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Hector caught him with a full bear hug. At this range, the magnetic field around Karkash was too strong for Hector’s metal to accumulate properly, and he didn’t want any metal that he could’ve made beforehand to be suddenly turned against him here; so he was weaponless, and rather than pin all of his hopes on landing an instant deathblow, the plan was just as Garovel had told him earlier. He felt for the metal under Karkash’s coat, and indeed, found it there.

Karkash thrashed, zigzagging in the air and trying to fling him off, but Hector had a solid grip on him. Hector ripped the metal undershirt out, and they were suddenly plummeting together. Karkash grabbed Hector’s arm and finally yanked him off, following up with a flash of lightning that cut through Hector’s stomach. Then they both hit the ground.

Hector struggled to stand but wasn’t yet able, as he was fairly certain that his spine and hip were both broken. Only a few meters away, he could see Karkash having similar difficulty. They were immobilized for the moment, but both men still had their arms.

The lightning came, and Hector was ready for it with a pair of iron spires. The force of the impact caused the base around each spire to explode, pelting Hector with globs of grass and mud, but the spires themselves remained standing. He didn’t bother trying to make them larger, because he knew Karkash could rip them to shreds at any moment, so instead, he went to work on something he’d cooked up over this week past--something Garovel had thought of for him.

Directly above Karkash, Hector materialized a gigantic, vertically-long chunk of iron--a mostly cylindrical tower. And at the top, where Karkash wouldn’t be able to see, Hector created a similarly giant, downward-facing spike. And what Karkash wouldn’t be able to tell while he was shredding the bottom half of the cylinder, was that the upper half of the cylinder was hollow and that an enormous spike was already falling toward him at a much higher velocity than the cylinder had been.