The shift was immediate and unmistakable. It didn't come with a roar or a change in posture. It came with intent.
The Lieutenant stopped trading with me and started advancing. From that moment forward, the fight ceased to be an exchange and became an execution in progress. Every step it took was heavy and deliberate, every movement calculated to compress space and deny me air. I was still fighting. Still dangerous. Still cutting and striking where I could. But the rhythm was gone, replaced by pressure so constant it felt like the world itself was leaning on me.
The first blow landed hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. Essence flared too late to fully blunt the impact, and something cracked deep inside my chest. Pain detonated outward, sharp and overwhelming, my vision stuttering as I staggered back. Before I could recover, another strike came. Then another.
Not all of them carried that corrosive wrongness from before. Many were simply raw, overwhelming force.
Fists. Elbows. Shoulders.
They slammed into me with bone-deep finality, each hit driving me backward, each one landing just fast enough that reinforcement became reaction instead of prevention. My body lagged behind my will as ribs began to break one by one, sharp, nauseating pain blooming through my torso as my breath turned ragged and wet.
With every impact, old injuries awakened like something pulled from a shallow grave.
The Mortar Zone clawed its way back into me. Scars tore open. Fractures I thought had healed screamed back to life. My insides twisted as something ruptured again, blood filling my mouth as I staggered. Essence surged instinctively to keep organs from failing outright, but it wasn't enough to stop the damage from compounding. Only to slow it.
When I tried to counter with Voidscar, my arm betrayed me.
The corroded limb was heavy and unresponsive, my grip slipping as a savage blow caught my shoulder and sent fire racing down my spine. The joint popped with a sickening sensation, and the arm went numb and useless at my side, hanging wrong, dead weight tethered to me by pain and stubbornness alone.
The dagger slipped from my fingers.
It clattered across the ground, lost beneath the chaos. Not destroyed. Just unreachable.
That was when the real beating began.
The Lieutenant no longer bothered to evade. No longer gave me space to recover. It hammered me again and again, lifting me off my feet with one strike and driving me back into the ground with the next. The world blurred at the edges as my vision doubled and swam, sound warping into something distant and hollow.
My body failed in increments I could feel but no longer stop.
Essence burned just to keep me conscious. Just to keep my heart beating through the trauma. Every breath was a fight. Every movement slower than the last.
Still, I tried to rise.
Still, I forced myself forward, because stopping meant death.
My legs buckled as another crushing impact folded me in half. Ribs gave way with a wet crack, air leaving my lungs entirely. Darkness crept in from the edges of my sight as I tasted blood and dust and ruin.
The Lieutenant loomed over me now. Implacable. Unstoppable.
When it struck me again, it wasn't to finish me.
It was to send me flying.
The force erased all sense of direction as my body hurtled through the air and smashed into the side of a building. Stone and metal exploded outward on impact as the structure collapsed in on itself, burying me beneath tons of rubble.
The world caved in with a deafening roar.
Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.
The weight settled. The last vibration faded.
There was no pain left to feel.
No sound left to hear.
No light left to see.
Only the crushing dark closing in as my mind finally let go and everything went black.