to get all the information about the Arcane eye and relaying it to their men.
They changed strategies, opting instead to knock the revolutionists out with blunt force. This was proving troublesome though as the revolutionists had the numbers advantage numbering in the dozens against the thirty enforcers. That and their lack of regard for themselves made it hard to knock them out.
Despite this, Pihla still continued to give them directions with mental prompts as she coordinated with Emma to take down Nastrod.
Emma deflected a blow from Craving and Nastrod lost balance. Seeing an opeining, Pihla's naginata swept in from the side, aimed at Nastrod's throat. He twisted, catching the blade with Craving's shaft, and the two weapons locked. Pihla's eyes narrowed. Using her telekinesis she pushed him back, freeing her weapon from his grip.
She suddenly staggered, feeling the feedback coming from their men she was linked to.
'Pihla?' Emma thought.
'The weapon—it's draining him from his followers. He's using their pain to fuel himself.' she sent to Emma through their telepathic link
'I noticed', Emma replied. 'This is very troublesome.'
He deflected an attack from Craving and responded with a double slash to the neck.
Nastrod sneered, flexing his left hand as a deep slash across his neck instantly closed without a scar. Simultaneously, three Enforcers on the perimeter gasped, deep gashes spontaneously tearing across their collarbones.
Emma didn't flinch. Activating his first Resonant—the power to manipulate time's flow—Emma targeted the temporal vector of the transferred damage. With a sharp flick of his wrist, Emma stole the moment the damage occurred on his allies, erasing the time in which the wound was inflicted on the Enforcers. The gashes on the soldiers vanished, though the sheer kinetic force of the spatial echo still rattled their armor.
Beside him, Pihla moved like a phantom. As a practitioner of the Phantom Blade Style, her combat philosophy was built entirely on deception, misdirection, and unpredictable illusion. She blurred across the stone floor, her Naginata weaving a dizzying pattern of feints.
'Enforcers, fall back three paces! Shift to defense!' Pihla commanded mentally while her physical body spun into a low sweep, her Naginata's blade whistling toward Nastrod's ankles.
Nastrod parried with Craving, but Pihla's strike was a feint—the blade dissolved into an afterimage, and her second strike whistled in from a completely blind angle, grazing his hip.
SCHLICK!
The wound opened, but before blood could spill, Nastrod's Eye of Abatement flashed, reverting the injury to zero and attempting to transfer the physical trauma directly onto Pihla and Emma.
Emma stepped forward, stealing away the moment of attack all while slowing down his movements to launch a counter strike in the form of a thrust. Nastrod spun and struck back and the floor under them cracked violently.
He then twisted the Craving, and the veined threads—hundreds of them, thin as spider silk—shot outward from the weapon's core. They lashed through the air like living whips, wrapping around pillars, slicing through stone, reaching for the Enforcers and Revolutionists alike.
Where the threads touched, agony followed.
Emma watched in horror as an Enforcer screamed, his body convulsing as the threads burrowed into his skin. But the scream was cut short—the Enforcer's eyes went glassy, his movements becoming jerky, mechanical. He turned and charged at his own comrades, his sword swinging with unnatural strength.
Pihla moved quickly, mentally severing the connection and knocking that enforcer out and using her mind to push his body towards the entrance where there was no fighting.
'Watch them.' She ordered the other enforcers while she did same for any others who were infected and even to the revolutionists. the number of revolutionists reduced as a result but the thirty enforcers now reduced to eighteen. They were still outnumbered three to one.
As they fought the chamber quaked and cracked but the two Saints didn't exert their full strength for fear that it would collapse a large portion of the old ruins and collapse a part or even the entire city above.
'Emma, I've analyzed his loop with my telepathy,' Pihla's voice rang inside Emma's head, her tone stripped of all levity as her Naginata parried a cluster of veined tendrils.
'His Craving relies on the network of agony he has created. As long as those crazed revolutionists are standing, he has an infinite pool of Agony Fuel and body-doubles to receive his transferred wounds. Furthermore, if we deal fatal damage to him, his eye of Abatement undoes it while feeding Craving. But if we isolate him—if there are no thralls left to act as lightning rods—he cannot transfer the trauma to us without us stealing the time or countering it directly!'
'Think you can do it?' Emma responded mentally, his Messer executing a flawless redirection to knock Craving's iron prongs off-target.
'Watch me,' Pihla replied with a faint smile.
To break the stalemate, both Saints simultaneously elevated their spiritual perception, stepping across the threshold of the Notion Layer and entering the elusive, divine state known as Flowstate.
In Flowstate, the world slowed to a absolute crawl. Every vibration of ambient Flow, every line of kinetic momentum, and every spiritual thread connecting Craving to its thralls became starkly visible, like glowing threads in a dark tapestry. Their control over Flow refined to absolute perfection, allowing them to exert immense force with pinpoint, localized micro-efficiency.
Pihla disengaged from the altar in a blur of misdirection, leaving behind a lingering Flow-clone that feigned a high thrust. Nastrod's living mancatcher snapped at the illusion, giving Pihla the exact opening she required.
Landing near the center of the sanctuary, Pihla planted the butt of her Naginata into the stone. She gathered her entire psychic reserve, unleashing a localized, high-frequency Aoe Mindblast.
BOOM!
A silent, invisible wave of crushing psychic force detonated outward from her frame. It didn't damage the stone or rattle the ceiling, but it swept directly through the brains of every single revolutionist and Enforcer in the room.
The the remaining frenzied revolutionists dropped like stones, their eyes rolling back as their nervous systems were instantly rendered comatose.
To protect her own strike force, Pihla embedded a precise mental timer into the Mindblast for the Enforcers: her soldiers were knocked unconscious for exactly four seconds before their conditioned mental barriers snapped them awake, primed with a direct mental instruction to immediately bind and round up the fallen cultists before they could recover.
With the thralls severed, Emma cut the all the veined tendrils and using the same momentum, slowed down Nastrod's movement while unleashing a storm of cuts on his body.
Pihla kept up the chain attack and thrust her arm forward, hurling her heavy Naginata with supersonic velocity straight at the platform.
She tapped into the conceptual Notion Layer, imbuing the spear with a single, absolute command:
'My blade will pierce the thing I am trying to hit, That is Nastrod '
THWACK!
Without anyone to transfer to, Nastrod remained isolated and the Naginata pierced straight through his left shoulder, pinning him violently against the ancient stone altar behind him.
"Gah!" Nastrod choked, his eyes wideninwg in genuine shock as blood squirted over his patchwork cloak.
Pihla psychically pulled the weapon back into her hand and the revolutionary staggered backward, spitting blood, his face twisting into a hideous, manic grin.
"Magnificent..." Nastrod rasped, his voice vibrating with unholy, corrupted resonance. "Simply magnificent, but this wont be enough to defeat me."
His eye shone and all the wounds back at Pihla.
"Pihla!" Emma yelled dashing to go catch her falling body. As he did, Nastrod without hesitation thrust Craving downward, channeling every remaining drop of dark Flow stored within the artifact into the altar beneath his feet.
CRACK-BOOM!
A localized explosion of dark energy detonated at the base of the altar travelling in a straight line towards the wall and blowing a massive jagged breach straight through, revealing a pitch-black, descending chasm beyond.
Emma stole the time of Pihla's wound and turned to see Nastrod shoot into the pitch darkness like an arrow.
"Emma I...." Pihla began weakly.
"Its ok." Emma said helping her up.
"Lets go after him."
Pihla nodded and the two vanished in a loud boom of hypersonic speed.