"You're just another fancy freak with a god complex!!"

Jorghan, turning his head slowly, red eyes gleaming under his hood of smoke

"You humans… always talk before you die. It's like a ritual of stupidity."

Carrow grumbled. "Ha! You think words scare me, boy? I've killed beasts twice your size before breakfast. You're just another target on my scope."

Jorghan steps forward, unbothered as bullets whiz past and bounce off his mana field.

"Scope? You rely on toys. That's the problem with your kind—you build weapons because you have no power within."

Major growls, moving to the side. "Power's what you make, not what you're born with. That's the difference between men and monsters."

Jorghan grinned faintly, voice low and dangerous.

"And yet the monsters live longer."

Carrow fires—a direct hit.

Jorghan vanishes from sight, the cannon beam passing through a crimson mirage. Suddenly, Carrow feels a presence from behind, the air trembling with mana.

Jorghan said, "You talk of making power… let me show you what forging blood truly means."

Major Carrow spins, elbowing him, the mecha's arm crackling with plasma.

"Big words for a corpse in waiting!"

The two clash—the forest around them erupts. Each of Carrow's punches tears the ground apart; each of Jorghan's counters sends shockwaves through the air. Sparks and blood fill the smoke.

Carrow gritting his teeth

"Gotta hand it to you—you hit like a truck. Shame you're wasting it playing god with those pointy-eared freaks."

"Better to be among gods than crawl with worms."

Major Carrow laughs.

"You'll burn, demon. You'll burn with the rest of this cursed forest!"

Jorghan leans close, whispering coldly.

"Yeah, the demon who will burn you alive."

He moved.

Not running but flowing, his body adapting mid-motion, becoming something that existed between states of matter. The Sentinel's targeting systems lost lock for a crucial half-second.

That was enough.

Jorghan was inside the Sentinel's guard, too close for ranged weapons, moving with serpentine grace that let him avoid the machine's attempts to grapple. His fist struck the chest plate—enhanced flesh and bone against meta-carbon composite—and the armor cracked.

Not much. Barely visible. But enough to prove it could be damaged.

The blood came then. Not manifested from nothing this time, but drawn from his own enhanced body, seeping through his pores in thin streams that moved with predatory intelligence.

The blood didn't form weapons. It simply was—liquid and solid simultaneously, flowing around the Sentinel like water while striking with the force of hammered steel. It found joints and seams, flowing into gaps in the armor, seeking the vulnerable systems beneath.

Carrow felt his suit's systems begin to fail. Servos locked. Hydraulics lost pressure. Sensor arrays went dark as blood infiltrated circuitry that should have been sealed against any intrusion.

"Nanomachine countermeasures!" he shouted to the AI.

"Purge all compromised systems!"

The Sentinel's surface rippled as millions of nanomachines activated, trying to clear the blood from critical systems. For a moment it worked—the blood was forced out, ejected from the suit's interior.

But Jorghan simply sent more.

And this time, when the blood touched the Sentinel's armor, it didn't just infiltrate.

It corroded.

The meta-carbon composite began to break down at the molecular level, exotic matter destabilizing under assault from something that existed outside conventional physics.

They fought through the ruins of the base, each exchange creating new destruction.

The Sentinel landed a punch that drove Jorghan knee-deep into the ground.

Jorghan responded by tearing off the Sentinel's left arm entirely, ripping through the shoulder joint with strength that exceeded what the armor's engineers had calculated as the maximum stress threshold.

Alarms screamed in Carrow's cockpit.

System after system went critical.

The fusion reactor was operating at dangerous temperatures, the containment fields weakening as blood seeped deeper into the suit's core systems.

He was losing.

The realization hit with the force of physical impact.

Despite the Sentinel's advanced technology, despite Earth's cutting-edge engineering and exotic materials, he was losing to a single individual who fought with nothing but enhanced physical capability and blood magic that defied every known law of physics.

"All units withdraw!" he transmitted on the emergency channel.

"I repeat, all units withdraw from the combat zone! Fall back to the dropships!"

What few soldiers remained alive scrambled to obey, abandoning equipment and positions in their desperation to escape the battle between titans that was destroying everything around them.

Jorghan and the Sentinel came together one final time.

The machine's right arm came up, particle beam cannon charging for one last desperate shot at point-blank range. Enough power to vaporize anything organic, to reduce flesh and bone to constituent atoms.

Jorghan raised his hand, palm forward.

Blood gathered there—not in visible quantities, but compressed, condensed, all the essence he'd absorbed focused into a space no larger than his palm. It took form gradually, becoming visible as a perfect sphere of crimson light that pulsed with contained power that made the air scream.

A red dot, no larger than a marble, floating an inch above his skin.

In that moment, both combatants fired.

The particle beam lanced out, coherent energy that should have ended everything it touched. It struck Jorghan's chest, burning through his shirt and scorching his skin.

And the red dot shot forward.

It moved faster than the particle beam, faster than thought, crossing the distance between them in a span of time too brief to measure.

When it struck the Sentinel's chest plate, it didn't explode immediately.

Instead, it burrowed inward, passing through meta-carbon composite like it wasn't there, penetrating deeper and deeper until it reached the fusion reactor at the suit's core.

Then it detonated.

A big crimson sphere slowly emerged from the spot, and it grew to a certain height, but not that much.

The explosion was contained—barely—by the Sentinel's remaining armor, but the force was still devastating. The suit came apart from the inside out, pieces of advanced engineering scattering across the crater like shrapnel.

Major Carrow had exactly one second of warning before catastrophic failure.

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