With the scythe out of the way, there was a brief moment of opportunity. One that Jonathan took. He plotted his course as the monster before him cracked the fabric of the world apart with a snap of its fingers. Razors of death crisscrossed the air all around the Circle Lord. Jonathan leaped through a gap in the matrix, and delivered a punch to the very center of the Great Farmer’s chest, where bone met flesh.
Compared to his earlier attacks, this one was like a bomb competing with a bullet. Pure kinetic force and the hunger of the Void tore the Great Farmer’s chest into bloody ribbons. The bones turned to dust. The monster’s body was blasted away, almost too fast to see. Then Jonathan felt something warm trickling down the sides of his neck. Something warm and sticky.
His vision shifted, until he was somehow looking at his own torso. Then he realized that he was holding his head in his hands, which had instinctively reached up to grab it. A tether of Divinity connected the stump of his neck to the base of his skull, keeping him alive. In the commotion of his attack, the Great Farmer had hooked its scythe around Jonathan’s neck, using its momentum to slice straight through. The vaunted durability of Jonathan’s neck had done nothing to prevent this, but at least he wasn’t dead.
“How are you still alive?” a pained voice called out from the distance. “That attack should have removed you from this mortal coil. Anyone below Tier 20 should have died from decapitation.”
Jonathan didn't say anything. Instead, he simply laughed at the strangeness of it all. An odd current of sensation passed through the conduit running from his neck to his head, and the noise came out of his mouth. Slightly disturbed by this, Jonathan lifted his head back up, and placed it back on his neck. The flesh immediately began to heal over, and he felt his body returning to normal. As it did so, he shuddered. That had not been an experience that he wanted to repeat.
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The Great Farmer was already returning, seemingly unconcerned by the vast hole that ran through the center of its chest. Bone and flesh flaked off it as it ran, but it seemed to not have lost any sort of agility. The ground rumbled as its multi-ton form thundered across the field of wheat. Its scythe glowed, and with a keening scream, the weapon tore through the air. Reality was unbound before it, and a tide of mingled Life and Death energies exploded outwards in the form of a legion of what looked like scarecrows. Half of their bodies were crafted from flesh, and half from straw. Just like the Great Farmer, they were monstrous amalgamations of the living and unliving. Their hands were tipped with iron claws, rusting and pitted. Their faces were stitched together lumps of skin, bone and canvas.
Each was Tier 7, though not much of a threat compared to Jonathan or the Great Farmer. Still, there were hundreds of the things. Joanthan met the charge with his fists. Each punch destroyed one of the scarecrows, turning them to chunks of meat flying off to land in the distant wheat. As Jonathan dealt with them, the Great Farmer reached up with its left hand, and with one sharp movement, brought down the sky. An inverted cone of darkness formed in the center of the heavens above, and came down like a tornado. It touched down before Jonathan, and released a wave of abyssal energies.
The ground was torn up by the maelstrom, and the scarecrows were lifted up by it. Rather than discorporating, they were instead empowered by the technique. They fused with the tornado, becoming one with its raging winds. The entire storm system grew claws and fangs, jagged spikes of metal sticking out. Like an inverted blender, it howled as it cut through the air. Smaller tornadoes of the more mundane kind sprang off from its sides, tearing lines across the land.
