Ragnarök, Eternal Tragedy.
Chapter 113: Cracks Beneath Command

Chapter 113: Cracks Beneath Command

It began not with flame, but with stillness.

Maverick was breathing harder now. Not out of fear—but because the fire-wielding Unco user had stopped fighting like a hammer and started fighting like a mirror. No more heat waves launched blindly. No more wild swings lined with smoke. The man had recalibrated. The way he moved wasn’t desperate anymore—it was methodical. Cruel in the way traps are cruel, not because they snap, but because they wait.

Maverick’s coat was gone. His Bastion Blade was planted beside him, vibrating faintly from the last resonance pulse. His skin shone with sweat and soot. The inside of his chest felt raw from heat drawn too deep. And when he moved now—his body asked him why. His Unco still burned behind his ribs, still surged when he clenched his fists, but the man in front of him had begun to box it in. Cut off angles. Shape the space.

He wasn’t just fighting with fire.

He was using terrain.

Maverick charged anyway—because that’s what you do when your blood won’t sit still.

He roared through the clearing, shoulder-first, gauntlet up, his voice a cannon meant to distract, meant to break rhythm. But the fire wielder didn’t brace. He sidestepped half a meter—and Maverick felt the shift in ground beneath him as he passed over something slick.

Ash.

Laced deliberately into the soil. Packed into a curve.

His boots slipped—not fully, but enough.

And that’s when the trap triggered.

From the side—not ahead—came the first burst. A redirected heat pulse, rebounding off half-melted stone from the earlier fight. It caught him across the ribs, hard enough to twist his balance mid-run.

The next wave was faster. A wall of flame risen not from the fighter’s hands—but from the path Maverick had just run. It had been left burning beneath the ground, feeding slowly on oil and oxygen, waiting for the path to close behind him.

And then—

The voice: calm, razor-clean.

"You lead too loudly," said the man. "So I made it easy to listen."

Maverick turned, too late, as the final movement dropped.

The fire wielder surged from the right—not head-on, but behind Maverick’s blind side. A spinning hook, flame wrapped like a serpent around his forearm. It caught Maverick full in the side of the face. His head snapped sideways. His feet left the ground.

And then came the blast.

A command detonation from the fire wielder’s palm, primed point-blank into Maverick’s gut. It wasn’t raw heat—it was shaped, focused, timed. The kind of controlled explosion that ignored armor and punished internal space.

The clearing detonated.

Earth cratered. Trees wavered. Smoke swallowed the impact zone in a single, heaving breath.

Silence.

Then—

Maverick’s body hit the ground in a skid. His greatsword, still planted, shivered once from the pressure of the blast but didn’t fall. Dust curled lazily across the clearing.

From the other end of the field, the fire wielder stood tall again, cloak charred to the hip, eyes glowing faint.

"Not dead," he muttered.

Smoke still blanketed the clearing, curling low across shattered stone and ash-soaked roots. The fire wielder stood at the center of the blast zone, chest rising with smug, uneven pride, his lips curled in exhausted satisfaction. Across the field, Maverick hadn’t moved. Not since the body hit the ground. Not since the crater bloomed wide enough to swallow sound.

"I said not dead," the fire wielder muttered again. "But not much else left, huh?"

He turned—half to catch his breath, half to savor the stillness.

Then heard it.

Not a scream. Not a charge.

A step.

Not thunderous, not sudden—but right behind him.

He barely had time to turn.

Maverick’s fist caught him square in the face.

No warning.

No Unco flare.

Just contact—clean, grounded, and thrown with the weight of a man who refused to be anyone’s outcome.

The fire wielder flew sideways into a broken slab of stone, the impact shaking dust free from the canopy overhead. His hands scrambled to flare heat again—instinct, not strategy—but Maverick was already there.

He grabbed the man’s wrist mid-ignition and drove his forehead into the bridge of his nose.

Once.

Twice.

Then spun him by the arm, yanked him backward, and suplexed him into the earth.

And Maverick didn’t stop moving.

He surged back upright, yanked the Bastion Blade free from the ground, and stomped forward. The fire wielder tried to rise, one leg sliding beneath him—too slow.

Maverick kicked him in the chest so hard the body bounced.

Crack—something gave. Ribs, maybe. Maybe resolve.

Then Maverick planted the greatsword beside the crumpled man and stepped behind it—back straight, arm cocked wide—and slammed his fist into the pommel.

The resonance screamed out like a freight bell, a field-wide chord that hit the senses like a shockwave. It pulsed through the field—through Maverick himself—and his Unco ignited. But not to burn.

To command.

The next sequence blurred.

He moved left—straight hook to the ribs.

Right—elbow into the collarbone.

Knee into the gut. Gauntlet across the jaw.

The fire wielder’s retaliatory flame burst flared wide—but Maverick pivoted through it, skin blistering at the edge, teeth clenched through the pain, and uppercut the man mid-flame, sending him airborne.

As the body flailed upward, Maverick jumped.

Caught him midair.

Turned.

And drove them both into the ground with a spine-bending piledriver that sent cracks spidering out in every direction.

Silence.

Dust. Again.

But this time, the silence didn’t threaten a surprise.

It held it.

Because when the smoke cleared, Maverick was crouched above the man, one gauntlet pressing lightly—but definitively—against the fire wielder’s throat.

His body didn’t shake.

His voice, for the first time, was steady.

"You wanted me to follow," Maverick said. "You should’ve asked who I used to lead."

The fire wielder groaned, tried to move—

And Maverick just pressed down.

One knee hit the scorched earth, then the other followed, slow and deliberate like a man trying not to bleed into the silence. Maverick’s breath dragged harsh through his chest, ribs twitching on every inhale. His knuckles were seared raw beneath the steel. The heat hadn’t left him yet—not the flame, but the fight. The ache that came after victory, when the body realized it had nothing left to shout about.

The Bastion Blade still stood behind him, humming faintly like it had something more to say. But Maverick... didn’t. Not right now. His Unco was burned down to its last flicker, and mana peeled off him in threads, the kind that never cooled the skin—just whispered out the cost.

He planted one hand on the dirt, grounding himself. Not to rise.

Just to feel the earth again.

The fight was over.

But his body hadn’t been told yet.

So he stayed there, sweating into silence, shoulders rising with effort, as if every breath needed permission. One eye closed. Not from pain, but the weight behind everything that just barely didn’t kill him.

He hadn’t been outsmarted.

He’d just been slow to remember what it meant to lead from the front.

Now he remembered.

And he wasn’t moving again.