Jason’s fist smashed into Maldred’s jaw once again.

The impact was disgustingly powerful.

No roots softened it, no summoned wood diverted the force, no trick of leverage or magic turned it into something cleaner than what it was. It was a bare-knuckled, desperate, full-bodied punch thrown by a man who had already spent too much of himself and still had more to give.

Jason felt the force surge from his planted heel, roll through his hips, twist through his spine and shoulder, and explode out through his arm. Something in his hand tore but also something in Maldred’s face broke.

A crunch snapped through the chamber.

Maldred’s head whipped sideways with enough violence to spray black ichor in a glittering arc through the torchlight.

The dark fluid splattered across stone and roots and hissed where it landed, eating into the floor with tiny curls of smoke. A jagged split opened along the giant’s jawline, exposing slick flesh beneath iron-grey skin. For an instant, the monster looked almost human.

Almost, that is but this wasn’t the reality.

The giant staggered a single half-step, one enormous foot scraping across the stone hard enough to shriek. Dust skipped over the floor. Jason landed in a crouch a few feet away, boots grinding, chest heaving. Pain sang through both arms. His knuckles were flayed open, blood running down over his fingers and dripping from his hand in bright red beads. His forearm throbbed from wrist to elbow as if the bones themselves had protested the strike but he had hurt him.

He had actually hurt him.

Jason sucked in a ragged breath and looked up.

Maldred slowly turned his head back into place.

The motion was wrong - too deliberate, too heavy, like boulders grinding against one another beneath skin. The split in his jaw twitched. Wet, dark fibers pulled together. Flesh crept and sealed with a pulsing sound that made Jason’s stomach tighten. Maldred rolled his jaw once, and the grinding click of reset bone echoed in the chamber.

Jason didn’t care about his healing factor.

He cared about what hadn’t happened.

No spreading rot.

No curling wave of decay.

No blackening corruption racing through the air to devour anything it touched.

That was wrong, there was no reason for him not to use it.

Jason had seen the power already - had watched walls of roots collapse into ash, stone crumble to powder, summoned barriers die under that hungry, impossible blight. Maldred should have answered every attack with it.

He should have erased every wooden construct the moment it touched him. Should have turned this whole chamber into a graveyard of dead matter and dust.

But he hadn’t which was strange.

Jason narrowed his eyes. Sweat ran into them, stinging, but he didn’t blink. He watched Maldred’s face, watched the hesitation buried beneath the fury, watched that brief flicker of strain around the eyes, the faint tightening at the corners of his mouth, as though some invisible pressure was being forced inward instead of released.

"Thalion?"

The truth slammed into place with the same force as his punch.

If the body on the floor had been Thalion’s, if the soul that had spoken to him had truly been trapped, then Maldred hadn’t merely killed his son, he had consumed him, taken him inside himself. Caged him and fed on him. And if Thalion was still there, still aware, still resisting with whatever remained of his will, then he wasn’t just a prisoner.

He was a hand on the blade.

A weight on Maldred’s arm.

And might be responsible for why Maldred suddenly couldn’t use this ability.

Jason bared his teeth because this was an assumption, he needed concrete proof.

He brought his hands together in a sharp clap.

The crack blasted through the chamber like a gunshot. The roots answered immediately. The floor around Maldred split with violent reports, and roots erupted upward in a frenzy of splintering stone and flying debris. They weren’t graceful, they weren’t vine-like. These were thick, brutal cords of wood, rough-barked and iron-hard, exploding from below with enough force to punch through bedrock. They coiled around Maldred’s ankles, cinched around his knees, looped around his waist and ribs, and lashed over his arms before he could fully react.

The roots tightened.

Stone groaned beneath Maldred’s feet. Bark scraped and shrieked against his skin. Jason fed mana into the bind and felt it answer him eagerly, each root thickening, hardening, constricting with crushing pressure. The loops around Maldred’s torso bit deep enough to leave dark grooves in his iron-grey flesh. One root twisted across his throat. Another locked both elbows back. The chamber filled with the sound of wood creaking under monstrous tension.

Jason waited for the decay.

Waited for the bark to blacken.

Waited for the roots to shrivel and collapse into dead rot but nothing happened.

Maldred snarled, planted both feet, and flexed.

It was like watching a siege engine come to life.

The giant’s body swelled with effort. Cords of muscle rose beneath his skin like cables drawn taut. His chest expanded against the constricting roots. A shudder ripped through his shoulders. Then, with a thunderous chain of cracks, the wood began to give. Splinters burst outward. One root snapped, then another, then all at once the bindings exploded apart in a storm of broken bark and shredded fibers.

Maldred tore free, hurling chunks of root aside. One slab of shattered wood smashed into a wall hard enough to crater stone. Another skipped across the floor and sheared the head from a toppled statue. He ripped the last coil from his arm and flung it down with a roar.

"Still no decay."

Jason laughed once, breathless and sharp.

It was not joy. It was the wild sound of a man who had just found a crack in the armor of something he thought invincible.

"So that’s it," he muttered, more to himself than to Maldred. "You have your limits,"

Maldred’s gaze snapped to him, murderous and burning.

Jason didn’t give him time to answer.

He drove his heel into the floor.

The chamber answered with a deep, subterranean boom. A ring of fractures burst outward from his foot, splitting the stone in all directions. From one of those widening cracks, a colossal wooden arm surged upward, dragging rock and earth with it. It was not a branch enlarged. It was a limb forged from dozens of trunk-thick roots braided together so tightly they looked grown as one, plated over with slabs of stone.

Each knuckle was a boulder. Each finger was the size of a battering ram.

The arm swung and air howled.

Maldred brought both forearms up just before impact, and the strike hit with the force of a collapsing wall. The boom that followed rolled through the chamber and back again in echoing waves. Maldred’s feet left grooves in the floor as he was shoved sideways, stone screaming beneath his heels. Chips of rock sprayed from beneath him. His body bent with the blow, not broken but forced, his planted strength barely enough to keep him upright.

Jason saw the instant of imbalance and attacked it.

Another hand burst from behind Maldred, ripping through a curtain of roots and stone like something clawing free from the earth’s own skeleton. It seized his left leg just below the knee. The fingers dug in. Wood cracked under the pressure of Maldred’s muscles. The construct yanked sideways with vicious precision.

Maldred’s balance vanished in an instant.

The giant dropped hard to one knee.

The impact split the floor.

Fractures raced outward from the point of contact in jagged, branching lines. Dust burst up around him. Before he could rise, the first wooden arm came back across in a murderous backhand and smashed into his ribs. Jason heard them break - a deep, ugly series of pops muffled beneath flesh and fury. Maldred’s body lurched. Black blood sprayed from his mouth and splashed across the broken stones.

Jason stalked forward through the dust.

His entire body ached. Every breath scraped. The power he had taken into himself churned like molten metal in his veins, too vast and too powerful to be contained comfortably by anything mortal. It pressed behind his eyes. It tugged at his mind. There was a hunger in it, a heavy weight, something that wanted to stop being used and start ruling.

Keeping it contained was like trying to hold shut a gate while a storm battered the other side because even he noticed his personality shift the moment he inherited this power.

But the storm was his for now.

He raised one shaking hand, fingers curled, gold light stuttering around them.

"This is pretty cool," he said, voice rough with exhaustion and pain.

Maldred glared up from one knee, chest heaving, jaw slick with ichor. One eye was swelling shut but his healing factor was coming into play just as quickly.

The other burned brighter, not with contempt anymore but with something hotter and more dangerous.

It was fear, for the first time in its life, Maldred felt fear because what was happening right now, should not be possible.

Jason stopped a few paces away.

"I don’t know what you are," he said. "I don’t know if ’god’ is the right word."

He tilted his head, studying the huge, battered thing kneeling before him. "But I know this much. If I can break you, I can kill you."

Maldred answered with a roar so violent it shook dust from the ceiling.

He surged upward in a blast of brute force, ripping his trapped leg free and tearing the wooden hand apart around it. Splinters flew like javelins. He spun into the rise with murderous speed for something his size, one fist drawing back to pulp Jason where he stood.

Jason slammed both palms downward.

The chamber convulsed.

A deep grinding rumble rolled up from beneath the floor, from beneath the roots, from beneath the foundation itself. Every loose stone on the ground danced. Cracks split wider. The walls trembled. Maldred’s advancing step faltered as the entire room seemed to inhale. Then the earth rose.

Not in pieces. Not as scattered weapons.

As a being.

Wood and stone surged upward in a spiraling mass directly behind Jason, dragging huge chunks of foundation with it. Roots twisted around pillars of rock. Crystal veins flashed through bark like lightning trapped in amber. Dust boiled outward in choking clouds. The structure kept climbing, higher and higher, until it eclipsed Maldred and then dwarfed him entirely.

A golem emerged from the chamber floor like a mountain deciding to stand. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Its legs were rooted columns of layered timber and granite. Its torso was a fortress of interlocked trunks, each one engraved with runes that pulsed gold with the steady rhythm of a heartbeat. Its shoulders spread wide enough to nearly touch both walls. Its arms hung massive at its sides, each one thick as a tree, ending in clawed wooden hands built for pulverizing towers.

Its face was rough-hewn and severe, more mask than flesh, and where eyes should have been, two molten orbs burned with a cold, primordial intelligence.

The air suddenly changed.

Pressure flooded the chamber, dense and electric. Ozone cut through the smell of dust and blood. Loose roots shivered as though bowing to something older than they were. Even the torch flames, what few still burned, bent away from the colossal figure.

Maldred froze.

For the first time since the fight began, he looked small.

His head tilted back. His eyes widened as the other had healed.

The fury in his face drained, peeled away by disbelief so raw it made him look different.

"What..." The word cracked in his throat. "How have you mastered it?" His voice rose, stripped of certainty. "You’ve held that power for hours."

Jason looked up at the thing he had made - or perhaps the thing that had agreed, briefly, to take shape through him.

His smile was thin and tired and a little disbelieving himself.

"Maybe," he said softly, "this place just likes me better."

Maldred bellowed and charged anyway.

There was no finesse left in him. No royal menace. No cruel patience. He ran like a wounded beast, every step hammering the floor hard enough to throw up broken stone, his body bent forward, both fists drawn back, a last avalanche of muscle and rage. He covered the ground fast despite the damage. Fast enough that another man would have panicked.

Jason only lowered his hand.

The golem moved.

It was not quick in the human sense.

It was catastrophic.

Its right arm lifted with the grinding inevitability of tectonic plates. Runes blazed brighter along the wood spreading down the length of the limb and gathered around the fist in a storming halo.

For one suspended heartbeat, the entire chamber seemed to pause around that rising hand.

Then it came down.

The fist fell like judgment.

Air ruptured beneath it with a concussive crack. Dust blasted outward before impact even landed. Maldred threw both arms up, every muscle in his body knotting in desperate defense, and the fist smashed into him with enough force to make the room disappear in thunder.

The sound was enormous.

It swallowed everything.

Stone shattered, walls split, torches blew out in a burst of sparks and darkness. A shockwave raced across the chamber floor and climbed the walls in a ring of destruction, knocking loose chunks of masonry from above.

The ground beneath Maldred cratered inward, the impact driving him down through fractured stone as if hammering a spike into bedrock. Debris geysered upward around the fist in jagged sprays.

A cloud of dust and powdered rock exploded out so violently it tore through the wall threatening to bring this entire place down.

He staggered and threw an arm over his face.

For several long seconds there was only settling ruin - stone clattering down, roots swaying, dust boiling in the dark.

Then, slowly, the golem lifted its hand.

A crater smoked beneath it.

At the center lay Maldred.

His body was half-sunk into shattered stone. One arm bent wrong beneath him. The other twitched weakly, fingers scraping against the crater wall as if he could still drag himself up by sheer hatred. His chest rose in shallow, ragged jerks.

Cracks spread across his iron-grey skin like fractures in metal. Black ichor pooled beneath him in thick, steaming sheets.

The light in his golden eyes had dimmed from furnace blaze to ember-glow.

But it had not gone out.

Jason stepped to the edge of the crater, breathing hard enough it hurt. The gold light around his fingers flickered erratically now, weaker than before, but still alive.

Behind him, the golem stood in silence, towering over everything, its face fixed on the ruined giant below like an executioner waiting for the order to finish the work.

The chamber had become a wreck of smashed stone, tangled roots, and drifting dust. Every breath Jason took felt borrowed. Every beat of his heart thudded against the pressure of the power inside him.

Maldred looked up at him through blood and ruin.

Jason looked back.

The fight wasn’t done. Not yet.

But the impossible certainty that had hung over this battle from the start was gone.

In its place stood something far more dangerous.

Hope.

For the first time since the giant had stepped into his path, Jason could see the shape of victory.

And for the first time, Maldred could see it too.