Chapter 968

Chapter 968: 968

From every surrounding mirror, a dozen identical, obsidian-ice surrogates stepped out in unison. They raised their hands, unleashing sweeping streams of dense, liquid frost that coated the floor in friction-less oil while raining long-range, needle-like ice javelins from the safety of the perimeter.

Ragnar was everywhere and nowhere, constantly swapping places with his reflections, sliding seamlessly through the mirror network to maintain maximum distance.

"You seek a brawl, God of War," Ragnar’s voice echoed simultaneously from a hundred mirrors, cool and detached. "Then dance through my court first."

The parasitic frost vines on the ground surged upward like living whips, wrapping around Björn’s ankles not to freeze him, knowing he would just sever his own feet but to continuously throw off his center of gravity and disrupt his footing on the slick, black mirror floor. Every time Björn tried to build momentum to close the gap, a mirror would project a localized slick floor, slowing his forward thrust and forcing him to waste precious milliseconds cutting through false reflections.

Ragnar kept his distance masterfully, hovering on the far edge of the domain. With calculated, high-tier precision, he wove complex, long-range arrays of ice, sending spiraling serpents of frost tearing through the air to strip Björn of his thermal energy from afar, slowly carving away at the titan without ever giving him a target to hit back.

Björn paused for a fraction of a second, his massive frame standing amid the disorienting maze of dark mirrors and whistling frost-javelins. His four eyes tracked the refractions, watching Ragnar glide seamlessly through the crystalline prisms, maintaining that perfect, untouchable distance.

The Law of the Matron’s Husk had fully evolved into a spatial control network, using long-range suppression, localized friction manipulation, and false reflections to deny Björn what he craved most, contact.

Björn’s four eyes narrowed, and his physiology responded instantly to the paradigm shift.

If the young king wanted to fight like an elusive mage behind a fortress of glass, Björn needed a body designed to erase the walls entirely.

His kinetic density multiplied exponentially. His skeletal structure shifted, fusing key spinal segments and expanding his leg muscles until his thighs and calves bulged with dense, hyper-compressed muscle fibers that throbbed with raw, pressurized war-divinity. His four arms grew longer, more whip-like, the skin calcifying into a rough, friction-defying hide that completely rejected the slicking mirror floor.

Without warning, Björn vanished. He didn’t use a portal or a spatial fold he simply exerted such monumental kinetic force against the black mirror floor that the space beneath his boots caved in. He reappeared instantly in front of one of the towering monoliths, his battleaxe executing a swing so blindingly fast it generated a localized atmospheric vacuum.

Ragnar, watching from three mirrors away, felt the spatial pressure spike. He immediately triggered Mirror Stasis, shifting his true body to a distant prism while commanding five surrogates to unleash a volley of parasitic frost-serpents toward Björn’s flanks to keep him pinned.

As the absolute-zero serpents spiraled toward him, Björn’s body adapted again on the fly.

Instead of severing his limbs or dodging, his newly mutated hide flared with intense, kinetic friction. His body temperature spiked into the tens of thousands of degrees, turning his very presence into a heat engine that flash-vaporized the frost-serpents into white steam before their tendrils could even touch his skin. He leaped across the domain, bouncing off the ice monoliths like a crimson meteor, shattering mirrors simply by passing near them.

Step by step, microsecond by microsecond, Björn was narrowing the safe zones. The distance Ragnar had worked so hard to maintain was shrinking.

Yet, as Ragnar slipped into another mirror to dodge an incoming kinetic shockwave, something subtle shifted within the young king.

On Ragnar’s featureless, obsidian ice mask, right above where his eyes used to be, a faint, deep-red glow flared within his pulsing blue core. It was small, almost imperceptible against the blinding frost of his domain, a tiny spark of satisfaction.

Ragnar himself didn’t even notice it. He was so completely focused on maintaining his distance, weaving his complex arrays, and cornering the titan through calculated attrition that he didn’t realize his own emotional state had subtly tainted his cold logic. He truly believed he had locked the God of War into an unwinnable maze, and that quiet, subconscious pride had manifested as a flicker of his inner fire.

But Björn noticed.

All four of Björn’s eyes locked onto that singular red glow floating through the refractions. A low, terrifying chuckle rumbled in the God of War’s chest, echoing through the sea of blood above.

The young king was finally starting to feel it, the faint, intoxicating thrill of the hunt. And the moment a mage starts enjoying the chase, they stop paying attention to where they are standing.

That faint, subtle spark of satisfaction in Ragnar’s core quickly spread like wildfire, consuming the cold, detached logic that had dictated his strategy.

Seeing Björn relentlessly close the distance, shattering his mirrors one by one, Ragnar didn’t retreat into the labyrinth. Instead, driven by an uncharacteristic, reckless impulse, he abandoned his long-range keep-away entirely.

He closed the remaining distance himself.

The two met halfway. The sea of blood above roared, and the black mirror floor cracked beneath the raw force of their collision.

What followed was a brutal, lightning-fast exchange of high-tier close combat.

Ragnar’s fused obsidian blade-arms lashed out in fluid, lethal arcs, aiming for micro-vulnerabilities in Björn’s dense frame, while Björn matched every strike with four fist, one gauntleted fist and his array of weapons. The sound of their blows echoed like thunder. With every single strike Björn landed, Ragnar’s brittle, prematurely birthed obsidian body fractured and fell apart, limbs shattering, chest ribs splintering into shards, and shoulder plates exploding into black dust.

Yet, Ragnar didn’t back down.

Reaching deeply into his immense mana pool and violently siphoning the ambient ice energy pulsing through the domain’s vein networks, his body reformed almost instantaneously. Broken obsidian arms regenerated in milliseconds, shattered ribs knitted back together with absolute-zero frost, and his hollow chest flared brighter with every reconstruction.

The pain of his body tearing apart and rebuilding itself was drowned out by something far more potent.

The tiny red glow within his pulsing core expanded rapidly, flooding his hollow face mask with a vibrant, crimson light. The insidious, maddening whispers of Björn’s blood-sea sky were finally breaching his mind, amplifying the raw adrenaline of survival into something primal.

Ragnar didn’t even realize he was doing it at first. A low rumble in his chest built into an echoing, resonant sound that cut straight through the deafening roars of the domain.

He began to laugh.

It wasn’t a bitter laugh, nor was it the desperate cackle of a dying king. It was a roar of genuine, intoxicating thrill, the pure, unadulterated joy of a warrior fully surrendered to the crucible of high stakes combat. For the first time in his life, Ragnar wasn’t fighting as a dutiful son, a desperate king, or a defensive father to his own survival. He was fighting simply for the electrifying sensation of the clash itself.

Björn looked at the crimson light burning inside Ragnar’s core and heard the wild, uninhibited roar echoing from the young king’s hollow chest.

He knew this moment. It was the inevitable end that awaited every sovereign, warrior, or divine entity who dared to trade blades with him and failed to conclude the slaughter quickly. Sooner or later, the blood-lust took root. Sooner or later, they would taste the intoxicating thrill of absolute violence, and his domain, a living crucible of pure, predatory war, would magnify that thrill until sanity fractured into madness.

Ragnar’s premature birth had sealed his fate.

Because his evolution had been forced, both his newly birthed obsidian vessel and his developing state of mind were raw, exposed, and malleable. Like a newborn entity thrust into a storm, he was easily swayed, easily impressed, and utterly powerless against the magnetic pull of Björn’s nature. Had the young king completed his full gestation, had his mind matured into the cold, absolute cage he intended to build, it might have turned out differently.

But Björn had never given him that luxury.

Seeing that the trap had snapped shut, Björn ceased fighting his own nature. The disciplined, calculating restraint he had maintained throughout the fight evaporated in a single breath. He unlocked the gates of his soul and allowed the slumbering madness, the true, unadulterated essence of the God of War to swallow his mind whole.

His four eyes bled into solid, radiant pools of pure, murderous light. The crimson sea in the sky above boiled over, cascading down in torrents of boiling blood, while the black mirror floor beneath them shattered entirely.

Strategy was discarded. Logic was murdered. Range, and tactical control vanished from the battlefield.

Two beings, entirely consumed by the blinding haze of madness, threw themselves at one another like star-crossing beasts.

Ragnar no longer used his surrogates to keep his distance or control the surrounding space, he used them as brute rams, hurling his fragile, regenerating obsidian frame directly into the meat-grinder. Björn no longer calculated leaps or micro amputations, he swung his colossal axe and bare gauntlets with feral, catastrophic intent, welcoming every strike, every parasitic tendril, and every shattering impact.