Chapter 1731: Welcome Back
Quinlan looked at the ice spire on the distant ridge, and the first cut hit it before his expression changed.
There were no hands raised, saber cuts, or gestures of any kind.
He stood in the sky with his arms at his sides and the upper third of the spire sheared clean off as if an invisible blade the width of the battlefield had passed through it.
The severed chunk toppled from the cut and crashed into the ridge slope in an avalanche that swallowed the treeline and sent tremors through the frozen earth hard enough to buckle knees on the nearest front.
The second cut came before the debris settled, then a third, then a fourth, each narrower and more precise than the last, the arcs tightening as the spire lost mass and the target inside it grew closer to the surface.
Multiple soldiers couldn’t help but look up.
The Primordial Villain hung motionless in the sky above the war and carved a mountain apart from half a kilometer away through nothing but will, each invisible slash sending another avalanche of shattered ice cascading down the ridge while the spire shrank from a monument into a pillar, from a pillar into a column, from a column into a block barely taller than a man.
The orange glow appeared on the seventh cut.
Faint and pulsing through the translucent ice, the same color it had been when Quinlan sealed it only minutes ago, the self-destructive explosion that had nearly killed them both flickering back to life as the cold that had suppressed it thinned to inches.
He brought the block to him.
Wind wrapped the frozen mass and lifted it from the ruined ridge, carrying it across the open sky above the battlefield in a slow, controlled arc that drew many eyes on the ground, and when it settled in the air beside Quinlan the soldiers close enough to see made out the shape inside: a limbless torso fused to crumbling armor, one socket empty, the other sealed shut beneath frost, suspended in ice that was already cracking from the heat building within.
The dwarven lines had by far the strongest reaction.
"That’s..." A frontline officer’s voice died in his throat as he squinted at the shape suspended in ice beside the Primordial Villain, and the color drained from his face so fast the soldiers flanking him thought he’d been hit. "No. That’s not possible."
"What is that?!" A shieldbearer beside him craned his neck. "Is that a body?!"
"Shut your mouth." The officer grabbed the man’s shoulder and squeezed hard enough to dent the pauldron, his eyes locked on the frozen block above them with a recognition he was refusing to finish. The fused armor-flesh was unmistakable to anyone who had watched their king walk onto that ridge.
"It can’t be," he whispered, and the whisper spread through the dwarven ranks faster than any order ever had.
The orange glow pulsed brighter.
Quinlan split the remaining ice with his bare hand and the cascade resumed the instant open air reached Ragnar’s flesh, cells that had spent time frozen mid-detonation reigniting in a chain reaction that tore through what was left of the fused armor-flesh and climbed toward critical mass before the dwarf king had drawn his first breath.
But Quinlan’s hand was already inside the chest.
Ice crystallized from his palm through the wound [Soul Reaper] had carved during the fight, spreading across the heart in a shell that thickened faster than the cascade could burn through it while his other hand pressed flat against the crumbling torso and pulled heat out through his fingers, fire siphoning the orange blaze while frost filled every vacuum it left behind.
He had done this once before on the ridge, bleeding and desperate, racing a dead man’s switch tied to Black Fang’s life with ice that cracked as fast as he built it.
Now, however, Black Fang was free.
He had no reason left to panic and rush.
The ice grew, dense and absolute, sealing every igniting cell before the chain could reach the next, and the cascade that had nearly beaten him died in sections like candles being snuffed one by one until the heart froze solid beneath his palm and the orange light went out.
...
Ragnar’s remaining eye opened and found a devil staring down at him.
Dark armor encased the figure from throat to heel, plates that shifted and breathed like something alive. Behind the visor that hid the face entirely, two red eyes burned with a hatred so focused and so patient that the dwarf king’s ruined body tried to flinch before his brain had finished waking.
His stumps moved, all four of them, the severed shoulders and hips jerking in a spasm his body refused to recognize as futile. The limbless torso rocked once in the open air and went nowhere at all.
He was exactly what Quinlan had left on the ridge: one-eyed, fused plate crumbling off his torso in patches that exposed the darkening meat beneath, a king reduced to a breathing ruin that the ritual refused to let die.
"What..." The word left him in a wet croak through a throat that hadn’t moved in hours, lungs fighting for air through the residue of hours spent frozen mid-decomposition.
"Welcome back."
The voice that came through the visor dripped with so much animosity it should have burned through the steel, and the stump of Ragnar’s right shoulder convulsed as a shudder tore through him before he could strangle it.
He was alive, but he should not have been.
The explosion should have burned through his body and killed him the moment the cold broke but when his eye dropped to his own chest the answer was already there.
The wound [Soul Reaper] had carved was still open, frost climbing the edges in a crystalline shell that spread across the surface of his heart. The orange glow that should have been chain-reacting through his cells sat dim and still beneath the ice.
He willed it to fire, pushed every scrap of intent the ritual had left him into the cascade, commanding the cells to ignite, to chain, to reach critical mass and burn.
But the ice absorbed the attempt without the faintest flicker reaching the surface.
"My soldiers..." His voice came out thin and shaking, consonants dissolving before they formed. "Even if I don’t die, they see me. They’ll send word to the guards and they’ll execute Black F-"
"Hehe~"
A feminine giggle reached him from somewhere past the villain’s shoulder, musical and utterly delighted.
Ragnar’s eye moved and found a blonde elf hovering beside the Primordial Villain with her arms crossed and her hair catching the winter wind. She looked down at him the way someone looks at a beetle pinned to a board, and the mockery in those blue eyes was so thorough and so entertained that dread settled in the base of Ragnar’s spine before his brain could name it.
If Black Fang was his leverage, if his soldiers sending word would trigger her execution...
Why was the elf smiling?
Quinlan’s hand closed around what remained of Ragnar’s collar, crushing through crumbling armor-flesh as if it were wet paper, and in a single motion the Primordial Villain shifted behind him and tilted the limbless torso downward until the battlefield spread below.
Ragnar’s eye swept the field on instinct.
A purple haze clung to the Fujimori lines like a sickness, and it took him a moment to understand what he was looking at. When the understanding hit, the air left his lungs as if the ice in his chest had cracked.
Black Fang carved through the Fujimori lines, fighting their elders and the brave soldiers who rushed to their aid.
She was at the center of a corridor of the dead, her katana burning with a violet infusion so dense the trail lingered for seconds after the blade passed, and the soldiers that fell in her wake were getting back up with purple light where their eyes should have been, moving with a predatory grace that belonged to one person and one person only.
His dead man’s switch. His leverage. His final gambit, the thing he’d spent his last conscious breath cackling about as the ice sealed him in.
She fought for the man holding Ragnar’s ruin over the battlefield, free and wrathful and more deadly than the Venomborne Terror had ever been, eyes burning violet, surrounded by his own former soldiers now serving her as puppets.
"No..."
Below, the dwarven lines that had been whispering about the shape in the ice were no longer whispering.
"THE VILLAIN HAS THE KING!" The cry tore from a sergeant near the front and the nearest formations buckled as soldiers craned upward.
"Is that really King Ragnar?"
"N-no way!"
"He’s holding him like a... like a..."
No one finished the sentence.
"I asked Black Fang what you did to her."
