Chapter 1732: Boiling Animosity |
The voice came from behind Ragnar’s skull, close enough that he could feel the cold air displaced by the visor, and the fury in it had thickened since the last words left it.
Each word came bitten off at the end, as if letting it run any longer would cost him the last thread keeping his hands from ending this too quickly.
"She didn’t want to talk about it, eager to get back to the front instead of telling stories."
The words rolled over Ragnar’s skin and the dread that followed had everything to do with how they were being said, because the voice was getting worse. Hotter. Closer and closer to the edge, memories stoking his own wrath higher with every detail instead of reining it in.
"Myrasyn was more than happy to indulge me, however."
Ragnar’s ruined body did something it should not have been capable of. His heart, frozen solid beneath a shell of ice, managed a beat.
"Her list was so long I still haven’t heard the end of it."
A second beat happened, a thick sluggish thud that pushed dark fluid through veins the ritual had burned hollow. Terror filled him, animal and absolute, the body’s certainty that the entity above it was so far up the chain that courage and defiance were jokes it refused to tell.
"You beat Black Fang. Slapped and punched her face. Kicked her in the stomach and ribs."
Ragnar’s stumps jerked, all four, the severed shoulders and hips scraping in a crawling motion that was as pathetic as it was instinctive, every nerve in what remained of him howling to get away from the voice whose source he could no longer see.
"You cut into her skin and flesh."
He couldn’t see Quinlan.
The helmet, the position, the angle, all of it arranged so the only thing filling Ragnar’s vision was the battlefield below and the only thing filling his ears was the seething recitation of what he had done.
"You mocked and ridiculed her verbally. You brought in dozens of renowned torturers and ordered them to do their worst."
The stumps kept scraping against the ice holding his torso together, dark fluid leaking from the shoulder joints where the movement tore tissue the ritual had already been failing to maintain.
"Hours upon hours, you gave her no rest."
The voice dropped, but the fury didn’t.
"Then you increased the intensity."
The anger went lower, close enough to the base of his skull that the words bypassed his ear and hit the bone.
"Dwarf king. You were liked by most of your subjects. I have no doubt that you would have gone down in history as a competent, respected ruler."
The stumps stopped moving because every scrap of will Ragnar had left was being spent on trying not to shake.
He failed.
"But you decided to torture my woman."
The tremor started in his torso and spread through what was left of him in a wave that rattled the ice, and the king who had laughed through his own dismemberment clenched what remained of his teeth so hard the crumbling molars cracked.
"So your legacy has been forfeit. You will be remembered as the pathetic little bitch whose decisions brought about the end of Elvardia and caused countless dwarven deaths. I’ll make sure of it."
The words hit something in Ragnar that cruelty alone could not have reached.
Pride.
"SOLDIERS!" The roar tore from the ruined throat with a volume the ritual had no business producing, dead lungs filling with air that tasted of his own decomposition and forcing it outward with everything Ragnar had left. "SHOOT HIM DOWN! INJURE ME IF YOU MUST! STOP THIS MAN NO MATTER WHAT!"
Crossbow bolts launched from the dwarven lines in a volley aimed at the figure in the sky.
Blue-skinned elites on the ground surged into the crossbowmen’s ranks before most could reload, and the couple hundred of bolts that made it past the screen reached Quinlan’s altitude and flattened sideways in the wind without the Primordial Villain shifting his grip on Ragnar’s throat.
Ice crystallized from Quinlan’s free hand into a shape that wasn’t quite a weapon.
Too thin for a blade, too precise for a spike, a flat razor of compressed frost.
The first cut opened Ragnar’s back from the base of his neck to where his spine met his hips.
A raw, involuntary shriek tore out of the dwarven king. It carried across the battlefield and hit the dwarven lines below like a physical blow.
"WHAT IS HE DOING TO HIM?!" A dwarven captain cried from the ground, and the soldiers nearest him broke formation entirely, turning in circles, looking up, looking at each other, looking for anyone who could make this stop.
Ragnar’s jaw locked shut around the second shriek.
"I won’t..." Dark foam sprayed from between his teeth. "I won’t give you the satisfaction, Villain..."
The second cut ran parallel to the first, two centimeters to the left, and the precision was so clinical that the skin between the two lines peeled upward from the muscle beneath in a strip thin enough to see light through. The third mirrored it on the right.
Black ooze welled from the opened flesh and began to fall.
It fell like sap, slow and viscous, trailing dark threads that caught the wind and stretched thin before snapping and tumbling toward the dwarven ranks below.
Seventy meters beneath the Primordial Villain, a young dwarven woman drove her warhammer through a Greenvale footsoldier’s guard and caved his breastplate with a strike that dropped him into the mud.
"Yes!" She whipped around to the soldiers behind her with triumph blazing across her face. "We can do this! Hold the l-"
Warm black liquid landed on her cheek.
She touched it and looked at her fingers. "What the...?"
It was nearly black and it reeked like a wound left to rot for weeks.
More fell, a thin dark drizzle spattering across her pauldrons, and the dwarven woman looked up.
She froze on the spot.
Her king hung in the sky with his back flayed open and a dark-armored figure behind him drawing another line through the meat, and the wailing she’d been blocking out finally connected to the image above her.
Everything she’d eaten that morning hit the dirt between her boots.
Around her, the reaction rippled outward.
A veteran sergeant dropped to his knees with both hands pressed over his ears.
A shieldbearer turned his face into his own shield and wept.
Three soldiers in the second rank curled into fetal positions on the ground as the wailing from above continued and the dark ooze kept falling, and the formation that could’ve held for days upon days came apart at the seams.
"Quin."
The female elf’s voice carried over the screaming, and the warmth in it was so misplaced it drove Ragnar’s dread deeper.
"Black Fang was healed over and over again." She leaned in close enough for Ragnar to see the blue of her eyes, and the cruel, sadistic upturn of her lips. "They stitched her back up between sessions so they could start fresh."
The razor paused.
"...Right." The word came out through Quinlan’s teeth, and the rage in it spiked so sharply that frost cracked along the ice still holding Ragnar’s torso together.
The realization hit Ragnar before the healing did.
This evil bitch wanted to do to him exactly what he’d ordered done to Black Fang.
"No!"
"Yes~" she sang and golden light washed over his back and the flesh knitted shut.
The peeling strips of skin reattached, the muscle sealed, the ooze stopped flowing, and for three seconds the dwarven king’s back was starting to look whole again.
Then the razor returned, and this time it didn’t cut lines.
Quinlan started at the shoulders, the ice edge slipping beneath the skin at the trapezius and separating it from the muscle in a single long pull, peeling an entire sheet of flesh away from the back in one piece.
The skin came free with a wet, heavy sound that carried farther than the wailing, lifting from the meat and folding outward under its own weight until it hung from Ragnar’s flanks like wings made of his own hide, the exposed muscle glistening raw in the winter light.
The sound that left the dwarf king was beyond wailing. His throat had exceeded its capacity to process what was happening and the noise that came through was high and hitching and gargling on the dark fluid that rose with every convulsion, an animal sound that had no king left in it.
"Sera."
"Yes~"
Golden light. The skin crawled back and sealed.
Quinlan reached into his pocket ring and pulled out a vial.
The glass was small and dark, filled with a liquid so deeply violet it was nearly black.