A simple headbutt sent Svend’s head careening off his shoulders, but his body kept moving. With an upward swipe of his arm, Jorfr severed both his right arms, and with a diagonal downward one he split his torso from the right clavicle to the left hip. Despite the apparent presence of internal organs, the body was flimsy. It was fake. The impact of its tail - or rather, the lack of impact - confirmed it… And the trail of footsteps it had left behind in Jorfr’s permafrost wasn’t the only one.

Jorfr stomped.

The icebound form of a towering man, mighty shield in hand and spear in the other, erupted out of the ground in front of him, slightly offset to the right.

ANCESTOR SIGN

REPRISING THE FEATS OF ONE’S FOREBEARS

SAGABORNE ARTS: WIDE-WUTH OF THE UNBROKEN SHIELD

He saw the footsteps’ trajectory shift, and spun into a middle-height counterclockwise spinning kick, while impelling the statue of Wide-wuth to stab down at him from overhead. The height of his kick was a feint; he dropped down into a one-legged squat halfway through the turn. An entirely un-borean tactic, derived from the advanced martial arts of the Newman Sect’s birdmen, one even Zelsys didn’t use often as she lacked the means to anchor herself the way a birdman or Jorfr were able to.

To the Ramdall’s credit, he managed to slip out of the pincer attack and rounded Jorfr’s back, still invisible. Wide-wuth’s spear stuck into the ground. An impact equalling a high-caliber cannonball in force smashed into his back, sending him careening forward right past his construct; all four of Svend’s arms, fingers outstretched and palms stacked together. As Jorfr skidded forward on his chest, however, Svend gave pursuit… And the statue of Wide-wuth spun around to strike him with its shield, twisting itself to pieces in the act.

The shield, however, remained unbroken, and Svend was cast to the ground, giving Jorfr the time to get up, laughing and spitting up blood. He was certain that under different circumstances the strike would’ve damaged his spine and internal organs.

“I was not aware that Manslayer Apes could create false copies of themselves and go invisible,” he said. Quietly, he was preparing; chanting, recounting a tale in his head. A tactic he’d borrowed from Zelsys, one he was alright with using since she hadn’t made use of it in the previous fight.

“That technique is mine and mine alone!” Svend seethed defensively against a perceived accusation that he couldn’t have developed such an ability on his own. His arm-blades receded, metallic spikes instead emerging from his fingertips.

“Not even a hundred of those copies will see you to victory. You stand against not just me, but all of the Hulson Clan’s honored dead whose deeds have passed into legend, whose lives have become sagas!” Jorfr bellowed, smashing his hand into the ground as Svend approached, his form flickering once again. This time, a single one of him split into three, leaving open the possibility of his true self being invisible. Before ripping his hand free of the ground, he bid the monads of Aqua and Gelum rise up, sprays of mist quickly coating the arena; an energetically cheap method of further reducing the effectiveness of Svend’s invisibility.

It was merely a solution conceived on the fly, secondary to what he had prepared. However, his attention was focused on the three very visible Svends before him.

In pulling his hand free, he ground before Jorfr erupted with a geyser of steam and ice, and in his hand was a ghostly hammer as long as he was tall, its head as long as his torso was wide. The shockwave of its emergence sufficed to smash aside the middle and left-hand Svends, meaning the right-hand one was real. He adjusted his footing and angle of approach, circling Jorfr and becoming invisible once more, exploiting the fact Jorfr’s own action had temporarily swept away his mist-cover. It changed nothing.

Jorfr let go of the mighty hammer, pulling back his right hand while feeding it Gelum. Its astral form spun up into a blur, hundreds and thousands of revolutions per minute. A moment later, the construct was given physical form; unstable glacierglass, unbreakable from without due to its vast internal stresses and temperature gradient. A single, fragile lynchpin laid in the hammerhead’s center; one which only Jorfr, as the construct’s creator, could break. The timing was razor-thin, yet he already knew it. He instinctively felt the exact timing to the microsecond, as if Runar himself was guiding his hand through his ring. With a gesture, he bid the hammer to arc out to where he saw Svend’s footsteps and smash down to the ground. A maelstrom of superheated steam and razor-sharp shrapnel followed.

REGALIA SIGN

RUNAR’S ASTRAL HAMMER

SAGABORNE ARTS: ICEBERG BREAKER

An invisible Svend careened across the arena, struck despite having managed to leap away; such was the impact’s shockwave. A crater was left even in the stone-solid ground. The astral hammer returned to Jorfr’s side in the blink of an eye, just as Svend’s form made itself seen once more.

“Is that… Is that the Iceberg Breaker? Don’t tell me the honored dead… Chose him?” Fryg uttered in a disbelieving whisper.

That vestment of compressed battle-aura, it was completely physical. She could feel its immensity blowing her hair back even tens of meters away. And that armor, that was… That was identical to father Haakon’s own Glacierskin. And his construct of Wide-wuth seemed to move on its own!

Fryg froze dead in her seat, staring wide-eyed. With Jorfr’s summoning of the hammer, any possibility of her denying the truth was shattered just like the ring’s ground, just like Svend’s hope for victory.

There was no other possibility. Runar hadn’t used that technique since before Gunnar and Yvonne had been born, and Fryg was certain he hadn’t passed it down to Jorfr. It was beyond advanced, an art that had taken the fool decades to develop. And Jorfr just… Pulled it out like some trick.