Scarlet

“Fucking damnit,” he mutters, but surprisingly doesn’t say anything else as he holds his hand out and summons some sort of fancy looking spear made out of magma along with a pair of magma gauntlets. And the man himself is wearing a fancy set of red and black medieval styled armor that seems to fit quite well with these gauntlets and the spear.

Guess he isn’t the type to lose his cool?

The man sprints towards me with his spear raised, clearly not using that skill again which he most likely still has on cooldown. Something I am rather thankful for, because it means I won’t have to skirt around him by attacking him only with blood boil and life drain.

I rush forwards to meet him, my blood shadow joining me from the other side of him. Both of us strike him at the same time, the blood shadow tearing a chunk out of his arm as his spear directly blocks my claws. We both then grimace, me from my broken ribs and him from the small chunk that the blood shadow managed to take out of his arm through his armor with its own claws. But I don’t let my pain stop me as I summon various weapons of blood and send them all flying towards him, all while also giving my blood shadow a sword – which is one of the two weapons alongside spears that I have gotten a little bit of training with during the first semester of university.

I continue trying to strike him with my claws along with my blood shadow who has switched to the sword, leaving him various small wounds that he simply ignores as he trades wounds with us. Eventually though, the wounds prove to be too great for my blood shadow, who suddenly begins to inflate before exploding and sending a wave of my own blood and some shadows outwards, my shadows slowly converging on me again along with a headache that I ignore.

“Ack,” he mutters as he’s completely covered in my blood, which can’t be very pleasant. Especially considering the blood in his eyes currently blinding him. I don’t waste any time, taking this chance to rush in and tear a large string of five gashes across his gut. Then I send various weapons of blood as I’m turning around to tear into his back. But despite his current blindness, he still manages to summon molten angelic wings to slap half of the weapons away, leaving the remaining half to pierce through his armor and barely into his flesh underneath.

By now I’ve managed to turn around fully again so I perform an uppercut with my claws wide open, only for the man to finally succeed in clearing his eyes of blood and twirl his spear around to knock my arm away before spinning in a circle and stabbing the thing blade first straight through both my magi-tech armor and blood armor into my gut, making me cough out a mouthful of blood. And at this point, we’re just staring face to face with each other, our faces just inches apart where I find him grinning at getting such a large hit in.

His grin goes away when he feels me gripping the spear with my claws, ignoring the searing pain that comes along with grabbing the molten rock, along with the molten rock that is burning my insides. And it turns into a look of fear when I pull the spear further inside of me, tugging him closer to me while I send blood weapon after blood weapon after blood weapon into him from all angles.

The pain I feel continues growing worse and worse, only exacerbated by the man trying and failing to overpower me with strength to take his spear back. But I ignore it all thanks to pain diffusion along with the magical reality’s fifty percent pain limiter as I pull him even closer so that we’re face to face.

Then I activate blood retribution and he immediately starts screaming as literal waves of bloody steam rise off of his body.

He tries very hard to pull the spear out, but I keep it in my gut as more and more steam lifts off of his body. And soon enough, the man drops to his knees, the fight in him mostly going away at this point, leaving him wide open for all of my blood weapons to tear into him. Meanwhile my own regeneration and life draining of him is keeping me alive.

Eventually though, I tear the spear out of myself and drop to my knees in front of him as well. But by now, he’s already long since dying and without any strength left to struggle.

So I do the most sensible thing in this situation.

I continue life draining him until he finally croaks right after I hear him muttering something about bullshit diviners.

Yeah, thought so. Their diviner warned them of my approach.

And it looks like they were good enough to know about our plan after all.

Not good enough to predict if they’d win this fight though.

With that thought in mind, I collapse onto my back with my arms spread out on either side of me as I try very hard to ignore the pain. But just a few seconds later, I remember to send a message to the others about having killed off three of their four remaining team members, leaving just the diviner left.

And with that, my job here is done.

“You really should stop doing these tactics…” Tar mutters, and I can’t even muster up the strength to shrug.

Fortunately my healing seems to be doing the work and regenerating the massive hole in my gut that spans from one side to the other. Or rather, it was a massive hole until I life drained him as much as I did, healing a lot of the wound simply through that. Enough of it at least for the wound to not outright kill me.

One benefit I’ve found to blood regeneration and life drain is that the only real way to kill me is to get my hearts or brain, or some irreparable part like my neck. Because anything that they’d just expect me to die from blood loss won’t likely kill me from blood loss. Not with blood regeneration.

Well, unless I’m literally starving and out of mana. Because the blood regeneration very slowly uses up nutrients to heal at a pace much too quick for those nutrients to normally work.

Because magic.

And if I don’t have any nutrients, it uses mana instead.

A very nice perk indeed. Even if the recovery process is painful as hell.

“Just be thankful you won’t have to experience the diffused pain,” Tar says, sounding both exasperated and worried at the same time.

Yeah. Although I get the feeling this battle didn’t do much for my image, considering I basically mutilated myself to kill him.

“I don’t think this’ll change your image much,” Tar says.

Really?

“Yeah,” he answers. “I’m pretty sure they already think of you as a berserker, so what would this change?”

Asshole.