Read Novel Full Chapter 1703 More
Chapter 1703 More
He filled it.
Frost surged into the vacuum before the cascade could reclaim the space, spreading from the heart into surrounding tissue while fire kept draining the heat faster than the chain reaction could regenerate it. Two elements working opposite ends of the same problem.
The ice held.
'More,' he grunted inwardly, and the ice spread faster, crawling outward through Ragnar's torso, locking the glowing cells rigid before they could ignite, and the dwarf king's triumphant screaming turned raw as the cold reached his lungs.
"No... I refuse...! Explode already, damn it..." The words came strangled as frost climbed his throat, the mad grin still splitting his face even as ice sealed the flesh around it, and the hatred in his remaining eye burned hotter than anything the cascade had produced right up until the moment it froze over.
'More.'
The cold hit the ridge and kept going.
Magma channels Quinlan had spent the entire fight carving froze solid in mere moments, red glow dying beneath white. The cratered stone locked under sheets of crystalline ice that spread outward in waves, every fissure and pool of cooling magma going rigid.
But the cascade still fought from inside, orange pulses visible through the frost climbing Ragnar's torso, each one trying to chain through the ice and reach critical mass. Quinlan's arm was buried to the elbow, his frozen fist still clamped around a heart that refused to stop burning, and he built the ice thicker and thicker and thicker.
The coffin rose from the ridge in walls that doubled with every surge of mana he forced through. Blood ran freely from his forearm and pooled on the frozen stone beneath his knees, and the ice climbing his own arm had started biting into the muscle, and he kept going. The coffin doubled again, Ragnar vanishing at the center of a frozen mass that grew into a spire taller than the ridge itself, visible from every front of the war still raging below.
Orange pulses still flickered through the translucent walls. Weaker now. Fainter. But still there, still trying to die loud enough to send the signal.
Quinlan kept building until the spire cast shadows across the slopes below, until the ice was dense enough to entomb a fortress, until the last orange flicker deep inside the frozen mass guttered once and went dark.
He finally pulled his arm free, and looked down from the ice mountain's peak.
...
Dark-light met infused steel and the shockwave split the stone between them, Sera pressing through the collision with both blades hammering Aelindra's guard while Kaelira's shield caught the counter before it reached Sera's flank.
[Daybreak's Wrath] had been climbing since the fight began, each swing landing heavier than the last as the Crimson Reservoir fed Sera's hunger.
Aelindra answered with Level 74 precision that turned defense into offense in the same breath, her weapons finding gaps in Kaelira's guard and punishing them, the infused edge carving a smoking line across Sera's bicep before the smith's shield slammed the follow-through wide and Sera's counter scored Aelindra's hip deep enough to draw blood.
"Wretched filth!" Aelindra hissed as she pulled free, both swords re-igniting. "Turning steel on your own kind for an outsider's bed."
"She's calling us traitors again like a broken record," Sera told Kaelira without looking, and the grin on her face was all cheek.
"Traitor number two likes it." Kaelira cracked both shields into Aelindra's next strike hard enough to stagger the blade dancer backward. "I always wanted that title, what a terrible nation Elvardia is..."
"I know right?!" Sera giggled and pressed the opening, dark-light burning brighter. "You keep screaming traitor, insecure woman, but he adores us. He bleeds for us and we bleed for him. You're the one trying to murder the First Elf's only living son. So who is really the traitor of our race?"
The fury that twisted Aelindra's face came from somewhere uglier than combat, from the casual warmth in Sera's voice when she talked about that man.
Her next chain came with everything her Level 74 body could produce. She drove Sera back three steps with a barrage that cracked the stone beneath each impact before a spinning cut found the seam in Kaelira's guard and scored the smith's shoulder deep enough that blood ran freely down her left arm.
"The elven race IS Elvardia!" Aelindra screamed. "Elvardia is led by the Council, and the Council has decreed that man a liar who uses trickery to confuse elves into betraying their own race!"
Then the bond screamed. No words came through [Master's Link], just intent, raw and predatory, falling toward them at a speed that bypassed thought.
Both girls moved in the same heartbeat. Sera's blades locked Aelindra's weapons from both sides while Kaelira drove her shields into the blade dancer's spine from behind.
Aelindra felt it before she understood it, a pressure from above that compressed the air visibly, and her body twisted hard to wrench free of the lock because every instinct she had was screaming to move. Her eyes snapped upward to find a shape diving down toward her at terminal velocity with seven elements condensed into the fist leading the descent. Bare-chested, bleeding, and carrying a focus that had no business existing in a wounded man.
Her barrier spell activated and went up in the last moment, right before the Primordial Villain hit it fist-first and it shattered like glass.
For one fraction of a second, their faces were close enough that Aelindra could see the lashes framing eyes so deep and dark and catastrophically beautiful that she recognized the face Sera had described between clashes with that dreamy sigh, the one his women woke up to, the one an elf had thrown away everything to sleep beside.
Those eyes had already killed her, and the rest of him was just delivering the receipt. "No!" Terror hit her spine before her mind caught up, and by the time the scream reached her legs it was too late.
His fist connected with her jaw and the entire lower half of her face left her skull.
The mandible held for a fraction of a second, then with a terrifying squelch it ripped free on both sides, taking teeth, gum, tongue, and a ragged curtain of flesh with it.
The bone spun away across the ridge trailing dark blood in an arc, teeth scattering in white fragments that bounced between the cracks. What remained below her nose hung in strips that exposed the raw meat of her throat to open air.
Pain hit her with a magnitude that millennia of combat had never once produced, so far beyond anything the war had ever delivered that her body couldn't even process it as a single signal. It arrived as everything at once, and the scream her lungs built had no mouth left to leave through.
Aelindra hit the stone with her face open, and the last thing her consciousness registered before the dark swallowed it was a notification burning across her vision.
[You have been defeated by the Primordial Subjugator.]
[Your fate now belongs to him. All you ever were, all you ever will be, is his to command.]