Then Ludwig moved first again.

This time, he did not simply swing once and hope stubbornness would become victory. His body moved before the answer came to him, while his mind clawed through everything he had seen. Nightbreaker rose and fell, Noctivex dragged his giant frame forward, Wrath burned red across the ice, and Pride kept his limbs from sinking into the suffocating drag of Sloth’s authority. His hands fought. His head worked.

The first strike failed like the others.

The second did too.

Nightbreaker came from the side, then from above, then in a brutal thrust meant to drive the mace’s cruel protrusions through Sloth’s chest. Each time, the same invisible rejection answered. The closer the weapon came to Sloth’s skin, the more the blow decayed. Force weakened. Intent dulled. Momentum bled out. The mace, which had broken monsters, stone, ice, and old nightmare alike, became useless in the last inch.

Ludwig changed tools.

He snapped his fingers and tried to create a Black Mirror beneath Sloth’s feet, intending to open the dark plane below him and tear away his footing. The mirror did not even finish forming. Its black surface flickered for less than a heartbeat, then dissolved as if the spell had forgotten why it had been cast.

"Of course," Ludwig muttered.

He tried curses next.

Then hexes.

Then old dark magic meant to rot the nerves, break balance, loosen joints, blind eyes, disrupt mana, and make the body betray itself. Every spell reached the border of that pale giant’s presence and evaporated. Not blocked. Not countered. Not purified. They simply lost consequence and vanished into the tired stillness around Sloth.

Titania attacked without pause.

She had abandoned wide holy flame after the first failure. Now her power was compressed into thin, precise edges along her blade, controlled enough not to spill into the Necropolitis, focused enough to pierce a fortress enchantment. It still did not matter. She came from above, from the side, from behind, every movement clean and brilliant. Whenever the blade drew close to Sloth, the golden fire lost its light. The edge stopped inches away, hanging in the air like a promise that no longer believed in itself.

Mot tried something less subtle.

The ground beneath the battlefield groaned.

A glacier-sized piece of ice tore free from the frozen plain behind Sloth, lifted by purple force and wrapped in tendrils that looked more like the limbs of a distant nightmare than magic. The chunk was large enough to crush a tower. Mot shoved it forward without ceremony, driving it toward Sloth with enough mass that even Ludwig paused for half a breath to watch.

Sloth turned his head.

That was all.

The mountain of ice stopped directly in front of his three-eyed face.

For a moment it hung there, enormous and ridiculous, its jagged shadow falling over him. Then cracks raced across its surface. The entire mass shattered and collapsed, spilling broken ice, frost, and white fog across the ground in a crashing wave.

"Are you sure you don’t want me to use more power?" Mot asked, voice flat despite the failure. "Because even an ice mountain failed to do anything."

"No," Ludwig said.

His gaze had dropped.

The shattered ice rolled across the ground. The heavy pieces stopped where they struck Sloth’s authority and fell away uselessly. But the fog, the cold mist born from the cracking ice, drifted forward. It slid around Sloth’s legs. It curled past his feet. It brushed close enough to touch him, faint and harmless, but close all the same.

Ludwig’s eyes narrowed behind Noctivex’s visor.

The fog had not stopped.

It had not decided motion was futile. It had not lost its purpose, because it never had one. It was not attacking. It was not trying to harm him. It was merely the aftermath of something else, moving naturally through the space his body occupied.

Ludwig slowly set Nightbreaker over his shoulder.

"Seems like I figured it out."

Titania landed on a broken arch above the dead city, sword still in hand. "Figured what out?"

Ludwig ignored her for the moment and looked at Sloth.

"Even you have hope."

Sloth’s eyelids lowered. "I do not. Hope is for those who want to see a tomorrow. I have no will to even exist in today."

"Nah," Ludwig said, and the grin beneath his helm turned vicious. "You’re full of hubris."

Then he charged.

Sloth sighed.

"Futility."

Nightbreaker dragged behind Ludwig, its head carving a red-lit trench through the ice as he ran. Wrath surged around him, but this time Ludwig did something different. He stopped looking at Sloth as the target. He stopped picturing Sloth’s chest caving in. He stopped imagining bone, flesh, impact, or victory.

The red glow behind Noctivex’s visor went dark.

Not extinguished.

Hidden.

The mace came around in a brutal arc, but the aim was wrong. Deliberately wrong. Ludwig did not swing at Sloth. He swung at the space in front of him. At the air. At the ground beyond. At the direction itself. He let Wrath be Wrath, not a blade aimed at a man, but a refusal to leave anything intact.

Sloth raised one hand for the obvious counter.

The authority did not answer in time.

Nightbreaker landed cleanly.

So cleanly that Sloth’s eyes took a moment to understand that contact had happened at all.

The mace struck his torso with a sound like a cathedral bell being smashed through a mountain. Sloth’s immense body folded around the blow and flew backward across the ice. He crashed once, bounced, carved a trench, struck the frozen field again, then skipped through shattered ice and black water while red wrath rippled over his pale form.

For one heartbeat, everyone who could still move simply stared.

Then Ludwig threw his head back and laughed.

"HAHAHAHAH!"

It was not heroic laughter. It was ugly, mad, and far too pleased with itself.

"That hope," Ludwig said, pointing Nightbreaker toward the distant crater where Sloth had landed. "I can see it waver!"

Titania stared down at him. "How did you do that?"

Mot’s tendrils paused around his feet. "Yes. Explain that."

"Don’t hit Sloth."

Titania blinked. "What?"

Mot tilted his head. "That seems contrary to the purpose."

"Don’t hit Sloth," Ludwig repeated. "Hit the place where Sloth happens to be."

A sharp, incredulous sound came from the Necropolitis wall behind them.

Kaiser had one hand on his staff, the other pressed against a cracked section of black stone he was forcing back into shape. "You madman," he howled. "How did you even come up with that?"

Ludwig lifted Nightbreaker back onto his shoulder. "Mot’s last move."

"The glacier?"

"The mountain of ice stopped," Ludwig said. "But its aftermath didn’t. The fog touched him. His authority didn’t care because the fog wasn’t trying to hurt him. It was just moving where it moved."

Van Dijk’s voice came coldly from farther back, where Celine and Joana were now behind Titania’s protection. "That means his authority reacts to directed consequence. Intent. Targeting. Perhaps the shape of an attack meant for him."

"Exactly," Ludwig said. "Don’t attack him. Don’t think of harming him. Blow up the space he exists in."

Titania’s expression tightened. "That is difficult."

"It is absurdly difficult," Van Dijk said. "To strike without allowing the idea of striking him to cross the mind? That requires precision bordering on insanity. How did you manage it?"

"The answer was Wrath all along," Ludwig said.

His gaze shifted toward the mountains.

"No wonder Sloth couldn’t progress when Wrath was here. Wrath wasn’t aiming to harm him. Wrath was literally trying to destroy everything. Anything. Even the very space Sloth existed in. Morde’Xander was that much of a maniac that he hated space itself."

The Red Tower Master, still fighting the weight of Sloth’s authority, managed to raise his head. "So don’t attack Sloth."

"Right."

"But blast his general direction?"

Ludwig grinned. "Exactly. Remove the general direction."

For the first time since Sloth had stood, something like grim understanding moved through the Tower Masters.

The Gray Tower Master inhaled slowly.

"Good then," he said. "I’ll give you all a moment."

He raised both hands in front of his chest and locked the index and middle fingers of each hand together, forming a rigid sign that looked almost ceremonial in its simplicity. Gray mana gathered around him, not bright, not dark, not warm or cold. Neutral. Still in a different way than Sloth, but not stagnant. A law of condition, not surrender.

"Status Quo."

The spell struck the battlefield without sound.

Immediately, the pressure crushing the living stopped worsening.

It did not defeat Sloth. Nothing so simple could. But the spreading exhaustion, the drowning weight that had been pushing men deeper and deeper into stillness, was cut off as if a boundary had been drawn around its current state and then rolled back a breath. Soldiers gasped like men hauled out of water. Priests jolted awake as though doused with frigid ice. Paladins lifted their heads, shaking, ashamed, terrified, but able to move enough to retreat.

The Gray Tower Master’s voice carried across the field with a force that did not invite debate.

"Everyone affected by Sloth’s authority, retreat! Anyone with mass area-of-effect abilities, come forward!"

The command snapped through the living ranks.

Those who had enough sense obeyed immediately. Soldiers dragged priests back. Paladins stumbled away from the Necropolitis and the center of the battlefield, no longer pretending glory had any place here. Mages who could barely hold a single-target spell withdrew, while those few with large-scale destruction grimly stepped closer under the cover of the Gray Tower Master’s temporary relief.

Far ahead, where Sloth had crashed through the ice, the field shifted.

A pale hand emerged from the trench.

Then another.

Sloth pulled himself free.

Slowly.

Slothfully slow.

Broken ice fell from his shoulders. Red wrath still crawled across one side of his torso, flickering before fading. He stood upright, and for the first time since his arrival, his eyes opened wider than before. The lazy heaviness remained, but something beneath it had changed. He looked almost awake.

"It seems," Sloth said, brushing frost from his chest with all the enthusiasm of a man wiping dust from a sleeve, "I have underestimated your futile struggle."

Ludwig rolled his neck.

Nightbreaker began vibrating again.

"Yeah," he said. "People do that a lot."