The hum shaking from the gold-silver metal shard-blade was not a sound of metal. It was the sound of reality shearing at the seams. Beneath the crushing weight of Berserker Ren’s nine-foot frame, the Man Who Returned didn’t struggle to push the monster off. Instead, he twisted the handle of his weapon five degrees to the left, disengaging the physical edge from three-space-folding space. Inevitability Severance: The Unbound Pivot point. The blade ceased to interact with the Berserker’s flesh, slipping through his locked fingers and chest tissue like a beam of pale moonlight through river mist, before solidifying instantly inside the beast’s chest cavity.
A muffled, bone-shaking crack echoed from within Berserker Ren’s chest. The orange embers glowing beneath his scarred hide flickered wildly, turning to dull, smoldering cinders. Black blood geysered from his nostrils and mouth. It splashed across the headsman’s grey wool lapels in thick, boiling globs. But rather than collapsing, the Ash-Eater’s jaw cracked open in an ugly, blood-soaked grin. He clamped his massive bare hands around the headsman’s wrists, his soot-caked fingers sinking into the man’s sinews with the desperate, end-post grip of a drowning sailor seizing an anchor chain.
‘Got you... Twice... Old man...’ the Berserker coughed, spraying dark gore across the headsman’s face. ‘You can cut my lungs... But you can’t cut... The weight!’ With his leftover life-force, the beast didn’t try to pull the blade free. He drove all nine hundred pounds of his mutated bulk downward. It slammed his spiked iron kneecaps…
