"Sorry—were you saying 'I've acquired extra chromosomes'?" Rudra said flatly, eyes narrowing. "Because it sounded like you just asked me to replace God." He tilted his head, voice dripping with mockery. "Maybe my ears have gone to shit after two years of solitary."
Agni only smiled faintly, brushing imaginary dust off his coat. "I know you hate Him, don't you? Poor little Red—born with an expiry date. Twenty-one years to live, carved by divine handwriting itself. Such a cruel joke." His tone softened, but his eyes gleamed with fanatic heat. "But that's what makes it poetic. Your true fate will always be—God. The God of the Third Testamen—"
He didn't finish. Rudra's fist collided with his face mid-word, snapping his head sideways with a sound like shattering ice. Frost burst into the air.
"SHUT. UP." Rudra's voice was raw, guttural—stripped of irony and rage alike. It was hatred in its purest form.
Agni staggered back, his jaw hanging grotesquely, the side of his face caved in where Rudra's punch had landed. A thin line of steam rose from the wound—the mingling of Rudra's heat and Agni's frost—curling into the air like incense from a desecrated altar.
For a heartbeat, he looked almost human. His breath hitched, his eyes wide, glassy with disbelief. A tremor ran through his hand as he reached up and touched his disfigured cheek. His fingers came away slick with blood and ice.
Then—his knees buckled. His shoulders began to shake. Not from pain, but from something else entirely.
Rudra watched, silent, as Agni pressed his palm to his ruined face. A soft, broken sob escaped him—small, childlike, frighteningly sincere. For a moment, he looked like the boy Rudra once knew, kneeling beside him under the same old roof, both too young to understand cruelty.
Then the sound twisted.
The sob cracked into a chuckle. The chuckle curdled into a laugh. Then it grew—ragged, animal, unrestrained—as if every fracture in his face poured laughter instead of blood. The sound echoed across the frozen island, laughter scraping the edges of hysteria and ecstasy alike.
When the laughter finally died, the air seemed to stop breathing. Frost retreated in soft spirals around Agni's feet as he rose, posture calm, almost reverent. His face was whole again—mended by frost and will—save for that thin, translucent scar bisecting his cheek like a thread of frozen glass. His smile returned, faint and unreadable, crimson against skin pale as marble.
"Still the same, Red…" His tone was quiet, half-sorrow, half-mockery. "Still thinking rage makes you righteous."
He took a step forward, boots crunching over fractured ice. "There are four domains where a Hunter is forged," he said evenly. "Tantra. Sword art. Gunship. And, finally…" He opened his palms, lowering his stance. "…CQC."
Rudra's eyes narrowed, the old instinct stirring in his spine. "Your Tantra was on my level," Agni continued, voice calm as if reciting scripture. "I surpassed you in sword art. You, however… were better with a gun. And when it came to close-quarters combat—" his tone dipped, almost fond "—you always had me cornered."
Rudra frowned. "Yeah? Why are you talking about this now?"
Agni said nothing at first. Then, with a deliberate motion, he tore off his cloak. The fabric fell to the frozen earth, revealing a body carved by war and winter—broad-shouldered, cut from tension, and in the center of his chest, a crystalline patch of frost where no warmth dared linger.
"I want to see it, Red," he said simply.
Rudra's hands clenched. The air between them thickened with heat. Then, without a word, he followed suit—ripping off his tattered upper cloth, his own skin marked with old scars, burns, and faint sigils that glowed faintly beneath the surface like restrained embers.
"Agni…" he muttered, voice low and tight.
The island went still. No frost moved. No flame flickered. Only two brothers stood in the silence—bare-chested, breathing hard, the past crackling between them like a storm waiting to begin.
The fight turned into something almost biblical in its brutality—no flash of divinity, no thunderous godlight, just two men dragging their bodies through the slow erosion of time and flesh. The frozen wasteland around them cracked and healed again and again beneath the weight of their persistence.
Rudra swung first, his knuckles a blur of red motion, teeth bared in the kind of grin only pain could carve. Agni swayed aside, almost gently, like he'd done this for centuries. His hand lashed out, open-palm, slapping Rudra across the face so hard his jaw snapped to the side.
Rudra spat blood and bone dust. "That all you got, snowflake?" he said, voice muffled through swelling lips, and rushed back in.
He kept trying—jab, cross, elbow, hook—but every movement found only cold air. Agni flowed around him like wind through the reeds. Every miss was answered with something deliberate, surgical. A fist into the ribs—crack. A knee into the spine—pop. A shoulder into the sternum—thud.
Hours passed that way, until blood and sweat glazed Rudra's skin in one indistinguishable sheen. The sky began to tilt into evening, violet and blue smeared across the horizon.
"You don't stop," Agni murmured between blows, his tone half-admiration, half-resentment, as if he couldn't decide whether Rudra was the man he loved or the curse he could never kill. He caught Rudra's wrist, twisted, and heard the wet snap of bone. "You don't stop even when your body begs you to. That's not bravery, Red—that's madness."
Rudra screamed, more out of fury than pain, his broken arm still swinging like a club. Agni slipped aside, drove his knee into Rudra's gut, and folded him in half.
"You call it willpower." Agni's voice shook now, heavy with exhaustion. "But it's pride. Rotten pride. The kind that would rather die burning than admit the flame hurts."
Rudra stumbled, legs trembling, his breath fogging thick in the cold. He tried another punch—missed. Another—caught and shattered against Agni's elbow.
Seven hours in, both of them looked less like gods and more like ruins pretending to stand. The frost around them was melted into dark slush streaked with blood.
Agni's strikes grew slower, heavier. Each time he countered, his voice cracked with something unnameable. "You endure. Even when there's nothing left to prove. You endure because you hate to lose. Because if you fall, even once, you'll remember you're mortal."
Rudra wheezed laughter, a wet, broken sound. "You talk too much, Dickhead."
He staggered forward again, pretending to falter. Agni came in to finish it—one last counter, one last righteous blow.
But Rudra's eyes, hidden beneath sweat and blood, flickered with something sharp and deliberate. He leaned into the strike, took the hit to the shoulder—let it land—and in the same instant, his other fist came from below, rising like a crimson comet.
The uppercut connected with a sound that cracked through the dead air.
Agni's head snapped back, frost exploding off his body. For the first time all day, he stumbled.
Rudra stood there panting, blood dripping from his split lip, teeth showing through the grin that could only belong to someone too stubborn to die.
"Bingo," he rasped.
Agni staggered back from the blow, hand covering the swelling bruise on his jaw, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Then something in him broke—or maybe unbroke. His shoulders shook first, quietly, like a man fighting back tears. But the sound that followed was laughter. High, raw, agonized laughter, the kind that splits the line between grief and revelation.
His tears hit the snow, sizzling into steam. "You… you finally got me," he said, voice strangled, lips twisting in that grotesque mix of pride and despair. "Seven hours, Red… seven damn hours…"
He began to laugh harder, but his face contorted—his laughter became a wail, an echoing howl that tore through the frozen air. "AGAIN!" he screamed suddenly, his voice breaking. "AGAIN, AGAIN, AGAIN! WHY DON'T YOU EVER GIVE UP, RED? WHY CAN'T YOU STOP?!"
Each word hit like a thunderclap. His laughter returned, shriller, manic, and laced with sobs. "You… you truly are deserving of Master's curse," he whispered, his eyes now glowing with a terrible frostlight. "Her will lives in you…"
Before Rudra could respond, Agni lunged—his hand bursting through Rudra's chest like a spear of ice. The impact sent a shock through the air, a mist of blood turning to crimson snowflakes that drifted between them.
Rudra's breath hitched. He looked down at the hand protruding from his chest, fingers twitching around something unseen, something burning and ancient. His body trembled, the color draining from his face.
Agni leaned close, their foreheads nearly touching, voice lowering to a whisper heavy with both reverence and sorrow. "Here… take it."
And then the world tilted. Rudra's vision tunneled, sound dissolved into a dull hum, and the light dimmed until all that remained was the faint reflection of Agni's tears on the ice.
Everything went black.