From my shadowed recess, I continued my vigil, the undercroft's fetid gloom parting just enough to reveal the duel.

  The Marauder Chief and the young Knight remained entangled in their grinding lock, blades crossed against hammer haft in a testament to two unyielding wills, profane energies clashing against Holy runes.

  With a surge of controlled might, the crimson-shrouded fiend twisted its wrists counterclockwise, leveraging the edges to force Angar’s weapon upward and away, breaking the stalemate with a screech and loud snap that echoed off the crumbling, vaulted walls.

  The boy staggered half a step, his balance disrupted as if the weight of impending doom had brushed his soul, but he recovered with a swiftness unseen in those so low of Tier, retracting his weapon in a tight coil before unleashing a horizontal sweep aimed to crumple the Gatekeeper at the waist.

  The brute dropped low into a crouch that brought it beneath the maul, the warped head passing so close I was sure the graviton pulse would erupt, splattering its decayed flesh in dark spray, the thought stirring a grim satisfaction in my chest.

  From its lowered stance, the Hellspawn champion exploded upward, its right blade leading in a rising diagonal slash toward the boy's side, the edge humming with unholy hunger as it sought to carve through both power armor and soul.

  Angar parried with the hammer's haft, the collision producing a spray of light, illuminating the strange crypt for a heartbeat, casting elongated shadows that seemed to writhe with malevolence.

  He counterstruck instantly, shifting his grip to drive the hammer downward toward the chief's helm, the weapon descending like the inexorable judgment of the Three, swollen with the promise of righteous annihilation.

  The crimson fiend dove to the left. The hammer’s side, turned in an attempt to track the foe, smashed into the flagstone. Luckily so, as it preserved the graviton pulse, but still cracked the ancient tile with a thunderous report that sent fissures crawling outward, dislodging silt and fragments that pattered down like the ashes of burned Heretics.

  This house of worship had stood long before Hell’s foul taint ever touched this world. Now it bled dust like an old man coughing up his lungs.

  Every blow after every blow shook loose a millennium of abandonment’s silence, and the stone answered with a terrible, grinding groan, the sound a dying beast might make if forced to endure two abominations attempting to kill each other inside its ribcage.

  The Gatekeeper dematerialized the twin swords in a flash of dissolving light, the air shimmering with the foul residue of infernal sorcery, and summoned forth a new armament, that of a sleek bow of wicked design, drawn from the Underworld's depths with a churn of manifesting power that made the shadows seem to deepen.

  In one fluid motion, it nocked and loosed an arrow of fell energy, a shaft of luminous force that streaked toward the young Knight's chest like a round from a railgun, trailing wisps of harsh smoke that burned into my filters even from afar.

  The boy wrenched his hammer up just in time, swinging it in a defensive arc to deflect the projectile, which veered off course with a shriek, slamming into a nearby pillar with an explosive crack that showered them both in stone sediment.

  Angar charged through the haze and rain of rocks, his hammer swinging in a vicious blow to the left flank, a desperate strike of one teetering on the edge of corruption, I knew.

  The undead warlord backpedaled, its bow discarded as swords reformed in a blur of profane light, parrying the strike with crossed blades that absorbed the impact like a seawall rebuking tidal fury.

  Angar pressed on with a blow to the right thigh, his movements fueled by a fervor that bordered on madness, and the crimson-shrouded fiend parried again, holding firm against the onslaught.

  I could almost sense the whispers burrowing deeper into the boy's mind, corrupting him with dark thoughts, as he followed with an attack to center mass.

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  It grazed Gatekeeper's forearm guard as it fumbled a block, barely a scratch, but enough to set off the graviton pulse, knocking the arm away and scoring a breached furrow in the armor, from which wept ichor the color of old altar wine.

  I felt a petty satisfaction. Let the vile bastard bleed before darkness inevitably consumed the boy, who unleashed an immediate follow-up overhead strike, the hammer descending with terrible force.

  The chief evaded by leaning aside, the hammer almost grazing its helm again, close enough that I heard the whisper of defeat.

  That was it. Unless the boy left the nullification zone, there would be no more imbuing of anything, the aura's insidious grip tightening like a noose.

  And I think he realized that as he stutter-stepped, his visor tilting toward his weapon in a moment of doubt as it rejected the infusion of Energy, and this just as his enemy lashed out with a spinning kick to his knee, the armored boot ripping through the grit-laden air.

  Angar met the kick with his metal foot, the impact jarring through the undercroft like the distant crack of thunder.

  The undead didn’t buckle or stumble, but used the foot as leverage to hop from, spinning again with unholy agility, its other boot whipping through the air in a deadly arc.

  The boy hopped back to avoid it, his stance momentarily compromised, a vulnerability that I assumed meant the dark whispers must have grown louder, gnawing away at his already frayed Resilience.

  How had he resisted them for so long? And well enough to continue to battle at such a relentless pace without falter?

  The ancient dust from shattered stone still hung in the air like the haze of an obscuring flare, forcing me to change to ultra-receptor mode to fully pierce the gloom.

  The chief exploited the momentary imbalance from the kick, its shroud blurring as it backstepped with spectral grace, dissolving its blades once more and reforming the bow in a seamless invocation of infernal might.

  It loosed an arrow in the span of a millisecond, the projectile a streak of incandescent wrath blazing toward its mortal target, trailing embers that lit the crypt like distant stars in the night sky.

  The boy hopped backward, his maul whipping up to intercept, and the arrow glanced off the head with a detonating flash, veering wildly into the chamber's far wall where it sank deep, cracking the masonry in a web of fissures that groaned worryingly.

  The young Knight leaped, closing the gap in a single bound that propelled him over the settling debris, his hammer blazing forward, feigning a head strike before plunging toward the Gatekeeper's chest with blinding speed.

  The champion sidestepped the deception, the maul's head almost tagging him, nocking and loosing another arrow with rapidity, this one aimed low at its foe’s leading thigh, the shaft curving with impressive precision through the silt-filled air.

  Angar vaulted over it, his body arching and twisting through the air, the arrow embedding harmlessly in the floor behind him with a thunk that vibrated through the undercroft's foundations, dislodging more debris.

  Landing on his cybernetics with bestial poise, he unleashed a swift strike followed by a powerful kick. Though the undead danced through both like a red specter, evading like a shadow given form, I noted a flash in its void-like eyes.

  Perhaps a calculation, a factoring of the boy's unexpected endurance?

  Angar unleashed Hell in earnest then, each blow filled with escalating fury as if to drown out the profane corruption eating away at his mind.

  Then, a sweeping arc to the Gatekeeper's knees, the hammer slicing low like a scythe through wheat, as it discarded the bow and flowed aside, dodging like crimson smoke, resummoning twin blades to meet the assault, the weapons flickering into existence with a hiss of unholy vapor.

  It blocked with a downward parry from the left blade, the clash sending vibrations up my spine even from afar.

  The hammer reversed, rising in a brutal uppercut toward the infernal brute's chin, seeking to shatter the helm, deflected with the keen edge of a blade in an eruption of sparks.

  The young Knight twisted into a horizontal strike to the chest, and the Gatekeeper evaded by leaning back until its spine should’ve snapped, the near miss stirring the dust into eddies swirling like little tornadoes.

  A bash to the shoulder followed, parried with crossed swords in a violent collision, then an overhead smash intended to crush the fiend in total.

  It dove beneath the descent, rolling aside, for the first time frantically, the impact cratering the stone where it had stood, sending shards flying like shrapnel from a frag grenade, one pebble even nicking my own armor.

  Angar’s metal foot stamped down to crush the rolling form. His foe twisted away by a mere centimeter, the cybernetic foot only shattering more stone.

  Without pause, the hammer followed, shrieking down like a falling meteor wrapped in Holy runes and hate, the air compressing under its descent.

  From its prone position, the chief flung its sword up in a desperate parry, the weapon battered aside like a toy, preventing the blow but leaving the undead horror fully exposed.

  Taking advantage of the opening, the maul fell again, missing the rolling form by a bare hair’s breadth, spiderwebbing stone once more, filling my filters with dust intermixed with undead rot.

  But the head lodged in the flagstone, trapped for one fatal moment.

  And one moment was all that was needed to end this brutal fight.