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Clearly, Sermung was waiting on something. Waiting for Hector to do something.

But Hector didn't mind waiting, either. Despite everything, he wasn't in a terrible rush to get his ass beat. So if the emperor wanted to sit there in that box, then that was fine. Hector didn't mind keeping it mostly stationary for the man while all the other boxes kept falling around it. He'd started things off that way just to prevent Sermung from being able to sense anything that was going on outside that particular box, since letting it fall on his head would've been rather telling, but Hector hadn't expected that he would need to maintain it for so long.

But what did he really expect to achieve here? That question kept nagging at him--across various thought processes, even. Just to knock some sense into him? This dude was basically invincible. To prove a point?

Yeah.

To prove that thing living within that man's aura wasn't right. It was too formless to even articulate, Hector felt. But also too familiar to ignore.

A kind of dark certainty. A hopeless and desperate misery.

That was his target in this fight. But how to attack it, then? That was the real question.

If certainty was the issue, then perhaps he could break that. Be surprising. Do something unexpected.

But what could take a centuries old emperor by surprise?

Good question.

Hector's floating iron fortress had grown so rapidly that he was already nearing his volume limit. He could feel it approaching, somehow. The expansion needed to slow and change. Sermung had granted him all this time and space. And even though he couldn't exactly sense the man's aura at the moment, he could all but feel Sermung's lingering question.

What was Hector going to do with all this?

Well, the purpose of the fortress had been to annoy him. But he was annoyingly not getting annoyed, it would seem.

Hector wanted to fix that.

He focused on Sermung's cube. He added a series of small, vertical, hovering tubes into the room. One in each corner for a total of eight. Then he added tiny metal balls inside all of them at the same time, having the orbs start at the top and then fall normally down to the bottom, hit iron against iron, then disappear.

Then he did it again. Eight little orbs falling in unison. Clinking in unison. Disappearing in unison. Then again. And again. And again.

Page 4133

He had to be mindful of the city below them, though. It was a pain to annihilate every individual bit of iron that started to fall too low, so he decided to reconceptualize his entire approach to that problem. He imagined all his iron materializing above an "annihilation barrier," a hard boundary where none of it was allowed to exist.

That simplified matters greatly. He didn't even need to dedicate an entire thought process to annihilation duty anymore. Every materialized piece came pre-packaged with that idea embedded into it.

Whoa. This felt like quite the realization, actually. And now he had a spare thought process to work with? Better put it to use, he figured.

The fortress of cubes grew still larger. He remembered that there were a few giant black boxes nearby that had encased some of the skyscrapers of Andeyal, so he had the fortress account for them, expanding around them and weaving between them.

Beyond that, though, it was a bit difficult to remember how far away the other black boxes were. He knew there were plenty more around, and he didn't want the fortress to bump into them. He'd have to ease off the expansion then, in order to be safe. There was no way to--

No, wait. On second thought, maybe he could remember where those more distant black boxes were. They felt pretty clear in his mind all of a sudden. Just like Sermung's location, actually.

Was that his iron, too? Informing him again?

He wasn't sure what to think, but now wasn't the time to be worrying about it, either. He decided to just take whatever he could get and be grateful. He was in a fight with the strongest servant in the world, after all.

A part of him was wondering if Sermung even considered it a fight in the first place, though. Hector hadn't stopped focusing on the man's location for an instant, and yet the guy still hadn't moved from within the box that Hector had put him in. What was he doing? Just waiting and seeing?

Agh. He was probably just amused, wasn't he? What a jerk.

There was no doubt in Hector's mind, though, that the dude had plenty of tricks up his sleeve. Maybe he had some secret way to keep track of Hector's movements, even through all this soul-infused iron. Aura wouldn't be able to do it, since it would be necessarily injected into all the iron as well, but maybe the guy had some other method.