takes a big hit

His armor began to burst in random places, taking shape around him as he stepped towards me. His previous armor seemed to melt away, flowing into a different shape along with his body. His forearms and hands widened and lengthened into bulky columns, fingers replaced with jointed blades. His body grew a pure white covering, armored and yet streamlined with odd modifications to his legs. Even his mask shifted, leaving his face and head covered by a smooth, featureless helmet. It didn’t look biological, like the Grimm tended to; if anything, it looked technological, akin to the power armor I’d spent quite some time imagining.

Something that had been created instead of grown.

In the next moment, Gilgamesh flickered, closing the gap between us in a meaningless fraction of a second and bringing a massive arm down with force enough to beat down mountains.
I managed to react at the last second, bringing up my arms in defense. His hand crashed against them with enough force that I felt the bones shatter, ground to dust in an instant, and it barely slowed down his claws. They bit into my forehead and dragged down through my eyes, one of them catching my nose on the way. I felt them split my lips, shatter my upper and lower jaw, and nearly tear the latter free of my face entirely. I felt it as the claws continued down, snapping ribs like twigs and shredding my entrails.

On pretty much anyone else, it would have been a fatal wound.

On me, it just hurt like a bitch. Not physically—truth be told, getting stabbed in the brain honestly didn’t hurt much and I was so accustomed to pain that I just brushed off everything else—but in the damage it did. Thanks to my recently improved Vitality, I’d limited that greatly, but still, it hurt.

But it bought enough time for my other self to evade the blow, stepping backwards as I took the hit and dancing out of the way. He extended a hand toward me and Gilgamesh both, snapping his fingers at once.