Chapter 1733: Upholding Tradition |
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.
Quinlan peeled the skin from Ragnar’s back again, and while the raw muscle glistened in the winter sun he uncorked the vial and poured.
The violet liquid hit exposed flesh and Ragnar’s body locked rigid.
"Black Fang gave me this little vial," Quinlan’s voice came wrong against the back of his skull as the venom began to seep. "All she said was ’use this.’"
The words cut through the first wave of sensation as the venom threaded into his muscle fibers, and Ragnar’s eye snapped toward the Fujimori lines.
He found her.
Black Fang’s katana carved through Tatsumi’s guard in a diagonal stroke that split the youngest Fujimori elder from shoulder to hip. The man folded and was dead before his knees hit the ground.
"BLACK FANG!"
The roar tore from Ragnar’s throat, raw and ragged.
She paused.
The katana stopped mid-arc and the violet eyes lifted from the carnage to find the limbless torso dangling in the sky.
"I WILL-"
Then the venom reached his nerve endings and the rage in Ragnar’s throat became a shriek.
It hit all at once, every fiber the poison had threaded through igniting with a sensitivity so extreme that the winter air across the open wound became its own blade, the wind itself flaying him, and the sound that replaced his roar had nothing honorable left in it, a high broken scream.
Below, Black Fang watched the dwarf king with the faintest flicker of life behind her eyes, so muted and so brief that anyone other than Quinlan might’ve missed it.
Then it was gone, and the Venomborne Terror turned her back on the limbless king in the sky as if he had ceased to exist, and the massacre resumed.
"Sera."
"Mmhm~"
The glow returned, and the skin sealed shut.
Ragnar screamed louder than he had during any cut.
The venom was still inside, threading deeper through rebuilt tissue, and the healing detonated every sensitized nerve at once as new flesh grew around the substance and pressed it tighter against the endings it had already claimed.
Golden light became its own instrument, warmth and restoration converted into white-hot agony by the poison lacing every fiber, and the dwarf king thrashed so violently that dark fluid sprayed from his shoulder stumps.
Sera watched the display with her head tilted, studying the dwarf’s shattered expression with thorough fascination.
But she realized that it wasn’t enough.
She no longer wanted to only watch her man do the dirty work.
After all...
"Quin."
Her voice came sweet and warm.
"So there’s this unofficial tradition among us girls." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as if she were the most innocent maiden in existence. "Ayame did it to slavers. Vex to the lionkin. Iris to Gilbert and dirty soldiers. Jasmine and her mom to Aurelion..."
She twirled the strand of hair cutely as she explained, "I want to uphold the tradition. But the councilwomen are, well... not equipped for this sort of thing."
Her gaze returned to Ragnar, and the smile that crossed her face was the most beautiful and the most terrifying expression the dwarf king had ever seen.
"That leaves me with this... thing."
She looked at Quinlan and blinked many times innocently. "Can I, Quin?"
He was silent for a long second before sighing.
"No touching."
Sera’s smile went soft in a way that was entirely about the man who still had it in him to be so jealous and possessive of her despite the situation, and she nodded like a delicate maiden whose beloved had done something far too romantic.
"Of course, my love."
A dagger of golden light crystallized in her hand and cut apart the rags covering his groin.
Then she giggled. "I might need a magnifying glass for this."
She brought the dagger down between the dwarf king’s legs.
The sound that left Ragnar hit a frequency the throat was never built to produce, high and thin, so raw that soldiers on the ground pressed their palms over their ears and several dropped where they stood.
The venom that had saturated his flesh caught the new wound instantly, flooding sensitized nerve endings that had never been exposed to open air, and the agony exceeded every threshold the dwarf king’s body possessed.
"Heal," Quinlan called.
"With a joyous heart."
Sera’s light flooded over him, sealing every wound.
From that point, two blades worked him.
Quinlan’s ice razor opened him from behind in methodical, furious lines, peeling and slicing through flesh the venom had turned into a landscape of raw agony.
Sera’s light dagger traced across his chest and stomach with a delicacy that made the cruelty worse, and she hummed while she worked, a soft melody that floated above the screaming.
Between cuts she healed everything back to perfection so the next round landed on fresh, unblemished, venom-soaked nerve endings primed to receive the full measure of what both of them had to offer.
Ragnar broke on the third dual round.
"PLEASE! GODDESS ABOVE, STOP!"
The words poured out of him in a flood that had no pride left in it, no dignity, no trace of the king who had laughed through his own dismemberment on the ridge, just a broken animal screaming at anything that might listen.
Below, the dwarven army was breaking in a way no weapon could have managed.
It started at the center, where the dark ooze had been falling longest and the soldiers had been listening to their king for minutes.
A captain in full plate lowered his axe, looked at the men around him, and stepped backward out of formation without a word. He turned and walked. No one stopped him because the man beside him was doing the same.
The collapse spread outward in rings.
On the left flank, three sergeants threw their weapons into the dirt simultaneously and dropped to their knees with their hands behind their heads, and the soldiers behind them followed within seconds, steel clattering to the ground in a cascade.
On the right, a dwarven company broke into a full sprint toward the rear with shields abandoned and formation gone, and the ones who remembered Quinlan’s words from earlier did exactly what he’d told them: they threw their weapons away and knelt, sinking into the mud with faces carved from misery, choosing surrender over one more second of standing beneath that sound.
At the rear of the center formation, a grey-bearded colonel with nine hundred years under the crown reached up and unclasped his helmet.
He set it on the ground beside his boots with a finality that said he would never pick it up again, then unfastened the officer’s gorget from his throat and placed it on top.
The rank insignia he had earned across dozens of campaigns caught the winter light one last time before the mud swallowed its shine.
He knelt.
The soldiers nearest him watched their most senior surviving officer surrender his commission in the dirt, and the flatness in his voice when he spoke carried more weight than any order he had ever given.
"It’s over, lads and lasses. Throw them down."
Steel hit the ground around him in a wave that spread outward for fifty meters.
"Captain! Orders!" A crossbowman cried at the nearest officer, and the officer was sitting in the dirt with his hands over his face, staring at nothing.
"Prepare for the dark age of the dwarven race, soldier. Or its extinction..."
"Sir...!" the soldier cried and lost all his will to fight.
The dwarven army that had marched through Kaede’s portal under the banners of the Elvardian Alliance unraveled from the center in minutes, and the wailing from above never stopped.
Ragnar watched a dwarven spearman from his personal guard throw his weapon into the dirt and kneel with both hands over his face.
He watched three companies collapse inward like tents whose poles had been cut. He watched the banners fall one after another, the golden hammer-and-mountain of his house trampled by the boots of men running from a sound they could no longer stand.
His army. His people. The soldiers who had followed him through the portal because their king had asked them to.
"Kill me." The words came out flat, emptied of everything. "Please just kill me!"
"Kill you?" Quinlan repeated the words slowly, tasting them on his tongue.
A breath left him that was almost a laugh but not quite, a single exhale through the visor that shook his shoulders once.
Then it came again, stronger, a low chuckle building in his chest that vibrated through the hand gripping Ragnar’s collar and traveled down through the limbless torso like a second heartbeat.
"Kill you...?"
The chuckle climbed, turning fuller and warmer, a laugh that grew and grew until the Primordial Villain threw his head back and released it completely, a boisterous, unrestrained roar of genuine amusement that echoed across the dying battlefield.
It shook through Ragnar’s bones, each wave of laughter reverberating through the limbless ruin until the dwarf king’s teeth rattled in his skull.
Quinlan laughed like a man who had heard the funniest thing in his life, and the sound of it was worse than every cut and every drop of venom combined because there was nothing forced about it.
The Primordial Villain found the dwarven king’s plea for death genuinely, thoroughly funny.
"Haaah... Thanks, I needed that," he chuckled, laughter finally fading.
The silence it left behind was heavier than the screaming had been.
"Sera."
"Heal."