[Sadge_enjoyer]: there were PEOPLE in that. there were people

[tower_dublin]: i can hear them screaming under it oh my god

[grimreaper_99]: this isn’t a fight anymore this is a disaster

[viewer_0451]: nobody walks away clean from this. nobody

Across the city, O’Shea had not sat down.

The room behind him had gone from loud to quiet, the bad kind of quiet, everyone watching the same collapse on the same screens.

"Director." One of his people had a hand pressed flat on a desk. "It’s a structural collapse now. People are dying. We have Enforcement staged four minutes out. Say the word."

"No."

"Sir, the public is watching us do nothing—"

"The public is watching two people who can level a building trade blows." O’Shea did not raise his voice. "Four minutes out puts your team in the rubble when the next column goes. I am not sending good officers to be the next clip."

He turned to Niamh.

"Where are we on the freeze?"

"Airports and private fields confirmed. Diplomatic routes are fighting it."

"Tell them the alternative is explaining on camera why they let it lapse." He kept his eyes on the screen. "Every record on that delegation, every Ganner Corp contract through this Bureau, every movement permit. Locked. Now. Before the man on that feed wins or loses, because either way someone is going to reach for the delete key the second it ends."

Niamh was already moving.

O’Shea watched the white-gold figure raise his arms on the screen, and his jaw set.

In the car park, Langford lifted both hands over his head, and the air changed.

[PALADIN ART: KING’S VERDICT]

Light gathered above him and took shape, a vast blade of white-gold the size of the level itself, heavy enough that the broken floor trembled before it even began to fall. The stream image whited out and squared and tore at the brightness of it.

"You are a threat to order," Langford said. "By the King’s authority, you are judged."

The blade came down.

James did not dodge.

He set his feet in the cracked concrete and brought the scythe up over his head in both hands and caught it.

BOOM.

The judgment drove him down. His knees bent, his boots punched through the floor, and blood ran from his nose and out of his ears at the weight of it. For a moment the light swallowed him and it looked like the verdict would press him flat into the ground.

Then the gold began to rot.

It started where the great blade met the scythe and crawled outward, black creeping up through the holy light, eating it, turning the verdict dark from the edge in.

The whole strike came apart into black ash and fell around James in a slow grey rain.

Langford stared at the space where his strongest attack had been.

For the first time, there was something close to fear in his face.

A guard lay dead near the rubble, killed when the lobby came down.

James reached for the death and pulled the chain.

[DEATH CHAIN TRIGGERED]

The chains that burst from the corpse were not the thin smoking lines from before. With the scythe released, they came out thick and black and heavy, and when they hit Langford’s holy armor they did not burn away.

They bit in.

They wrapped his sword arm, then his chest, then dragged a coil around his neck, and they held. Langford strained against them and the gold light fought them and for three full seconds he could not move.

James paid for it at once.

The backlash hit the inside of his skull like a hammer. His vision split into two of everything, the car park sliding apart and back together, and his knees nearly buckled under the strain. He had blacked out from less than this.

He did not black out now.

He stepped into the three seconds the chains had bought him and cut across Langford’s chest with the scythe.

The wound did not just break the plate.

It aged it.

The gold dulled to grey where the blade passed. The white metal cracked and went dull and old, and the holy light inside the cut flickered and pulled toward the black edge like it was being dragged somewhere it did not want to go.

Langford looked down at the dying light in his own armor.

He understood it then. The scythe was not stronger than him.

It ended what it touched.

So he stopped trying to live.

[PALADIN ART: MARTYR’S OATH]

He drove his own vitality into the armor. The cracked, greyed plates flared back to white-gold, brighter than before, and the broken sword reformed whole in his hand. The pressure that came off him filled the collapsed level and pressed down on everything in it.

The Dark Knight was forced back a step. The wolf went flat against the concrete and could not rise. What was left of James’s pulled-up dead burned to ash.

James stood alone in front of him with the scythe.

Langford did not beg. He did not panic. His face had gone calm in the way men went calm when they had already paid the price and only had the spending of it left.

"If I die here," he said, "I take you with me. That is a fair trade for the crown."

James pulled his dead back out of the way.

[GRAVE COMMAND: RETURN]

The Dark Knight dragged herself clear. The wolf pulled back from the line. This last exchange was his.

Langford charged, Martyr’s Oath burning white through every seam of his armor, the holy sword raised for a killing blow.

James did not meet the strike head-on.

He waited until the bright blade crossed into range, hooked it with the curve of the scythe, and dragged it wide. Langford’s guard tore open down the middle.

James stepped inside it.

He drove the black blade through the center of the Paladin’s chest.

For one second, nothing happened.

Then the armor went dark from the wound outward. The white-gold drained out of it, plate by plate, until there was no light left in any of it. Langford’s sword slipped out of his hand and rang on the floor.

He went down to one knee.

He looked up at James, and his mouth moved, trying to get out one last thing — England won’t — and the rest of it never came.

James pulled the scythe free.

Langford fell.

[tower_dublin]: ...

[grimreaper_99]: is he. is he dead

[viewer_0451]: he killed him. he killed the King’s Paladin on live stream

[Sadge_enjoyer]: ...

[poggers_pat]: chat why is no one typing

The car park did not go quiet.

The building was still failing. Water still came down through the broken ceiling. The fires were spreading car to car, the alarms still screaming, and somewhere under the marble someone was still calling for help.

James stood over the body of the King of England’s Paladin aide with Azrael’s Scythe still cold and black in his hands.

[AUTHORITY RELEASE: 24:18]

He still had time.

The uncle was alive a few meters off, dragging his ruined leg, propped on one elbow. The broker was alive, flat against a pillar, frozen. The few witnesses still standing did not move at all.

James turned from Langford’s body.

He turned toward his uncle.

His uncle’s eyes went to the black blade still wet in James’s grip, to the cold coming off it, to the fact that whatever James had unlocked had not switched off yet.

He started dragging himself backward across the wet concrete.

James walked toward him.