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Kallmakk was truly a resilient bastard. Most attacks simply phased through or bounced off of it. After days of continuous combat, it was becoming quite clear that their only real hope of putting the thing down for good was to coordinate their attacks.

Which everyone refused to do, of course.

Save for him, at least. They would work together with him but not each other.

So that had become his task here. Finding the openings in the fight and using it to quickly discuss strategy with both sides. One time, he nearly tricked them into working together, but Morgunov saw through it at the last moment and used the opportunity to attack Germal, instead.

And in retrospect, Gohvis-Aeha supposed he should have been expecting as much. Morgunov, more than anyone else here, probably wanted Kallmakk to survive as long as possible. The madman had led them to it, after all. Trying to acquire the Mad Demon’s assistance was probably a fool’s errand, at least until the Vanguardian crowd was thinned a bit.

But when he decided to devote more of the openings to discussions with the Vanguardians, they proved just as stubborn, if not even more so. While they might have been more receptive to the idea of working together in order to eliminate the feldeath, they were not at all on board with his proposal to have some of them fall back. Even when he said he would help them fake their deaths in order to fool both the feldeath and Morgunov, they refused.

They were too eager. They saw an opportunity here to finally slay an emperor of Abolish and definitively shift the balance of power across the entire world in their favor.

These men.

They didn’t care if they died in the process. Even their reapers.

He couldn’t fault them for their bravery, at least.

But how long could this stalemate continue? Realistically, it could actually go on for many, many more days. Potentially even weeks. Everyone here was determined and immortal. The reapers could just keep pushing their servants on and on, not caring about the future consequences.

But those consequences could not be put off forever. The Prime had only experienced this a few times over the course of his long life: these sorts of fights that truly tested a servant’s ability to endure.

Only a few times, yes, but every one of them had made for quite the lasting memory.