There was a moment of confusion amongst the gathered officers at Hirrus’s words.

Even the mercenary guards seemed to hesitate.

It was more than enough time for Hirrus to set up.

He was hesitant to use Going Ape here due to the penalty it applied to his GLE. In his experience, adventurers who wore mostly cloth tended towards the use of magical Arcana, and rendering himself vulnerable to it seemed unwise. But he had plenty of other empowering Arcana to stack up in the brief second before the fight broke out in earnest.

Mighty Guard and Carchian Verve were obvious choices. Cerberus’s two-ability buff suite was too powerful to ignore. Fleetness of Tonner would make him incrementally more powerful as the fight went on, and the incredible attack speed bonus of Pumped Kicks had become essential to his fighting style.

As the powerful glow of those Arcana suffused his body, the hesitation of his foes broke and the scramble of panicked combat began.

He only had time to apply one more quick buff before the first foe stepped up to engage with him, and in this tight quarters, Terminus Grip seemed like a must. This fight was going to be a brawl, and the sooner he could get his Crushing Blade passive from his legendary sword capped, the more powerful his strikes would be.

The first foe that came at him was one of the mercenaries. Their attack seemed so slow and clumsy to Hirrus. It wasn’t that they were unskilled, but instead that Hirrus’s speed was so impossibly amplified that no normal person could present a threat to him.

Even though the mercenary’s broadsword started its descent towards Hirrus before he had started, his counterattack came in with blinding speed, landing first. He almost felt bad as his weapons lashed out, cleaving the bug-armored mercenary in twain. The first strike was a critical strike for over thirty thousand damage, and the second hit from the icy greataxe added another twenty thousand damage to finish the job.

“Buy me some time,” Keynes snapped, raising his hands. “I’m going big on this one.”

A glowing energy began to grow in the air between his hands. It was a mote of golden color, but the longer Keynes focused on it, the larger and brighter it grew. Hirrus wanted to rush him to interrupt whatever that glowing mote was going to do, but at Keynes’s order, all of the officers flung themselves to their feet. They physically interposed themselves between Hirrus and their leader to stop him from just running over there and kicking the large man in the face.

The remaining mercenary guards moved into position as well. They moved into a protective formation, filling the meeting chamber from wall to wall with their armored bodies at the foot of the long table. Hirrus would have to act fast to break through these defenses.

Fortunately, he had more than enough tools for the job.

He began by raising his own hands and activating one of his newer Arcana. Megagun only struck the wall of mercenaries for about one hundred damage, but it was a channeled Arcana. As long as they allowed him to stand here and maintain the ability cast, he would hit them with it over a hundred and fifty times every second. Hirrus could have focused down on one individual mercenary with the Arcana, but instead he swept the attack back and forth over them, spraying them with eighteen thousand damage per second to weaken them before they could respond.

The whole defensive line was badly injured when one of them forced their way forward. Their armor was battered, dented, and bloody from the Arcana, but they managed to strike Hirrus with a backhand strike. It only did a few hundred damage, but it interrupted his channel, putting the ability on its short cooldown.

Hirrus responded by grabbing the armored figure by the throat. An instant blast of eighteen thousand damage from Bloodrake finished them off.

The remaining mercenaries tried to move in to attack Hirrus all at once, but before they could encircle him, he opened his mouth and unleashed Twistered Breath. Each of the mercenaries took seventeen thousand damage. The ones in the middle that had suffered the brunt of the spray of Megagun instantly died to the blast of green energy from Hirrus’s mouth.

Only the ones on the edges survived, but the damage of the Choke debuff was going to finish them off shortly.

The officers had recoiled behind their mercenaries, but now their defenses were stripped. Hirrus expected them to flinch back farther into the room, huddling against the back wall to let him obliterate them all at once.

Instead, a group of them moved forward, linking arms and tensing themselves for what there were about to endure.

They were intent on screening for Keynes, even though they obviously knew it was going to mean their death.

Hirrus was happy to oblige. If they weren’t even going to raise weapons, he wasn’t going to waste Arcana on them. He stepped up and his hooked sword and icy greataxe ripped through them in seconds. Nearly every strike was a critical hit, dishing out over fourteen thousand damage with the first, with the growing power of Crushing Blade amplifying it as he went. Each critical strike did twenty thousand damage by the time he had ripped through the first row of sacrificial officers. Before Hirrus could rush towards Keynes, the next row of officers stepped up, eyes closed and faces screwed up in anticipation of what was to come.

Cutting them down like this was almost unsatisfying. They weren’t fighting back. They were only putting themselves physically in the way of whatever Keynes was doing. Through the crowd he could see that the golden mote had grown significantly, going from a pinprick of golden light to a roiling ball of what looked like molten gold roughly the size of a man’s head. The glow radiating off of it reflected on Keynes’s cloth-of-gold outfit, giving him a strangely deific appearance.

“You should be honored,” Keynes announced when he saw Hirrus looking. “Not even the other members of the council have ever seen me use this attack!”

Hirrus thought of no better response than to kill the man where he stood. He activated Rapid Rip. Hirrus’s other movement abilities would mostly only increase his speed briefly, which wouldn’t allow him to pass through the crowd blocking his passage. But Rapid Rip would tear through them without stopping Keynes from taking damage from the attack.

The Arcana sent Hirrus dashing forward through the defensive line and over the table towards Keyne’s spot at the head of it. A poor soul directly between Hirrus and Keynes suffered twenty-five thousand damage instantly. There was a brief satisfying moment of the fear on Keynes’s face growing closer and closer-

And then Hirrus was going back the other direction. That one unfortunate member of the defensive line in Hirrus’s path suffered another twenty-five thousand damage, reducing them to a spatter of gore in the air around Hirrus. But Keynes went unharmed, underlined by his triumphant laugh.

When Hirrus looked back, one of the officers had lunged in front of Kenyes, and for a brief moment, a strange hexagonal field had been encompassing their body. An Arcana. Hirrus was going to have to obliterate all of the officers before Keynes could be dealt with one way or the other. Even as they refused to defend themselves as they barred his way, their Arcana could defend Keynes from any underhanded trick Hirrus could employ to bypass the sacrificial defense.

“You only delay the inevitable,” Hirrus snapped as he turned and started hacking down the remaining defenders of this row of officers. “Face me yourself, and let the end come swiftly!”

“I don’t delay anything,” Keynes shot back with a laugh. The golden globe continued to grow, now nearly four feet in diameter. “As soon as I’m sure this is gonna take you out in one shot, I’ll throw it. And then we’ll see who's end comes!”

“You’re running out of sacrifices,” Hirrus observed. The next row of officers barred his way, but Keynes didn’t have many left. “If you care so little for them, go ahead and wait.”

“Why do you think they aren’t trying to escape?” Keynes asked. “They’re here for the same reason everyone is in this guild. Cold hard cash. They don’t care about their lost gear or progress as long as they get their cut of the week’s take after the reset!”

As Hirrus cut through the officers, the glowing ball of molten gold continued to grow. It grew past six feet across and the top of it was nearly touching the ceiling. The energy radiating off of the orb caused the ceiling to blacken and smoke.

He had to stop it.

The final row of officers forced themselves into Hirrus’s path, and he knew his time was nearly up. He cut one of them down and leaped up onto the long table, ready to run down its length to reach Keynes.

“Too slow,” Keynes said, bringing the orb down in front of himself and sending it flying down the conference table towards Hirrus.

Slow enough to watch, but too fast to dodge, even with his dramatically amplified speed.

Hirrus activated an Arcana of his own. Gates of Hades had been one of Cerberus’s most potent Arcana, not because of its damage output - though it was significant - but because it rendered the caster invulnerable while it was casting. True, the blast did sixteen thousand damage to the immediate area, finishing off the remaining officers. But the reason Hirrus activated it was because it meant the giant globe of molten gold passed harmlessly through him, splattering against the far wall. It created a tremendous conflagration, but no damage to Hirrus himself.

“Oh,” Keynes said, his boastfulness past, and his confidence gone.

There was a sound of finality to that simple word.

It was as if Keynes had put all his eggs in one basket, and now that basket was shattered on the ground, full of empty shells. He was alone, cornered, and had wasted all the time he could have used to formulate a defense. Hirrus supposed that this was the most demoralized any foe had been before he finished them off.

“I don’t suppose,” Keynes ventured weakly, as Hirrus stomped down the surface of the long table, “that I could buy you off? Another few million to make you just go away?”

“I’ve never much cared for money,” Hirrus said, reaching over his shoulder to rest his greataxe against his back, sheathing it there briefly. “I am here for your death. And I will have it.”

“I was afraid of that,” Keynes said, slumping back down in his chair.

Iaido Strike caused Hirrus’s icy greataxe to do unimaginably tremendous damage.

The automatic critical hit applied to an enormous multiplier dealt seventy-five thousand damage, destroying the gaudily-dressed merchant in an instant.

A double-strike hit that followed ripped the chair in half, unable to get a damage number out of a corpse.

And the Cleave effect reduced the corpse and chair both into a splattered mess of gore, gold, cloth, and wood across the back wall of the room.