Chapter 1755: A Battle of Wills
Chapter 1755: A Battle of Wills
The relic’s scraping grew louder as Quinlan closed the last three paces between his throne and the severed arm twitching across the frost.
In the elven sections, the prayers stopped.
Elves who had been weeping with clasped hands a moment ago went still, their ears twitching forward as the Holy Son moved toward the cursed blade.
Wide eyes tracked him in silence, and just like that the arena had gone quiet again, numerous gazes following the Primordial Villain as he walked toward the relic.
Quinlan stopped a pace from the arm and flicked a pointer finger skyward.
Wind gathered beneath the severed limb and lifted it off the frost, blade and all, until the obsidian edge hung at eye level with Kaede’s dead fingers still locked around the hilt.
"Hmm..." He tilted his head, brought one hand to his chin, and studied the obsidian edge like a man browsing a weapons stall.
In the elven sections, Myrasyn’s hand flew to her chest. "What is he doing?!" she hissed at Isveth, her toes curling and her fists trembling at her sides. "He’s just been told that relic has been consuming wielders for ages! He needs to destroy it, freeze it, anything but stand there looking at it!"
Isveth didn’t even glance at her queen, her gaze fixed on the man below. "He’s curious."
"Yes, I’m not blind! But why is he curious about that hideous thing?!"
"... That I don’t know..." Even his most devout followers were lost.
But the dwarven war chief with the braided beard leaned forward in his seat.
The smith beside him did the same, then the row behind them, grizzled hands gripping their knees as they craned for a better look at the obsidian edge.
A master-crafted relic from an age before their forges had been lit, and the Primordial Villain was holding it up to the light like he’d found something worth appraising.
Unlike the long eared ladies, the dwarves understood perfectly.
*Swish!*
The relic didn’t like being studied.
The blade wrenched sideways in the dead grip and slashed at his throat, a jagged, desperate swing.
Quinlan leaned back half a step and let it pass. The obsidian edge cut air an inch from his chin, and the expression on his face didn’t change.
If anything, the curiosity sharpened.
His grin spread, slow and shameless, and he tilted the floating blade back and forth with a lazy flick of wind like he was inspecting a fish at market. "Without your host, you remind me of a parasite that’s been pulled out of the body."
*Swish!* *Swish!* *Swish!*
The relic’s response was immediate, wrenching and thrashing in the air, hilt snapping left and right, the obsidian edge slashing at nothing as the wind held it firmly in place.
Quinlan watched the tantrum with his grin deepening even further.
"Don’t worry."
He raised his right hand, and using the same pointer finger he’d flicked to call upon the wind, he aimed.
"I’ll put you out of your misery."
Water concentrated at the tip of his finger for a moment, growing rapidly, then shot out.
The rush coiled around the severed hand, prying the dead fingers loose one by one and sluicing blood off the obsidian in a single clean pass.
The blade hung suspended in the wind while a new current carried the limp arm across the duel ground toward Seraphiel, who reached up and caught it without looking away from Kaede’s wounds.
"They hadn’t even exchanged a word!"
"The villain and his healer have reached a state of inhuman synchronization!" the realization spread through the stands like wildfire.
Finally, after ensuring no blood remained on the hilt, Quinlan wrapped his fingers around it.
"!!"
Every warning system in his body fired at once.
His veins went dark from wrist to shoulder, his heartbeat slammed once and then seized, and something ancient and starving tore through his palm and drove straight for the core of him.
It bypassed bone and blood entirely and latched onto his will, clawing inward with eons of starvation behind it, and heat poured off the metal in a hiss that the nearest rows flinched from.
At the edge of the arena, Chizuru laughed.
It started low, more wheeze than sound, barely distinguishable from a cough behind the ice still locking her from the neck down.
But it sharpened into a dark, rattling chuckle that turned heads in the nearest rows, because the lifeless husk who had been staring at nothing while delivering her confession was suddenly very much alive.
"Arrogant brat..." Her dead eyes had found a spark, bright and vicious, fixed on the darkening veins crawling up Quinlan’s arm.
"That blade has devoured men whose willpower and swordmanship skill would make you look like a child playing soldier."
The ice around her chest began creeping upward without warning.
Chizuru’s grin faltered as frost climbed her throat in a slow crawl, and the man responsible hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction.
"The Goddess’s justice may be slow, Villain, but it arrives all the same! You’ll experience it now!" she was screeching, but his attention was fixed on the blade in his grip, darkened veins pulsing against the hilt, and the ice sealing the old woman shut carried about as much ceremony as plugging a leak.
"You can’t silence the truth forev-" The frost sealed her jaw, and the last syllable died in a muffled grunt behind a fresh sheet of ice.
Her eyes still smoldered with spite above the frozen line for one defiant moment before the ice climbed those too and locked her expression in place.
On the duel ground, a very different voice screamed.
"Let it go quickly!" Kaede’s cry tore across the frost, raw and cracking through the blood loss.
She was thrashing against the hands trying to heal her, her remaining arm shoving at Seraphiel’s golden light as she fought to rise. "Just because you have your strange powers doesn’t mean you can conquer this blade!"
"I just closed three ruptured vessels in your stump and you’ve torn two of them open." Seraphiel pressed the girl flat against the stone with her free hand, golden light flaring brighter around the reopened wounds. "Thrash again and I’ll have Liora sit on you."
"Wait, what?" the human healer gasped.
"He’s going to die!" Kaede twisted under the healer’s grip, leaving a fresh streak of blood across the frost. "It killed wielders for hundreds of thousands of years, it’ll-"
"?!" She then abruptly stopped, because the man holding the sword was still grinning.
"He’s smiling?!" Myrasyn’s voice hit a pitch that made the elves around her wince.
The dwarven war chief exhaled through his nose and sat back, arms folded, wearing the expression of a man who’d just watched someone pick up a live coal and juggle it.
"He expected the backlash..."
Inside him, the Abyssal Genesis Physique woke up and fought back.
Heat bloomed from Quinlan’s palm and spread through his forearm and ribs in a slow, heavy pulse, markings beneath his skin flaring hot, veins darkening along his hand and wrist, and every surface the blade’s hunger tried to bite into hardened before it could sink in.
’Not bad.’ His grip tightened on the hilt. ’But if you want to consume me, you’ll need more... After all, the worst demon in Thalorind’s existence already tried to eat me alive.’
His heartbeat deepened.
Each thrum shoved the invading will back an inch, and it clawed an inch of its own in return, and neither of them was giving ground.
He could feel the relic pressing against the walls of his being from the inside, backed by the accumulated hunger of every being it had ever consumed, and his own will burned back against it in steady heat, the markings flaring bright wherever they clashed.
Quinlan shoved back against the hunger with everything he had, teeth bared, forcing it back inch by inch. From the outside, the man hadn’t moved. His grip on the hilt was the only thing the crowd could see.
Then, somewhere deep inside him, far past where his will and the blade’s hunger were grinding against each other, a second presence made itself known.
It didn’t erupt. It simply existed, suddenly and completely, the way a mountain exists when the fog pulls back and reveals it was there all along.
The relic’s hunger and the Primordial physique grinding against it shrank to insects scrapping over a crumb beneath a weight so vast that the scale of the confrontation inverted in an instant.
Far beyond the borders where Quinlan’s will and the blade’s hunger clawed at each other, a throne sat in the dark.
And on it, a silhouette.