Chapter 1698: She’s Fine
’She’s fine.’
The thought ran flat and practiced, the same groove it had been cutting since the fight began.
Black Fang was simply too strong to die.
[Soul Reaper] drove at the seam between Ragnar’s shoulder and neck. The blade bit shallow, and the scratch sealed before blood fell.
"Your elf girls are pretty, even I can admit that much." Ragnar’s grin stretched past what the taut skin should have allowed. "When this is over, I’ll give them to the same boys who had your snake. I can’t wait to learn if they will hold their dignity as good as she had."
Fire blazed through [Soul Reaper] and the next strike hit the fused chest plate hard enough to stagger Ragnar half a step, magma detonating in a spray of sparks that scored a line twice as deep as the last.
It still sealed in two heartbeats.
And the gap Quinlan’s overcommit left was wide enough for Ragnar to drive through.
The dwarf’s counter grazed him across the side before wind could carry him clear, and [Synchra] took the blow with a fracture that webbed across her left torso plate.
Ragnar was grinning wider. "You should focus on the present and forget about the dead, or you’ll lose even more of your women to me, Villain."
The dwarf king had found the pattern: every taunt about Black Fang spiked Quinlan’s output, and Ragnar was feeding the fury on purpose because the openings it created were worth more than the harder hits.
’She’s fine.’ The lie landed thinner every time he ran it.
But...
Slavery magic existed.
The dwarves had collars, and a prisoner as valuable as Black Fang would have been turned within the first hours and sent to this battlefield to fight against him.
She hadn’t appeared.
Which meant she was resisting through agony he couldn’t measure, or she’d escaped and was too broken to come back, or... she was truly dead. His mind kept restarting the loop because finishing it meant choosing one.
A question had been eating away at his thoughts since the fight began.
Even if she was resisting, why wasn’t she here?
She could’ve been brought before him, they could’ve used her as blackmail. Yet they didn’t.
So was she really...?
"After I kill you, your harem of whores will be tossed in the same filthy goblin den." Ragnar ground the words out between swings, each one rougher than the last. "The dog. The samurai. Every last one. They’ll wish they died fighting."
Quinlan’s elements burned brighter and his next chain scored the deepest line of the fight, [Soul Reaper] biting past the armor-flesh into tissue that bled for four full heartbeats before knitting shut.
Ragnar took the wound and swung through it, and the backhand drove Quinlan sliding across ruined stone.
The part underneath the rage was what he hadn’t let himself look at.
She was in this predicament because of him. She stayed behind and let four centuries of surviving everything end because he wasn’t strong enough to fight his own retreat.
He hated that more than Ragnar, more than the words.
He’d torn through Elvardia, stormed their forts, built a rebel army, and leveled up multiple times.
Yet here he was. After everything he’d done to become stronger, a single dark ritual had turned a dwarf he should have been able to kill into this, and now Quinlan was forced to listen to his hideous rants.
He hated this situation, his own inability to grow powerful enough no matter how hard or how smart he thought he tried, with a fury deeper than any taunt could reach.
Because Black Fang had looked at him and decided he was worth sacrificing herself for, and every second he failed to end this farce was evidence she’d been wrong.
Ragnar’s fist caught [Synchra]’s shoulder and the fracture shot down his arm in white pain.
"And when I’m done with you, I’ll drag what’s left of you with me and make your women watch as I feast on your flesh-"
[Soul Reaper] answered before the thought finished forming, three elements compressed into a thrust aimed at Ragnar’s throat with every ounce of wrath behind it.
The saber hit the fused plate and skidded sideways without biting. The worst strike he’d thrown today, where anger committed his weight before his feet were set, and Ragnar punished it with a backhand that cracked [Synchra]’s chest plate from sternum to hip.
Wind caught him before the ridge’s edge.
He tasted copper, and in the half-second it took to steady himself a thought surfaced that the fury had been drowning out for a while.
’No. I won’t allow myself to wail in self-pity over and over again.’
Every exchange since the fight began had been him throwing heat at a wall and watching it seal, and the wall was still standing while [Synchra]’s reserves burned lower with every hit he shouldn’t have taken.
He’d trained under the primordials. Fought beside Black Fang. Mastered seven elements through precision that made each one an extension of his will, and the man on this ridge was fighting like none of that existed.
Ragnar charged and Quinlan sidestepped, but this time he held the fire back. Let his feet find the angle instead of letting the rage pick it, and put [Soul Reaper] through the cleanest line he’d cut in the last twenty exchanges.
The next exchange was cleaner, and the one after that cleaner still.
The rage didn’t vanish, but it stopped steering, settling into a heat that ran beneath his technique instead of over it, and with each exchange where his body moved properly the gap between what the anger wanted and what the fight needed closed.
’I’ve been fighting his fight instead of mine.’
Every taunt about Black Fang had pulled the leash, and Quinlan had let it happen because the fury felt righteous and the alternative was thinking about what was actually done to her.
’I’m not at the peak of power. But neither are my enemies.’
Ragnar was burning his own body to match his strength, a man who traded his future for this moment. The fight had been grinding long enough for those costs to compound, and every wound Quinlan scored was one more debt the ritual couldn’t repay forever.
He didn’t know if Black Fang was in a cell, or badly injured somewhere hidden, or gone. He couldn’t learn the answer by asking nicely. The only path to knowing ran through the dwarf standing in front of him.
The elements settled into the rotation they were built for. Fire held even. Ice compressed. Wind moved with intent, and the earth answered solid.
’I will win this, then I’ll find her.’
He raised [Soul Reaper], and the pale flames along the blade burned clean for the first time since the walkdown.
’If I’m too late, I’ll carry that for the rest of my life. But I refuse to be late because I spent this fight getting led around by my own damned emotions instead of fighting the way I know how.’
Ragnar read the shift in the air Quinlan suddenly exuded, and the grin died.
The wrathful fighter whose emotions he’d been exploiting was gone, and what stood in his place carried a hatred so controlled it had stopped being an emotion.
Quinlan Elysiar had stopped fighting in rage, and his powers answered their master’s call stronger than ever before.
