Chapter 1695: Intense Primordial
Sera’s arrow hit Ragnar’s chest and the burst of compressed 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 compressed 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 competing 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 command.
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.
<You are more... intense than I’ve ever seen you, Quinlan.> Her voice came quiet through [Master’s Link]. <What happened?>
His answer came without the link, decreed aloud between exchanges. "He spoke the most hideous words I’ve heard in my entire life."
Kaelira’s barriers pulsed once as her heart skipped a beat. She instantly got the gist of what had happened, as there weren’t many things in life that could’ve made Quinlan like this.
Black Fang.
The woman who spent years inside her poison baths because the world outside them held nothing she needed, who could go seasons without speaking to another living soul and never once feel the lack.
Kaelira understood that so completely it sat in her chest like a second heartbeat whenever she thought about it.
She was the same, a woman who’d spent her years inside her forge the way Black Fang spent hers inside her baths, content with the company of their craft and nothing else.
Well, Quinlan’s company she didn’t mind. Not at all. Especially when they started getting sweaty together, and celebrated their successes with big hugs... That was a new methodology to her smithing, but she wouldn’t have wanted it otherwise...
But Black Fang and her disciples had been the ones who kept them alive when they were too weak to keep themselves alive.
She had sacrificed herself so the rest of them could escape these two and their armies safely, and before that, Black Fang’s generous donations had helped finance Kaelira’s first real smithy.
But all of that was secondary.
She liked Black Fang. Genuinely, as a person, in the uncomplicated way she rarely liked anyone.
The thought of what Ragnar’s words must’ve implied settled into the shy smith’s body like iron heated past its flexibility, and when her shields reformed they were denser than anything she’d produced before.
Kaelira had made her decision.
She’d come onto the ridge with one shield and her hammer, but the hammer was wrong for this fight.
She couldn’t crack Ragnar’s fused plate anywhere close to how Quinlan could, and every second spent swinging was a second she wasn’t standing where the damage would land.
The hammer dissolved into [Runeweaver’s Armory] in a flash of runic light and a second barrier materialized in its place, primordial earth flooding through the mark on her womb and reinforcing both surfaces until the stone beneath her cracked from the weight.
She drove her boots into the ridge and the earth answered, flowing up around her greaves and locking her down with the permanence of bedrock, and Kaelira planted herself between Quinlan and the worst thing on this field.
Aelindra read the formation in a single sweep and moved.
A feint toward Quinlan’s flank drew Kaelira’s guard left, and in the gap the blade dancer burst toward Sera at full Level 74 speed with both weapons angled for the throat.
Sera barely raised her bow before Kaelira was there, wrenching herself sideways against the earth anchoring her legs to slam both barriers into Aelindra’s path, and the collision of primordial earth against infused steel sent the elf skidding across the stone.
The pattern ground them down within the first minute.
Ragnar pressed Quinlan with relentless aggression and sheer physical supremacy, while Aelindra probed Sera’s position between exchanges, and Quinlan fought both fronts with everything his class could give him.
Fire walls erupted between Aelindra and the backline to buy Kaelira seconds to shift position, wind caught the tanker before a Ragnar follow-through could send her off the ridge, and ice crystallized across her barriers in thin reinforcing layers between reformations.
He fought Ragnar with six elements and spent the seventh keeping his allies alive, and it still wasn’t enough.
Kaelira caught what got through from both sides, Ragnar’s follow-throughs shattering her barriers and sending her sliding backward despite the earth anchoring her, while Aelindra’s probes forced her to lunge into strikes meant for Sera.
The barriers cracked and reformed, the blood from her nose and the split in her lip saying the cost was reaching through.
Through all of it, a small, focused grin formed on Kaelira’s lips.
Her arms trembled and her twin shields were on their ninth incarnation and the blood on her chin had started pooling in the hollow of her collar, yet...
Sera was behind her, the best friend she’d made in this new life of hers, alive because Kaelira stood where the damage fell.
Quinlan was beside her, the man who’d handed a thrown-away conscript a forge and a future, fighting with the creativity that made her chest tight every time she watched him work.
Her class could rebuild what was destroyed, using her own expertise in the art of smithing and tanking, two of her most beloved professions combined into one.
Every shattered shield turned into a fresh creation born under pressure, made better with what she learned, and the grin on her lips belonged to a smith standing in the heat she was forged for.
But then...
