29. Evil (3)

Having thrown me the dagger, Beron hurried off to call for reinforcements, but the Blood Lord couldn’t have cared less either way.

“Let the bugs multiply. They remain insignificant.”

The language of humans spilled from his mouth.

“You call them bugs, but here you are speaking bug?”

I was needling him on purpose, jabbing at his temper. A strategy, provoking your opponent to get him hot under the collar and rattle his judgment? That kind of plan’s for serious enemies, and this guy didn’t qualify.

“So you wish to die!”

The Blood Lord lifted Astraea’s sword almost casually and slammed it straight down.

Crash!

The red mana riding the blade erupted, and the ground tore open in a heave.

Eve shrieked and threw a red warning panel up across my vision.

Warning or no warning, I didn’t move a single step.

Shoom—!

The shockwave brushed across the bridge of my nose and split cleanly past on both sides of my body.

“See, this is the gimmick where if you chicken out and start running around, that’s when it actually hits you.”
“…Hoh?”

The Blood Lord’s red eyes narrowed. He looked thoroughly intrigued to find me still standing in the middle of the dust crater, perfectly fine.

“A lucky little rat.”
“Losers always whine about luck.”

I brushed the dust off and grinned wide.

“Your hit-detection just sucks, my dude. You lean on your size and swing sloppy, so you leave gaps.”
“Hit… detection…?”

He clearly didn’t understand a word of that, but the displeasure on his face came through loud and clear.

“You don’t know your place. I’ll grind you into paste.”

He laid his sword flat sideways, and the massive blade ripped through the air and came scything for my waist.

The warning was urgent, and she wasn’t wrong. The textbook answer to this pattern is to drop flat and let it pass. But I planted my foot toward his chest instead and boldly stepped in.

“You… you wretch…!”

His eyes wavered, caught off guard. And no wonder, because this attack isn’t a one-and-done. It’s a combo move, and a combo move means the user’s actions are locked into the animation while it’s running.

He forced his arm back for the follow-up, jerking it into position, and the blade-aura wrenched off its path and came down again. This time I dropped low and flattened against the ground.

Whoosh!

A razor-sharp whistle of cut air grazed the tips of my hair.

That left him a single swing, but by then I’d burrowed inside his guard like a flea, and there was no angle he could hit me from. I took the dagger in a reverse grip and drove it straight into his neck.

Shhk! Shhk!

“Khh—!”

The Blood Lord spat blood in a forward arc and staggered backward, but I’d already darted clear and put distance between us.

“You insolent rat—!”
“How’s it feel to get knifed by a rat?”
“I’ll kill you!”

His eyes glistened red. He spread both arms, and the blood pooled thick across the floor began to writhe like living snakes.

Gluuurg—.

It seeped rapidly into the cracks between the stones, and the plain stone floor of the underground was carved into red-lined squares, until the whole thing had become one enormous, vividly marked chessboard.

Krrrrumble!

Soon the spikes that were about to erupt began stirring, and the glowing red tiles and the unmarked ones mixed themselves up in a dizzying scramble. To ordinary eyes it would’ve looked like nothing but a sea of blood churning in chaos. To me, it was no different from someone laying the answer key out on the desk.

“Two, five, seven, nine.”

I murmured the numbers and stepped through them as if dancing, shifting my foot lightly onto what I’d arbitrarily designated in my head as [tile two]. At the same instant, a razor-sharp spike of blood erupted from exactly where I’d been standing, as if to punch through the ceiling.

Skrrch—!

A hair slower and I’d have been a skewer. But I didn’t stop.

“Four, three, one, five, six.”

Back-left, forward, diagonal-right, jump two squares over and land, then to its left. I glided across the red-glowing chessboard like I was waltzing with an invisible partner, and though the spikes brushed the hem of my clothes here and there, not one of them drew so much as a scratch.

“How can a mere human evade this?!”
“I was kind of good at rhythm games.”

The instant the final tile’s spike shot up, I kicked off the floor and dashed right up to his face. The Blood Lord tried frantically to pull his arm back, but I was faster, because he’d just unloaded a large-scale AoE and the recovery animation had him locked stiff.

Dump phase.

I slipped right under his chin and drove the dagger into the wound I’d opened in his neck earlier, one more time.

Shhk!

The cold blade punched through thick hide and muscle and sank deep.

Just as she’d warned, simply stabbing wasn’t doing enough damage to count. So with the blade still buried in his neck, I gripped the handle with both hands and wrenched it sideways with everything I had.

“GRAAAAGH!!”

The ghastly scream that burst from his mouth nearly tore my eardrums, and a geyser of dark-red blood shot up and drenched my face. Writhing in pain, the Blood Lord looked down at me with bloodshot, disbelieving eyes.

“This… cannot… be…”

Instead of answering, I bore down with all my strength to saw through his neck.

“Hnnggh…!”

Another groan tore from him.

“Surely… That One… told me…”

How he could still be talking with a dagger buried in his throat, I wasn’t going to bother figuring out. But more to the point: That One?

That’s a line I’ve never heard before.

“That the humans of this world… could never withstand this power!”

KABOOM—!

I’d been moving to finish him off, but an enormous burst of mana detonated from the center of his body, and a violent shockwave slammed into me and hurled me all the way to the wall at my back.

BAM!

“Gakh—!”

I hit the wall and crumpled face-down on the floor, while the dust kicked up in waves and my vision went hazy.

When the haze cleared, the blood pooled thick across the floor was crawling up his legs like caterpillars.

“Second phase.”

Raid bosses have one boring thing in common: right when the players think they’ve won, they evolve into a stronger form.

I pushed myself up. My back stung, but not enough to throw off my movement.

Unlike Arden’s body, this one’s solidly built — I really lucked out on the possession.

At that I looked back at the Blood Lord. The blood that had crawled up him like caterpillars was sliding over his skin now, covering the wound and wrapping his whole body in a hardened shell.

“It’s a little different.”

“That one only covered his neck. This one covers his whole body now. That’s the difference, I guess?”

Blood Lord Phase 2 is him outfitted in blood-armor. For the record, that thing swallows physical strikes like a swamp, so in theory it’s a hundred-percent physical immunity.

Which is why a Blood Lord raid is easier when you bring magic.

The problem is that this body I’m possessing, just like Arden, doesn’t have an ounce of magic talent.

“I will no longer dignify you with this clumsy slab of metal.”

He tossed Astraea’s sword aside and let it clatter to the floor.

“I will show you my true power.”

With a wet sloshing sound the blood swallowed his entire right arm, and it quickly took the shape of a chillingly massive red greatsword. Commonly known as: Bloodblade Mode. As a status effect, it inflicts wounds that rot inward and bleeding that won’t stop.

“…It does look pretty cool, though.”

I picked up the dagger that had fallen on the floor, and the Blood Lord didn’t let the opening slip.

BAM!

The bloodblade slammed into the floor where I’d been standing, and the floor heaved and burst — POP! — in a geyser of blood.

“Power’s still no joke, huh.”

It really was a terrifying insta-kill move, even seen again after all this time. I only just dodged the follow-up swings.

Every raid boss has a counter-strategy somewhere.

“That armor? Looks invincible at a glance, but it’s not.”

It was time to share that with Eve, whose analysis ability still wasn’t perfect.

“That thing is just an intelligent fluid-defense layer.”

I leveled the tip of my dagger at him and finished the calculation.

“The principle’s simple. It senses where you’re hitting and rushes blood there to crank up the defense. But here’s the key: the total amount is fixed.”

The blood doesn’t gush out infinitely. The amount of shield wrapping his body is limited. So if you push the defense on one side to its maximum?

“Then the other side absolutely has to thin out.”
“What are you muttering about?!”

The Blood Lord raised his bloodblade and rushed in.

“So all you’ve got to do is hit him with something so big he’s forced to pour every drop into blocking it.”

The combination of bloodblade and armor looked like an impregnable fortress.

Kraaa-BOOM!

But it had a weakness too: for all its firepower, it was on the slow side. Then again, my stamina was draining fast as well, so the weakness wasn’t going to mean much in practice.

“…Khh.”

In the end, a remnant of the bloodblade grazed my flank, and pain slammed into me as if my whole side had been ripped clean off.

“This ends now.”
“…Whoo.”

Instead of answering, I drew a long, deep breath.

“RAAAAAAGH!”

And then I charged him, screaming so the pain wouldn’t knock me out.

“Fool.”

The Blood Lord sneered and reinforced the defense on his chest.

Glug, glug—.

The red liquid wrapping his legs, back and shoulders rushed toward his chest at insane speed, and a barrier of blood, thick as an extra shield layered on, sealed off the area in front of his heart.

When I didn’t slow down even with his wall up, he was sure of his victory. “You’re done!” he crowed.

But I hadn’t been running at the Blood Lord, not from the start. I’d been running at Astraea’s sword, the one he’d discarded earlier. I scooped it up with my instep like a soccer ball, then drove my foot into the pommel with everything I had.

BAM!

With a heavy thud, the longsword crashed into his wall.

“Cheap parlor tricks!”

I’d never expected the longsword itself to do any damage. Its only job was to draw his nerves and his defensive instinct toward absorbing one heavy hit. And the recoil from ninety-nine percent of his armor diverting to his chest had left the membrane of blood around his neck paper-thin, pale skin showing dimly through.

I slid up to him like a snake and whispered right beside his ear.

“Found the empty house.”

Shhhk—!

The dagger punched through the thin film over his skin, and the keen edge sliced cleanly into his carotid artery.

“GRAAAAGH!!”

I drove the dagger into his throat over and over, listening to him scream.

“Khurgk…!”

The Blood Lord coughed up blood and dropped to his knees. Under the force of my hands twisting the dagger, dark-red blood gushed from his neck like a dam giving way, and he no longer had the strength to resist me.

“Through my death… That One will become aware of your existence.”

That One again, the unknown. I was about to ask him one last question.

Who is that?

But instead of answering, he twisted the corners of his mouth into a grotesque shape.

“You will… surely… be eliminated…”

Bzzt—.

His voice abruptly cut out, and his form began to ripple violently, as though a radio’s frequency had slipped.

“What the—?”

I pulled back a step in surprise, and at that instant —

Pfft—.

His enormous body didn’t disperse into dust. It broke apart pixel by pixel, in tiny square dots of blue, and dissolved into the air. No blood, no chunks of flesh, nothing left. It wasn’t death so much as someone forcing a [Delete] button on him.

And just like that, the Blood Lord evaporated into thin air. Only the dagger that had been twisting in his throat clattered, ringing, to the floor.

“…”

I stared blankly into the empty space. But no matter how long I waited, no system window popped up, and not a single coin dropped on the ground. In that instant, indignation came surging up from deep inside me.

“What kind of raid boss disappears without dropping any loot?!”

I was waving an accusing finger at empty air before I could stop myself.

Of course I knew. This was inside a book, and whether an item from in here could even be carried back to reality was anyone’s guess. And that bloody bloodblade he’d been using? Wouldn’t take it if you handed it to me.

But this was a question of raider’s honor. You take down a raid boss, you at least get a fanfare, or at minimum the game spits out some junk-loot shells. Isn’t that the unwritten law?

“You make me work my ass off, then just pretend nothing happened and bolt?”

I was so worked up I was about to lose it.

“Are you kidding me, dev team?!”

I guess my heartfelt complaint reached the heavens.

Wuvvvvm—!

The space rang, and a red light began to draw itself into shape in front of my eyes. I sprinted over to the magic circle, thrilled.

At that I screeched to a halt and looked again, and yeah, it was the return-magic-circle Rose had shown us at the very start.

“You dev-team bastards!!”