Chapter 291: The Ugly Rat that Polluted the Sea (8)

The shock of impact rolled outward in a heavy, grinding wave. The ruined bear cub, fouled and warped until it hardly resembled what it had been, threw itself against Bayern, and Bayern met it head-on.

The Barbarian King reset his stance and let out a low sound of genuine appreciation. “You are strong. They are calling you a cub, are they not?”

It was not yet fully grown, and even so, it had already become a monster on the level of a Hero. By itself, it carried enough weight to scar the North.

The youngster barreled forward and chopped a forepaw through the air. Bayern tightened his grip on the axe and gave it what it asked for. The force blew the beast backward; its torso skidded and ploughed a deep trough across the ground. Bayern watched it tumble and, despite himself, felt a pinch of regret.

“That is the pity of it,” he muttered.

The cub was undoubtedly powerful. However, it simply did not reach him. Even among those called Heroes, there were distances the title did not bridge.

“It might have grown into its parents’ height if left to its own path... but something else stained it first.”

The cub lurched up, shook filth from its fur, and rushed in again. Bayern exhaled and spoke as it came. “I owe your parents a great deal.”

He had nearly died to the White Bear in the White Snowfield. If not for the tribe of barbarians, the White Snowfield would have taken him whole, and the cold would have kept his name.

“I am grateful for it now. I was arrogant, and they gave me the truth. I will repay that favor,” he said. Myst rose around Bayern in an instant, sheathing muscle and bone in a second skin. His frame felt lighter and heavier at once. “I will set you free.”

The two met again, and the sound of their clash cut through the noise of the wider field. A monster from the White Snowfield and the Barbarian King fought, and the fight was the sort that would mark a page in history. Yet few eyes could stay on them. At the edge of sight, something else kept drawing every glance away, because the weight behind that other collision made even a battle with a bear look small.

“That rat is on the same level as the White Bear,” Bayern muttered when he caught a glimpse of the other struggle. “As I am now, my odds would not be good.”

However, there was one person who was overwhelming such a creature—Ketal.

Bayern’s mouth tilted in a rough smile. “I will have to explain things properly to the barbarians later.”

He meant that he would tell them he was weaker than Ketal was. Whether they believed it was another matter. He tightened both hands on the axe and went to meet the corrupted cub with everything he had.

***

The ground churned as if it had learned to boil. The bog and the stain blew up like molten rock and painted arcs of filth across the air. The wind itself took on a color. The sky drew a breath and turned a humid, sick green.

This was the rat’s nest. The density of corruption here belonged to a different scale than at the perimeter. Thick, compressed venom moved as its master willed. The place was no longer the surface of the world. It was a domain of filth—a world that answered to the rat.

Ketal smashed that world apart. He ground it down and sent it flying. The stain that had tried to claim everything sloughed into clots like wet clay. Some of the venom splattered through his guard and kissed his skin. He felt it scorch. He felt it try to bite deeper. However, it could not. The shape of the strength in his body kept the poison from working its way inside.

He burned through the storm of small strikes and kept going until he could swing. Something gave with a brittle crack, and the rat’s body snapped away from the impact like a stone off a river. It dug at the floor with both hind feet and barely checked its own slide, then chopped a forepaw in a diagonal that would split a wagon.

The mire heaved once, then heaved again in earnest. It rose in a wall and broke like surf, but this tide was venom. Anything it covered would rot for a thousand years or more.

Ketal drew the axe. Veins laced his forearms and shoulders in red lightning and pulled taut as cables when he put his weight behind the cut.

The wave broke in two. A strike meant to drown a continent came apart on one swing. The wind that ran outward from the split did not stop there; it traveled and took a slice out of the rat as it went.

“Kiiit!

” the rat shouted. Hide peeled away, and blood sprayed in a bright, toxic sheet. Bone shone through for an instant before flesh sagged back over it. The rat rocked but did not fall. “You are disgustingly strong.”

“You have done your preparations. Is this all you have?” Ketal asked it.

The density here had made the rat stronger. However, it was still not enough. If this were the sum, it would lose. Ketal understood the animal well enough to know it would not come to this point and stop short of a last card. The small, ugly laugh that rattled in the rat’s throat agreed with him.

“Of course not,” it said.

They had drifted toward the exact center of the mire while they traded blows, and the rat had been waiting for that. It chopped both forepaws down.

“Open,” the rat ordered.

The floor split and fell inward. A hole opened beneath Ketal’s feet, a hole so deep the bottom did not show. He looked down once and lifted his eyebrows.

“Oh?”

“Come. We are going down.”

They fell into the abyss.

***

Ketal did not know how long they dropped. When the floor finally rose to meet him, time had stretched enough to make his sense of distance useless. The place at the bottom felt wrong. The round throat of the pit had become a shaft of glass. The walls were smooth, hard, and clean to the eye. There was no slickness, no ooze.

That did not mean there was no poison. The venom here had been compressed until the air trembled with it.

“The Abyss,” he said, recognizing it.

It was a hole into which the rat had pressed every part of its domain. It was an old trick. In a far season, the rat had decided that the barbarians of the White Snowfield stood too squarely in the way of its expansion, and it had hunted Ketal in earnest. The fight had gone on for a week, and Ketal had survived by inches. He had still taken a wound that his unusual knack for healing turned into a full week in bed.

The rat had used this then. It was the hidden move.

“It is thicker than before,” Ketal said.

Even breathing here marked his body. Even standing still let the foulness be itself against him.

“It feels like I have come back to where I was born. I had almost forgotten this,” the rat said, shaking as if shivering with pleasure. It swam in that old memory for a heartbeat, then tore itself out of it. “I lost to you. I took you lightly. I tried to kill you with a thin plan. That will not happen again.”

The rat crouched. The density of its domain climbed, and the echo of its presence swelled. It was the same creature, and also it was not. The Abyss made it more of itself.

“I will stake everything I am and kill you,” the rat said as it pounced.

The speed was extreme—fast enough that even a fully committed Bayern would have struggled to meet it. There was no room to build toward a perfect answer. Ketal raised the axe and swung anyway.

Edge met claw. For the first time in a long while, the rat did not yield. Ketal’s heels skidded. He took two steps backward. His eyes widened, and a thin sound of interest left him. He, Ketal, had been shoved straight back.

The rat screamed and did not stop. It worked both forepaws, and each stroke carried speed and weight together. The pattern was tight. Even Ketal needed a breath to find a seam.

The place itself fought with it. The Abyss fountained a new surge of poison. It spilled in sheets that Ketal could not avoid all of it. The edge of the rain met his shoulder and ran down his side. The patch of skin it touched tried to surrender; the muscle below quivered and softened; the venom went looking for bone.

Ketal’s eyes went flat.

The next exchanges pushed him again. The Abyss was a field tilted against him, and the rat knew it. It saw too that he was choosing his moments, drawing contact and falling away when the trade did not suit him. He had bled strength on purpose in the last set.

He let the rat shove him, then set his feet and brought his weight up through both legs into his hands. The axe answered with a hum. He filled it with enough power that the hair stood on the rat’s back. The shape of Ketal’s strength was close to a kind of authority. Even here, even now, the rat could not afford to take that strike. It could not stop it. It would have to avoid it.

It called venom until it gathered in a wall and hardened it. It built a shield thick and ugly enough that even an Elder Dragon would have wanted its best stance before it tried to break it.

Ketal swung. The shield shattered in a breath. It slowed him, and that was all the rat needed. It moved while the axe chewed through, and the blade ate emptiness.

The cut scored the wall of the Abyss and left a long, smoking wound. However, the rat itself was not there.

“

Kiiiiiiik!

” The cry rattled the glassy air. “I can avoid you!”

They had fought too many times not to know one another’s habits. That familiarity gave the rat a rare kind of confidence.

“As I am now, I can beat you. You will lose!” the rat shouted. It was not simple bragging. It laid out its thoughts like a map. “You do have a limit!”

Ketal’s strength stemmed, at its core, from his body. Of course, that was not the whole of it. When he set his will, that intent could ripple out and affect the world itself. Yet compared to his true power, such effects were painfully ordinary—pathetically meager to the point of being beneath notice.

The fact that it had even taken time to break free from the High Elf Queen Karin’s suppression, or to shrug off the control of an Elder Dragon, made this plain. Given the true measure of his might, such things should never have touched him at all.

It was odd, and the reason was not hard to sketch.

“You are strong. You can stand against the Primarchs. But you are suppressing yourself,” the rat said. Ketal had the frame to step into a higher room, but he refused to climb the stairs. The rat continued, “You insist on calling yourself human. That stubbornness breaks you. You are still overwhelming, but a hole exists that should not have been there.”

His body bruised itself under his own strength. Muscle tore and bone cracked whenever he let everything he had show. The reason was simple: he did it to himself on purpose, bending his own shape to fit a name.

“Here in the Abyss, I can kill you.”

Inside the pit, the rat could slip free of his grasp and pour its poison over him without end. Given enough time and pressure, even this body would eventually break. It clung to that belief, tasting victory in its teeth at last.

“At last! I can beat you, barbarian!” it shouted. After an age of collision, it had found the one field where victory was possible. The rat’s mind rang with pleasure. “Coming down here was your mistake, barbarian. Your arrogance will kill you!”

“You are right,” Ketal said. He did not argue.

If he had cast everything aside, if he had abandoned his humanity and accepted what lay beyond, he could have reached a higher place. He could have gained power, stature, and rank far greater than what he now held. But in doing so, he would have become something entirely different.

What he sought was not greater strength. It was fantasy. It was the dream he had longed for above all else.

“You are still full of yourself. Perhaps that is why you built so much in such a short span, but it is also why you die here,” the rat said.

“We will see.” Ketal smiled. “Because I did not let go, I lost powers I otherwise might have held. On the other hand, because I did not let go, I also picked up something.”

Rise

, he told the beast within.

The Myst that slept in him woke and ran. It wrapped him, reinforced him, and settled as if it had always belonged.

“You...!” The rat’s eyes flew wide.

He closed his hand on the axe and let it fall. The strike landed clean. The rat could not answer in time. It took the blow squarely, hit the wall, and left a dark smear down the glass as it slid. It spat blood the color of a nightmare.

“It was hard keeping this hidden.” Ketal’s breath came steady despite the stain trying to make a home in his lungs. “If I showed it too early, you would have run away without looking back.”

“You... Do not tell me that is—”

“You called it arrogance to come down here.” He nodded. “I am returning the line.”

The rat’s trump card was the Abyss. It gathered everything within the domain and pressed it into a single space, a power so immense that even Ketal felt the weight of its poison.

However, it also meant there was nowhere else to go. With the domain concentrated to this degree, there was no slipping from patch to patch underground, no diving through a saturation line and stepping out a league away. For the first time since they had met, escape was not a word the rat could use.

He could kill it here and mean the word.

Ketal’s smile thinned until it looked like a cut. “I told you that this time, I would kill you.”