The impact of my landing sent a cloud of salt and dried blood into the air. I saw Bernard's face, the man who had orchestrated the corruption of Town Tata, the man who had looked at my flayed skin with nothing but boredom. He didn't look like a lord now. He looked like a cornered rat, his silk robes fluttering as he turned to bolt toward the back exit of the cellar.
"No... escape..." I croaked, my wings snapping back to propel me forward like a spear.
I flew headfirst toward him, my blood-sword leveled at his spine. I was inches away from ending the man who held the keys to my torment.
But the air to my left suddenly rippled.
A fist, glowing with the golden mana of a high-ranked warrior and moving with the force of a runaway truck, slammed into my ribs. The sound of the impact was a sickening crack as the blood-armor protecting my torso shattered. I was flung sideways, crashing through the stone wall of the cellar and through the foundation of the manor itself.
I tumbled through the dirt and masonry, finally coming to a stop in a heap of debris. My vision swirled.
"Did you really think a few liters of blood would make you my equal? You're still just a wounded dog, Roxy. Or Eirene. Or whatever is left of you."
Dominik's voice echoed through the dust. He stepped through the hole I had made, his invisibility flickering off. He looked down at me, his eyes burning with a sadistic joy.
He didn't give me a chance to breathe. He charged, his speed blurring the air. He lunged forward, his arm pulling back for a massive, bone-shattering uppercut aimed directly at my jaw. He wanted to finish what he started, he wanted to rip my head from my shoulders.
But I wasn't the girl from six days ago.
My instincts, sharpened by a week of pure survival, flared. As his fist traveled upward, trailing golden sparks, I twisted my body mid-air. My blood-sword flashed in a crimson arc, meeting his knuckles with a screech of clashing mana.
CLANG.
The shockwave of the parry blew the surrounding dust away in a perfect circle. My feet skidded across the stone, but I held my ground. The blood-wings on my back flared to their full span, hissing and bubbling with the intensity of my curse.
Dominik's eyes widened slightly, seeing his attack blocked.
I looked at him through the curtain of my matted hair, my glowing green eye fixed on his throat. I didn't need to speak. The jagged, vibrating edge of my blade told him everything. The flea was biting back.
"You flea, such audacity to touch me."
The force of the parry wasn't enough to stop Dominik's momentum. With a roar of frustration, he slammed his shoulder into my chest, sending me flying backward. I crashed through the final layer of the cellar foundation, bursting into the manor's main hallway.
The scene was chaotic. Maids who had been polishing the floors or carrying linens shrieked, dropping their tasks and fleeing in terror at the sight of a blood-drenched, naked nightmare bursting from the floor.
Dominik stepped through the ruins, his eyes scanning my body with a look of pure, lecherous disgust.
"Look at you, the great hero of the Bureau, reduced to a common exhibitionist. You're shivering, you're bleeding, and you're standing there without a stitch of dignity left. You think those wings make you a god? You're just a naked freak waiting for a cage."
In an instant, his body flickered and vanished. The invisibility spell took hold.
I dropped into a low crouch, my blood-wings arching over me like a shield. I closed my eyes, ignoring my sight, focusing entirely on the vibration of the floorboards and the scent of the salt and wine that clung to him. I predicted he would go for my blind spot, the left side where my arm was missing.
I was wrong.
Dominik reappeared not at my side, but directly behind me.
"Too slow, parasite!"
Before I could swing my blade, I felt a white-hot explosion of agony in my torso. Dominik's fist, reinforced with golden mana, didn't just punch me, it punched through me. I gasped, a spray of crimson foam erupting from my lips as I looked down to see his gore-slicked hand protruding from the center of my chest. He had torn straight through my sternum, pinning me in place like a butterfly on a board.
Dominik leaned his head over my shoulder, his breath hot and foul against my ear.
"Do you feel that, Eirene? That's your heart beating against my knuckles. Even with all this stolen power, you're nothing. You're a toy. I could pull my hand back and take your spine with it."
He laughed, a jagged, triumphant sound.
"Look at yourself. Dying, naked, and forgotten. This is how the Hero ends."
But Dominik had made a fatal mistake. He was within reach.
My vision blurred, but the Blood Curse roared into a frenzy. If he wanted to be inside me, I would make him a part of me. I didn't try to pull away. Instead, I leaned back into him, the hole in my chest widening as I forced myself further onto his arm.
I whipped my head around, my jaw unhinging with unnatural, predatory grace. My fangs, lengthened and sharpened by the curse, flashed in the light. With a guttural snarl, I sank them deep into the bicep of the arm that was currently impaling me.
Dominik's triumphant laugh turned into a high-pitched, curdling scream of pure terror.
I drank. I inhaled his life force, pulling the rich, mana-infused blood directly from his veins. It was like liquid fire pouring into my parched system. The sensation was electric. As I drained him, the massive, gaping hole in my chest began to hiss and steam. New muscle fibers knit together around his arm, bone fused back into place, and skin raced to cover the void.
[Drain Activated Extraction Completed consumed three liter of blood]
I was healing around his limb, trapping his hand inside my chest cavity like a vice.
"Get off! Get off me, you monster!" Dominik shrieked,
I pulled back, my mouth stained a vibrant, terrifying crimson. I looked him in the eyes, the hole in my chest now completely closed, locking his arm in a prison of my own regrown flesh.
"My... meal," I rasped, the first full words I had formed since the cellar.
The sickening sound of blood being siphoned through my fangs was the only noise in the hallway until Dominik's survival instinct finally kicked in. With a desperate, guttural roar, he planted his boots against my stomach and thrust outward with every ounce of his remaining strength.
The force was immense. I was ripped away from his arm, the flesh of my chest tearing once more as his hand was forcibly dislodged, and I was sent hurtling backward. I slammed into a massive oak display cabinet. The wood splintered, and priceless porcelain antiques shattered against my bare back, raining sharp shards of pottery over my skin.
Dominik stumbled away, his face a ghostly, translucent white. His left arm hung limp, withered and shriveled like a piece of dry leather where I had drained him. He looked down at his own trembling hands, terror finally overriding his arrogance. Without Lara to knit his veins back together or replenish his essence, he was a dying man.
"You... you monster..." he wheezed, blood leaking from his pale lips.
He flickered. The air warped as he cast his invisibility spell, desperate to vanish into the shadows of the manor to find Bernard or a way out.
I couldn't speak, but the Blood Curse roared in my ears. I wouldn't let him leave. My wings snapped open, spraying the nearby walls with droplets of stolen crimson. I took off, a blur of pale skin and red feathers. I didn't need eyes to see him, I could smell the iron of his blood, the blood that was now partially inside me.
I closed the distance in a heartbeat. I reached out with my one good hand, my fingers clawing at the empty air where I knew he was. I felt the fabric of his tunic. I gripped it and yanked, my blood-sword humming as I prepared to take his head.
Realizing his spell had failed to hide him, Dominik reappeared. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. In a final, frantic act of cowardice, he reached out and snatched a heavy, marble-based vase from a pedestal.
CRACK.
The vase shattered against the side of my skull. The impact was like a lightning bolt through my brain. My vision fractured into a thousand jagged pieces, and the strength in my wings vanished instantly.
I let out a gargled gasp as I lost control. I plummeted from the air, my naked, blood-stained body slamming hard into the polished marble floor of the main hallway. I skidded through the debris of the antiques I had broken earlier, the cold stone biting into my newly healed skin.
I lay there, dazed, my head ringing with the sound of a thousand bells. I could hear Dominik's ragged, panicked breathing as he scrambled away, his boots clicking frantically on the floor. I tried to push myself up, my one hand sliding in a pool of blood and shattered porcelain, but the world was spinning.
The alarm bells of the manor were still screaming, a constant reminder that the hunt wasn't over. I looked up, blood trickling from my forehead into my left eye, and watched the blurred shape of my torturer disappearing around the corner.
I couldn't fail. Not after the salt. Not after the cellar. I forced my fingers to curl into a fist, the Blood Curse beginning to throb in time with the pain in my skull. I wasn't finished yet.
The world was a blur of marble and ringing silence until Dominik's heavy boots slammed into the floor beside my head. Before I could even attempt to push myself up, he lunged. His remaining good arm hooked around my throat in a brutal, desperate chokehold. He hauled my weightless, naked body upward, pinning me against a fluted marble pillar.
"Look at you! Where's that hero's fire now? You're just a worthless piece of junk. A broken, tongueless doll."
He tightened his grip, the pressure on my windpipe becoming absolute.
"You couldn't save the maids in this manor. You couldn't save your own skin. You're nothing but a parasite that survived by sheer luck!"
My vision began to fray at the edges, darkening into a suffocating black. The air wouldn't come. Through the haze of my fading consciousness, the faces of the maids I had failed flashed behind my eyelids, their screams, their blood, the same rusted knife he had used on me.
Something inside me snapped. It wasn't just my will, it was the last tether of my humanity.
I didn't struggle against his arm. Instead, I activated Pain Manipulation. The searing agony in my throat and the throbbing in my skull didn't vanish, they simply became irrelevant, data points I no longer cared to process.
With my right arm pinned, I turned my focus to the stump of my left. The blood-wings on my back surged, siphoning their mass down into my shoulder. There, I activated my blood manipulation.
The blood manipulation was a gift from my fifth evolution, I can use my own blood to shape everything I want, similar to Elias's dark magic, I can create solid objects including solids, shapes and obviously, blades.
The crimson liquid solidified, calcifying into a jagged, bone-hard blade that extended from my missing limb.
Dominik was too busy screaming insults to notice the blood molding into a weapon.
In the split second before my vision went completely black, I struck. I thrust backward over my own shoulder with the precision of a cornered predator. The blood-sword tore through the air and buried itself deep into the side of Dominik's skull, entering through his temple with a sickening, wet crunch.
His grip on my throat loosened instantly. His body went rigid, his eyes bulging as the golden light in them flickered and died. I let go of the pillar, and we both slumped to the floor. Dominik hit the marble with a heavy, final thud, his head lolling at an unnatural angle, pinned to the ground by the blade of my own blood. He lay there, motionless, a pool of red spreading from his head to join the mess on the floor.
I collapsed forward, my chest heaving as I dragged in great, ragged lunges of air. My throat felt like it had been shredded, but the air was sweet. I sat in the center of the hallway, a naked, gore-stained specter surrounded by the wreckage of my past.
I looked at Dominik's corpse, then turned my gaze toward the grand staircase where Bernard had vanished. I drank his blood for the sake of my miraculous survival.
[Drain Activated Extraction Completed consumed two liters of blood]
"Dominik down, Bernard left" I thought, the words echoing in the cold, hollow chambers of my mind.
The manor fell into a terrifying silence, broken only by the distant, frantic ringing of the town's alarm. The hunt wasn't over. It was just getting started.