Rudra ran toward Aagni with a feeling he had never experienced before.
It wasn't just anger. It wasn't just the grief that had been sitting in his chest. It was something deeper — a feeling that started in his spine and moved through his entire body, sharp and electric, the kind of feeling that strips everything else away until all that remains is the next step forward and the person standing at the end of it. It was revenge.
Aagni noticed him coming immediately. He turned from the corridor ahead and faced the sound of running footsteps without urgency, without alarm. If anything, his expression shifted into something that looked almost like anticipation — the slight loosening of a man who has been waiting for something to finally begin.
The distance closed in seconds.
As soon as Rudra entered range, he threw a straight punch at Aagni's face. Aagni slipped it with ease, rotating his head just far enough to let the fist pass. But Rudra had not expected the first punch to land — it was never meant to. The moment Aagni moved to dodge, Rudra was already rotating, driving a coordinated uppercut from his left that came from beneath Aagni's sightline.
It connected cleanly to his chin.
Aagni's head snapped back. He stepped backward, only a half-step, but he stepped. His jaw tightened. Something flickered behind his eyes — not pain exactly, but acknowledgment. He reset his footing and returned a counter punch directly to Rudra's face.
The impact rattled through Rudra's skull and his vision whitened for a half-second. He shook it off and kept moving.
From there the fight became a storm.
They traded blows in rapid succession — punches thrown and deflected and landed, combinations that broke apart and reformed, footwork carrying both of them back and forth across the corridor. Rudra did not fight the way he had in their first encounter, all untrained instinct and desperation. The weeks showed. His movement had structure now. His breathing stayed controlled. Every combination he threw was deliberate, built on what Arjun and months of gruelling daily training had drilled into him until it became reflex.
Aagni felt the difference too. He was working harder to keep up, his responses tighter, less relaxed than they had been at the start.
Then Arjun entered.
He had held back for the first few exchanges, reading the fight, waiting for an angle. When he found one he took it — a throwing dagger launched from Aagni's left flank, aimed low and fast.
Aagni's hand moved.
He caught the blade between two fingers. Not deflected. Not knocked away. Caught — the handle spinning to a stop between his index and middle finger as cleanly as if he had plucked it from a table. He held it there for a moment, looking at it with mild curiosity. Then, before either of them could react, he flicked it toward Rudra in a fast, flat throw.
Rudra threw himself backward. The blade passed close enough that he felt the air move against his cheek, and it cracked into the wall behind him, burying itself an inch deep in the plaster.
Aagni watched this, and then he smiled. It was not a warm smile.
"You have gotten really strong in a very short amount of time," he said. His tone carried something close to genuine appreciation. "I will give you that."
Rudra straightened and took his stance again. "I have trained every single day since our first encounter." He held Aagni's gaze. "So that I could beat you. And put an end to Horns."
Aagni's smile widened slightly. "You think you can destroy Horns when you have barely managed to give me a scratch?" He let out a short, sharp laugh — not the nervous laughter of someone trying to convince themselves, but the laughter of someone who finds a situation genuinely absurd. "You have a very long way to go. Both of you."
He wasn't entirely wrong. Rudra knew it and Arjun knew it. The gap between them and someone like Aagni was still significant, and acknowledging that honestly was not the same as accepting it. The fight had only just started.
Rudra launched into a full combination. Straight, hook, body shot, back up — Arjun coordinating from the right with a second dagger drawn, pressing from the opposite angle, forcing Aagni to split his attention between two points at once. They moved like something rehearsed, though they had never rehearsed this specific situation. It was the product of fighting alongside each other long enough to develop an instinct for where the other person was going to be.
Aagni began to stagger.
Small at first — a half-step to stabilise, a fractional delay in his responses. Then more visible. Rudra was inside his guard more often now, and Arjun was denying him the space to reset. The corridor, too close and too confined for someone of Aagni's size to manoeuvre freely, was working against him.
Then it happened.
An opening — brief, real, simultaneous.
Rudra drove a full-force punch into Aagni's face. It landed with the kind of impact that travels up through your fist and into your shoulder, and Aagni's head twisted hard to the side. In the exact same moment, Arjun closed the distance and drove a dagger into Aagni's left side, just below the ribs. Not deep enough to be fatal — but enough to bury the blade and leave it there.
Aagni went still.
For one suspended second the three of them existed in that stillness together — Rudra's fist still extended, Arjun's hand still on the hilt of the embedded blade.
Then Rudra saw the opening in Aagni's posture — his weight shifted wrong, the wound pulling at his balance — and he threw a sharp right hook directly into the same spot Arjun had stabbed. All of it behind it. Every day of training, every bruise and early morning, every hour he had spent wanting to be strong enough for exactly this moment.
Aagni went down.
He hit the floor hard, one knee taking the impact first, then a hand. The dagger clattered to the ground as he pulled it free. The corridor was silent for a beat — just the faint hum of the building's systems and the sound of Rudra breathing hard.
Aagni stayed down for several seconds. Long enough that both Rudra and Arjun dared, in the back of their minds, to wonder whether it was over.
Then he began to stand.
Slowly, with the deliberate effort of someone choosing to rise rather than being pulled up. He straightened to his full height, and his expression had changed. The smile was gone. The studied calm he wore like a mask had cracked open just slightly, and underneath it was something more honest — not rage, not pain. Something more like recalibration. A man adjusting his understanding of a situation.
"I got too cocky, didn't I," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
He reached up and pulled at his shirt, and removed it in a single motion. He dropped it to the floor beside him without looking at it.
"There is no point in hiding it anymore," he said. "You are going to die here regardless."
Rudra and Arjun exchanged a fast glance. The same wordless question passing between them — 'what does that mean?'
They got their answer almost immediately.
Aagni's body began to change.
It happened fast but not instantly — there was a terrible in-between moment where he was neither one thing nor the other, where the human shape seemed to strain and expand outward like something too large trying to fit through a space built for something smaller. A wave of heat radiated off him. The temperature in the corridor spiked sharply enough that Rudra took an involuntary step back. The lights overhead flickered.
Then the change completed.
He was enormous now. Where a man had stood, something entirely different occupied the corridor — broad, scaled, and wrong in its proportions in ways that took Rudra's mind a moment to fully accept. Dark green scales covered the skin from throat to fingertip, catching the stuttering light. Two heavy fangs had extended past the jaw. A thick tail had grown behind him, pressing against the far wall. And across the creature's back, slow and steady and constant, flame burned — not wildly, not like something out of control, but with the steady, patient permanence of something that had always been there.
The eyes were the same. Pale and calm and looking at them from very far above.
The creature said nothing. It simply stood in the ruined corridor — one of the overhead lights had gone dark entirely from the heat — and existed. Let them look. Let the reality of it settle over them like something being lowered slowly onto their shoulders.
Rudra stared up at it.
It was like déjà vu. He remembered seeing a monster like this one before. It was like..
Something that had killed Arthur.
His voice came out quieter than he intended. "You're the same monster." He didn't look away from those pale eyes. "The one that killed Arthur."
The creature that had been Aagni looked down at him.
The silence that followed was its own kind of answer.
Beside Rudra, Arjun had gone very still — not frozen with fear but the particular stillness of a person who has received information that changes everything and is deciding, in the space of a few seconds, what to do with it. His last dagger was in his hand. His knuckles were white around the handle.
Rudra's hands came up.
The creature waited. The flame across its back moved in slow, steady waves. The corridor smelled of heat and something older than the building around them.
It didn't matter what it was. It didn't matter how large, or how ancient, or how far beyond anything Rudra had trained for.
Who knows what going to happen next.