A roar crossed with a chittering laughter filled the skies.

’What a smug bastard.’ Grey thought, his Helm Frame splitting in a digital growl.

BANG.

Calixan suddenly appeared, grabbing at one of the blades in Grey’s body. The force with which he pulled at the hilt sent Grey spiralling into the distance, the blade sawing its way out.

Grey felt like he had been skewered by the same blade twice over, and it was about to happen a third time as the hands hovering above Calixan split.

One of them remained attached to Calixan’s body, the other shooting off toward Grey even faster than he was flying. At first, Grey thought it was going to attack him, but then it overshot him entirely, appearing behind him.

At the same time, Calixan vanished from his distant location in front of him.

The warped space and danger signals flashed beyond Grey. About the only thing from his Resonant Frame that was working properly was his sixth sense. It spanned far and wide, swallowing up the entire space and catching every twitching and minor detail.

So it saw the entire process as a newly minted Calixan appeared beneath the second hand, attached to the very same puppet strings and thrusting a blade at his back.

Grey tilted to the side to dodge, watching as 10,000 units of energy vanished from his Helm Frame as the curse of the two blades leached into him.

Unfortunately, whatever relief he managed to claw back from the situation didn’t last long as the second hand flashed forward as well, blocking his escape route.

This time Grey almost expected Calixan to appear before him again. He was wrong. Again.

The palm slapped down and Grey roared, bending down to his bad knee and using the Turning Shield to block above him.

Grey’s body was almost instantly flattened to the ground. There was no resisting it at all.

For the first time, he felt the true weight of the power that backed a Command Class. Until now, he had been skating around the edges, dodging and reading moves ahead of time, launching attacks from the back that were well prepped and even better timed.

But now...

A mouthful of blood pooled out of him, the blades running through his body vanishing beneath the impact, but only leaving more mangled flesh in their wake.

The squires didn’t even dare to breathe too hard. Part of them noticed that the only reason they hadn’t been flattened to the ground like before was because Grey’s Resonant Frame was bearing the pressure for them. But the other part was so locked away in a shuddering fear that they couldn’t even think straight.

Grey’s Shadow Forces flashed and he vanished the moment the slightest bit of pressure let up, only for a puppeted Calixan to appear right in front of him as though it was predicted from the very start.

A battle of Grey hanging on by a string erupted. Calixan bounced between his two God Hands, sometimes flashing and teleporting instantly between them and sometimes using them to directly attack.

The curses sapped at Grey’s reserves again and again in one, five, even ten thousand unit chunks. And for the first time since Grey was inundated with his current wealth, he saw the reserves he stored away in his inventory suffering severe decline.

A palm landed nearly squarely on Grey’s body. He just managed to block with the Turning Shield, but only half of him was covered. The other half felt like every single bit of bone shattered.

—

Stamina: 29/351

—

Grey was being hit on all fronts, his healing factor limping for air as it tried to keep up. But his mind was also suffering the effects. He had the Crimson Rage Helm active for far longer than he should have, and it was eating away at his focus.

Every second that passed felt like he was a second further away from grasping the rhythm, and whenever he felt like he might have cut that distance down to the last stretch, a screech would come from Calixan that interrupted everything.

Grey slammed his tower shield to the ground, expanding the Turning Shield to its largest side. He almost stumbled into it, pivoting around its body to block Calixan’s path forward and prop himself up at the same time.

At that moment, he couldn’t help but recall a meme he had seen on Instagram. It made him chuckle every time he came across it.

Some chud, probably sporting a huge beer belly and a double chin, would post some cinematic masterpiece. A mountain of snow, a path of trees lined with fireflies looking off into a lake, maybe a cave glowing with diamonds—almost certainly AI generated, but sometimes it was real.

Then he would caption it with something like: "10/10 spot to bleed out" or "The male urge to fight to the death and bleed out in glory".

Those men never really meant it, maybe Grey never really meant it. Sure, he liked contact sports, whether it was ones with a ball or ones in a cage, but those never really had any high chances of death. Not like this.

This... this was very different from that.

There were real lives on the line. These weren’t NPCs that had died. They were people that had almost certainly come from other universes, people that had once had real stories and real families and real aspirations, chained here to become someone else’s entertainment... just like he was.

Grey had never liked those captions, though. What was manly about dying and leaving your wife to fend for herself, your children to grow up without a father?

No. He always modified those captions: "10/10 spot to watch your mortal enemy bleed out".

’Damn fucking straight.’

Even now, bleeding out, half his body shattered, there was nothing Grey wanted more than Calixan’s head on a pike.

That image of the goblin filled his mind again.

That was what it meant to be the Last, huh?

Edmun’s death flashed in his mind. Globb’s death followed it. Then Esmeralda’s death, not the second time, but the first time as a mere shell of herself, a broken piece of a lost lineage rotting away in the forest.

The tip of Grey’s spear glowed.

He had seen a lot of lasts, a lot of bleeding out.

He wouldn’t be one of them.