Sera's arrow hit Ragnar's chest and the burst of pressed celestial light scorched the fused plate in a shallow ring before the surface sealed itself shut, and the dwarf king walked through the fading radiance without breaking stride.
He wasn't looking at her. That single eye, bright with a hatred too precise for sheer madness, found Quinlan and stayed there.
"Your own women will be the witnesses of your death, Villain."
Aelindra circled wide to the left with her twin blades low, her gaze sweeping past Quinlan to the blonde elf in the backline, because she had already decided who she intended to kill first.
Ragnar charged and Quinlan answered with everything he had.
Wind hurled him clear of the first fist that cratered the ridge, and in the same motion ice erupted between them in a wall that Ragnar smashed through without slowing, shards spraying across the slope.
Fire hit the breach at point-blank range, earth buckled beneath the dwarf's boots to throw his balance, and [Soul Reaper] drove through the stumble with magma, ice, and lightning stacked behind the edge.
The saber scored Ragnar's ribs in a glowing line that sealed before the sparks finished landing. One fingernail deep.
Lightning arced from Quinlan's free hand into the wound before it closed, and magma pooled in the fissures Ragnar's own strikes had torn into the stone, turning the terrain itself into a weapon. Seven elements cycling through saber and will and bare hands, and the fused armor-flesh absorbed all of it between heartbeats.
Ragnar's follow-up cut off Quinlan's elemental spacing from an adjusted angle, reading every pattern and closing the routes before they could form. Three more strikes, each carrying fortress-gate force, and Quinlan wove through them by margins so thin that surviving looked indistinguishable from luck.
Every exchange that followed was Quinlan doing his best to break through the incredibly robust enemy he was facing. Wind pressed the air behind his retreat and launched him back in before Ragnar's momentum could reset, [Soul Reaper] carving magma-edged arcs that found the same healing seam three times in succession to force the regeneration to work harder.
Ice crystallized inside the wound on the third pass and shattered outward to widen the gap, lightning followed through the exposed flesh before the fused plate could seal, and fire cauterized the closing edge to slow the knit by a heartbeat.
A fraction was all he needed. Earth surged beneath his boots and tilted the section of ridge Ragnar stood on, throwing the dwarf king's footing into a momentary stumble, and in that sliver of imbalance [Soul Reaper] found the gap beneath Ragnar's fused collarbone and drove two inches deeper than anything had managed since the fight began.
Ragnar's eye went wide and he screamed gutturally before the wound closed around the blade and pushed it out, but the blood that fell was darker than before.
For the first time since undertaking the dark ritual, the dwarf king gave ground, one involuntary step backward before the fused flesh finished sealing and his eye locked back onto Quinlan.
And in a place dimensions away, the Goddess was watching with bated breath. This was the version of Quinlan Elysiar that had never existed on a battlefield before this war.
Despite watching him almost constantly since his arrival in her domain, she'd never seen him like this.
Every fight against an enemy far stronger than him, such as these two should've been, had ended the same way: Black Fang or someone else strong enough to contend at the vanguard, and Quinlan in the back doing his best to support them with his great utility.
The Primordial Villain as support, the jack-of-all-trades whose versatility served others best when it multiplied their strengths rather than peting with their peaks.
But Black Fang wasn't here now, yet the man who used to support from the sidelines was standing at the center of this ridge against the hardest thing he'd ever fought with nothing but two gorgeous elves at his flanks and seven elements at his mand.
Furthermore... He had told his women 'Let's do this, ladies' with a casual grin, and the moment he turned back to Ragnar every trace of that warmth fell away.
What replaced it was focus. Pure, absolute, and hostile in a way the Goddess had rarely witnessed from any man across any era.
The Primordial Villain wanted Ragnar dead. That intent saturated every element he cast, turning tactical precision into something personal and merciless.
His fire burned darker at its core than fire should, the hatred bleeding through the element itself. The ice formed with edges that could have split enchanted steel.
The wind carried a cutting pressure that scored Ragnar's fused plate in passing, and the magma pooling in the fissures glowed a wrathful red-black that belonged in a furnace stoked by vengeance rather than fuel.
The Goddess's hands pressed flat against her lap.
'Evil Boy...'
Kaelira felt the same intensity pour from Quinlan.
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