Chapter 26: Blood Magic

Chapter 26: Chapter 26: Blood Magic

While Donald fought a desperate, grinding battle of survival against Silas on one side of the cavern, the other side had transformed into a blinding hurricane of high-tier magic.

The clash between a B-Rank Vanguard and a Level 38 Lesser Vampire didn’t look like a normal fight. It looked like two localized storms tearing the dungeon apart.

Evelyn was a blur of dark leather and glowing blue Vanguard aura. The Bloodhound’s Fang left trails of harsh crimson light in the air, humming with a thirsty, violent frequency. But despite her flawless technique and years of front-line experience, she was being pushed backward.

The cloaked assassin didn’t move like a human. There was no wind-up to his strikes, no shifting of weight or planting of feet. He utilized a horrifying movement skill that allowed him to glide across the jagged stone floor as if gravity and friction didn’t apply to him.

He lunged, thrusting the two jagged stilettos made of his own hardened blood toward Evelyn’s throat.

Evelyn parried with a sharp, upward flick of her sword. The crimson metal of her blade struck the blood-daggers with the screech of grinding steel.

But the Vampire didn’t pull his hands back. Instead, he smiled under his deep hood.

The hardened blood-stilettos suddenly liquified. They lost their solid shape, wrapping around the Bloodhound’s Fang like red serpents, traveling down the length of the blade directly toward Evelyn’s hands.

"Drop it!" the Vampire hissed, his pale eyes glowing from the shadows of his hood.

Evelyn didn’t let go of her sword. She instantly channeled a massive burst of her blue Vanguard mana directly into the hilt. A shockwave of pure kinetic energy blasted outward from the steel, vaporizing the liquid blood into red mist before it could touch her skin.

She used the recoil of the blast to spin, driving a devastating roundhouse kick into the Vampire’s ribs.

The impact sounded like a cannon firing. The Vampire was launched backward, crashing into the solid rock wall of the cavern. The stone cracked into a massive spiderweb pattern around his body.

Evelyn didn’t pause. She dashed forward, covering the distance in a fraction of a second. She drove the Bloodhound’s Fang straight into the center of the Vampire’s chest, pinning him to the wall.

The cursed blade flared with intense light, its unique magic activating immediately. It began to violently drink the blood from the horrific chest wound, attempting to drain the assassin dry.

For a normal Awakener, it was an absolute death sentence.

But the Vampire just laughed.

He reached up with a pale, sharp-clawed hand and grabbed the glowing crimson blade protruding from his chest. The steel hissed, burning his palm, but he didn’t care.

"A blood-drinking sword," the Vampire mocked, his voice echoing wetly. "How terribly redundant. You cannot steal what I command."

The Vampire’s eyes flared a brilliant, terrifying crimson.

The blood that the sword was greedily sucking up suddenly stopped. Then, it reversed. With a sickening, wet sound, the Vampire forcibly ripped his own blood out of the sword’s magical channels through sheer willpower. The deep, lethal wound in his chest knit together in less than two seconds, sealing perfectly without a single scar.

He manipulated his own cellular structure, Evelyn realized, her eyes widening in horror. His regeneration outpaces the blade’s curse.

Before Evelyn could pull her sword free, the Vampire retaliated.

He didn’t reform his daggers. Instead, he snapped his fingers. The red mist of vaporized blood still floating in the air from Evelyn’s earlier parry suddenly solidified into dozens of microscopic, razor-sharp needles.

The needles shot forward like bullets.

Evelyn threw herself backward, twisting violently in mid-air to avoid the deadly swarm, but she wasn’t fast enough to dodge them all. Three of the blood-needles clipped her right shoulder and thigh, slicing cleanly through her dark trench coat and biting deep into her flesh.

She landed on her feet, skidding backward across the stone, and hissed in pain.

The cuts were shallow, but they burned like absolute hellfire. Her Vanguard interface flashed a bright, warning red in her mind. Her blood wasn’t clotting. The wounds were leaking a steady stream of vital fluid, and the ambient mana around the cuts felt diseased.

The anti-heal effect.

"You are slowing down, Vanguard," the Vampire taunted, stepping away from the wall. He raised his hands, and the ambient blood pooling on the floor from the crushed thugs and dead monsters began to levitate, forming a ring of floating, jagged red spears around him. "Your core may be fixed, but your stamina is still fragile. How much longer can you keep up?"

The Vampire stepped forward, and his stance suddenly shifted. He lowered his center of gravity, bringing his right arm back while his left hand formed a loose, deceptive claw.

Evelyn froze. Her breath caught in her throat.

She had seen that exact stance before. Five months ago.

A high feint, an unnatural shadow-step to the right, followed by a reverse-grip spinal slash.

It was the exact, highly customized combat sequence that had bypassed the shield of her former team’s heavy defender. It was the exact move that had slaughtered Marcus, her raid leader and closest friend.

The memories hit her like a physical blow. The darkness of that fateful dungeon. The sudden, impossible speed of the Wildfire assassins. The feeling of absolute helplessness as her team was butchered in seconds while the heavy iron doors were locked from the outside.

"It was you," Evelyn breathed, her voice trembling not with fear, but with an earth-shattering realization.

"Pardon?" the Vampire asked, tilting his head.

"That footwork," Evelyn snarled, her blue eyes turning as cold as absolute zero. "That exact phantom-step. You were there. In the Obsidian Vault. You were the one who killed Marcus."

The Vampire paused, looking at her with genuine surprise, before a cruel, twisted smile stretched across his pale face.

"Ah," the assassin murmured smoothly. "The Silver Griffon raid team. I remember now. A messy job, but we were paid very well to ensure none of you made it out. My Guild Master was quite disappointed when he heard you had survived the core fracture. It is a rare privilege to be able to fix one’s mistakes."

The floating blood-spears around the Vampire vibrated, humming with lethal intent.

"You didn’t make a mistake," Evelyn said. She gripped the wolf-head hilt of her sword with both hands, lowering her blade into a hyper-aggressive, desperate guard. "You just dug your own grave."

The Vampire vanished.

Evelyn parried blindly, acting purely on instinct and memory. The blood-spears rained down on her like a meteor shower. She deflected one, dodged another, and smashed a third with her Vanguard shield, but the Vampire’s speed was simply too much for her recovering B-Rank body.

A blood-spear grazed her cheek, leaving a burning, unhealing cut. Another pierced the heavy leather of her boot, slicing her calf.

Across the gorge, Donald witnessed the entire exchange while desperately keeping Silas at bay. His [Valuation Eye] fed him the terrifying data in real-time.

[Target: Evelyn Vance]

[Status: Bleeding (Anti-Heal inflicted).]

[Stamina: Decreasing rapidly. Critical danger.]

Donald’s heart clenched. She was losing. The sheer physical disparity between a recovering B-Rank and a Level 38 Lesser Vampire with blood magic was an insurmountable wall.

"Keep your eyes on me, rat!" Silas roared, swinging his yellow kinetic gauntlet in a massive arc.

Donald ducked the punch, but the concussive shockwave clipped his ear, making his head ring violently. He stumbled backward, his back hitting the cold, damp stone of the cavern wall.

"You see that?" Silas laughed, pointing his heavy metal fist across the gorge toward the flurry of red and blue magic. "Your woman is being bled like a stuck pig. Those Wildfire freaks don’t just kill you; they play with their food. When he’s done drinking her dry, I’m going to take that cannon off your arm and crush your skull with it."

Donald looked at Silas. He tasted blood in his mouth. His shoulder throbbed with agonizing pain, and his F-Rank shield was shattered.

But as he looked across the room and saw Evelyn fighting for her life against the monster that had destroyed her past, something inside Donald fundamentally snapped.

The timid, fearful slum kid who used to scrub armor for pennies died in that exact moment.

"She is not going to die," Donald said.

His voice didn’t shake. It was entirely calm, filled with a dark, heavy certainty that made Silas’s cruel smile falter for a fraction of a second.

Donald gripped the heavy handle of the Type-3 Pile Bunker. His 41 Mana flared to life, pouring into the weapon.