Read Novel Full Chapter 1702 You Lose
Chapter 1702 You Lose
The Primordial Villain stood over the dwarf king's body and cast [Subjugation].
The spell reached outward through the bond the way it always did, searching for the threshold that separated a defeated enemy from everything else, and found nothing to grip. The magic washed over Ragnar's crumbling form and slid off like water on stone, returning a system refusal so absolute it didn't even produce an error notification.
"The ritual created a true tank in every sense of the word, huh..." Quinlan murmured, analytical.
[Subjugation] required a defeated enemy or a willing submission. Ragnar was face-down in the dirt with a hole through his chest and his body breaking apart from the inside, and somehow the system didn't register either condition as met. The dark ritual was keeping him in a state between alive and dead, unable to win but refusing to lose, and that grey zone sat outside the boundaries of what defeat meant.
He used earth magic to turn the dwarf onto his back.
The state of Ragnar was worse than the fall suggested. The fused armor-flesh that had tanked everything Quinlan threw at it was cracking apart in patches across his torso and limbs, the tissue beneath softening and darkening as the necrotic current that maintained it failed section by section. His remaining eye was open but vacant, the pupil blown wide and rolling loosely in its socket without tracking anything, and the breaths that racked his torso came wet and labored through a mouth where foam had started going dark.
He was decomposing while still breathing.
Quinlan had more work to do. He began with clinical detachment.
[Soul Reaper] took the right arm at the shoulder in a single downward stroke, the coated blade passing through the failing armor-flesh with less resistance than healthy tissue would have offered. The left followed before the first limb finished hitting the stone. Then both legs, each severed with the same clean efficiency.
Ragnar's mouth moved before his voice caught up, the sound that emerged slurred and dissolving, consonants breaking apart before they fully formed. "You win... Villain..."
The grin that followed split the crumbling face wider than the muscles should have allowed. "But don't think for a single second... that I'll let you parade me around as your slave... or turn me into one of your blue things..."
He coughed hard and ugly, spitting up his own insides before slurring, "Gorthrax theorizes that... this ritual would burn my very existence to nothing... Even if you kill me... there's nothing left for you to harvest..."
The grin kept widening. Past what was sane, past what the dissolving face could hold, teeth showing through gaps where the flesh of his cheeks had started coming apart.
"I'll see you in purgatory-"
[Soul Reaper] punched through his sternum before the word finished, because the Primordial Villain had never been the type to let a dying man finish a sentence when it was heading somewhere dangerous.
Ragnar laughed.
The sound was wet and broken and gargling around the blade in his sternum, and something faint pulsed through the cracks in Ragnar's fused plate as he laughed. A glow, dim and orange, flickering beneath the surface like embers catching air.
"You were right, by the way... I was bluffing... Black Fang is alive yet... The serpent whore refused to surrender, no matter what I did to her..."
The saber didn't stop carving flesh, but somewhere beneath the cold machinery driving Quinlan's hands... A small, quiet thing emerged.
She was alive. "My death... will signal my allies..." The cackle kept going, rising in pitch. "Black Fang... will be executed... the moment my heart stops..."
Quinlan's hand paused for the first time.
The orange glow beneath Ragnar's fused plate surged the moment the words left his mouth, as if the declaration itself had started a clock. The dim flicker from seconds ago blazed into visible light that bled through every crack in the crumbling armor-flesh, pulsing outward in waves that grew brighter and hotter with each heartbeat. The necrotic cells that had been failing quietly were igniting, chain-reacting through his torso in a cascade.
Ragnar was still laughing when the issue became apparent.
[Subjugation] needed a defeated or willing target, and Quinlan was already doing so much damage Ragnar could die at any moment. But if he believed the dwarf, killing him would send the signal, and [Eternal Damnation] might not even work on a soul the ritual was already burning to nothing. He couldn't let the dwarf die, but he wasn't defeated enough for [Subjugation] yet.
[Soul Reaper] drove into the chest again, searching for the threshold, the tipping point where the system recognized what any sane observer already knew. Ragnar laughed through it, cackling with a madness that had eaten whatever was left of the king who had traded his future for this ridge, and the orange glow pulsed brighter with every stab as the cascade crept closer to critical mass.
The laughter was still going when Quinlan pulled the saber free and released it.
Ice crystallized over his right hand in a single surge, jagged and dense, forming a spike that extended past his knuckles in a point sharp enough to split enchanted steel. The wound on his forearm was still open, still pouring crimson down his wrist, and sealing it would have cost less ice than a breath of frost.
But he didn't spare it as he drove the spike through Ragnar's chest and his frozen fist closed around the heart.
It was burning. Orange light bled through the ice on his fingers as the cells in the organ fought to finish what Ragnar had started, each pulse hotter than the last, and the frost cracked against the heat the way a dam cracked against a flood.
Quinlan fed more, and the cascade broke through his ice like it was nothing.
Orange fire swallowed the frost around his fist in a single pulse, the heart burning so hot the ice on his fingers shattered and reformed and shattered again, and Ragnar's scream of laughter tore across the ridge with triumphant fury.
"YOU CAN'T STOP IT, VILLAIN!" The voice that came out of the limbless torso was louder than anything Ragnar had produced in the entire fight, powered by cells that were burning themselves alive and didn't care. "I HAVE WON! YOUR WOMAN IS DYING WITH ME!"
The cascade surged and Quinlan's ice shattered across his knuckles for the third time, the orange fire eating through every layer he built the instant he built it.
He didn't spare it.
He rebuilt the frost around his fist and forced it deeper into the heart, and the cascade met him again, hotter than before, melting through the ice before it could set. Ragnar's laughter shook the stone beneath them.
"SHE'LL DIE KNOWING YOU WERE TOO SLOW!" Ragnar screamed, and the joy in it was hideous because it was real. "TOO WEAK! THE GREAT PRIMORDIAL VILLAIN, AND HE COULDN'T SAVE THE ONE WHO SACRIFICED HERSELF FOR HIM!"
Quinlan's teeth cracked against each other, and the ice shattered a fourth time.
His free hand pressed flat against Ragnar's burning torso and fire answered, but not the way it had all fight. He didn't push heat in, instead pulling it out. The element obeyed its master, siphoning the orange blaze through his palm and up his arm in threads of stolen warmth that scorched his skin from wrist to shoulder, and the gap it left behind was ice-cold and empty and waiting.
He filled it.