Chapter 307: Fight to Death (3)
Grathak’s remaining eye flooded completely black.
The densification that had been knitting his ruined ribs and swelling shut the damaged eye cluster suddenly accelerated beyond anything the refined doses had shown before.
Dark fur split along the shoulders and spine.
Bark-like plates of hardened tissue erupted in overlapping layers.
Antler-like ridges of blackened bone pushed from the skull.
Extra eyes, smaller, glowing the same sickly green Kane had seen on the Guardian’s fragment, opened in irregular clusters along the temples and forehead.
The emperor’s frame swelled another half-meter in height and breadth.
When he exhaled, the air itself carried the thick, wet-earth-and-lightning stench of the deep forest’s old power.
The mutation was incomplete, still bound by the pacts that limited full manifestation, but it was enough.
"Heh..."
Kane barely got his good arm up before the transformed fist landed.
BAM!
The impact was no longer densified muscle.
It was divine-adjacent mass. Kane’s forearm broke cleanly.
He was driven into the stone hard enough to crater it a second time.
A follow-up kick caught him in the side and folded him around it; ribs that had already been compromised gave with wet, multiple cracks.
The crowd noise peaked into bloodlust. Pure-blood terraces screamed approval. Southern sections went rigid.
Grathak, now something larger and wronger, reached down, seized Kane by the ruined shoulder and the throat, and lifted him clear of the floor.
Pitch-black and green-glowing eyes stared into Kane’s fading vision.
"I told you," the mutated voice layered over itself, resonant and final. "You were a worthy human, Kane."
He smashed him down multiple times until Kane couldn’t move.
Grathak’s massive foot rose, ready to smash the skull against the stone and end it.
High on the rails, Kessa snarled and tried to vault the barrier.
Griselda’s wings snapped open.
Both were immediately swarmed by pure-blood retainers and palace lackeys who had been waiting for exactly that movement.
"Going somewhere?"
"I’ll take the angel to the breeding grounds."
Steel and claws pinned them before they could reach the floor.
Marisa stood motionless on the northern rail, amber eyes locked on the broken figure in the emperor’s grip, expression unreadable.
Grathak’s foot started down.
Swish.
Mjoldr left the chamber wall half a city away, tore through corridors and open air in a single screaming line of reinforced steel, and struck Grathak in the side of the mutated skull with the force of a siege weapon.
Bang!
Black fluid and green light sprayed.
The emperor staggered, grip loosening.
Kane hit the stone on his knees, vision tunneling, left arm shattered, ribs grinding, blood everywhere.
The system window detonated in harsh, overlapping red.
[Critical trauma threshold exceeded]
[Multiple compound fractures]
[Internal bleeding: severe]
[Emergency override available]
[Full Barbarian Rage – 100 %]
[Time before Exhaustion: 00:01:00]
[Warning: Host body will not survive prolonged output at this level]
Kane’s hand closed around Mjoldr’s haft as the axe rebounded into his grip.
Red aura erupted from his skin in a violent, uncontrolled corona, with killing output, no throttle, and no safety.
The pain receded behind a wall of violence.
He stood on legs that should not have held him, left arm hanging useless, and looked up at the mutated emperor with eyes that reflected the same red light.
"One minute," Kane rasped, blood running from his mouth.
"That’s all I need."
Grathak recovered, mutated face a mask of black blood and green-glowing rage.
"You bring the axe after accepting no weapons—"
"I brought the axe after you stopped being the thing that accepted the rules."
Kane moved.
One hundred percent Rage erased the mass difference for the duration of the timer.
He closed the distance in a blur the mutated Grathak barely tracked, Mjoldr already swinging in a full horizontal arc aimed at the right arm, the one still fully functional.
The reinforced edge, singing with system resonance and output, sheared through bark-hide, densified muscle, and bone in a single catastrophic cut.
The severed arm hit the stone with a heavy sound.
Black fluid and green light poured from the stump.
Grathak’s layered roar shook dust from the highest tiers.
Kane did not stop.
He pivoted, used the emperor’s own staggered momentum, and brought Mjoldr around in a reverse rising cut that took the left arm at the elbow.
The second limb dropped.
The mutated emperor reeled, green-glowing eyes wide with something that was no longer only fury.
Kane stepped in, planted a foot against Grathak’s chest, and kicked the larger body backward hard enough to send it crashing into the already-cratered wall.
The red aura around Kane flickered.
[00:00:47]
Grathak pushed off the wall with the stumps of his arms, bark-plates shifting, green veins rerouting around the catastrophic damage with visible effort.
The incomplete manifestation was trying to adapt, to seal, to keep the body fighting.
Kane gave it no time.
He crossed the floor in three strides and brought Mjoldr down in a two-handed overhead strike aimed at the junction of neck and shoulder.
Grathak twisted; the axe carved a deep, catastrophic line through bark and bone instead of taking the head cleanly.
More black fluid sprayed.
"You—" Grathak’s layered voice was raw. "You were finished—"
"I was finished when you mutated mid-fight and tried to cave my skull in under a foot."
Kane’s own voice was a blood-choked rasp under the roaring red aura. "Now you lose the arms. Next you lose the rest."
He pressed.
The mutated emperor had reach and mass even without hands, using shoulders, antler-ridges, and sheer densified bulk like living weapons.
Kane took a glancing blow from an antler that opened a new line across his already-ruined shoulder and kept cutting.
Mjoldr’s spike punched into the vein clusters along Grathak’s side.
The axe head sheared through another section of bark-plating over the ribs.
Each strike landed with the full, suicidal commitment of a one-minute window that would leave the host body broken beyond any ordinary recovery.
[00:00:31]
The crowd had gone past screaming into a stunned, continuous roar.
Kessa and Griselda still fought against the pure-blood swarm holding them, but their eyes never left the center.
Marisa’s gaze remained fixed on Kane, the political mask gone; only calculation and something softer remained.
"Kill him... Kane."