"You… bastard!"
Eternal Puppeteer spat the words with unrestrained hatred, his voice cracking as blood streamed down his face. The axe was buried deep within his skull, its divine edge lodged between shattered bone and alien flesh. The strike had been his own—returned to him in the cruelest way imaginable.
At the decisive instant, Vlad's Celestial Eyes had opened a spatial portal directly in front of the descending axe. The weapon's head vanished into the rift, only to reemerge a heartbeat later above the Alien Lord himself. There had been no time to react, no chance to evade.
Vlad's eyes bled as he severed the portal, space collapsing inward with a shriek of distorted reality. The axe's handle was cleanly sundered, the edge left buried in the Alien Lord's brain.
