Chapter 445: Kill it with fire

One of the swarms chasing Belladonna broke apart as their hive was incinerated. As soon as their tether to the Plague Lord severed, they lost all sense of cohesion and unity, and simply returned to the mindless beasts that they were.

Belladonna couldn’t help but smirk, sending another volley of fireballs into the Devouring Black, and watched as another portion of the swarm disintegrated into disinterested insects that buzzed off in different directions a few seconds later.

Mac was pulling his weight, and coming through where it mattered. But it made Belladonna feel a little left out.

Sure she was illuminating the Hives, but she couldn’t let Mac have all of the fun. First things first though, she couldn’t do anything in this outfit.

The dress that she hard worn might be perfect for her spooky and domineering act as the Baroness, but it was not combat suitable. Although she had to admit it looked amazing fluttering in the air as she had been leaping and flipping constantly.

The dress dissolved, morphing back into a black goo that wrapped itself tight around Belladonna, before solidifying itself into a simple, black body suit that clung to her curves and really sealed in the flavour.

But even if the body suit looked like it was made of just shiny nylon, it had the structural strength of enchanted steel and could take hundreds of blows as it acted like a non-Newtonian fluid with actual intelligence on how to distribute the incoming force.

Belladonna pulled a blood red crystal from her shadow and popped it into her mouth, as she leapt into the air and dove into the Devouring Black, its remaining buzzing tendrils still surging after her.

Her body started to glow from within, a soft orange light pushing through her skin, as she descended and as soon as she hit the ground, Belladonna’s body finished processing the crystal.

Every inch of her body erupted into roaring flames, turning her into a living beacon within the buzzing blackness.

The insects tried to swarm her, to flood her orifices and invade her body. But they would have had a better chance trying to invade a pizza oven for some pepperoni.

Anything that came even close to her, nevermind actually touching her body, burst into flames and was reduced to smouldering ashes in a second.

Boosted elemental infusions really were amazing, and now that she had her symbiotic armour, she didn’t have to worry about reducing her clothes to ashes either.

But really, that wasn’t the worst outcome. When she had been playing around with them during training, she had tried a boosted Earth infusion, and ended up frozen as a statue for three hours until she finally figured out how to move in that form.

As for the fire infusion, it was much easier to move and even healed the small injuries that had built up at an even more accelerated rate. The only issue was that it, unsurprisingly, burned through her mana at an incredible rate.

However that was worth it for the combination with her new Glyphs.

Pouring a drop of her burning mana into her fists, Belladonna activated the enchantment on her knuckles. Usually it was supposed to create elemental knuckles of the infused element, in this case fire.

This time, however, when she thrust her flaming fist forwards, a ball of fire burst from her fist. It incinerated everything in its path, before exploding in the distance.

Amazing. Although it did mean that, as she rushed up to the Living Hive that her flaming beacon had illuminated, that the football kick that was supposed to punt it into the air just simply cleaved through its neck like a hot knife through butter.

Actually, was that even a bad thing? No, that was actually pretty cool.

A demonic laugh escaped her lips, sounding almost like a hiss as the flames sizzled the air as it left her lips, a feat of physics that she couldn’t even understand how it was working considering where the breathe came from.

Flames leapt from Belladonna’s punches, turning the fearsome Devouring Black into a fireworks display, as its precious and well hidden Hives were revealed and killed by a burning hammer strike or a flaming fist, or were simply incinerated directly by the fireball that was supposed to reveal their location.

More and more of the swarm dispersed, at least what hadn’t been reduced to smoking black dots on the ground, until finally a deafening, high pitched shriek like rusty nails across a chalkboard cut through the air.

"There you are." Belladonna muttered to herself with a wicked smile, before spinning on her heels and swinging wildly behind her.

Giant claws, each one over 12 inches long, wrapped around her wrist and stopped her punch short, sending the fireball screaming into the skies.

Another clawed hand wrapped around her throat, both of them uncaring for the way their rotten flesh smoked and seared against her skin, as Belladonna was forced out of the black abyss of the swarm and finally got a good look at the Plague Lord.

One look was enough to understand why Revenant didn’t want this thing. Even for the standards of undead, he was disgusting.

Despite that it was an all too familiar sight. A wretched monster bursting out of the human shell that it had worn, tearing it apart in the process. However this human shell was long dead, rotten and shrivelled up and yet still somehow positively dripping with corpse juices.

The claws burst out of where fingers used to be, two sets of large buzzing wings tore through its back and whirred frantically in the air as it drove Belladonna back.

It’s face was half human, half insect. Or at least it was human, as all that was left was disgusting, black or green rotten flesh that stubbornly clung to the bones that had rapidly changed.

One eye on one side of its face, and four more soulless black orbs on the other side, as it was replaced by that of an insect.