Samael descended slowly from the air, floating inches from King's face. He stretched out his silver fingers and touched the temper of the meteor gauntlet, not to attack, but to extract something deeper. Like a sorcerer and an entity of pain, he could read the scars of the soul as well as those of the flesh.
"Do you know what I see in that stone mind of yours, King?" Samael whispered, his voice rising like a serpent. "I see an oath. I see... a thunder god with a red beard. Thor, wasn't it?"
King froze. The name struck his ears like a hammer blow.
"By my blood, by my strength, I will be the bulwark against chaos"... blah, blah, blah," Samael mocked, mimicking a deep, solemn voice.
"What a pathetic oath, man. You vowed to be a fanatical barbarian, a force of nature... and look at you now." Kneeling before a "Project of Kyton" like me, trembling from a tiny shock. That's right, you heard me, I'm currently much weaker than when we first met in that dungeon.
Samael chuckled, circling the Goliath like a shark.
"What would your god think if he saw you now? The great King, the barbarian who swore total destruction, reduced to a backyard blacksmith who gets beaten up in his own forge. You traded the blood of your enemies for coal soot. You've become tame, King. You've become domesticated. That star metal in your hands? It's an insult to Thor. It's a collar you forged yourself."
He stopped in front of King and spat on the ground, right on top of the giant's paralyzed hand.
"You're not a real barbarian. You claim to be a barbarian, but you fight like a monk, with empty hands. What sense does that make?" If Thor were here, he wouldn't shake your hand... he'd crush you just to spare the world the shame of having such a useless "follower" as you.
Samael leaned forward, the cold breath of death hitting King's face.
"Where is that blind fury, 'Goliath'? Where is the barbarian who feels no pain? Or did the blacksmith kill the warrior, leaving only this gray, cowardly carcass?"
"You know what?" Samael knelt, his lips inches from Goliath's ear. "I think your father did the right thing, trying to kill you. He must be turning in his grave seeing what you've become, and bitterly regretting not succeeding."
King felt something break. It wasn't a bone. It was the barrier of control he'd been maintaining since entering the city. The meteoric iron began to glow with an unbearable neon-blue light, reacting not to magic, but to the Barbarian Fury that was being awakened by the insult to his god and his oath.
Samael poked the beast with the short stick. How will King react to this profanation of his memories?
The silence that followed the mention of King's father was not an ordinary silence. It was the vacuum that precedes the eye of a hurricane.
Samael was still kneeling, with that smirk, savoring the poison he had just injected.
But the smile began to wither as the ground beneath Kyton's knees not only cracked, but melted into fine dust. The temperature in the chapel rose not from Ignis's fire, but from the spiritual pressure emanating from King's body.
The meteoric iron gauntlets emitted a sharp sound, a metallic lament that transformed into a neon roar. Samael's electrical paralysis was repelled from King's body as if it were trash.
King didn't rise like a man. He rose like a tectonic force.
"You talk too much... for a corpse."
King's voice was no longer that of the calm blacksmith; it was the sound of bones breaking and distant thunder. Before Samael could process that the Goliath was moving, King's hand shot out. It wasn't a punch. It was a lunge.
King grabbed Samael's face with his left gauntlet. The bluish metal burned the Kyton's porcelain skin, fusing the human mask to the true silver face beneath. Samael tried to scream, tried to use a Misty Step, but King's Barbarian Fury created an interference zone where magic could barely breathe.
POW!
King delivered the first punch with his right. The impact threw Samael's head back with such force that the sound of a whip cracking echoed throughout the entire West Wing.
"YOU SPOKE OF MY GOD!" Another punch. Samael's nose disappeared in a blur of black and silver blood.
"YOU SPOKE OF MY FATHER!" King lifted him by the neck and hurled him against the chapel ceiling. Samael struck the oak beams, splitting them in two, and before gravity could pull him back down, King was already up there, leaping like a predator. In mid-air, King grabbed Samael by the shoulders and began a meteoric descent. They crashed through what remained of the altar in an impact that caused the chapel floor to give way, revealing the catacombs below.
Ignis watched, motionless, as King mounted Samael in the crater. The Goliath didn't use technique, didn't use "monk fighting." He used pure hatred. Each blow from the meteoric-iron gauntlets left an incandescent blue mark on Samael's flesh.
"I DON'T FIGHT LIKE A MONK!" King roared, delivering a double blow that buried Samael's chest in the ground. "I FIGHT LIKE THE CHAOS YOU WORSHIP SO MUCH!"
Samael tried to stammer, his face now a shapeless mass of twisted metal and hanging human flesh. The mockery vanished. The "Kyton Project" was being dismantled piece by piece by the same "tool" he dared to insult.
King grasped Samael's two silver arms and began to pull. The sound of metal stretching and supernatural tendons snapping filled the hole.
"Thor doesn't need to give me his hand," King hissed, his eyes white with fury staring into Samael's trembling soul. "He only needs to give me the strength to send you back to hell in pieces!"
Samael was literally being ripped in half by a King in a state of fury. A laugh erupted from the depths of his throat, a broken sound, utterly insane. Even with his face deformed and limbs being shattered by King's brute force, Kyton didn't exude fear—he exuded triumph.
— Hahaha... HAHAHAHA! — Black blood splattered on King's face as Samael's torn mouth gaped open. — You didn't understand anything, you ignorant fool!
Even immobilized, Samael didn't need his hands for what came next. The magical aura around him began to collapse, turning a sickly orange color. He burned every drop of his arcane reserve, every point of Metamagic he had left, forcing reality to bend to his suicidal will.
— Are you going to send me to hell? — Samael hissed, his black eyes fixed on King's, gleaming with terminal hatred. — So be it... I can come back as many times as I want. Pain is my home! I'll go... but YOU... YOU COME WITH ME!
The words barely left their mouths before the air around them felt like a thousand tons. Samael channeled two simultaneous Fireballs (Accelerated Magic) directly into ground zero, right between his chest and King's gauntlets. There was no time to react. There wasn't time for King's roar to end.
The world went white.
The double explosion wasn't just fire; it was a magical supernova that engulfed the crater, the altar, and the catacombs. The initial shockwave disintegrated what remained of the marble benches and hurled the supporting columns away like toothpicks.
Ignis, who was just a few meters away, was struck by a wall of solid heat. She was hurled against the opposite wall, her scales screaming as Samael's fire tried to compete with her own internal heat.
At the epicenter, hell broke loose. The fire consumed the oxygen in a second, creating a vacuum that imploded the West Wing of the chapel. The flames licked King's meteoric iron, which glowed an incandescent blue before being submerged by the destructive orange of Samael's sorcery.
The chapel's ceiling couldn't withstand it. Tons of stone, ancient wood, and melted stained glass collapsed onto the hole where King and Samael had fought. A cloud of soot and embers rose to the sky, marking the disaster's location for the entire capital.
Where once there had been the epic duel between a barbaric Goliath and a sorcerer demon, now only a smoking crater remained, buried under rubble and flames that stubbornly refused to be extinguished.
There were no survivors of the explosion; Lirien, who had escorted the queen and the children to safety, returned seconds before the chapel collapsed, also struck by Samael's intense fire.