The blast struck Constance's chest, fire washing over her armor, heat that would have melted normal metal. Her suit's defensive matrices flared, energy shields engaging to disperse the thermal load, but even Imperial engineering had limits.

She was driven back, her armor's surface glowing red from the heat, systems screaming warnings about critical temperature thresholds.

Caden hit Jorghan from the side like a meteor.

The tackle carried both of them across thirty feet of desert before they impacted with the ground hard enough to create a crater. The wind was driven from Jorghan's lungs, ribs cracking under the impact despite his enhanced durability, pain flaring white-hot through his torso.

Caden's fist came down toward his face, the armored gauntlet capable of delivering enough force to pulverize stone. Jorghan's head snapped to the side, dodging by millimeters, and the fist cratered the ground where his skull had been.

The second punch wasn't as easy to avoid.

It caught him on the jaw, and even with his bloodline's enhancement, the world went white for a moment, consciousness threatening to flee.

Only his supernatural resilience kept him awake, kept him fighting.

Blood essence erupted from his body, not in controlled streams but in explosive bursts, covering Caden's armor, seeping into joints and gaps, seeking access to the vulnerable human inside the technological shell.

Caden felt the blood trying to infiltrate his suit and immediately disengaged, his anti-gravity yanking him upward and away before the essence could find purchase. He landed beside his sister, who'd recovered from the fire attack, her armor's surface cooling rapidly as emergency systems worked to prevent permanent damage.

Jorghan rose from the crater, blood streaming from his nose and mouth, his jaw already swelling from Caden's punch.

But even as they watched, the injuries began to heal—bones knitting, tissue regenerating, swelling reducing as his bloodline worked to repair the damage.

"He's absorbing ambient essence," Caden said, his tactical mind cataloguing every detail. "Environmental magic, residual energy from the Haelve deaths—he's converting it all to fuel his regeneration."

"Then we don't give him time to heal," Constance replied.

They came at him together this time, truly coordinated, their movements synchronized at a level that suggested either shared consciousness or training so intensive it had become instinct. Their blades moved in complementary patterns—where one struck high, the other went low; where one thrust, the other swept; each attack covering the other's recovery, creating an unbroken chain of lethal force.

Jorghan met them with equal ferocity, his style wild and savage compared to their refined technique, but no less effective. He fought like a natural disaster given form—unpredictable, overwhelming, caring nothing for his own safety if it meant creating an opening to hurt his enemies.

Blood essence flowed around him like living armor, hardening to stop blade strikes, liquefying to redirect force, and shifting states of matter so rapidly that even the siblings' enhanced perception struggled to track it. When their swords found gaps in his defense, cutting into his flesh, the wounds closed almost instantly, blood essence accelerating healing to rates that should have been impossible.

And between the defensive maneuvers, he attacked with savage creativity.

Fire erupted from his palms without warning, forcing them to dodge. The sand beneath their feet would suddenly become spikes of crystallized silicon, requiring constant movement to avoid. The air itself became a weapon, compressed into blades of wind that cut with invisible edges.

The battlefield transformed into chaos, three figures moving at speeds that exceeded human comprehension, impacts creating shockwaves, and energy discharges lighting up the desert like a localized storm.

The siblings' suits began showing damage—scorch marks from fire attacks, dents from impacts where blood essence had struck with battering-ram force, and frost forming where Jorghan had suddenly dropped the temperature to extremes. Their energy reserves were depleting faster than anticipated, the constant defensive adaptations draining power at unsustainable rates.

But Jorghan was suffering too.

Despite his regeneration, the accumulated damage was adding up. Cuts that healed but left him fractionally weaker, burns that closed but cost essence to repair, and the constant expenditure of power to maintain his defenses wearing down reserves that weren't infinite.

It was a war of attrition, and the question was simple: who would break first?

Constance made the decision to escalate.

Her suit's energy core flared brighter, power channeling through circuits designed specifically for this purpose. The blade in her hand began to resonate, vibrating at frequencies that approached the molecular level, and light gathered along its edge—not visible spectrum, but something beyond, energy that existed at the intersection of magic and physics.

When she struck, the blade didn't just cut.

It was unmade.

The molecular edge passed through blood essence like it wasn't there, the magic matter simply ceasing to exist where the blade touched it.

Jorghan barely twisted aside, the edge missing his torso by a hair's breadth, but even the near-miss left a line of destroyed flesh across his ribs—not cut, but erased, cells simply ceasing to be.

The wound didn't heal immediately.

Couldn't heal, because there was nothing to heal from, no remaining tissue to regenerate.

Pain unlike anything he'd felt in this battle lanced through him, and Jorghan's eyes widened with the realization that they'd been holding back capabilities, testing him, and learning his patterns before committing to techniques that had real costs.

Caden's suit underwent a similar transformation, his blade taking on a different quality—spatial distortion visible around its edge, as if the weapon existed slightly out of phase with reality.

When he swung, the blade's path extended beyond its physical length, cutting through space itself to reach targets that should have been out of range.

Jorghan found himself forced fully defensive, unable to risk the blood essence barriers that had protected him before, because these enhanced blades simply ignored such defenses.

He had to dodge, had to stay mobile, and had to constantly shift position because remaining still for even a moment meant death.

They drove him backward, step by step, their coordinated assault pushing him toward the edge of the killing field where the Haelve corpses lay scattered.

The siblings were breathing harder now despite their enhancements, the sustained high-level output taking its toll, but they could sense victory approaching.

Jorghan's back foot hit something—the remains of one of the first Haelves he'd killed, its body partially intact despite the violence that had ended its life.

An idea formed, born of the cold calculation.

If these blades could unmake his blood essence and could erase his flesh without leaving anything to regenerate from, then he needed a different approach.

Something they couldn't simply cut through or erase.

He needed to stop fighting like himself and start fighting like what he truly was.

A Berserk Lord.

-

Jorghan stopped retreating.

His eyes blazed brighter, and for the first time in the battle, he pulled on the bloodline without restraint, without control, without the careful limitations he'd been maintaining to prevent losing himself to the transformation.

The blood essence he had been absorbing had responded to his call.

Not just the essence he'd already absorbed, but all of it—every drop scattered across the battlefield, pooling in craters, soaking into sand, and splattered across glass and stone.

It rose in crimson streams, flowing through the air like serpents, converging on Jorghan's position from every direction.

"Don't let him complete whatever that is!" Constance shouted, recognizing the danger.

They both lunged forward, blades positioned for killing strikes, moving with every ounce of speed their suits could provide.

Too slow.

The blood struck Jorghan like a tidal wave, washing over him, coating him, and absorbing into his body in quantities that exceeded anything he'd attempted before.

The pain was instantaneous and overwhelming—his body wasn't designed to handle this much foreign essence, this much raw power being forced through systems already strained to their limits.

[WARNING: CRITICAL ESSENCE OVERLOAD]

[Bloodline Mutation: IMMINENT]

[Recommend Immediate Purge]

[BLOODBORNE RAGE: EXCEEDING SAFETY PARAMETERS]

[TRANSFORMATION: FORCED EVOLUTION INITIATED]

Jorghan screamed, and the sound was inhuman—rage and agony and triumph all woven together into something that made the siblings hesitate despite themselves.

His body began to change.

Not the controlled transformation he'd undergone before, but something more primal, more fundamental. His height increased, eight-foot-three becoming eight-foot-six, then nine feet, his frame expanding to accommodate the power flooding through it. His muscles became denser, his bones thicker, his very cellular structure rewriting itself in real-time to handle forces that would have torn apart anything less adaptable.

His skin took on a deeper red hue, patterns emerging across his flesh that glowed with internal light, not tattoos but manifestations of the bloodline asserting itself visibly, ancient symbols that had marked the original Berserk Lords appearing on their descendant's body.

His hands elongated slightly, fingers ending in claws that were blood essence made solid and permanent, integrated into his physical form rather than manifested temporarily. His teeth sharpened, becoming predatory, designed for tearing and rending.

And most striking were his eyes.

The crimson glow intensified until it was painful to look at directly, but within that light was intelligence, cold and calculating, the merger of human consciousness with bloodline instinct creating something that was more than either alone.

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