[Oliver’s PoV]

  “Finally, I’ve been wanting to meet you," the Sovereign said, his voice smooth and certain, as if he were greeting expected guests rather than standing in a slaughterhouse.

  Oliver couldn’t speak. His mind was still locked on the image of Lucius’s head separating from his body, then rolling across the blood-slick stone.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” He continued, smiling as if Oliver’s silence amused him. “Sometimes you have to slaughter an ox so the herd can survive.”

  He laughed, an easy sound that didn’t match the room, and casually shoved what remained of Lucius off the chair. The Emperor’s body toppled to the floor with an undignified thud, landing among the dead Imperial Guards.

  The Sovereign walked through the blood, his boots leaving dark streaks behind him. He sat down in the same chair, settling into it like a host reclaiming his place at the head of a table. He crossed his legs and rested his face in one hand, elbow on the armrest, posture relaxed to the point of insult.

  “Poor Lucius,” he said, sounding almost bored. “One of the weakest emperors we’ve ever had. To the point I needed a little help from his Guard to recover a portion of my strength.”

  Oliver’s eyes tracked him, searching for the lie in the man’s expression and finding nothing. Not sorrow. Not anger. Not triumph. Only a calm that suggested the massacre was routine.

  “You even helped,” He added, his purple eyes glinting in the dim. “The Orks were delicious.”

  “But not enough,” he finished, as if he were discussing a meal that hadn’t satisfied him.

  Oliver’s throat tightened. The hall smelled of rot and iron. Hundreds of bodies lay in a ring around them, uniforms soaked, faces young, too young.

  Why?

  Why kill the Emperor now, when Lucius had been the perfect shield, the perfect symbol, the perfect piece?

  Oliver’s thoughts barely formed the question before the man’s gaze lifted, meeting him with unsettling clarity.

  “Old,” He said, answering as if Oliver had spoken out loud.

  Oliver went rigid.

  Odin's smile deepened, as though that reaction pleased him. “Each of you produces Energy for me,” he continued, as if explaining a simple mechanism. “But sometimes it’s better to just absorb. Especially if the specimen developed well.”

  The hall seemed to compress around Oliver’s lungs. He had known Sovereigns communicated in ways humans couldn’t measure; he had felt Athena’s presence brush his mind before, a distant connection he’d always assumed was bound to the System.

  Odin’s smile stayed in place, but there was no warmth behind it.

  “Not to worry,” he said, voice light, almost indulgent. “It’s an old trick. After a few millennia, humans are nothing but puppies. Every emotion, every thought. You wear them on your faces.”

  The words should have sounded like mockery.

  Oliver’s hand trembled at his side. The tremor wasn’t fear alone, his instincts and Energy rising in the same breath. He was readying himself to strike, to break the distance before Odin could do something.

  Oliver glanced sideways.

  Mordred stood perfectly still, yet the air around him felt strange. His jaw clenched so hard it looked painful, his gaze locked on Odin with a hatred so complete it bordered on devotion.

  “During the last decade,” Mordred said, quiet enough that the words felt like ice sliding over bone, “I thought about this moment every day. Every second. Every fight. Every training session. Thinking about how I’d kill him.”

  Odin blinked once, slowly, like someone remembering a minor inconvenience.

  “Oops. My apologies.” The apology came out empty. His face didn’t shift into guilt or surprise. Only a superficial clinical interest, as if Mordred had finally said something worth recording.

  Oliver’s eyes narrowed.

  Odin’s attention lingered a fraction too long, studying Mordred the way an engineer studies stress fractures in a material.

  Then Odin rose.

  The motion was unhurried, almost graceful.

  “Well,” he said, looking between Oliver and Mordred, “now that you’re both motivated.”

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  His purple eyes sharpened.

  “You two aren’t entirely human,” Odin continued, voice calm, almost pleased. “So you’re not fully within my domain. You want to defeat me, good. A useful exercise. I’ll test my powers.”

  He paused, letting the silence press down.

  “The one who walks out alive,” Odin finished, “will make an excellent target to become my newest toy.”

  Something inside Oliver’s chest tightened. Not the fear of death, he’d carried that weight too long for it to surprise him. It was the sudden clarity of what Odin considered them to be: not enemies, not even threats, but candidates.

  Oliver’s boots shifted a fraction on the slick stone. Mordred didn’t move.

  The shadows did.

  They stirred first at the edges of the chandelier’s reach, where the ballroom’s corners were darkest. Then they surged. Black tendrils whipping out from multiple angles at once, fast enough to blur, sharp enough to look like blades.

  Every one of them aimed for Odin’s throat.

  For the first time, Odin’s expression changed.

  The amusement fell away, not replaced by panic, but by focus. His posture tightened, shoulders settling, his chin lifting a touch.

  The first shadow struck, cutting through the air where Odin’s neck had been.

  It met nothing.

  The second and third arrived from opposite sides, timing meant to close any escape route.

  They met nothing.

  Odin was already elsewhere. Half a step to the side, then another, slipping between converging strikes that should have intersected. His movements weren’t frantic. They were efficient and pre-decided. The shadows whipped through the space he’d abandoned, snapping against stone and leaving faint fractures along the floor where they struck.

  Oliver watched, breath tight in his throat.

  It wasn’t speed.

  Some of the attacks were impossible to avoid by movement alone. They were angles that pinned the center, lines that arrived simultaneously. Mordred’s shadows did not behave like ordinary weapons; they were traps, snares, a net designed to close in the space between an inhale and an exhale.

  Yet, every time the shadows reached Odin, he was already gone.

  Not because he outpaced them.

  Because he wasn’t there in the first place.

  Odin’s feet touched down with a rhythm that felt wrong, like his steps were landing in the spaces between time.

  The shadows struck again. Faster, more coordinated, converging in a tight spiral meant to sever escape.

  Odin’s head turned slightly before the blades arrived, eyes tracking a point in the air as though he were watching the attack in advance.

  The room filled with the sound of shadow impacting stone: hard snaps, sharp cracks, the scrape of black force ripping at marble.

  The ballroom shuddered. Blood sprayed in a wide, wet fan across the marble, and the dead uniforms scattered around the floor. Chairs and banquet tables in the blast’s path buckled, twisting into grotesque spirals of metal and splintered wood.

  The boom snapped Oliver back.

  He dropped into a crouch, bringing the long metal case up. His boots slid a fraction on the slick floor. He keyed the latches, two sharp clicks. The case hissed open.

  A wave of Energy rolled out of it.

  For half a second, the force of it stole his breath. He forced his hands to move anyway, fingers closing around the weapon inside.

  The lance came free in one smooth pull.

  Its body gleamed bronze under the hall’s dim light. Its head had been engineered with three slots. Though for now, only two of them were fitted with Unique Crystals.

  Oliver reached into his armor and drew the Silver Crystal. It still carried the Empress’s stench.

  He slammed it into the open slot.

  The moment it seated, the lance answered.

  Energy cracked across the weapon from tip to shaft in jagged, luminous veins, like lightning trapped under skin. The air popped and warped around it. A pressure wave rolled outward, rattling debris and making the blood on the floor ripple.

  Even Mordred stalled for an instant, head turning.

  “What is that?” Mordred’s voice came out sharp, disbelieving.

  Odin’s hands met in two slow claps.

  “That,” Odin said, voice almost pleased, “is a compliment. A gift. He prepared all of this for me.”

  He smiled without warmth, eyes fixed on the lance.

  “When this is over,” he continued, “I’ll display it as a war trophy.”

  Oliver lifted the spear and leveled it at Odin. The weapon’s tip thrummed, hungry.

  “We’ll see,” Oliver said, and then he kicked off the floor.

  He shot forward with a burst of speed, the lance sweeping up from low to high in a brutal arc meant to split the space where Odin stood.

  Odin vanished from his sight.

  Not blurred. Gone.

  The lance still completed its path, and the Energy at its tip leapt outward in violent tongues, striking everything near the swing. A strip of floor blackened and bubbled.

  Oliver’s eyes tracked instinctively, searching for the Sovereign’s position.

  One clean hit. I only need one hit.

  He drove forward again, thrusting this time, changing angles, cutting the space where Odin should have been able to exist. High, low, left, right. Each strike left a scar of destruction, each miss turning furniture into ash and marble into ruin.

  Odin remained a step ahead.

  Mordred’s shadows came with him. Tendrils and blades of darkness snapping in from the corners, striking to bind and sever, to remove the future from Odin’s options.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Together they struck from two sides, trying to compress the space between them into a trap, trying to corner the divinity.

  Odin flowed through it.

  Oliver heard Mordred’s voice, low and strained beneath the clash.

  “It’s not enough.”

  Oliver glanced long enough to register something that didn’t fit: Mordred’s breathing had turned heavy. Ragged. The kind of effort that should have belonged to an exhausted soldier, not someone like him.

  Mordred’s gaze flicked to his gauntlet, calculating, distant for a heartbeat. He pressed something.

  A harsh tone cut through the air.

  [Corrupt Mode]

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