[Oliver’s PoV]

  [Corrupt Mode]

  Oliver had never seen anything like it.

  The moment Mordred triggered the command, the air around him changed. It wasn’t a simple Energy spike. The atmosphere itself felt wrong, as if the room had inhaled something rotten.

  At Mordred’s feet, orange slime spread.

  Not splashing or pouring, but forming. As if it were being born from the marble itself. It seeped up in slow, deliberate pulses, then gathered into thicker masses.

  It climbed.

  The slime rose along Mordred’s boots and shins, flowing upward in controlled streams. It wrapped around his black armor and began to harden, shaping itself into new plates. Layer by layer, locking on top of the existing suit.

  Orange over black.

  A second skin.

  A weaponized infection.

  Oliver felt his jaw tighten as he watched. He remembered the corrupted Crystals. The way corruption wasn’t merely poison. It was a tool, if someone was willing to pay its price.

  Odin watched it all with visible interest, his purple eyes brightening as though he’d been given a new toy to examine.

  “Interesting,” Odin said, tone almost approving. “A clever approach.”

  “I like how you think,” he continued. “Always wanting more. Seeking a better method. Not caring who or what you have to use. Greedy.”

  Mordred flexed his hand, opening and closing his fingers as if testing the new weight and balance of his altered form. His voice came out cold, controlled.

  “Maybe,” Mordred said. “But there’s a difference between us.”

  He turned his head slightly, orange plating crawling higher across his shoulders.

  “I don’t care what I have to do,” Mordred continued. “But I don’t force my followers to do it for me. I’m the one on the front line.”

  Odin’s smile sharpened.

  “Is that what you tell yourself in the mirror?” he mocked, voice light, cruel.

  Mordred didn’t answer.

  He attacked.

  The shadows in the ballroom erupted like a tide. Not the controlled strikes from before. This was something else entirely. The darkness multiplied exponentially, thickening until it looked as though the room itself had become a sea of living black. Shadows poured up the walls, spilled across the ceiling, and surged across the blood-soaked floor in waves.

  Blades formed within that darkness, too many to count. Tendrils snapped and coiled like snakes made of night, each one aimed at Odin from a different angle, at a different timing, designed to erase every possible future step.

  Mordred’s speed had increased, yes. Yet, it wasn’t just speed anymore.

  It was volume.

  It was pressure.

  It was the kind of assault that didn’t ask if the target could dodge, but how long it could keep dodging before the room ran out of space to move.

  For the first time, Odin’s movements weren’t effortless.

  He still shifted with that wrong, pre-decided precision. However, the shadows were too dense. Too coordinated. Too relentless.

  Some of the blades grazed him, carving shallow lines across his skin.

  Yet, Odin didn’t bleed.

  Oliver had seen the line open, had seen the strike land. Instead of blood, only sparks of pure Energy fell from the wound. They drifted downward like bright embers and vanished before they touched the floor.

  For a heartbeat, Odin’s expression fractured.

  Surprise flashed across his face. Followed immediately by something colder. Disgust. Contempt.

  He lifted one hand.

  Not a weapon. Not a stance. Just a hand, as if he were brushing dust from a sleeve.

  Then he flicked his fingers.

  The space in front of Mordred exploded.

  There was no warning flare, no charge-up hum, no visible projectile. One instant, the air was intact; the next, it was a concussive burst that tore through the ballroom. The shockwave slammed into Mordred and launched him across the hall.

  Mordred hit the far wall hard enough to crack stone.

  His black-and-orange armor buckled. A section at the center of his chest was shattered and torn away, exposing inner layers beneath. Mordred tried to rise, shadows twitching in agitation around him, but his movements were heavier.

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  Odin watched him struggle and spoke with bored irritation.

  “Ants,” he said, voice flat. “Insufferable.”

  Oliver’s grip tightened around the lance. He knew what he had to do. Also knew what it would cost.

  He could feel fatigue creeping into the edges of his movement.

  Magic isn’t the moment.

  If Odin realized Oliver had access to it, this fight might not continue. Odin wasn’t the sort of enemy you surprised twice.

  I need to reach their level, Oliver told himself.

  He swallowed once.

  I’m already tiring.

  The thought tried to become doubt. He crushed it.

  No. I need it.

  If Mordred could come close enough to cut Odin, then Oliver could do it too.

  Oliver triggered the command.

  [Combat Mode]

  His reserves were ripped from him. Energy pulled so hard it felt like something inside his chest had been hooked and yanked forward.

  Over the red plating, bronze segments began to form. New plates assembled in overlapping layers, locking into place with rapid, metallic clicks.

  His body lightened. His perception sharpened.

  Oliver surged forward.

  He launched, bronze plates flashing over red, lance leveled like a comet’s point.

  His first strike came fast. Low to high, designed to cut through Odin’s midline. The second followed without pause, a thrust aimed for the heart. The third was a feint that turned into a sweeping arc meant to remove Odin’s head if he shifted wrong.

  The lance’s Energy snapped with each movement, leaping outward in short, lethal bursts that scorched the floor and sent the scent of burned iron into the air.

  For the first time, Odin’s posture changed in response to Oliver.

  He moved. Still impossibly smooth, still slipping into spaces that shouldn’t exist. Yet, now the lance’s reach and speed pressed him. Not a corner yet, not a trap, but a tightening circle.

  Oliver could feel a timer inside his own body. It wasn’t a clock on a HUD, but a tightening in his muscles and a thinning pressure behind his eyes that warned him every movement was costing too much.

  Every time he shifted his weight, the joints answered with a hungry pull, siphoning Energy as if the suit were trying to drink him dry. He needed that strength later. He couldn’t afford to burn everything where they were just starting.

  Still, he pressed.

  Odin moved like a thought that had already happened. Oliver’s strikes chased him across a room littered with bodies and broken furniture.

  Another thrust. Another sweep.

  Oliver’s shoulders screamed under the strain, but he forced the timing tighter, forcing the angles smaller, forcing the gaps to close.

  This time it nearly landed.

  The blade grazed Odin’s chestplate. Not deep, not clean, but close enough to matter. There was no blood. Instead, a bright spray of pure Energy sparked outward, scattering like burning embers.

  For an instant, the ballroom seemed to inhale.

  Odin’s expression flickered. His posture shifted subtly, as if the Sovereign had finally decided the game was over. The air around him tightened, the pressure turning predatory.

  Oliver felt it and braced without thinking.

  Odin started to turn toward him.

  Then the shadows arrived.

  They crawled up from the floor and the corners in a sudden surge, coiling around Odin’s space like a net made of night. The darkness thickened until the blood-smeared marble looked almost black beneath it, and the edges of the corpses blurred.

  Oliver’s attention snapped sideways.

  Mordred was standing again.

  He had no helmet. His face was ghost-pale, and veins with a faint orange glow spread across his skin like corruption trying to map him from the inside. Blood ran from his nose in a thin line, dark against his lip. His breathing was wrong, too heavy, too strained. Each inhale was a battle.

  His eyes weren’t tired.

  They were furious.

  “I’ll create an opening,” Mordred said, voice steady despite the rasp in his lungs. “You finish him.”

  Oliver didn’t have time to answer. He barely had time to register the order before the shadows obeyed Mordred’s will.

  They rose behind him, then folded inward, engulfing him completely. The darkness swallowed Mordred whole, erasing him from the center of the room.

  A heartbeat later, the shadows surged again. Carrying him across the ballroom toward Odin’s reach.

  Oliver’s first thought was disbelief.

  Hand-to-hand?

  It made no sense to Oliver. Charging a Sovereign’s reach with flesh and bone, even wrapped in armor and shadow, was the kind of decision that belonged to either madness or absolute certainty. This was a coin toss against a god.

  Mordred hit Odin like a storm breaking free of a cage. Shadows surged with him, blades and tendrils rising from the blood-slick marble and the dead air itself. They struck from angles that would have trapped anything mortal.

  A few shadow-edges tore at Odin’s outline, ripping away slivers of him.

  Still, Odin looked bored.

  His purple eyes stayed steady. His posture didn’t tighten with threat. Even as Mordred’s darkness roared around him, Odin watched with the same contempt a man reserved for insects crawling across a table. He didn’t rush. He didn’t flinch.

  Mordred’s own strikes were worse. Clean punches aimed for the throat, jaw, and sternum. Hits that would have crushed armor plating and bone. Yet when Mordred’s fist reached Odin, it landed with a dull nothingness that produced no stagger, no recoil, no proof that impact had even occurred.

  Odin’s gaze drifted, dismissive, and his arm lifted as though he were about to brush away a fly.

  Once more, Mordred disappeared.

  His shadows folded inward and swallowed him, devouring his silhouette in a blink.

  For the first time, surprise flickered across Odin’s face, small but real. His eyes shifted, not with fear, but with a momentary calculation that suggested something in the script had changed.

  Oliver’s mind took a second longer to catch up.

  Then he understood.

  Mordred reappeared behind Odin like a nightmare stepping out of its own shadow. One arm locked around Odin’s neck, the grip brutal and absolute. Shadow-limbs erupted at the same time, coiling around Odin’s wrists, pinning his elbows, trapping his legs.

  They won't last.

  Odin’s body tensed against the bind.

  Oliver knew what this was. Not a win. Not even a real opening. A fraction of a second, paid for in blood, corruption, and whatever price Mordred’s lungs were already struggling to breathe through.

  Oliver surged forward, lance raised. The weapon’s triple cores crackled, and the air in front of its tip shimmered with pressure.

  He drove the lance toward Odin’s chest.

  For a heartbeat, Odin’s expression changed again. To Oliver, it looked almost like fear, not of pain, but of consequence.

  The lance hit.

  It didn’t strike like steel into flesh. It struck like a spear into a star, the universe briefly refusing the idea that a god could be pinned.

  Then it gave.

  Energy detonated along the lance’s length in a brutal cascade. Light burst outward, bright enough to turn the blood on the floor into a gleaming mirror for a fraction of a second.

  The lance drove through Odin.

  Into Mordred.

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