Gentry stared, mouth agape, as his plans disintegrated all around him. He didn't even bother responding as Orton attacked; barely noticed as one of the multifarious legions of demons in his mind slipped him smoothly into a higher-rated temporal frame while another conjured a spherical vector of sustained force in every direction, blasting Orton and Enna roughly away with howling winds. His fingers twitched, his eyes bulged, and his breath came in gasps as the horror of what had just occurred penetrated his brain. "You fool. You absolute fool. You have no idea what you've just cost me."

The tables and chairs floated away off the edges of the rooftop terrace with dreamlike slowness, caught in the slow eddies of realtime as they were blasted away into the night by Gentry's explosion; Orton and Enna struggled to stand against the gale. Orton grimaced; he hadn't expected Gentry to react that quickly. Against a normal foe, the Spear would have guaranteed an effortless victory, but he could already feel Gentry's infernal hivemind of servitors swarming to overcome his astral obstructions; Pretty soon this thing's only going to be useful for stabbing him, he thought to himself sourly.

Enna, who had taken a little bit longer than the other two mages to adjust to her new circumstances, finally caught up with current events; she shook off Orton's hand with a growl and a glare, hauled herself to her feet with an iron guardrail, and screamed out an arcane word. As in their previous contest, Gentry's unbreakable will and flawlessly precise spellcasting was no match for her raw power, and she blasted the howling winds away in an instant, bringing their temporal frames back into congruence at the same time. Curling her hands into claws and crossing her forearms in front of her chest, she swept them apart and incanted fearsomely, summoning a quartet of blazing starlike motes that swept and swooped around her before rocketing towards Gentry's head.

With a negligent gesture, Gentry cast the Antiphon of the Asymptote; the motes slowed, then stopped, straining against infinitely-multiplying forces as they streaked mindlessly towards him in an endless cascade of foreshortened distance. He didn't even look up. "Decades of effort. Billions of dollars. You cannot remotely fathom what your asinine, farcical posturings have undone."

"Do you have a 'shut this asshole up' spell?" Enna snapped at Orton, weaving her hands into a spiraling sigil of suppression; Orton winced, watching as Gentry counterspelled it with only his left pinky finger. In awe, he realized that in all his final battles with Gentry in the previous loops, his foe had barely even been paying attention; with access to a nigh-infinite number of minds, Gentry had been able to divine each step of the combat to its conclusion and manipulate Orton so expertly that he'd never even known he'd been holding back. And no wonder, if he knew I was looping the entire time too, he thought miserably. He tried for a holistic battlespace visualization, but it showed him only black, silent futures; things were looking pretty fucked.

With a shrug, he dispelled his divinatory faculties and let himself slip into a martial trance; he flipped the Spear around in his left hand, so that it jutted out of the bottom of his fist like a reverse-gripped dagger, and took one step forward. He took one deep, hopeless breath.

"You know what?" he replied to his enemy, squaring his body into a martial stance, "I probably don't. What I do know, though, is that your mom is a whore."

Gentry froze. Enna winced. Then all hell broke loose.

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In his sight, Gentry suddenly seemed to grow twelve arms and nine heads for the briefest of instants; awed, he realized that the other magus had invoked multiple accelerated timestreams from within other accelerated timestreams, granting him the power to cast dozens of personal enchantments in the blink of an eye. Before he could even gasp, Gentry was upon him, crashing a continuous stream of trainwreck-strength blows directly into his guard; he wasn't even trying to circumvent Orton's defenses, but rather crush them mercilessly under the sheer force of his power.

It was working, too. With each strike, Orton's chakras and meridians shuddered like struck iron; his spiritual core rang like a great bell with each impact as his personal paradigms buckled and crumpled under the sheer, limitless weight of Gentry's assault.

"You filth," he howled, battering Orton's blocking limbs and visible extremities furiously. "You detestable wretch. How dare you speak such... such indignity about her! You are not fit to die under her feet!"

"Whoa shit, looks like somebody's got mommy issues," Orton managed, nearly getting his nose torn off by a sweeping tornado kick; he managed to jerk back at the last instant, but the mere passing of the strike cascaded black infectious energies into his aura, and he had to thrust even more of his waning power into fighting those off too.

Gentry screamed -- a raw, primal bellow of towering fury -- and kicked Orton so savagely that even though Orton met the blow with the full force of his strength, he was still hurled off his feet and thrown backwards with fearsome power; he barely had time to notice he was being hurled off the side of the building before plunging the Spear of Destiny into the stone like a mountain-climber's spike to arrest his momentum. Gasping, he hung there like a marionette, too stunned to move; that was too close, he chided himself.

Enna strode into the breach, moving to block Gentry's path, but he barely acknowledged her; with a flurry of lightning-fast spells, he conjured bindings and restraints, minions and fetters, and a concussion of directed force to batter her out of his way. Unfortunately for him, the sight of such things renewed Enna's fury; "Oh no you don't," she growled as she carved his spells out of the air with blazing red claws of sorcerous violence. "You've shackled me for the last time, you bastard."

Thus gifted with one precious second of distraction, Orton heaved himself back up onto the parapet; he sucked in quick breath and hung all his hopes on it. "Hey, Gentry!"

His left hand came up, holding the pistol he'd pickpocketed from Gentry moments ago. "Any chance your only weakness is bullets?!"

As his foe turned towards him, Orton pulled the trigger as fast as his accelerated reflexes could manage; nine precisely-placed shots rang out, echoing outwards like ripples in a pond as the swarm of bullets rocketed towards Gentry's seven chakras and two testicles. The first few bullets were slowed to a crawl by the Antiphon of the Asymptote, but its energy was near exhaustion and it failed to halt the rest; they zipped through the other wizard's guard... and went wide, deflected by the Cantillion of the Hair's Breadth. "Fuck my life," Orton groaned.

Gentry laughed insanely; drool ran down his face, streaking his handsome countenance. "Pathetic. You pin all your hopes on a weapon a novice could ignore." Backhanding Enna away with a crushing blow, he suddenly appeared before Orton; his right hand grabbed Orton's wrist as he kicked the other magus's foot out from under him, then ground him downwards into the dirt of the terrace floor with inexorable, judicious force. Orton flailed, trying to marshal his thoughts, but something was wrong; his strength wouldn't come, and his mind was stuck, going in circles. Something's blocking my prana, he realized, puzzled. And then it hit him.

He wasn't breathing.

He tried to draw breath, couldn't; tried again, and only succeeded in making a gurgling noise. Looking down, he discovered the reason -- the head of the Spear of Destiny, still gripped in his left hand, but also lodged in his own throat.