A very large man leaning into full-force ironwood on purpose, over and over, the skin splitting where her strikes doubled up, blood coming through in thin lines down his ribs and back, breathing through all of it.
Two of the marks across his forearm had already gone from red to a dark swollen purple that had no business arriving before tomorrow. He offered her no feints and no answers to her craft. He just kept coming, unhurried, like the whole night belonged to him.
That wasn't a man absorbing punishment. That was a man who had stopped filing it as punishment at all. Blood ran from a dozen marks and he breathed through it like weather. His eyes hadn't changed. The same warm, faintly amused eyes he wore across a breakfast table, and they watched her through a mask of his own blood without a flicker of pain behind them.
'The Primordial Villain...'
