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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 Andayel, so had 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 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 of 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, since it would be necessarily injected into all the iron as well, but maybe the guy had some other method.