Join my Discord, it's kinda funny sometimes. And I also give pings n shi for the fic, among other things. Join at discord.gg/aWZ9qX9mAW
Glory to my bum ass proofreader: Solare.
----------------------------------------------
Golden light tore the world sideways.
One moment John had been standing on Stormveil's northern rise with Melina and Millicent at his back. The next, Margit's gnarled hand was locked around his throat like an iron shackle and the sky was spinning above him in violent flashes of gold and gray.
Wind screamed past his ears. Liurnia's soaked cliffs and drowned woods blurred below them in streaks of green, stone, and silver water. Margit had carried him high and fast, the bastard moving with that same hateful, unnatural explosiveness he always seemed to pull out of nowhere.
John's boots kicked once in open air.
Then he snarled and grabbed the Omen's wrist with both hands. 'Yeah, no. Absolutely fucking not.'
His fingers dug in hard enough to make old scar tissue creak beneath Margit's skin. Muscles bunched in his shoulders. Then, with a surge of strength that would have pulped a lesser man's arm from the socket, John tore the hand off his neck.
He did not waste the opening. His right fist slammed into Margit's face. Then again, and again, and again.
Each punch landed harder than the last, fast enough that the air between them started popping in short, brutal reports. John's knuckles split on the first impact and healed before the third.
Black-red scales began creeping over his forearms, then his hands, then up past the wrists as his body instinctively chased violence with transformation.
Claws pushed through flesh where fingernails had been. Tendons thickened. His arms lengthened fractionally, shoulders widening as draconic force flooded into them punch by punch.
Margit tanked it as a sheen of golden hardlight flared over the Omen's body with each strike, thin at first, then denser, knitting itself into layered armor beneath John's fists. Every hit cracked against the glowing surface with enough force to shiver the light but not yet break through it entirely.
Margit's lips peeled back from his teeth.
"Thou worthless, graceless cur…" He growled, voice shaking with rage even while he endured the beating. "I shall be the judge of whether a filthy Tarnished such as thee is worthy of bearing that Great Rune!"
John stared at him for half a heartbeat, then he barked out laughter. Because the sheer fucking audacity of it was the funniest thing he'd heard in a while.
He punched harder. The next blow made the gold flash violently.
The one after that left visible fractures racing across the hardlight plating over Margit's cheek and brow.
John's grin turned all teeth. "Oh, that's rich."
His left hand snapped forward and raked across Margit's face. His right joined it immediately after. Both arms were fully draconic now, blackened scales plated over thickened muscle, crimson seams glowing faintly beneath them.
He seized the Omen by the face with both clawed hands, fingers digging into the cracked golden shielding rather than flesh.
"As if I needed permission from a hypocritical dumbass like you!"
He then inhaled deeply. Violently deep.
The world seemed to drag inward toward his lungs for a split second. Air, mist, sound, and heat. Something older and heavier gathered in his chest alongside that stolen dragon-memory and the legacy of devoured hearts.
{Unique Innate Draconic Skill: Greyoll's Roar – Activated}
The power tore out of him in a wave so dense it seemed to become visible, a stormfront of draconic supremacy and ancient ruin blasted point-blank into Margit's face.
The sound alone shook the treetops below them and sent ripples racing across the swamp waters far beneath. Birds exploded from the forest canopy in panicked clouds. Branches bent. Mud and mist were shoved flat in every direction.
And the Skill did what John needed it to do. And it did not politely stop at the glowing armor. It punched straight through.
Greyoll's ancient dominion rode the roar straight through the cracks John had beaten into Margit's shield and slammed into the Omen. His strength withered, and his defenses sagged. The invisible weight of the debuff sank into Margit's body and soul alike, pulling him down from the impossible pedestal he always fought from.
Margit's golden armor shattered. The sound was sharp and crystalline, like a cathedral window breaking in a storm.
The blast tore him off John entirely and hurled him backward through open air, staff spinning in one hand while the rest of him pinwheeled in a flare of broken gold.
John himself was blown back in the opposite direction, chest heaving, throat raw, the aftershock of the roar still buzzing through his fangs and ribs. For one brief, weightless moment, the two of them hung apart above Liurnia's drowned wilds like opposing stars knocked from orbit.
Then gravity remembered them. And they hit almost at the same time.
Margit slammed down first into a stretch of swamp-choked woodland, exploding water, mud, and uprooted reeds in a wide crater. John hit a few dozen yards away and carved his own impact into the flooded earth, skidding through black water and broken stone before digging his draconic claws into the ground to stop himself.
Mud fountained around him, his boots sinking in ankle-deep. For a heartbeat, the only sounds were water hissing back into the craters, distant frogs falling silent, and the crackle of dying gold in the air.
Then both of them moved.
Margit rose from the swamp like a curse dragged upright by its own fury. Golden spectral weapons flickered into existence around him for an instant and vanished again as he gathered himself. His breathing was heavier now. His posture, just slightly lower. Greyoll's Roar had bitten deeper than he wanted to admit.
John stood too.
Water streamed from his clothes and scaled arms in sheets. He rolled one shoulder, then the other. His neck still throbbed where Margit had grabbed him, but the bruise was already fading. His draconic hands flexed once, claws opening and closing with wet clicks.
Across the ruined patch of marsh, Margit planted his cane and drew in a harsh breath through his teeth. Golden light rose along his body again, this time less like armor and more like a grim consecration, a fresh reinforcement laid over fury and old pride.
He spoke no spell aloud, but John felt the Omen settle into his stance with the certainty of a man reasserting his right to kill.
John answered in kind.
He straightened slowly, water dripping from his hair into his eyes. His heart beat deep and steady in his chest. He rolled his jaw once, then pulled heat and strength through his body by instinct. Bringing a burning fist to his chest as he summoned his Commander's Standard, filled it with mana, and twirled it playfully.
The incantation and innate skill took with a low bloom of red-orange heat around his limbs and torso, steam curling off the swamp water where it touched him. His muscles tightened, sharpened, and filled with strength.
The two of them stood facing one another in Liurnia's dark shallows, each wreathed now in their own answer to power.
'All right then…'
John let out a low chuckle as the swamp water hissed around his calves and a small smirk tugged at the corners of his lips.
'Marika, play me something.' John rolled his shoulders once, felt the weight of his Commander's Standard settle more firmly into his grasp.
For a beat, she did not answer.
"And what, precisely, am I to play? Thou hast enough 'playlists' and strange mortal noise-hoards to confound a lesser deity." She grumbled with all the dignity of a goddess being asked to operate a peasant's novelty device.
John's smirk widened.
'Just hit shuffle on one.'
Marika's silence this time was heavier, more judgmental, before she let out a tired sigh. "Thy shamelessness grows, mine champion. Very well."
He felt her attention shift somewhere inside the strange lattice of Helios' system, brushing against the new Media tab with the same cautious disdain she might have used to prod a suspiciously glowing mushroom.
There was a moment of faint mental fiddling, a few phantom clicks.
"Want a break from the ads?"
John blinked. The words hit him harder than any incantation had.
"What the fuck?!"
His brain, for one traumatized and completely involuntary heartbeat, stopped being in Liurnia and returned instead to another world. A cheaper world. A world of bad internet, interrupted songs, and having his mood personally assassinated by soulless audio intrusions at the worst possible moment.
Margit did not grant him the luxury of processing that.
The Omen moved in a burst of golden light and swamp-spray, crossing the distance between them with enough speed to flatten reeds in his wake.
"Pay attention, fool!" Marika snapped.
But it was too late.
A massive golden spectral hammer screamed into existence in Margit's hand and came crashing down at John's head.
John barely got the Standard up in time.
The blow landed like a collapsing tower.
The impact detonated outward through his arms and spine, drove his boots from the mud, and launched him bodily into the air. He grunted, teeth grinding as the weapon's shaft shuddered in his grip. Golden force rolled off the blow in a radiant shockwave, tearing up swamp water beneath him in a ring of spray and shattered roots.
As he spun upward, John's face twisted. 'Helios, you rat-fucking bastard! You gave me a system with ads on the music player?!'
He righted himself in midair with a wrench of his shoulders, cape and wet hair whipping around him, and a system panel burst open directly in the middle of his vision.
It contained the image of a familiar little white-haired, red-eyed anime gremlin with a smug grin stretched across her tiny face.
[Nah, I'm js fuckin with u~]
John's eye twitched as the panel flickered once. Then the image vanished, replaced by a proper music prompt.
["Tamed" by Aethoria — Playing!]
A low, rough guitar growled into existence through the air around him, spilling out over the marsh in a wave of distorted energy that somehow felt both alien and perfect.
"The buried mess from the mundane
Strikes again"
John's mouth opened.
Then another system prompt slammed up beneath the first.
[This was a preprogrammed event.]
[The System Administrator accurately predicted the User's thought process, verbal response, and subsequent slander.]
John's face entered a state of spiritual ruin.
"Oh, fuck off."
"A dormant ache freed from restraint
Spread like wildfire through her veins"
He crashed down a second later in a low crouch, one knee driving into the mud hard enough to crater the swamp beneath him. Black water exploded around his body. Steam hissed off him where his lingering heat met the cold flood.
He rose slowly from the little crater, shoulders squared, face twisted into pure and concentrated annoyance.
'I am not letting that little shit ragebait me.'
Marika sighed, though there was the slightest thread of amusement in it. "Somewhat hypocritical, no? Given that thou art, at this very moment, preparing to do precisely that unto my son."
That made the corner of John's mouth twitch upwards.
"It claims its place
Until no memory remains"
"Well..." He muttered as the guitar thickened and the percussion kicked in beneath it. "You're not entirely wrong..."
The irritation didn't vanish. It just changed shape. It turned meaner, more focused.
John rolled the Commander's Standard once behind his back in a wet, whistling arc and dropped into a low stance. Flame still curled over his body in wavering red-orange tongues. His draconic arms remained half-transformed, scales black and crimson and sharp along the forearms, claws flexing around the weapon's haft.
Across from him, Margit stalked forward through the shallows, each step sending small ripples through the dark water. His golden conjurations flickered into and out of existence around him like thoughts of violence given form. He had recovered from Greyoll's Roar faster than John would have liked, but the dragon-skill's mark still clung to him. His movements were just a fraction heavier. His aura just a touch less absolute.
Good.
John grinned as the music swelled.
"It all remains"
He moved, his legs tensed subtly. The swamp exploded beneath him an instant later.
He shot forward like a launched spear, Commander's Standard spinning in behind his shoulder as he rushed the approaching Omen with enough force to split water and mud in his wake. Margit answered instantly, spectral blade flashing into existence in one hand while his cane twisted in the other.
They met in the middle as steel and gold collided with a shriek.
John's halberd-lance slammed into Margit's conjured slash at the exact centerline between them, and the impact birthed a brutal gust of wind pressure that blasted outward through the swamp. Water flattened. Trees shuddered. Reeds bent flat against the mud. The burning ache in John's arms deepened as the Omen's strength crashed into his own.
Margit snarled behind his beard.
John bared his teeth right back at him.
And there, in the drowned wilds of Liurnia, beneath a sky still bruised by morning and gold, with mortal music growling through a divine duel and two Great Rune-bearing monsters testing each other's bones.
Their fight began truly as the two burst forward with an explosion of water heralding their path.
Steel, hardlight, and brute force met with a scream loud enough to send half the nearby marsh-birds exploding out of the treeline.
John's Commander's Standard bit against Margit's conjured blade and the recoil ran up both his arms like a bolt of live wire. Mud and water burst outward under their feet. The reeds nearest them simply ceased to be, flattened into slurry by the pressure wave.
And then Margit shoved.
John's boots plowed backward through the swamp.
He dug one heel down, twisted the Standard free in a screech of metal and light, and barely got it back across his body in time to intercept the Omen's follow-up. Margit came at him with the old fury John remembered, but there was more behind it now. More weight. More force. More of that hateful, kingly certainty packed into every motion.
Their last fight in Stormveil had been a formality, at least at first. This felt personal.
Margit's cane hammered low at his knee. John skipped back. A golden knife followed immediately after, hissing for his throat, and John swatted it out of the air with the butt of the Standard. A spectral hammer bloomed into existence over Margit's shoulder, and he brought it around in a savage arc that clipped John's guard and sent him crashing through a young tree.
The trunk split apart around his body as wood snapped, and splinters blasted through the mist.
John landed in a crouch, then sprang back out before the falling halves of the tree had even finished hitting the swamp.
"Mine champion." Marika said, cool despite the speed of it all. "He is stronger."
"No shit, Sherlock."
He twisted aside from another thrown dagger and answered with a thrust aimed at the Omen's ribs. Margit batted the spearhead aside with his cane and drove a knee into the shaft hard enough to jar John's wrists.
"And not merely stronger in temper." Marika continued. "He must be nearer to his true body. And I would wager he hath poured more mana into this projection than when last you fought."
That tracked.
John's draconic eyes picked up the difference now that he had a second to really look. Margit's body still had that slight wrongness to it, that projected quality, but it was denser. More substantial. The golden seams of conjured selfhood binding him together were thicker, more deeply fed. Less a lazy avatar and more a deliberate incarnation.
"You really put premium hateful fuel in the clone this time, huh, Morgott-kun~?"
Margit answered that by swinging his cane at John's head with enough force to pulp a knight in plate.
John ducked under it by an inch.
The two of them tore through the forest after that like a pair of natural disasters trying to one-up each other.
Margit pressed him hard, driving him through flooded roots and half-submerged stones, every strike birthing some new golden weapon into his free hand. Swords, knives, hammers, short spears, every hateful glimmering thing the Omen could will into murder.
John met it with aggression that was only getting meaner as his draconic instincts settled deeper into his morphed limbs. Every time the Standard swung, it hit with enough force to crack bark like pottery.
A tree exploded under Margit's back when John shoulder-checked him through it.
John only got half a second to enjoy that before Margit rebounded off the collapsing trunk and brought a spectral blade down at his collarbone. John caught it on the shaft, twisted, and kicked him in the gut hard enough to send the Omen skidding through three more trees in a spray of broken wood and swamp water.
They were leaving a trail of destruction through Liurnia.
The marshy forest behind them looked like some deranged lumberjack deity had thrown a tantrum in it. Trees hung split and half-fallen, roots exposed like torn veins. Water boiled up from churned mud where their feet struck. Every impact redrew the battlefield.
Margit came back through the wreckage in a flash of old gold.
He thrust one hand out and a long spear of hardlight formed in his grip, heavier and sharper than the little knives he liked to throw. He hurled it with enough force to scream the air apart.
John saw it coming, and didn't jump or try to sidestep.
He bent backwards.
His entire body snapped backward into a brutal, impossible angle, only his knees and lower legs still vertical while everything above them folded nearly ninety degrees under the incoming spear. The hardlight javelin tore over his face close enough that its radiance seared the tips of his hair.
For one absurd second, he was halfway to a limbo pose in a swamp while the weapon passed overhead.
Then his left claw shot up.
He caught it by the shaft just before it could continue on and dissolve.
There was a pulse of resistance in it, Margit's will trying to drag the construct back into nothing. John barked out a laugh and spun with it instead, pivoting on one foot in the muddy water. The spear whirled around him in a great shining arc.
Faith energy answered him as John poured his own power into the thing mid-spin, red-gold heat and raw conviction flooding up his arm and into the spectral weapon until Margit's clean golden construct was streaked through with Johnathan Pendragon's uglier, warmer, more personal light.
He let it fly.
"HEY BUDDY, I THINK YOU LOST THIS!"
The spear howled back the way it came.
Margit's eyes narrowed. He conjured another spear in his off hand and barely got it up in time. The two hardlight weapons collided point-first in a burst of radiant sparks that lit the whole swamp white-gold for a heartbeat. The impact forced Margit half a step back.
He snarled. "How childish."
John burst out laughing again and rolled the Standard across his shoulders.
"Says the motherfucker chasing a grudge match over a few jokes."
Margit lunged.
John grinned like a bastard and met him head-on.
Their weapons crashed again and again in the flooded trees. Margit fought with the relentless, compressed efficiency of someone who had killed too many things to waste motion. John fought like a gladiator, improvising constantly, shifting ranges and rhythms and feeding off every opening the older fighter was forced to leave.
Cane met halberd. Hammer met claw. Spectral sword hissed past John's ribs, only to be answered by a draconic backhand that nearly ripped Margit's jaw sideways even through the projection's reinforced flesh.
Still, the Omen kept coming.
That was the problem.
No matter how hard John hit him, Margit just kept coming. Slower, maybe. More irritated. More visibly burdened by the projection and Greyoll's debuff. But he did not stop.
So John cheated.
They broke apart around the remnants of another shattered tree, both of them knee-deep in swamp water and breathing harder now. Margit raised one hand, gathering yet another spectral weapon.
John inhaled, and frost pooled at the back of his throat. Then he exhaled in a roar of white-blue ruin.
Dragonice blasted across the battlefield in a wide cone like a glacial torrent of freezing mist and razored ice that shoved its way over water, mud, bark, and root with merciless force.
Margit crossed his cane and hardlight together to block it, golden force flaring around him as the breath hit.
The swamp hissed. Water instantly skinned over into brittle ice. Reeds froze solid and snapped. Frost climbed up Margit's golden guard, spread over it, thickened, and in the space of seconds turned his defense into a blind, frozen shell.
His vision vanished under rime and solidifying white.
The ground beneath him froze too, black mud turning to slick ice around his boots.
John cut the breath and moved.
Margit had to waste precious seconds breaking himself free. Golden hardlight pulsed, shattering the crust over his face and chest. He wrenched one leg loose. Then the other. Ice cracked. Frost blew off him in shards.
By the time he could see again, he heard a sound.
Something being grabbed, and lifted, along with a wet, scraping, confused sound.
"CATCH!"
Margit turned just in time to see a small giant crayfish flying through the air at his face.
It wasn't small by normal standards. But a baby giant crayfish by Liurnia standards.
He instinctively caught it.
There was a ridiculous half-second where he stood there in the frozen swamp, still half-sheathed in broken frost, holding an enraged juvenile crayfish in both hands and visibly wondering what in all cursed creation the point of this was.
He did not react in time to the answer, as its mother fired first.
A violent jet of bubbling spit erupted out of the nearby waterline with all the force of a siege engine and hit Margit square in the face. The impact burst across his features in a wet, foul spray, coating his beard, his projection-flesh, and what remained of his pride in stinking crustacean filth.
He recoiled in instant disgust, and the baby dropped from his hands.
But the mother lunged at him anyway.
The swamp exploded upward as the enormous crayfish launched itself at him in a clattering frenzy of snapping claws and territorial outrage. Margit was forced to abandon all dignity and defend himself from an enraged lake-monster that absolutely, sincerely believed he had just kidnapped its child.
John, meanwhile, was sitting on a boulder about twenty feet away. He had one leg propped up, one arm braced over the knee, and he was pointing.
And laughing. Cackling so hard his shoulders shook.
Marika appeared beside him with one hand pressed to her temple. "Is all of this truly necessary?"
"He came looking for problems this time!" John said petulantly as he wiped at one eye. "Why the hell should I hold back?"
The mother crayfish snapped one great claw at Margit's torso. He twisted aside, a spectral blade flaring into existence just long enough to hack through the joint. The creature shrieked, thrashed, spat again, and forced him back another step.
"It just..." Marika sighed.
Margit finally buried a spectral weapon through the creature's skull and tore free of the collapsing carcass in a spray of ichor and cracked shell.
He turned toward John with an apoplectic growl.
John started clapping and called out to him teasingly. "Wow! Incredible! Do you feel bad creating an orphan?!"
Marika let her head fall back with the long-suffering expression of a goddess whose champion had become too powerful to publicly disown.
"...It just feels mean-spirited, is all..."
Margit charged.
John hopped down from the boulder at the last second, still grinning.
"I've gotta teach our dear Omen king how to have thicker skin somehow..." He muttered to Marika as Margit's cane came in low and vicious. "Man wouldn't last a second in an old-school Modern Warfare lobby."
Marika did not even bother looking into his mind for that one. "I do not even wish to know what thy meanst."
John's grin widened.
Then he bent backward just enough for Margit's cane to whistle past his nose by less than an inch, swamp spray kicking up around his heels as the next phase of their ridiculous, violent duel began in earnest.
And their battle did not slow after that. If anything, it got worse.
John and Margit tore away from the shattered swamp where the unfortunate crayfish family had met its tragic and extremely avoidable end, and the chase of their duel carried on through Liurnia like a pair of vindictive storms that had spotted each other across the horizon and taken personal offense.
John ducked a sweeping cane strike and drove the butt of the Commander's Standard into Margit's ribs hard enough to send the Omen skidding sideways through a curtain of reeds. He followed it with a thrust aimed for the throat, but Margit twisted his torso at the last possible second and the spearpoint only gouged a deep line through his shoulder instead of punching clean through.
Golden knives flared into existence around the Omen's off-hand.
John barked out a laugh. "Oh, we're still doing projectile spam? Really?"
"Dost thou ever shut thy mouth?!" Margit snarled, flinging the blades.
John spun the Standard in a hard, circular sweep, knocking two aside and letting the third skim his upper arm with a hot slice of pain. He did not stop moving. Pain barely even registered anymore unless it was catastrophic or emotional.
"Only when you stop acting like a bitter old forum moderator with a god complex!"
Margit's brows furrowed. He very clearly did not know what a forum moderator was. But that did not stop him from taking offense anyway.
"You gibbering Mongrel–!"
He lunged.
John met him with the grin of a man who had already decided that the best way to win this fight was to physically injure his opponent and emotionally inconvenience him until something gave out first.
That realization had settled into his bones ages ago. He understood Margit's true flaw faster than even the man himself had, even with several millennia of time to identify it.
Margit, or rather Morgott, fought like a man who had spent his entire life clenching every ugly thing inside himself until it calcified into duty.
Rage, shame, grief, self-loathing, devotion, bitterness, all of it was packed down under layer after layer of kingly restraint and holy misery. He fought like a sealed furnace.
John, on the other hand, had no such problems.
So he attacked the seal.
He parried another strike, let the force of it roll through his arms, stepped inside Margit's reach, and drove a headbutt into the Omen's face hard enough to crack his own brow open. Blood ran warm down into his eye. He only laughed harder.
"You know…" He called out as he hopped back from a retaliatory hammer blow that smashed a stone archway behind him into gravel. "For somebody who acts like he's the last sane adult in the room, you are unbelievably easy to piss off."
Margit came at him again, cane whistling low toward his knee.
John jumped, planted one foot on the shaft, and kicked off into a twisting slash that bit across the Omen's chest.
Margit hissed and answered with a burst of spectral blades.
"I am not angered by thee, worm, I am merely disgusted." He growled.
John landed, skidded through shallow water, and immediately jabbed the bloodied tip of his lance accusingly at him.
"See? That right there. That's cope. That's textbook cope."
Marika, drifting unseen above the violence like the world's most judgmental war correspondent, said nothing at first.
She was watching.
Because she could see it too. John was not merely taunting for fun, though God knew he was enjoying it.
The duel carried them through the flooded outskirts and over broken causeways where old Liurnian stone still rose from the water in pale, stubborn lines. Every time one of them struck wide or hard, something in the world suffered for it.
A toppled bell tower lost the rest of its side when Margit's spectral hammer missed John and slammed into the masonry instead.
A drowned chapel wall came apart when John ducked and Margit's cane tore through it.
A stretch of old forest became so much shredded bark and splintered ruin beneath their feet that it looked like a battlefield had mated with a sawmill.
And still they kept talking.
Eventually Margit started answering more.
Not just with one-word growls and kingly condemnation, but with actual insults.
Petty ones. Personal ones.
John nearly got clipped by a spectral spear because he laughed too hard the first time Margit truly snapped back with all the venom of a younger brother who had been holding onto some grievance for centuries and finally got to speak it aloud.
"Thou art loud, witless, graceless, and possessed of the face of a man who would eat glue if left unwatched!"
John stumbled half a step backward in sheer delight. "Did you just elaborately call me a glue-eater?"
"Because thou lookest the part!"
"Holy shit!" John parried a conjured sword with the shaft of the Standard, then kicked Margit in the hip. "Okay! There we go! That's the spirit!"
They tore over the Temple Quarter like a divine custody dispute.
The drowned district rose out of Liurnia's waters in half-submerged plazas, broken colonnades, and broad flooded courtyards choked with algae and old, rotting prayer banners.
Second-generation Albinaurics scattered in every direction the moment the two of them hit the area. Little gray frog-people shrieked and dove for cover as stone shattered, water geysered upward, and two Shardbearer lunatics turned sacred ruins into a screaming obstacle course.
One unlucky Albinauric carrying a bundle of reeds looked up just in time to see John vault over a cracked balustrade while Margit hurled three golden daggers after him.
The poor creature threw himself flat into the water with a terrified croak.
John landed on the roof of a ruined prayer pavilion, spun, and pointed accusingly down at Margit. "You are being so unbelievably dramatic right now!"
Margit answered by hurling a spectral hammer that obliterated the pavilion.
John crashed through the roof, came up through the wreckage with splinters in his hair, and shouted back, "SEE?!"
What made it even worse, or better depending on one's perspective, was that Margit eventually started matching his cadence.
Not perfectly. He still sounded like a wrathful king from an age that had forgotten how joy worked.
But he was in it now. Trading barbs, snarling answers, biting back at each taunt like he was no longer some distant holy executioner pronouncing judgment, but a furious, overworked older brother getting dragged into the pettiest argument of his life.
To anyone watching from a safe distance, and several horrified Albinaurics unfortunately were, it would have looked like two monstrous children having a playground fight.
Only instead of a sandbox and a broken toy between them, the world itself kept taking the hits.
John rolled under a hardlight sweep that sliced a ruined temple statue clean in half and popped back up on Margit's blind side.
"You know what your problem is?" He questioned as he slammed the butt of the Standard into the back of the Omen's knee.
Margit staggered, recovered, and whipped an elbow into John's jaw with enough force to make teeth clack.
"List thy blasphemous complaints quickly!"
"You think suffering makes you morally interesting!"
Margit's spectral sword flashed. John barely caught it.
"I have never once desired thy interest!"
"That's not what I said!"
"That is what thou implied!"
"Oh my Goood!" John groaned, then ducked another strike. "You are the most divorced man alive."
Margit recoiled like John had just spat in the Erdtree's roots.
"I HAVE NEVER BEEN MARRIED!"
"That somehow makes it worse! You're a king who's lived for thousands of years, you're telling me you never once tried to find a man or a woman that's interested in you?! That is fucking sad, get your life together!"
Marika, despite herself, had to look away for a moment and press two fingers to her brow. Not because the battle was beyond them. Or even because of what he just said, though that did affect her.
It was because she could feel the shape of what John was doing more clearly now.
He was not merely teasing. He was teaching by irritation.
Every insult forced response. Every response forced Margit to externalize something he would otherwise have swallowed and weaponized against himself later. John kept baiting him into admitting anger, annoyance, insecurity, pride. Into making noise instead of sanctifying his own pain as duty.
It was a wildly irresponsible method of emotional unpacking.
It was also perhaps the only method that could possibly work on Morgott the Grace-Given.
Their clash finally tore away from the Temple Quarter and out over a lower, wetter stretch of Liurnia where the flooded ruins gave way to a swamp of rock and earth.
The Academy of Raya Lucaria loomed off to their right, vast and blue and arrogant atop its rise, watching the entire disaster like a disapproving professor pretending not to notice students fistfighting in the courtyard.
All above and around them, dozens of flying scarabs drifted through the air in loose, shimmering swarms. Red ones glowed like embers in motion. Blue ones shined with an azure glow reminiscent of glintstone. White ones flashed pale gold and silver as they spun through the mist.
At John's back, farther inland on the island's rough slope, lay the curled form of a sleeping glintstone dragon.
Its scales gleamed faintly blue-gray under the damp morning light, breath rolling from its nostrils in slow, misty pulses. It had not yet stirred. Mercifully.
John skidded to a stop in the shallows near the island's edge, boots carving twin furrows through mud and water. He straightened, rolled the Commander's Standard once through his fingers, then twirled it in an easy flourish that flicked dark blood in a shining arc from the blade.
With his free hand, he swept his wet hair back in a deliberately flamboyant motion.
Across from him, Margit stood with his chest heaving, projection-flesh marked by cuts, frost-burn, mud, and a lingering dusting of dried crayfish spit around one side of his beard that he had apparently failed to clean entirely. John himself was not in much better shape.
He could feel bruises forming under fresh regeneration. His shirt was a wreck. Blood from his split brow mixed with swamp water down one side of his face. Both of them looked like they had been fed into a catastrophe and spat back out half-chewed.
John smirked, he could heal himself, he just chose not to.
"So…" He asked lightly, tilting his head at the Omen. "How much more collateral damage you wanna deal before you quit it with this temper tantrum?"
Margit grunted, rolled one shoulder, and stretched his neck with a low crack. Then he raised one hand and snapped his fingers.
Golden discs of hardlight bloomed into existence behind him in a crescent.
At first they hung there as radiant shields, then they shifted.
Each one thickened, sharpened, and slowly formed into a different weapon. Sword. Spear. Hammer. Curved blade. Knife. Greatsword. The whole hateful armory of the Golden Order rendered in shimmering, murderous geometry behind a king-shaped projection standing knee-deep in Liurnian marsh.
"As much as it takes…" Margit growled, his voice low and rough. "To wipe that smug smile from thy horrid face, Tarnished."
John's face lit up with delight. His grin spread so wide it almost looked painful.
"Oh, come on~!" He exclaimed, dragging out the words with theatrical disbelief. "I think we both know you're very aware what my name is by now~!"
For one treacherous, unmistakable instant, Margit's mouth twitched. It was not quite a smile.
But it was close enough that John saw it.
And so did Marika.
The Omen crushed it down almost immediately, his expression hardening back into stony wrath.
Then, very slowly, very deliberately, with all the petulant emphasis of a man refusing to give ground on principle alone, he said:
"TAR."
A spectral spear tilted forward behind him.
"NISH."
A sword followed.
"ED."
The last word came out like a thrown brick.
John stared at him for half a heartbeat, then his grin turned absolutely feral.
Oh, this was going to be fun.
John's feral grin held for exactly one more heartbeat, then something in his expression changed.
Not the humor. That stayed. But it sharpened, tilted, and then took on that dangerous little glint Marika had already learned meant he had just thought of something so petty and so effective that it would inevitably make everyone involved miserable.
Including, relatively often, himself.
His free hand dipped into his inventory. And came back holding a small, ugly little trinket of humiliation.
Margit's Shackle.
For the first time in six or seven minutes that their battle had taken place in real time, the Omen's face did something other than snarl or scowl. His eyes widened, as he recognised it instantly.
Of course he did. It had defined his formative years, and haunted his soul to this very day, after all.
John saw recognition hit him like a spear to the gut, and the resulting satisfaction was so immediate it almost counted as a buff.
"Oh, no way~!" John said, delighted. "You remember this? That's adorable~."
Margit moved at once. Or rather, he tried to.
The weapons behind him began to surge forward in a brilliant, deadly fan of hardlight, his shoulders tensed to lunge, his mouth opened to say something that was almost certainly unflattering—
—But John fed the Shackle his mana.
Golden force exploded downward instantly. Thick spectral chains of old grace and punitive design erupted around Margit's limbs and torso and slammed him bodily into the ground with all the force of an angry law.
The earth shook, and water splashed high around him.
The floating arsenal behind his back sputtered and destabilized, several weapons collapsing outright as the Omen was driven to one knee, then both, then face-first toward the muddy shallows before he caught himself on his palms with a strangled, furious sound.
The chains held him there, pinned, humiliated, and silent for one brief, glorious instant.
John let out a warm little chuckle and planted the butt of his Commander's Standard in the mud like he had all day.
"Well?" He asked lightly. "Why're you down there? You find a coin on the ground or something?"
Margit's answer came out as a low growl that seemed to vibrate the water around him.
John raised his free hand to cover part of his face, shoulders shaking with private laughter.
"Hey, now!" He called out, his voice dripping with sympathy so fake it almost counted as performance art. "You were the one who called me a beggar for picking things up off the floor in front of enemies last time we met."
That only made the growling worse.
Margit strained against the shackles, thick shoulders bunching under the weight of golden chains that had once been designed for beings much larger and much more inconvenient than most Tarnished. Hardlight sparked around him. Mud exploded under his fingers. Veins stood out in his neck.
John took a slow step back, braced the Standard across one shoulder, and listened.
Because once Margit got his mouth back, he really got it back.
The insults came in a flood.
"Faithless scavenger–"
"Sniveling cur–"
"Shameless worm–"
"Vile, grinning half-drake gutter-rat–"
Each one came rougher than the last, dragged out of him by the combined agony of physical restraint and emotional desecration.
John covered his face more fully with one hand, as though trying to hide his expression.
He failed.
'Oh, this is delightful~!' John thought, almost reverently. 'What a deliciously depraved way to ragebait!'
His grin widened behind his fingers until he looked, for all the world, like a demon wearing a man's face and trying not to laugh too loudly in church.
Marika, who had started this whole exchange mildly scandalized and ended it helplessly entertained and yet still horrified on account of her estranged son, sighed through her nose.
"Thou truly art awful."
'Thank you.'
"I did not praise thee."
John's shoulders shook once with another suppressed laugh, then Marika's tone changed very slightly with a hint of alert.
"Johnathan…" She said, and he felt her attention shift behind him toward the island slope. "The dragon wakes."
He had already heard it.
The subtle crunch of stone under shifting weight. The low drag of scales over earth. The heavier change in breathing.
At his back, the glintstone dragon had raised its head from its slumber and fixed its luminous gaze squarely on him.
It was the Glintstone Dragon Smarag.
The beast's blue-gray scales caught the pallid light from Raya Lucaria in dull glimmers. Crystal growths around its head and back gave it an uncanny, sorcerous outline, and its jaws parted just enough to show the wet glint of fangs as it tasted the air.
Whatever sleepy instinct had ruled it a moment before was gone now. It had recognized him.
Not as prey, not exactly. It recognised him as competition. As a threat.
As another dragon-shaped claim walking upright on two legs and stinking of hearts, runes, and challenge.
It rose slowly from its half-curled rest and slunk forward through the island grass with horrifying quiet for something that large. Wings twitched once. Claws dug furrows into the earth. Its maw opened wider, glintstone rot-light gathering faintly in the back of its throat as it prepared for the simplest and oldest answer to rivalry.
Eat the other one first.
Marika watched it advance, then looked at John, and realized with growing suspicion that he was not moving.
"Mine champion, there is a dragon preparing to devour thee from behind." She informed carefully.
'I know.'
"You know?"
'Yep.'
"And thou intendest to–"
'Wait for it, yes.'
Marika stared at him. "...What?"
John's grin did not falter. 'Let me cook.'
She blinked.
Then looked from him, to the dragon, to the Omen King currently pinned to the mud and barking blasphemies, and very slowly understood exactly what kind of manipulative bastard her champion had chosen to be in this precise moment.
She brought a hand to her face. "Oh, thou impossible creature."
Behind John, Smarag lowered itself further, great neck coiling for the strike. Its eyes narrowed on the back of his skull. The beast was close enough now that John could feel the pressure of its breath on his wet hair and the back of his torn shirt.
He still did not move.
Margit, meanwhile, finally tore one arm halfway free of the shackle's hold. Then the other. Golden chains creaked and snapped in bursts of hardlight. He lifted his head…
And he saw it.
The dragon.
Its maw opening behind John. The idiot Tarnished still standing there. The absolute certainty that if the beast bit down now, all of this would end in a way that was technically convenient and spiritually intolerable.
Something savage crossed Margit's face.
It was not fear, or even concern, exactly.
It was possession.
The last of the shackle shattered.
Margit surged upright with a roar, spectral weapons flaring back into being around him in a violent corona. He did not even look at John. He looked past him, at the dragon, and his voice rang out over the island in pure, furious command.
"I am the only one allowed to kill Johnathan Pendragon!"
The weapon barrage launched.
Golden knives, spears, and blades screamed through the air in a brilliant fan and hammered into Smarag's face and skull just as the glintstone dragon lunged.
The impact burst scales, shattered crystal growths, and drove one blade cruelly across the ridge of its eye. Another lodged near the cheek. A spear gouged into the side of its neck and exploded into sparks of hardlight.
Smarag recoiled with a roar of pain and shock, jerking its head sideways before its jaws could close around John at all.
The dragon thrashed backward, wings flaring, one claw ripping a trench through the island earth as it put distance between itself and the two maniacs currently fighting in its front yard.
Blood, dark and glittering with glintstone flecks, dripped down its face. It hissed, glared, and then, deciding for perhaps the first time in its life that this was not worth the trouble, retreated in a bounding, furious limp back toward the higher rocks of its den.
It did not flee far. Just enough distance to watch with one injured eye and wait for a less stupid opportunity.
John, still where he had been standing, slowly turned his head back toward Margit.
He was smirking with clear satisfaction.
Margit saw it.
Then he understood the exact shape of the trap in hindsight. The deliberate stillness. The refusal to react. The dragon's angle. The timing. The fact that John had known, beyond any doubt, that either the dragon would bite him or Margit would not allow it to.
And because Margit was not an idiot, even while furious, he understood the real obscenity of what had just happened.
John had baited him into saving him.
The realization hit like a slap to the face.
John watched it land, watched the Omen's eyes narrow and his jaw tense as the truth settled in, and his smirk widened into something younger.
It was brighter, almost boyish. And almost charming enough that it would have been dangerous even without the fangs.
"Now then…"
He leaned forward over the shaft of the Lance in his hands, shoulders loose, wet hair falling around his face, blood still drying at one temple. His expression was playful in the way only truly fearless or truly insane men ever managed in front of something that could kill them.
"My future Son-In-Law~…" He said lightly, meeting Margit's stare head-on.
Marika made a strangled sound somewhere between a laugh and a divine aneurysm.
John did not break eye contact.
"May we chat like adults~?"
---------------------------
Author's Note:
Gimme power stones.
All the Ragebait has a point, in the end lol.
I haven't been able to write much nowadays, sigh... Why did I have to go and get a j*b...
…
Next Chapter Title: Step-Daddy and Step-Son Bonding Time I
…
If you want access to all my stockpiled chapters, up to 16 chapters ahead (150k words ahead), as well as special privileges on Discord among other things, you can go do so on my Patreon!
Join at patreon.com/Helios539