It keeps moving.
One massive arm catches me across the torso. The blow lifts me off my feet, sends me crashing into a rock formation ten feet away. Stone shatters against my back. The impact drives breath from my lungs.
The Executor takes three steps toward Soreia.
Three steps too many.
I’m on my feet before my vision fully clears. Moving before my body fully recovers. The rage isn’t tactical anymore—it’s pure, primal, the fury of a creature watching its claimed target approached by a threat that should already be dead.
The fight becomesa blur of violence.
I tear. I rend. I destroy with a savagery that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the absolute rejection of what this creature represents.
The Executor regenerates. Divine power knits flesh faster than I can shred it. Every wound I inflict begins closing before I can inflict the next one.
I don’t care.
I tear the wounds open again. Deeper. Wider. I rip away chunks of armor and flesh, throw them aside like garbage, drive my claws into the spaces I’ve created and dig.
The creature’s screams fill the air. Its attempts to reach Soreia become increasingly desperate—less coordination, more blind struggle. It knows it’s dying. It knows the Predator has finally committed to ending it rather than simply wounding.
But I’m not fast enough.
Between my strikes, between the moments where my claws are buried deep in its body, the Executor continues to advance. Inch by inch. Foot by foot. Dragging itself toward Soreia with single-minded determination even as I’m killing it.
She’s backed against a rock formation. No retreat route. The creature got closer than any threat should have gotten.
Too close. Too fucking close.
The rage peaks.
I stop tryingto be strategic.
My hands close around the Executor’s skull. Not its throat—I’ve torn that out already. Not its torso—that’s more wound than body at this point. The skull, with its obsidian eyes still fixed on Soreia, still tracking her, still calculating the fastest route to her death.
I pull.
Divine bone resists. Armored plates crack and groan under pressure they were never designed to withstand. The creature’s body convulses, its remaining arm scrabbling weakly at my grip.
I pull harder.
The skull separates with a wet, tearing sound that I’ll remember for centuries. Blood sprays in arterial patterns across the rocky ground. The body collapses, finally—finally—going still.
But I don’t stop.
I throw the skull aside and turn on the corpse. I destroy the thing completely, utterly, leaving nothing that could reform, nothing that could ever threaten her again.
The violence continues past all tactical necessity.
I only stop when there’s nothing left to destroy.
SIXTEEN
KASTER
Silence.
I stand in the center of the destruction, ribs expanding with each breath, blood coating my hands to the elbows. The Executor is gone—not dead, not defeated, gone. Slag and ash and scattered armor.
