Inside the cracked, crimson-domed battlefield, the nature of the fight transformed completely.
There were no more jokes. No more smirks. No more theatrical bows or clever deflections.
Milim came at him again, her jet-black dragonoid battle armor gleaming beneath the fractured sky, her fists laced with compressed Draconic force capable of crushing bedrock to powder. She drove a lightning-fast combination toward his chest and throat, her movement blurring space itself in a series of violent, kinetic snaps that rattled the mountain roots beneath their feet.
Loki didn't retreat into a spatial fold. He stepped directly into her reach, meeting her head-on.
He brought up a dense Hephaestus gauntlet to block her first left hook. The collision boomed like heavy artillery, the shockwave shattering the stone beneath their boots into fine powder. He pivoted, using a localized gravity well around his hips to absorb her follow-up right cross, deflecting her forearm upward with his elbow before stepping into her guard to check her shoulder. Dried blood stained the left side of his face where her earlier strike had shattered his cheekbone, but beneath the surface, Infinite Regeneration had already pulled the bone back into place.
When she spun with a ferocious low sweep, Loki didn't hover out of range. He planted his heel into the dirt, braced his posture with gravity manipulation, and took the physical momentum against his guard, using the contact to slide along her flank while keeping his footing locked. His coat torn and scorched, his body absorbed the sheer kinetic transfer as his Nephalem energy surged to meet hers.
It was brutal, intimate, close-range combat. A grueling exchange of physical weight, martial discipline, and raw force. Loki didn't try to overpower her. He didn't deploy spatial severing blades to cut her armor, nor did he use gravity to hurl her against the barrier walls. He met every blow with exact parity, matching her speed and power strike for strike, demonstrating through raw, unyielding action that he respected her strength as an equal.
Yet every movement he made was governed by a single, unwavering constraint: the obsidian cube clutched tightly against his left ribs.
Milim drove a sweeping roundhouse kick toward his neck. Loki could have ducked or used a spatial cushion to slide beneath it. Instead, seeing that ducking would leave the cube exposed to the backscatter of her Draconic aura, Loki raised his left shoulder, taking the full force of her shin directly against his collarbone.
Crack!
The collarbone fractured beneath the blow. Pain Nullification completely neutralised the agony, but the kinetic displacement forced Loki to grimace, coughing up a spatter of blood. Even as he twisted with the strike, Infinite Regeneration ignited instantly. The fractured bone snapping cleanly back into alignment beneath his skin within a split second. Yet his left arm never loosened its iron grip on the box. He absorbed the kinetic transfer through his spine and legs, keeping the container completely motionless in the center of his posture.
Milim's eyes narrowed as she pulled her leg back. She launched a brutal flurry of direct claw thrusts. Left, right, upper, lower aimed at his exposed torso.
Loki parried the high strikes with bare hands, his knuckles fracturing and immediately knitting back together against her armor. When a low claw thrust aimed dangerously close to the container, Loki didn't use a spatial barrier to block it; he thrust his own right thigh into the path of her claws. The Draconic aura tore through his trousers and flesh, leaving three deep gashes along his leg.
Blood splashed onto the ruined bedrock, but almost instantly, muscle fibers reconnected and skin sealed beneath the torn fabric before Milim had even fully withdrawn her arm. Loki used the moment of contact to pivot his body, placing his own torso between her claws and the cube once more. He didn't counterattack while she was open; he simply recalibrated his stance, his chest heaving, his left arm locked tightly over the obsidian face of the box.
Milim paused, her breath coming in heavy, ragged gasps. For the first time since the battle began, a crack appeared in her absolute certainty.
She stared at him. At his bloodied coat, his torn trousers, his freshly healed knuckles, and the rapid pulse of Infinite Regeneration knitting his flesh together. She saw the formidable magnitude of his Nephalem power, an authority capable of matching her seriousness step for step and shrugging off physical destruction. And yet, every time she struck, every time a stray shockwave threatened to hit the space around his left side, Loki threw his own body into the line of fire.
He was using a body that could rapidly restore itself as an absolute shield for a fragile soul container that could not.
He's not hiding behind Gaia, Milim realized, the thought piercing through her rage like an icy needle. He's protecting the it from me.
"Milim!" Loki called out, his voice raspy, quiet, and devoid of any bravado. "Look at me! Look at what we're doing! If you keep swinging at me with everything you have, you're going to break the space around us! I cannot help Gaia if you destroy the surviving soul in your anger!"
"You... you locked Gaia away!" Milim's voice trembled, her claws lingering in the air, but her tone lacked its previous absolute fury.
"When Mariabell unleashed the Chaos Dragon, Gaia was already buried beneath centuries of corruption!" Loki insisted, taking a firm step forward. "I didn't know how much of the original soul was left, and I wasn't willing to gamble whatever survived on a finishing attack. That's why I used Infinite Prison!"
Inside the obsidian box, the thrashing, dark violet energy suddenly hushed.
The black, spiderwebbing fractures of malice across the container stopped violently reacting to their magicules. Instead, the core of the soul flared with a soft, pale emerald light that vibrated in dual resonance matching the frequency of Milim's Draconic aura and the steady, protective spatial sheath Loki held around it.
Through the authority of Hades, acting as the bridge to the soul, a sudden stream of fragmented memory data surged directly into Loki's consciousness.
'Alert. Soul resonance established through Hades,' Manas: Loki reported instantly in his mind. 'Parsing fragmented visual and emotional impressions from the dragon's origin core.'
The memories were not a smooth, structured narrative, but chaotic, sensory flashes:
Dark breath. A mountain disappearing beneath corrupt miasma, and Mariabell's imperative command driving an already-corrupted body forward through mindless violence.
Loki above the dragon's roaring jaws.
An open hand, and six interlocking walls of white-gold light snapping shut around the thrashing Chaos Dragon.
The crushing violence stopping instantly as the six walls compressed, the prison shrinking down into Loki's palm instead of the finishing blow the dragon's buried instincts had braced to receive.
And beneath the dark weight, a sudden, ancient warmth. A faint, trembling spirit reaching out toward the edge of the box, recognizing Milim's aura with aching, ancient familiarity.
Loki's eyes widened as he accessed the memories clearly, the unfiltered truth of Gaia's recognition flooding his mind.
Milim froze ten feet away, her hand hovering in midair, her blue eyes wide as she felt the sudden, gentle pulse of recognition emanating from the cube in Loki's hands.
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