Chapter 443: The Blood of The Serpent

The god was fast before, but he must have been holding back, since he came for me much faster than before.

The scythe came for my throat, and I brought the blade up to block, and the impact nearly tore the sword from my grip. The scythe’s blade skidded along the edge of Dorrik’s gift, sparks flying, and the god twisted his wrist, bringing the weapon around for a second strike.

I stumbled back, barely avoiding the follow-up. The blade passed close enough to cut through my robes, and I felt the wind of its passage against my skin.

The tongue of the god tasted the air, and he bent his head far to the side and observed me. "You are not a swordsman," he crooned. "And you hold the blade of a god? Is this the depth that the so-called free gods have fallen to?"

He did not give me the time to consider his question as he came at me from every angle, using the scythe like an extension of his body. The blade whistled through the air, and I blocked and dodged and retreated, losing ground with every exchange.

I was bleeding from a dozen cuts. Adamantium could hold against his claws, but the scythe was different. It carried something, a curse, a poison, a weight of malice that I could feel in my bones. Every cut burned, and the wounds healed slower than they should have.

However, I struggled to hold the smile away from my face. It was not as if I was not in danger, but there was something in my soul that gloried in the fact that I was at the edge of death, and in this place, my growth was terrifying.

Every cut was a lesson. Across the shoulder because I dropped my elbow. Across the back of the thigh because I turned the wrong way out of a step. Through the meat above the hip because I flinched towards the crystal when his tail came near it, and he saw me do it, and after that he came for the crystal every third strike just to watch me move badly.

I bled everywhere. The Law of Flesh closed what it could and could not keep pace with the opening, and my blood, which should have been silver, ran red, as the crystal in my left hand got a little brighter.

That should not have been possible. I should not have been bleeding like a human, not unless this orb in my hand was somehow influencing my vitality. How fascinating and terrifying.

The god was enjoying himself. I could see it in his eyes, in the way his tongue flickered out to taste my blood in the air.

"You bleed," he said. "That is good. I was beginning to think you were something other than mortal."

"Ah, you should have seen me before now, when I was not shackled." I sighed. "But I am mortal enough."

The god grinned. "Then die like one."

∞

He came at me with a flurry of strikes, and I blocked and blocked and blocked. The impacts rattled my bones, but he was losing himself to bloodlust, and this gave me the opportunity to get two hits in.

I put my sword through the meat of his thigh and the wound just smoked, even as I expected his leg to become a torch from the heat of the blade. Still, his scream of pain was shocking, as if he had not experienced pain like this before.

His focus slipped for half a heartbeat and I got an elbow into the side of his head that put him down onto one knee. Then he cut my hamstring and I went down on both of mine, and we looked at each other across four feet of corpses and body parts at the same height, and he gave a pained smile, gasping.

"There," he said. "Now you are praying."

I bared my teeth. "To whom?"

"Me!" he roared and surged to his feet, and rotated his scythe as he rose, burying its blade into my chest before my hand could block the strike.

With a brutal move, he stomped on my stomach, and leaned his entire weight on me, and he pulled back the scythe before slamming it repeatedly into my chest with unerring accuracy.

The scythe hammered through my flesh and my bone and I felt it enter my heart.

The pain was everything. It was white and hot and absolute, and it filled my world for one long, endless second. I could feel the blood vessels tearing, as my flesh and bone parted.

I thrashed in pain and the god put his free hand flat on my chest to hold me still, and pushed the blade sideways so it sliced its way under my ribs. I felt it go through the muscle and then through something else and then out the other side of me, and the bastard did not do this quickly.

Under the pain, a part of me was fascinated that I was bleeding so much, and that my blood was red. Why would this crystal affect my vitality in this manner when it was filled with lifeforce?

The god leaned close, his yellow eyes inches from mine. "You do not understand what you are holding," he said, and his breath smelled of nothing at all. "I told you that before and I meant it kindly."

He twisted the scythe. "Now," he whispered, "you die."

∞

I looked at the serpent’s face leering at me, and the smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and I felt a bit pissed. With my Unbroken Titan Title, I could heal back to a perfect state when I suffered a lethal strike. This power had a long cooldown that stretched over months, and so I was not too worried about dying... still, despite the pain, this was not a lethal wound for someone like me.

And I sighed in resignation. So, without my spells and magic, was I such a bad fighter?

"You should have gone for my head..." I groaned.

The god’s smile faltered. "What..."

My body began to glow, and I grabbed the hand of the god that he had placed on my chest. He tried to pull back, but it was already too late.

My body glowed bright blue, highlighting every channel in it. With Lightning Resonance at Sovereign, I did not need spells to change my Anima to lightning, I only needed my mind.

I whispered to the god whose eyes had gone wide with shock as he looked at my body. "My turn."

All the lightning being passively created by my body instantly gathered in my chest, focused around my heart, and with a cry filled with pain and anger, I released all the lightning into a focused beam, causing a shockwave of air to erupt from my body that shredded every corpse around me for hundreds of meters.

The blue bolt tore out of me, and it vaporised the blade of the scythe in my heart, and it continued outward and slammed into the chest of the god with so much force that it tore through him, and his body was blasted away from me as the lightning carried him into the air for a thousand meters before he slammed into the roof of the cavern, and it still kept pushing him into the rock, causing enormous blocks of stone to rain down.

I groaned in pain, then I looked at my hand, and saw I was holding the left hand of the god that had been torn out of his body.