Chapter 104: Parasitic Blood vs. the Silver Lion (1)

Hours passed without anyone really noticing. The mansion remained shattered, the hallways filled with glass and the smell of something burned, but the second floor had become the only place where the silence was almost tolerable.

Shin stood guard by the door, his arms crossed over his oak chest, unmoving, silent, with that particular stillness only beings who don’t need sleep or rest can maintain.

Veronica sat at the edge of Kanary’s bed, her daggers resting on her knees and her eyes fixed on the room. Her cat ears twitched from time to time toward the hallway, catching every small sound coming from the more destroyed parts of the mansion.

On the floor, wrapped in a large blanket someone had dragged from the wardrobe, Ebony slept on her back with her mouth slightly open. And she snored. Not just a little, but with such absurd consistency that Shin slowly turned his wooden head toward her for the third time in the last hour.

“Is she always this loud?” the tree man asked in his deep, slow voice, looking at the blonde as if expecting her to wake up from the noise she herself was making.

Veronica glanced at him for a second and then looked back at the door. “I don’t know, honestly. We haven’t slept together enough times to tell.” Her ears twitched slightly. “But it doesn’t bother me.”

Shin processed that answer in silence and looked forward again. Kanary was still asleep on the bed, breathing normally, her skin color much more stable than it had been hours ago when everything had almost ended much worse.

In the hallway, by the half-open door of the adjacent room, the edge of Lucian’s blanket and Daniel’s feet could be seen, both still showing no signs of waking up anytime soon.

Minutes kept passing. Veronica sharpened her focus when she heard the first sound, small, almost imperceptible, like something moving inside the walls. She ignored it. Then came another. And another.

“That’s not the wood settling,” Veronica said in a low voice, standing up quietly and tightening her grip on her daggers.

Shin had heard it too. His roots, always connected to the ground, had felt the vibrations even before the sound reached the air. “It’s coming from everywhere,” he replied with the same heavy calm as always, though this time without crossing his arms.

The walls began to creak louder, and then they appeared. First one, then three, then too many to count properly. Rats. Black, gray, brown, crawling out of cracks in the walls, from holes left by the explosions in the garden, from the edges of the broken floor.

All of them had reddish tumors on their backs. They pulsed. They emitted a faint red vapor that dissipated into the air like candle smoke, and that vapor smelled like corrupted magic, like something brewed with blood and bad intent.

The first rat lunged straight at Shin. Its teeth sank into his oak forearm and did nothing. The tree man lowered his gaze, looked at the animal hanging from his arm trying to bite solid wood, and calmly shook his arm to fling it off.

The others quickly understood Shin wasn’t an easy target and turned toward Veronica and Kanary’s bed, moving in small, disorganized groups, stepping over shattered glass without caring about the noise.

“Hey, back off her,” Veronica muttered, stepping between the bed and the first group approaching, and without waiting further, she threw her first dagger in a clean motion that pierced two rats in a single strike.

{{Beast Magic: Predator Instinct}}

Her movements became faster, more precise, responding to each rat as if she already knew exactly where it would jump from before it did. The daggers moved back and forth to her hands in a constant cycle, cutting, deflecting, piercing.

Shin, for his part, activated his spell without warning, and thorns burst from his arms, shoulders, and chest with a dull crack, turning his body into something no rat would willingly touch.

{{Forest Magic: Thorn Armor}}

He crushed several with his fists, the thorns doing the dirty work with every blow. Those that tried to climb his legs ended up impaled before reaching his knees. It was a quiet massacre on his part, almost mechanical, but the rats kept coming.

From the broken window at the back of the room, without entering, without moving, without any tumor on its body, a white mouse with red eyes watched everything. A scar crossed its left eye from top to bottom. Its eyes emitted a faint, constant magic, as if it were recording every second of what it saw.

At the mansion’s entrance, on the other side of the iron gates, standing in the middle of the empty street at dawn, the man in the black coat looked toward the lit windows on the second floor with calm, unhurried curiosity.

His plague doctor mask was white, clean, strange in contrast with the black undertaker’s hat he wore, covered in symbols drawn with fresh blood that barely glowed under the faint light left in the street.

“(Interesting… They handled the first wave pretty easily. The cat girl is faster than I expected, and the wooden dog is impossible to kill with teeth.)” the man thought as he adjusted his gloves calmly. “(Good. Let’s move on to something more entertaining.)”

He activated his ability without exaggerated gestures, just a flick of his wrist and a brief concentration that made the symbols on his hat glow for an instant.

{{Blood Magic: Viscera: Sleep Gas}}

Inside the room, the tumors on the rats that were still alive began to swell faster, pulsing with a different urgency, as if something from outside were pressing them from within.

“Shin,” Veronica said with a tense voice, watching as even the bodies of the dead rats on the floor began to bloat. “Something’s wrong.”

The tree man saw it at the same time. There was no time to analyze or plan. He slammed his oak fists together with a deep, heavy impact that echoed through the floor.

“Move!” Shin shouted, and that was the first time all night he raised his voice.

{{Forest Magic: Bird Cage}}

His arms extended, and branches burst out at a speed that didn’t seem possible for something made of wood, growing, curving, closing over Veronica and Kanary like a living cage trying to seal before it was too late.

But the rats exploded before the sphere could fully close.

The explosions were simultaneous, chaotic, and brutal. Not one, not two, but all of them at once, bursting from within with a force that shattered the ceiling, tore open the walls, and ripped pieces from the floor. The blast shook the entire second floor.

A cloud of dust, splinters, and chunks of plaster filled the room in an instant. Nothing was visible. Only dust, the lingering echo of the explosion, and the strange silence that followed, too still to be good.

Slowly, the cloud began to settle. The sphere of branches had partially held, enough to shield Veronica and Kanary from the worst debris with the thicker parts of Shin’s structure. They were alive. Shaken, covered in dust, and pinned under broken branches, but alive.

There was almost nothing left of Shin. Only scattered splinters, pieces of oak spread across the floor, and a wooden hand separated from the rest of his body about a meter from where he had stood.

The hole where the window once was had become almost the entire wall. And in that opening, standing on the edge with one hand resting on the remains of the frame, was the man with the white mask, looking inside with the same calm of someone who had come to see the result of an experiment.

“I see you survived thanks to the summon.” His voice was polite, almost conversational. His gaze moved over the broken branches, the open ceiling, the two girls among the debris. “At least your wooden dog was good for something.”

Amid the broken branches and the dust still falling from the ceiling, something moved. Veronica slowly stood up, a dagger in each hand, her clothes torn at the edges and a cut on her forehead dripping blood down her brow.

She brushed the remnants of branches off her shoulder without taking her eyes off the masked man, her eyes glowing with an intense red color as they released magic like a soft mist.

“That dog would’ve smashed your face in.” Her voice didn’t tremble. “But now I’ll take care of that myself.”

And without looking away, feet firmly planted among the debris, Veronica took a breath, tightened her grip on the daggers, and let out a single word with all the conviction left in her body.

“Roar.”

{{Beast Magic: Transformation: Silver Lion}}

At that moment, the girl’s body began to release a brutal amount of magic, so much that the very pressure of the air reacted as white fur grew along her forearms and her hair lengthened down to her waist.

Her face shifted slightly, revealing a semi-elongated snout, while her eyes sharpened into those of a predator ready to devour its prey.

“Interesting, I suppose I’ll finally get to taste the blood of a wild one… It’s been so long since I last did,” said the assassin, releasing a dense, dark reddish magic so heavy that the mansion itself began to tremble.

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