The dent in his helmet was already closing.

Quinlan watched the blacksteel knit itself back together where his fist had caved it inward, the metal flowing like liquid mercury back into shape, and beneath it the cheekbone he’d fractured was doing the same.

Scorched skin sealed over. Burst blood vessels refilled. The burns across Ragnar’s neck and chest from the boot-blast in the channel smoothed away as if someone were running a cloth across a dirty surface, and the armor followed in lockstep, fractures in the plate filling with fresh blacksteel that grew from the edges inward.

’Anima-grade...?’ The thought formed and died in the same breath.

[Synchra] had self-repair abilities because she was, in a way, alive. The metal moved because she could choose to move.

’No...’

But what Quinlan was watching had nothing to do with choice. The blacksteel wasn’t repairing itself around Ragnar’s body.

It was repairing itself as Ragnar’s body, the same flesh knitting that closed his burns spreading seamlessly into the metal as if the two were the same material growing from the same source.

The armor was fused with him. It wasn’t equipment anymore. It was skin.

"What have you done to yourself?" The words left Quinlan quiet and flat as he watched the last dent smooth away. "You turned yourself into a freak. Your own people won’t be able to recognize you."

Ragnar’s remaining eye burned in its socket, and the muscles in his neck bulged as the veins of black pulsing beneath his skin throbbed in answer.

"And for what?" Quinlan asked.

"FOR A BETTER FUTURE!" The howl tore from Ragnar’s chest and shook the hillside, every word ripped from a throat that was half flesh and half the dark that pulsed beneath it. "A future where my people don’t kneel to an arrogant, self-obsessed BRAT who thinks the world owes him worship!"

"I never demanded worship from anyone," Quinlan replied nonchalantly. "You deluded yourself into thinking this is what your people need you to do, when in reality, you just couldn’t stomach defeat."

"Haha..." Ragnar chuckled, the sound coming out wrong, lurching.

Silence held the space between them for a beat.

Then both men began walking forward.

Ragnar came first, his swollen frame settling into a stride that cracked the stone beneath each boot, blacksteel-fused fists clenching and unclenching at his sides as the dark energy bleeding from his skin thickened into a haze that warped the air around him.

Quinlan matched him.

[Synchra] blazed across his body in a flare of deep crimson, the pitch-black plates of the armor hardening and shifting as she responded to her master’s intent, edges sharpening, surface darkening until the armor drank the light around it.

[Soul Reaper] left his back, the pitch-black saber rising to meet Quinlan’s grip as ghostly pale flames erupted along the blade’s edge, and the moment his fingers closed around the hilt he spun it.

The first rotation split the air in a shockwave that flattened the grass in a circle around him.

The second sent a gust tearing across the hillside hard enough to scatter loose stone.

The third cracked the ground, and by the time the saber settled in his grip properly, the wind was still screaming outward from the point he stood on.

"Bowing to a supreme power isn’t something to be ashamed of, Ragnar." Quinlan’s voice carried across the distance between them. "It’s the natural course of events. Those who bow willingly are going to have a better future under me than anything they could have built on their own."

His head tilted, and the red of his eyes caught the firelight from the battlefield below.

"I’m not going to send your soul to the Goddess until you’ve had a good look at the future you forbade yourself from existing in."

Ragnar stared at the man walking toward him, and an ugly, morbid laugh clawed its way out of his ruined throat.

"Do you even hear yourself? You egotistical, arrogant bastard. You actually believe every word, don’t you?"

Quinlan’s aura thickened.

The crimson glow around [Synchra] deepened, the pale flames along [Soul Reaper] climbed higher, and the pressure rolling off the Primordial Villain pushed the air itself outward in a visible distortion that bent the light between them.

"Of course. After all, it’s the truth. I’ll make it so."

Ragnar’s body lurched forward with a violence that had nothing measured left in it, the dark energy around him detonating outward as every ounce of ritual-enhanced Strength fired at once, and the ground behind his launch cratered from the force of a single step.

"LET’S SETTLE THIS THEN, VILLAIN! THIS WORLD IS TOO SMALL FOR THE BOTH OF US!"

Quinlan met him.

Two forces collided on the scorched hillside and the shockwave that followed silenced every fight within a hundred meters.

Ragnar’s fist came through the blast wave first, a blacksteel-fused column of muscle that cratered the ground where Quinlan’s head had been a fraction prior, and [Soul Reaper] answered in the gap with a magma-coated stroke that opened the dwarf’s ribs in a spray of sparks and dark blood.

The wound closed before Ragnar finished his follow-through, fused flesh knitting shut as if the saber had never touched him, and the backhand that came next carried enough force to shatter the stone beneath the point Quinlan vacated.

Raw, annihilating power against precision and control, and neither giving an inch.

Their positions locked, [Soul Reaper]’s edge grinding against Ragnar’s forearm, flames hissing against fused metal, and Quinlan looked at the dwarf king through the sparks.

"What did you do to Black Fang?"

Ragnar’s remaining eye widened a fraction, and the grin that split his face was the ugliest thing he’d worn in his life.

"The snake cunt?" He leaned into the lock, pressing his weight forward until the ground beneath Quinlan’s boots cracked.

"I defeated and captured her, then my men and I decided to use her for what women like her are good for."

The grin stretched past what the stretched skin should have allowed. "We took turns using her hot piece of ass until she stopped fighting. When that got boring, I threw her to the goblins who gang raped her and then ate her alive."

The pale flames along [Soul Reaper] guttered once and went dark.

The wind around Quinlan died.

For a fraction of a second the Primordial Villain was just a man standing very still with his blade pressed against a monster.

Then the aura that had been pressing outward in a steady, overpowering tide collapsed inward against his body and detonated.

What erupted from him was nothing like before.

The confident dominance, the casual authority, the pressure that had bent light between them on the walkdown, all of it burned away, and what replaced it was wrath so dense the air between them went dark.

Crimson bled from [Synchra] in slow pulses that matched a heartbeat running far too steady for the fury behind it, and the ground beneath Quinlan’s boots cracked outward in a spiderweb that reached twenty meters in every direction.

Ragnar felt the change in the blade first.

The pressure through the lock tripled, then quadrupled.

"I don’t believe you." The voice that left Quinlan was flat and wrong.

His eyes found Ragnar’s through the sparks. Those red orbs of churning, violent hatred had nothing left in them that was willing to talk.

"But for daring to utter those hideous words to me, I’ll make sure you never get to greet that Goddess of yours."