A few seconds before Rakshasa destroyed the orb in Edgar’s office, inside the Ritual dimension, Grace was beginning to understand that this fight had surpassed anything that could be called a dispute between participants.

She remained standing at the edge of the destroyed clearing, with a thin blade of ice floating beside her right hand and her eyes fixed on the two monsters colliding at the center of the devastated field. The forest around them no longer looked like a forest. Centuries-old trees had been uprooted, broken, cut, or crushed against the ground. Ancient ruins, which were probably meant to serve as ritualistic scenery for dramatic encounters between young nobles, had been reduced to craters, loose stones, and broken columns.

Victor and Jake had turned the place into a battlefield.

And the worst part was that neither of them seemed willing to stop.

Jake roared.

The sound crossed the clearing like a physical wave, making the ice around Grace vibrate. He was different from a few minutes ago. At the beginning of the fight, his Berserker ability had only increased his strength, speed, and resistance. Now, however, it no longer looked like mere physical reinforcement. It was transformation.

His body was getting larger.

Not in a monstrously disproportionate way, but enough for his silhouette to look wrong. Muscles expanded beneath his skin, dark veins pulsed like living cords, and red cracks spread across his arms, neck, and part of his face. The blood aura boiled around him, dense and unstable, forming the distorted shadow of something bestial behind his body.

Grace narrowed her eyes.

"He is forcing it too much."

It was not an assumption.

It was obvious.

Jake was not simply using Berserker. He was pushing the ability beyond its safe limit, feeding it with fury, humiliation, pain, and the growing obsession of crushing Victor. Every time Victor smiled, every time he mocked him, every time he resisted a blow that should have broken him, Jake lost another piece of control.

And Victor knew that.

Worse.

Victor wanted that.

He was covered in blood, his clothes torn, his ribs freshly healed, and dark marks spread over his skin where the Black Ice constantly broke and rebuilt itself. Even so, his smile did not disappear. That irritating, hungry smile, almost childish in its sick excitement.

Victor dodged one of Jake’s punches by centimeters, sliding to the side with a short burst of Black Lightning. The blow passed by him and struck the air.

Even without landing, the pressure swept away an entire line of forest.

Trees were cut by the shockwave, not by a blade, but by pure force. Trunks split in half, leaves were torn away in mass, and a cloud of dust rose where vegetation had stood before.

Victor glanced quickly at the trail of destruction.

Then smiled back at Jake.

"You are getting better," he said. "But you are also getting uglier."

Jake disappeared.

Grace almost lost the movement.

Victor also reacted too late.

The punch came from below, straight into his chest.

This time, Jake did not aim at his face. He did not seek humiliation. He did not try to grab, crush, or throw him. It was a simple, direct, brutal blow, fed by all the fury accumulated inside the Berserker.

The fist struck the center of Victor’s chest.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sound was different from the previous impacts.

Drier.

Deeper.

More wrong.

Victor was launched backward at an absurd speed, plowing through the ground, stones, and broken trunks before crashing into a distant natural wall of rock. The entire stone surface caved in on impact, creating a vertical crater around his body. Fragments fell like heavy rain.

Grace felt her blood run cold.

Half of Victor’s chest had been destroyed.

That was not an exaggeration.

The blow had opened a grotesque hole in his chest, tearing away flesh, ribs, and part of his internal organs. Blood ran down the rock behind him in thick lines, and for an instant even the red glow in his eyes seemed to dim partially.

Jake landed on the ground, breathing like a beast.

He smiled.

For the first time in several minutes, Jake smiled as if he had won something.

Grace took a step forward.

"Victor..."

Victor looked down.

At his own chest.

The hole was large enough for the forest behind him to be seen through the irregular opening in his torso.

He blinked once.

Then he began to laugh.

Low at first.

Then louder.

The regeneration began immediately.

Not in a normal way.

Red flesh rebuilt itself in violent layers. Broken ribs grew like white roots before being covered by muscle. Blood vessels reconnected in pulsing threads, organs reconstructed themselves, and new skin closed over the wound as if the body itself were irritated at having been damaged in that manner.

In a few seconds, his chest was whole.

Victor took a deep breath.

Then laughed even harder.

"That," he said, slowly raising his head. "Was excellent."

Jake was already on him.

The first punch struck Victor’s face before he finished speaking.

BOOM!

His head hit the rock.

The second blow came to the abdomen.

BOOM!

Victor’s body sank deeper into the crater.

The third struck the side of his skull.

The fourth, his chest.

The fifth, his neck.

Jake did not stop.

He punched Victor against the stone wall with such absurd fury that every impact seemed to reduce the distance between the two of them and the heart of the mountain. The rock cracked, split, pulverized. The ground trembled. Shockwaves crossed the air and struck Grace even from a distance, forcing her to raise an ice barrier so she would not be dragged away.

Victor could not get out.

Or perhaps he did not want to.

Grace no longer knew.

His body was crushed repeatedly, regenerating in the interval between one blow and the next. Black Ice appeared beneath his skin to reinforce bones and organs, but Jake broke the layers with increasing ease. Black Lightning crackled around his arms, trying to generate acceleration to escape, but the rhythm of the blows was too fast.

For the first time, Victor looked like he was dying.

Not in theory.

Not as a distant possibility.

Truly dying, crushed by brute force that surpassed defense, regeneration, and the capacity to adapt.

Grace clenched her teeth.

"Enough."

She moved her hand.

Dozens of ice spears appeared around her, thin, long, and extremely sharp. They were not strong enough to kill Jake in that state, she knew that. But perhaps they would be enough to break the rhythm. Perhaps they could open a gap. Perhaps Victor only needed an instant.

Then she heard it.

Laughter.

Not a short laugh.

Not a provocation.

An uncontrolled, broken, deep laugh, growing between the impacts like something that should not come from the throat of someone being crushed against stone.

Grace froze.

Jake hesitated for a fraction of a second too.

Victor was laughing.

But something was wrong.

Very wrong.

That was not exactly Victor’s irritating laugh. It was not the acidic humor of someone mocking enemies while learning from them. There was a distortion there. A deeper note. Older. Hungrier. As if something inside him had found the situation amusing for reasons Victor himself might not understand.

Grace felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

"That is not..."

She did not finish.

Jake roared and resumed punching.

Victor kept laughing.

Louder.

Madder.

More distant.

Grace attacked.

The ice spears shot toward Jake, crossing the devastated clearing in absolute silence. She aimed at joints, eyes, neck, tendons, and support points. She did not try to pierce the chest. She did not waste strength against the most resistant part. The goal was interruption.

Before the spears arrived, a wall of Black Ice appeared between her and Jake.

Jake was not the one who created it.

Victor was.

Grace stopped.

The spears collided with the dark wall and shattered into white fragments. Her ice cracked and fell to the ground like glass. Victor’s barrier remained standing, thick, irregular, and predatory, emanating a cold that seemed to bite even the energy around it.

Grace stared at the wall.

"What are you doing?"

Through the translucent Black Ice, she saw the distorted scene on the other side.

Jake was still striking.

Victor was still pinned against the rock.

But one of his hands was raised.

Not to defend.

Not to attack.

His left hand was partially open beside his body, his fingers trembling.

And on his middle finger was the ring.

The old rusty iron ring they had found inside the box.

Grace felt her throat tighten.

The ring no longer looked ordinary.

Small opaque lines ran across its rusted surface, as if something dormant inside the metal were beginning to wake up. It did not shine clearly. It did not emit light like a magical jewel or a ritualistic inscription. It was worse. Its presence seemed to suck in the attention around it, creating a sensation of emptiness where there should have been energy.

Victor’s laughter changed again.

For an instant, Grace was certain he looked at her through the ice.

Not with his usual eyes.

Not completely.

Then the world exploded.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The entire rock wall behind Victor disappeared.

Jake was launched upward.

Not pushed.

Not thrown sideways.

Launched directly toward the artificial sky of the Ritual, as if a gigantic force had emerged from below and decided to expel him from the earth. His body crossed through dust, clouds of fragments, and the remains of the ruins, rising in a brutal line while black waves spread through the air.

Grace raised her arms to protect herself.

The Black Ice wall between her and the fight dissolved into thousands of fragments, but none of them fell. They rose.

No.

They were not fragments.

They were shards.

Gigantic shards of Black Ice began to appear in the air around Jake, forming from the very energy released by the explosion. Each one was several meters long, irregular, sharp, and dark like bones torn from an underground creature.

Jake tried to move in the air.

Too late.

The first shard pierced his thigh.

The second pierced his shoulder.

The third entered through his abdomen and came out through his back.

Then dozens came.

Jake’s body was skewered from every side.

Black Ice pierced arms, legs, ribs, abdomen, and shoulders, pinning him in the sky like a brutal offering. His blood ran down the dark shards, but froze before it could fully fall, forming red lines over the black surface.

Grace remained motionless.

The dust began to settle.

At the center of the newly formed crater, Victor was still standing.

His chest was whole.

His body covered in blood.

His left hand still raised.

The ring remained on his finger.

And the smile on his face did not look completely his.

Grace took a step back without realizing it.

"Victor?"