A/N: Don't think I did this fight as much justice as Hrami's, but I'll just have to redeem myself in the future.

Chapter 7 – Uridimmu Is the Least of My Problems

(III)

The first exchange rang my shield like a gong and showed me that my bioenhancement gave me the edge in strength, but not in striking power or leverage because Svengar still outmassed me twice over. The second exchange saw the spear tip of my pollaxe scrape loudly against his chestplate when he forwent defense to smite me with both hammers. My shield buckled but my arm didn't, showing him that I wasn't some weakling that could only hide behind illusions and fling spells from far away. On the third exchange my shield deflected Garmr, but Gormr's top spike managed to rend a gauge into my cuirass because I wasn't actively drawing on extremis yet, which was a mistake.

I didn't quite stagger, but I did have to jump back for distance and ward him off with a series of swings and thrusts while I reassessed my position.

I'm faster than him at least, I thought grimly as I ran Chamon through my equipment to repair and enforce it. I can react fast enough to roll with hits, but he has the superior skill.

Immortality, at the end of the day, wasn't a promise of unlimited growth. You could practice and even master however many skills you set your mind to, but there was always an upper limit to any one of them which no amount of practice time could overcome. Few skills needed more than a year or three to fully master if one was dedicated enough, and talent and mindset always had their due as well, that was why mortals could compete with immortals at all. I, whose inborn talents other than hunting with bow and arrow had always been more scholarly and spiritual, was once again experiencing the insurmountable gap between my kind and a literal combat monster.

Seeing as it was what killed me the first time, I didn't much care for the experience.

If not for the edge in strength and speed from my extremely fortunate enhancements, I'd be already dead, I thought as my shoulders rattled from having to shield a hit from both Chaos Hammers at once. But… Svengar used Garmr to hook my shield out of the way and ate a gut strike from my spear tip to smash Gormr down on my arm. He has regeneration too.

My armor took the brunt, and extremis the rest. My pauldron warped but my arm survived. I could've done without falling to my knee, but I did it anyway so I could grab him by the legs and haul him up in a back body drop. He crashed face-first into the ice-hard ground, and while he was flailing I spun around and put all my strength into a sweeping strike with the pollaxe's hammer side.

The three meters-tall, massive warrior-king went flying into the harbormaster's building.

I felt aches all over as extremis healed all my internal damage, from Svengar and also myself when I overdrew on its power just now.

Credit the architecture and Svengar's sheer weight slowing him down, he didn't outright blast a hole through the building. Only the wooden windows shattered from the impact, showering him in wood chunks and rusted hinges as he climbed back up. He hadn't lost hold of his weapons, but his armor was cracked where I'd struck my hammer blow, shards falling to reveal a hole big as a fist.

"It'll take a lot of blood to fix that," the Skaeling High King muttered as he advanced on me again. "Try not to die before I'm done squeezing it out of you!"

The fight stretched for minutes, then more, then further. We fought all over the port town, all through the night. The whole time, the Chaos Gods appeared to intervene on Svengar's behalf, calling on the elements themselves to aid his twin warhammers. I had all sorts of ninja ploys in my head to balance the scales, but shadow tricks would just drive Khorne even further into Tzeentch's web, hypocrites both of them.

If only I'd grasped a proper martial form of some sort.

My toughness was better and my strength a breath higher, but with his size and weight Svengar still won nine out of ten contests of might. His skill was superior, but my speed kept me ahead of lethal blows by just a hair while I hammered new and deeper holes into his armor. My healing was faster but also thrice as strained due to the sheer number of hits I had to take. Every time I drew blood, he'd go berserk and rain so many blows on me that I didn't have time to capitalize before his own healing came through. Every time he drew blood, some would land on him and the broken plates would regrow bit by tiny bit.

As the fight went on, Svengar's mood was like a cauldron full of everyone else's tears. Impressed reluctantly, impressed unabashedly, when he finally had my measure but didn't manage to end the fight in a moment of epiphanic frenzy, thanks to the third of my neutron star charms being expended against a lethal strike I'd failed to otherwise defend, he became outright euphoric at the challenge I gave him.

That euphoria only grew and grew despite that I didn't return the same feelings, more and more as he saw through my plan to winnow away at his defense. As his euphoria grew, so did his combat prowess and recovery speed. When the wan, pale light of the two moons flashed in the sky and signaled the end of one year and the start of the next, Svengar threw his daemon hammers at me, and while I was distracted deflecting them, he lunged at me and caught me in an over-under bodylock clinch hold. When I couldn't escape, I drew my knife and stabbed him in the hole I'd made in his armor, over and over. He only laughed harder as his own blood spilled and fed the armor's repair faster than all the hits on me had managed to that point.

I only escaped by superheating my own body so much that not just my armor but his own also melted, exposing the flesh of his arms to the brutal heat spewing out of my pores until his muscles cooked. I screamed from the pain of burning alive, he screamed too, long and hoarsely and the first time in that fight that was only from pain, but even so he didn't let me go until the very tendons in his elbows melted from the heat.

"Aaaagh – fuck!" The giant man swore as he cradled the smoking chunk of flesh his arm now was, though there was still laughter in his voice when he looked at me. His helm was half-melted so that half his grinning mouth was bare to the wind. "Shoulda known that fucker lied, an upstart sorcerer pretending at godhood for the easy and stupid he said, ha! To get so angry that you literally catch fire in a fight, you're Khorne's own berserker you are!" Svengar laughed heartily as his arm regenerated, slower than before due to the sheer damage. He reached out, and Garm and Gormr flew back to his arms. When he spoke again, it was with the rapture of a man who no longer cared if he won or lost. "Come then, boy, show me what fate my God laid down for me!"

We fought all the way back to the promontory where the broken altar now lay in dusty chunks. As through the rest of the night, I almost gave up the fight in favor of magic more than once. But I didn't. I kept putting it off, again and again every time I barely blunted his assault. If I forfeited my own rules of engagement here, Khorne might just stop opposing Tzeentch's schemes against me completely. That offended my inner mastermind on a level so deep I didn't have words for it.

When dawn broke, I failed to achieve the poetic justice that might have redeemed the memory of Marcus du Bordelaux. Had the first duel between these two men concluded as it was meant to, atop the lighthouse of L'Anguille, Svengar would have been fighting in just a loincloth, and the Grail Knight would have found renewed strength with the first sunlight. He'd have finally opened his foe's guard and struck Svengar with a blow of such might that his body would have been cleaved in two, to land in twain upon the rocks below.

Here, now, I had neither the blessing nor mindset to gain power from sunlight, and Svengar still wore that huge, thick plate of blood and steel that I still hadn't winnowed down.

It took me all the way to noon to finally destroy enough of Svengar's armor that my pollaxe could land a true, clean hit.

Impossibly, the giant man's body stood upright for nearly a minute after his head flew off, before it finally collapsed. When it finally did, and I chanced a look to where his head had rolled, it had a smile on its face even in death.

I slumped and took a long, deep breath.

I turned around to face the Bloodfathers, and the rest of the Skaeling and Sarl warriors that had been hanging back, further down the path to watch the end of the long fight. They were all silent, some grinning, some grim, and all had weapons drawn.

"Zanek lied to you," I said. "And the people who attacked you in my name tonight are all his patsies. Many wrongs and mistakes were done tonight, but it can all end with this."

"Can it?" the biggest and bloodiest of the Khorne priests gruffly denied me. "You fight well, and talk even better. But so did the sorcerer, and as much as he played with words, he lied to us less than he didn't. Maybe you're a god and maybe you ain't, you don't fight quite like one but you scheme like one and you take whatever you want like one too. It doesn't matter. What matters is that he said you'd have us change everything we are, give up our ways, give up our very Gods themselves. Do you deny it?"

Curse Tzeentch and all his sycophants to the darkest hell. "I do not."

"Then you'll have us the same way everyone else has ever had us, all the way to great Kharnath himself." The Khorne priest stepped forward, the first of many. "Over our dead bodies."

Abhorrently, they lived up to that boast. First the Bloodfathers one by one, then the rest of the warriors in ones and twos and threes, and then all in a tide. They charged me, fought me and died with the name of their god on their lips.

I almost washed my hands of everything several times. I didn't know if I wanted to just leave or destroy the entire town and everyone in it with an amethyst sphere of annihilation, or just transmute a barrel of gunpowder and blow it in their face. I was completely out of patience even with Khorne's hypocritical whims at this point, I didn't care if he'd be upset that I gave up honorable combat for despicable sorcery and 'showed my true colors' or whatever else he tells himself.

The only reason I kept fighting and killing on their terms was because I still had hope that they would finally stop at some point, that they weren't all just zealots here. Then, too, the Skaelings were not administrators, more so even than the Graelings, relying instead on a system made entirely of thralls who operated as spies as well as bead-counters. For those few Norscans that weren't completely brainwashed, and those countless thralls that didn't deserve to be butchered out of hand for being forced to carry Skaeling and Sarl society on their backs, I played the part of the one-man-army all the way to dusk.

Strategically, it was a victory because any enjoyment I caused Khorne was cooperation and blind eyes Tzeentch wouldn't get from him in the future. Tactically, it was an even bigger victory because all the able-bodied warriors joined in, even the ones in the ships in the harbor. Every fighter converged on me to cheer, jeer, watch or take their turn dying in battle even without Bloodfathers to goad them, thereby leaving the entire settlement defenseless.

All this time, Bjornling ships had been waiting right outside the bay, carrying both their warriors and some of mine. The ships were expertly concealed from both flesh and arcane eyes by the many Ulgu talismans that I'd actually put most of my time and resources towards making, since summer's end. They were still single-use, but I'd made a lot of them. When I signaled Bran through my half of the protean talisman pair made for this very purpose, they were able to sweep into port and take over the place practically unchallenged. They barely even had to use the organ guns.

My newest allies were most impressed by my immense feat when we were reunited, but I couldn't return their enthusiasm.

Bran proved every bit as perceptive as ever, at least. He made sure to have everyone celebrate on the other side of our newly conquered settlement from me, where I couldn't hear them over the wind.

Finally able to take a few moments to myself, I left my meditating body in Bran's unknowing care for a few minutes and flew as fast as I could through the rest of Skaeling lands, all the way to Doomkeep. In four of the eight largest enclaves and towns that I stopped at, there were either pretenders still causing grief in my name, or angry Jarls and Chieftains calling their fighters to war against the Graelings for the same. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Mammoth Riders and other exiles who'd fled my rule were in the process of being lynched as conspirators.

I returned to my body and just… sat there for a while. Just coming to terms with this complete catastrophe.

We were now at war with the Skaelings, and the Sarls too. And probably the Baersonlings as soon as they finished subjugating the Goromadny, if the other coalition of tribes doesn't attack them first. Or us, it would be just our luck with Tzeentch pulling the strings.

We wouldn't be able to sue for peace because everyone believed we started it, and in the most pathetic and outrageous way too. We wouldn't be able to convince them otherwise unless we beat them down hard enough, to force them to listen, which meant we had to win the war anyway. It would take months, maybe even years. Even if we did win, a lot of people would still choose death for Khorne's glory, as they'd done here today rather than entertain a new way of life.

We were at war with no chance to apply any of the various ideas me and mine had brainstormed to prevent it, even partially. The Graelings were no longer as demoralized after my stunt at the boat graveyard, but they were few now. The Bjornlings were too valuable to waste on pointless war, especially since I'd already asked them to foster the leaders of everyone else's next generation. If, however, we didn't commit our full forces, the enemies would swarm into our lands and kill everyone piecemeal, the warriors and their families and everyone else too. If we didn't form at least two fronts, either the Skaelings or Sarls would raid and invade uncontested, and probably the northern tribes too if they smelled the rich opportunity. Conversely, if we concentrated our forces too much, they would get around us and achieve the same.

Gunpowder weapons would turn the tide of any battle, at least, even if we were vastly outnumbered. But I'd obviously had to keep the recipe restricted to my few trusted men while the broader loyalties of the tribe were still settling. I had a fair stock as these things go, you could do a lot by telling different clans to collect different resources without telling them what they're for. But there was a new strategic need now, that would need constant refilling. I would either have to release the recipe to the common craftsman, or put all my time into just that.

Which I couldn't do because I couldn't personally stick around for the war at all, if I wanted to do something about the even bigger calamity that was the massive chaos Rift in the east. It was not only a beacon for every beastman and goblin and orc and every other monster this side of the Empire, it was also building up to something worse. But if I went there and got tied up studying it or, worse, outright ensnared by whatever it was that had trapped bloody Grimnir, I wouldn't be available to deal with whatever absurdities Zanek's other copies came up with.

At the very least, with or without stealing the gunpowder secret, he'd murder my inner circle. I couldn't let that happen, I only had four of them.

And then there was the other Chaos Lord that was off doing who knew what. And the Ulthuan invasion! Valnir felt some future absurdity coming from that direction too, because of course there was.

As much as I hated it, today's ultimate victory belonged to the enemy several times over.

I looked inward. Dove into the world of Forms hoping to grasp for some manner of miracle solution.

I gave up in disgust and returned to myself when all I got was the promise of a thoroughly masterful instruction on the creation of wonders reliant on metaphysics that had long since been usurped or outright broken by the War in Heaven. Perhaps the incidental insight into time manipulation would be useful, but I'd probably get more on that just from studying the Karak Vlag rift for a day or three, never mind the two or three weeks it would take me to assimilate the Form itself.

I could force a reconceptualization… It would cost anima every time I did it, I didn't even know how much, or if it depended on the scope of the Forms being dismissed, but if it gave me something good enough…

No. Not yet. I was too emotionally compromised.

And…

I'd been in worse situations before, and too few of them did I overcome by sheer dumb luck while acting rash.

I got up and walked to the edge of the overlook, looking into the horizon beyond the bay. My griffon, Ravana, bumped into my side. I played with her but I didn't register it. I had my enemies' lamentations and my allies' joy all around me, but I couldn't enjoy any. I had everyone else's hopes for the future I promised them, but now I couldn't trust any. I listened for laughter in the Warp, but didn't hear any.

I had some very risky decisions to make.

Banked Anima

1,100 (Banked Last Chapter) 900 (New Word Count) = 2000 CP

Forms

(Rejected) Silken Mountainriver Diagram (Talisman, Emperor Mortal Dimension, Domain: Time) (600CP)

This Immortal Artifact takes the form of a painting picturing a verdant landscape with majestic mountains and rivers so lifelike that they appear to move. With a small amount of essence, a cultivator can enter the painting which expands to the size of a world. Time flows more swiftly inside the painting, allowing a year to pass when the outside world only experiences a single day. While plants and animals grow older accordingly, sapient beings still only age a single day, making it ideal for cultivation. The owner of the Silken Mountainriver Diagram can control who enters it, but cannot directly force them to exit it. Anything which can become an attachment to your Warehouse can instead be placed inside the Silken Mountainriver Diagram.

Next chapter is available on P treon (karmicacumen), Ko-fi (karmicacumen) and Subscribestar (karmic-acumen), along with advance chapters for The Unified Theorem (Warcraft), my HP multicrossover Everything, Everywhere, one Thing at a Time,and the pilot chapter for a new story called A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law (Highschool DxD X-Over, Inspired Inventor).