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….
"I grant you a duel, here and now! Anyone who interferes will answer to me personally," he barked, throwing a lethal glare at his overly zealous guards before turning his full, murderous attention back to me.
The very next instant, I found myself twisting out of the way of a volley of jagged ice spears that nearly pinned my head to my shoulders.
The floor beneath my feet rapidly slicked over with treacherous frost, though that concerned me very little.
A blazing arrow of pure, condensed fire tore free from Gungnir's tip, while my left hand, extended toward Laufey, unleashed a bolt of solid ice, cloaked beneath a subtle illusion that shifted its trajectory just enough to throw him off.
The Casket of Ancient Winters had given me a lot, and simply standing in this frozen wasteland seemed to whisper exactly how to best wield its native magic.
I'd only had two days in Asgard to acclimate to this new knowledge and fold it into my arsenal.
Naturally, it wasn't my main battery, no matter how magnificent the Giant's artifact was, it couldn't replace centuries of muscle memory and practice.
It isn't enough to just know the spells; you have to seamlessly weave them into the rhythm of a fight.
Honestly, I only needed the fact that I was using ice magic to be visible, just in case the blue tint of my skin wasn't enough to legitimize this "duel" in the eyes of the locals.
A highly unlikely scenario, but I was preparing for every possible outcome, even the absurd ones.
Meanwhile, Laufey exhaled a massive, howling cone of absolute zero in my direction and lunged forward to close the distance.
Given his sheer size and raw strength, dragging me into a brutal melee was his best option.
Even wielding the King's spear didn't give me a reach advantage, against his towering frame, the Jotun still held the upper hand in reach.
Yet, this entire fight was one massive, theatrical farce.
The Frost Giant was acutely aware that he couldn't actually kill me. If I died, Heimdall would open the Bifrost and crack Jotunheim like a walnut.
I, on the other hand, had absolutely zero restrictions.
Therefore, this wasn't a battle. It was an assassination. A cold-blooded, meticulously calculated execution.
Everything else was just window dressing for his subjects, a necessary pantomime to preserve his warrior's reputation while simultaneously amputating the head of the snake, preventing a full-scale war by leaving the Jotuns too busy to wage one.
Choosing a new King is a messy, bloody business, especially when there are no direct heirs left and plenty of "mighty and deserving" warlords eager to stake a claim.
With Asgard showing no outward hostility or active aggression, they would have no unifying reason to turn their blades outward.
Maybe in two hundred years, when the struggle for the throne finally died down and a victor emerged, they might want to revisit the whole "vengeance" thing.
But after a couple of centuries of brutal civil war, there would be precious little left of Jotunheim's current military might, and frankly, that would no longer be my problem.
A brilliant plan, perfectly in the style of the God of Deceit.
The clash raged on, and to be completely honest... it really wasn't that difficult. I could see Laufey pushing himself to his absolute limits, his attacks growing heavier, faster, and more desperate with every exchange.
He was swinging for the fences, but I was simply faster, and thanks to my divine physiology, I didn't yield much in terms of physical strength either.
I had already counted a dozen distinct openings where I could have ended his life in a heartbeat, vaporizing him with a point-blank blast from Gungnir or slipping a dagger into an unprotected cluster of nerves.
But instantly butchering Laufey wasn't part of the script. The duel had to be demonstrative. Visual. Every giant watching from the periphery needed to be absolutely convinced that their King was beaten fair and square.
Of course, it's delightfully hypocritical to preach about "fairness" when you're wielding Gungnir, wearing an adamantium-laced undersuit that protects every vital organ, and happen to be a Master of Illusions who could confuse the opponent into fighting his own shadow.
But... the audience evaluates the execution, not the loadout. I didn't cast a single combat illusion. I didn't unleash Gungnir's true devastating plasma potential to end it in one shot.
And I meticulously dodged his ice blades rather than letting them shatter fruitlessly against my indestructible armor to flex my invulnerability.
I was dismantling him with pure martial skill, not relying on my overpowered toys.
But all things must come to an end, and a "face-saving" duel is no exception. Ducking yet another sweeping strike that would have turned my internal organs into soup, adamantium armor or not, I lashed out, carving Gungnir's golden blade across the giant's massive thigh.
Dark, steaming blood poured down the Jotun's leg. We both knew this was the beginning of the end.
Laufey roared, attempting a crude, desperate kick to punt me across the hall, but it was a clumsy miscalculation.
I was far too small a target for him, making me obscenely elusive.
A sharp sidestep to the left, and the King of Jotunheim swung through empty air where my body had been a fraction of a second prior.
That overextension tore a massive hole in his defense, and this time, I didn't hold back.
Shifting my grip closer to the heel of the spear, I lunged, driving Gungnir violently upward.
The magically honed tip buried itself deep into Laufey's right armpit, instantly severing the tendons and rendering the arm useless.
But due to our severe height difference, the angle of the blade was catastrophically bad for the giant, it punched cleanly through the ribs and pierced his lung.
It was a fatal wound. Without immediate, divine-level medical intervention, the ruler of Jotunheim was going to drown in his own blood in under three minutes.
I could have finished him right then and there. A mere twitch of my will, and a storm of lethal magic would detonate from the blade directly inside his chest cavity.
But... that lacked the necessary finesse. Instead, I took a step back, brutally ripping the blade free from his flesh.
Laufey staggered, taking two unsteady steps backward. He spat a mouthful of dark blood and began to list toward the frozen floor, but caught himself.
In a sheer, agonizing display of willpower, he literally froze the entire right half of his own body solid to staunch the bleeding and force himself upright.
Not exactly a health-conscious maneuver, as my newly awakened Jotun instincts helpfully pointed out, but it bought him exactly enough time for one final, desperate strike.
And Laufey delivered.
The air... no, the very fabric of space around us began to crackle and scream under the unbearable, absolute zero chill the giant summoned.
A massive spear of condensed winter, a construct capable of freezing the very soul of its victim, tore free from his ice-crystallized fingers and hurled toward my chest.
I met it with a battering ram of roaring, golden fire, unleashed from Gungnir's tip with a single thought. The two opposing forces collided, and the ice spear instantly shattered into harmless, evaporating steam.
In the next heartbeat, I crossed the distance and drove Gungnir directly into his abdomen.
"You... have won," the giant rasped, his massive hands weakly gripping the golden shaft of the spear as blood pooled on the ice from his ruptured liver.
Life was rapidly draining from the Jotun, but he had just enough spite left to pull one last maneuver.
"I... acknowledge you... my son... and my heir."
….
If you want to read ahead by 20+ chapters from here you can visit my Patre-on.
[P] [A] [T] [R] [E] [O] [N]
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