It was inexplicable. In his gut, something bloomed—a tremor of happiness, relief, even pleasure. Was it the shock of seeing a human face after two years in darkness, or that face in particular? Whatever it was, that warmth lasted only a heartbeat before confusion, anger, and disbelief flooded in like a storm surge.
"Long time no see, Red," Agni said.
The sound of his voice—calm, anchored, infuriatingly familiar—snapped something in Rudra.
For anyone else, they might have looked like twins. Agni's face was the same mold as Rudra's—same sharp jaw, same tired eyes, same slight scar on the lip—but his tone of skin was fairer due to having kashmiri heritage. His hair, unlike Rudra's unkempt black, was a softer brown that caught light like it remembered warmth. His eyes were a ghostly gray, like ash. Even his haircut, a slicked-back wolfcut parted at the middle, gave him a certain careless elegance—an infuriatingly alive look.
"Tum… yha… huh?"(You… here… huh?)
Rudra's voice cracked as his ankles trembled. He felt small for the first time in years, like the cold that had frozen the prison had spread to his spine. His breath stuttered. The air between them was thick.
Agni didn't answer right away. He just smiled faintly, the kind of smile that could mean everything or nothing.
Rudra's knuckles tightened, the dull throb of his heartbeat echoing through his temples as the ice on the floor creaked beneath his bare feet.
Suddenly, Agni could see vapor rise from beneath his feet as Rudra stood up, a vein popping on his forehead.
"Tum zinda kaise ho?" he asked.("How are you alive?")
Agni looked at him and smirked. "Kyunki mai margya tha."("Because I died.")
Rudra's body kept producing more and more heat as the ice gave way beneath him.
"MERE SAWAL KA JAWAB DO!" he roared.("ANSWER THE DAMN QUESTION!")
"ZEROOOO!!!!!" he shouted.
Agni's smirk widened.
"MAKE. ME—" he began, but the sentence snapped mid-air as his head jerked to the side. His eyes went wide when he felt the warm trickle slide down his neck—blood.
The tip of his ear had been carved clean off by an invisible slash. Behind him, the wall bore a seven-foot gash, still steaming from the impact. He turned back toward Rudra, whose legs trembled as if his body was rebelling against its own fury.
"Don't overdo yourself, Red," Agni said, half-laughing, half-cautious. "After all, you've been in this place for two years. Your flower hasn't opened for a while… it must've gotten rus—"
Another invisible strike ripped past him, slicing the air where his throat had been. He barely ducked in time.
"Geez…" he muttered, brushing the blood from his neck, eyes glinting with something feral. "So you were training inside that cell."
The ice cracked first. A faint hiss ran through the tundra air as vapor rose around Rudra's feet, the temperature inverting violently—steam swirling with snowflakes, fire and frost caught in a struggle for dominance.
Agni moved first, not through brute force, but precision—his breath a plume of cold as he tapped his boot against the frozen floor. Instantly, a filament-thin frost line slithered along the ground like a serpent, splitting and curling into geometric patterns beneath Rudra's shadow. Rudra recognized it too late—"frost runes"—and stamped down hard, melting the sigils with raw heat before they could detonate.
But Agni was already gone.
A shadow flickered in the whiteout. Rudra's body turned by instinct, swinging an invisible slash so fast the air didn't whistle, it collapsed. It sliced clean through a frozen pillar, splitting it diagonally before his eyes caught a faint refraction of movement—Agni reappearing midair, using the mirror-like shards as stepping stones. He twirled once, palm grazing the air.
"Apsara Step," he muttered. The world folded into mist.
Rudra saw eight of him—mirages refracted through the storm's chaos. But instead of panicking, Rudra inhaled deeply, his veins lighting faintly beneath his skin. Divya Dhristi. Only one of those Agnis gave off warmth. He swung his arm back—no sword, only will—and released another invisible arc that bent mid-flight, slicing through the fake images before nicking Agni's sleeve.
Steam rose where the cut met ice. Agni smirked. "You're getting slower."
"And you're getting predictable."
Rudra slammed his heel down. A thermal inversion burst rippled outward—melting the ground beneath, creating a layer of boiling water over black stone. He clenched his fist and pulled the heat up again. The water rose with it, exploding upward as steam geysers—enough to blind sight, enough to distort spatial sense.
Agni countered beautifully. He spread his arms, summoning a spiral of snow that condensed into a single cyclone around him, spinning fast enough to freeze the vapor midair into needles of ice. He sent them forward—not directly, but through angle manipulation, bouncing them off invisible surfaces of condensed air pressure. They hit Rudra's blind spots—one grazing his cheek, another stabbing his shoulder.
Rudra stumbled but didn't fall. Instead, he grinned and flicked the blood off his fingers.
The air shifted. Every invisible slash he'd thrown before—every trace of pressure—returned all at once, now guided. The sound was delayed, reality catching up to him in a single breath. Walls, snowfields, and broken towers around the island split into patterns like origami torn apart. Agni barely managed to freeze a wall in front of himself, but even that cracked under the residual shockwave.
They paused. Only the wind moved.
Agni smiled faintly. "You always have me like this."
Rudra wiped the frost from his eyelashes. "Almost always."
Agni's eyes glowed ash-grey and indigo as he stepped forward, frost spreading from his soles like roots.
And the illusion broke as he looked back—and Rudra was right behind him with an icicle in his hand.
"You really weave illusions like a spider still," Agni said.
"You really got me," Rudra said as he got bombarded by icicle rain, and suddenly Agni found out that too was an illusion.
"FUCK----!!!!" Before he could look back, four invisible slashes de-limbed him as he looked at Rudra coming towards him.
"You learned to stack illusions over each other," Agni said, sounding pretty mad.
"I have around two years in that damn place," Rudra said. "Someone with ADHD with all that time—it would have been a surprise if I hadn't trained like hell."
Agni staggered, chest heaving, frost clinging to his hair and shoulders, but a faint, cruel smile tugged at his lips. Slowly, impossibly, his limbs began knitting themselves back together, sinew knitting over bone as if the battle had barely scratched him.
Rudra froze mid-step, crimson eyes widening, the adrenaline in his veins screaming in disbelief.
"You really thought this was the fight?" Agni's voice was low and teasing, carrying that same mirrored cadence of Rudra's own tone. "I was just… playing."
Snow swirled around them, shards of ice and invisible slashes suspended in midair, caught between breaths of time. Rudra clenched his fists, energy coiling around him, but Agni merely laughed, a sound like wind over broken glass.
The island itself seemed to pause, holding its breath, as the shadowed figure stepped fully into the moonlight, limbs fully restored, aura still simmering with frost and malice.
And just like that, the world seemed to split—Rudra and Agni, hunter and mirrored hunter, poised on the knife-edge of chaos.
The chapter ended there, a frozen tableau, the storm of fire and ice suspended, leaving a single, impossible question hanging in the cold night air:
"How far are you really willing to go, Red?"