poor face

It should go without saying that I made sure Gilgamesh was standing right next to me at the time.

The ancient Grimm actually flinched once, recoiling at the sudden rush of flames. He didn’t evaporate as lesser Grimm had, didn’t even start to immediately burn—but I saw his armor heat and glow and knew it must have hurt. He recovered quickly, however, lashing out at me with one hand without the slightest care about entering the core of my flames and—

Um. Well, technically, what he did was grab my head with one hand, lift me off the ground, and slam me back down—but when Gilgamesh was doing something like that, it was the type of thing that was best described with words like ‘smite.’ The already broken ground shattered for another few hundred meters as he plunged me straight into the field of molten earth my presence was creating, driving me down until I hit something solid. I reached up reflexively to grab his wrist, instinctively trying to leverage him off, but in a contest of pure strength, Gilgamesh probably had more in his fingertips than I did in both arms. He held on and made it clear he wasn’t letting go as his grip tightened on my skull, other hand pulling back to strike me in the face, pushing me further and further down.