Chapter 106: Parasitic Blood vs. the Silver Lion (3)

The pale hands didn’t let go until the earth closed over Veronica’s head and the garden remained above as if no hole had ever existed. The descent was fast, too fast to resist, with the walls of dirt and stone brushing against her shoulders just inches away as she was dragged downward by a grip that didn’t loosen at all, no matter how much force she pushed back with.

Her daggers struck the dirt at her sides, searching for something to latch onto and stop the fall, but the tunnel was exactly the size of her body, with no room to maneuver, no useful angle, as if it had been built specifically for her so she couldn’t do anything on the way down.

The spiritual copies she had left in the garden reacted instantly. All five dove into the hole after her, one after another, their silver vapor forms compressing to fit into the tunnel and following her downward without hesitation, guided by the same instinct that bound them to Veronica as long as the transformation remained active.

Meters down. More meters. The darkness between dirt and stone lasted long enough for Veronica to count five tight breaths, and then the tunnel ended and the space opened abruptly, vast, with a depth she hadn’t expected to find beneath a mansion in the middle of a city.

A cavern. Large, with a high ceiling and irregular walls that absorbed the faint light coming from hundreds of red eyes scattered across the ground, rock ledges, and holes in the walls. Rabbits. Hundreds upon hundreds of rabbits staring upward in silence as she descended, as if they had been waiting for this exact moment.

The pale hands didn’t release her until the last meter, and then they let go. Veronica didn’t wait for the impact. She twisted midair sharply, locked onto the assassin the instant he was within range, and drove a punch into his torso with her full body behind it, her fist clenched tight.

The impact sent him crashing into the cavern floor with enough force to form a crater in the rock, kicking up dust and fragments of stone in every direction as the assassin’s body sank into the center of the hole created by the blow.

Veronica landed a few meters from the crater, on her feet, without stumbling, absorbing the drop with bent knees as if it were nothing. Behind her, one by one, her five spiritual copies touched down on the cavern floor and spread out at her sides, growling low with an instinctive tension that didn’t need to be commanded.

She didn’t wait to see if the assassin moved. She lunged toward the crater immediately, daggers ready, calculating that if he was even slightly stunned, this was the moment to end it before the cavern became an even bigger problem.

But the rabbits moved before she reached him.

Dozens of them poured out from the walls, from holes in the ground, from the rock ledges, placing themselves between Veronica and the crater in a dense, silent mass of brown and white bodies with reddish tumors pulsing on their backs with far greater intensity than those she had seen above.

They opened their mouths at the same time and spat blood forward, forming a dark curtain between her and her target, splashing the ground with that familiar scent she had already learned not to touch.

Veronica stopped and took two steps back, nose wrinkled, eyes scanning the entire situation rapidly. The blood from those rabbits smelled the same as the one from the white rabbit above, that mixture that wasn’t exactly poison, but clearly designed to do something unpleasant if it touched skin or entered the lungs.

What caught her attention most wasn’t the number of rabbits or the smell of the blood. It was that the assassin hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t whistled, hadn’t given any audible command, and yet the rabbits had reacted at the exact moment she moved, intercepting her with coordination that didn’t feel animal, but tactical.

“(He doesn’t control them with his voice. He controls them with something else. With the parasites, with magic threads, with something that doesn’t need him to speak to work)

” Veronica thought, stepping back again as her copies closed in around her, ready. “(Which means even if I knock him out, he can still control them.)”

At that moment, the rabbits began to hiss. Not one, but all at once, a sound that echoed through the cavern walls and bounced from ceiling to floor, filling the space with an uncomfortable vibration that could be felt in the teeth and chest.

Their eyes glowed an intense red, all at once, as if something had flipped a switch inside each of them simultaneously.

From the bottom of the crater, with a calm that made no sense given the state he should have been in after the hit, the assassin spoke a single word.

“Burst.”

{{Blood Magic: Blood Parasite: Flesh Missiles}}

Several rabbits among the mass began emitting reddish magic with such intensity that their tumors swelled until they were about to burst on their own. Then they jumped. Not with the clumsy leap of a frightened animal, but with such concentrated force in their hind legs that their bones gave out on the push, snapping with a sharp sound as their bodies were launched forward like bolts from a crossbow.

They left trails of blood magic behind them, reddish lines cutting through the cavern air in different trajectories, all converging toward Veronica from multiple angles so that dodging one would expose her to another.

Veronica started running. Not toward the assassin, but through the cavern, using the space to stay in motion and avoid becoming a fixed target. Her feet found solid ground on the uneven surface almost by instinct, jumping cracks, dodging rock pillars, changing direction without warning.

The first rabbit missed her by inches and exploded against the wall to her right. Bone shrapnel shot in every direction, and several fragments struck her shoulder and side, embedding into her skin with a sharp precision that made the transformation absorb the pain and turn it into rage.

The second exploded on the ground just behind her heel, the blast pushing her forward, but she kept her balance and kept running. The third she avoided completely. The fourth grazed her left arm, leaving a clean cut that immediately began to bleed.

“(What kind of sick bastard uses rabbits like this? But if that’s how it is, we’ll tear them all apart.)”

She whistled once, sharp and short, while still running. Her five copies received the order without further instruction and launched themselves toward the mass of rabbits filling the cavern, moving with the same speed and precision as Veronica, but without the risk of bleeding if struck by bone fragments.

Heads began to fly. The copies advanced in a loose formation, covering different sections of the cavern, crushing, cutting, clearing a path toward the crater where the assassin had fallen. The rabbits that weren’t caught retreated to the walls or launched themselves as projectiles, but the spiritual pack intercepted them before they could gain trajectory.

Through the shared vision she maintained with her copies, Veronica saw the crater the moment one of them reached its edge and looked down. Empty. The assassin was gone.

There was no visible exit at the bottom, no new tunnel, no trace of where he had gone. Only the hollow in the rock and the dust still settling inside as if the man had ceased to exist between one second and the next.

Veronica processed that information while continuing to dodge, without stopping, without changing her external rhythm even as internally she reorganized everything. “(He moves through the ground. Like before. He can enter and exit the earth whenever he wants, from anywhere in the cavern.)”

Which meant the entire ground was his territory.

She kept running. The copies kept clearing rabbits. The number of living projectiles decreased as the pack advanced, but those that remained became more selective, waiting for better timing before launching, as if the parasite controlling them was learning not to waste them.

Then the ground beneath her right foot gave way.

A pale hand burst from the rock, grabbing her ankle with the same grip as before—cold, firm, without room for negotiation. But this time Veronica was ready. Not for that exact spot or exact moment, but ready nonetheless, and that was enough.

Instead of resisting the pull, she moved with it, using the direction of the force to add her own speed, and with all the strength of her transformation, she grabbed the arm emerging from the ground with both hands and yanked upward with violent force.

The assassin was ripped out of the earth, dragged from his own tunnel by the very momentum he had used to try to catch her. His body emerged into the air for a brief instant, and in that instant, Veronica had already twisted him, positioning him directly in front of the rabbits flying in from three different directions.

The smile that formed on her face came easily and wide.

The explosions were simultaneous. Three suicide rabbits slammed into the assassin’s body at once, and the detonation echoed through the cavern with a force that sent fragments of rock falling from the ceiling and momentarily extinguished the red glow of the rabbits’ eyes.

The dust took time to settle. When it cleared enough to see, every rabbit in the cavern lay still, collapsed on the ground with their eyes closed, still breathing but without will, like puppets whose strings had been cut all at once.

Veronica stood at the center of that silence, slightly out of breath, with several cuts along her arms and her shoulder stained with her own blood. In her right hand, she held the assassin by the neck, lifting him with the strength her transformation still gave her.

What she held wasn’t in good condition. His legs were gone from mid-thigh down, part of his torso had been blown open by the explosions, leaving an irregular cavity where ribs and organs should have been, and the black coat was completely destroyed, reduced to charred strips hanging from his shoulders.

No groans. No screams. No sound at all came from the body she held in the air. Veronica waited. Nothing. Not even breathing, not even the slightest involuntary movement a living body always makes.

“(Dead. He has to be dead. No one survives that.)” She thought it, but something didn’t sit right. The instinct that had been active all night hadn’t relaxed at all—it still pulled in the same direction of maximum alert, as if the fight wasn’t over.

She looked at the mask. Still there. White. Intact despite everything else. She grabbed it with her free hand and tore it off in one pull.

Behind the mask, there was no face. No eyes, no nose, no normal skin. Where the eyes should have been, a reddish, glowing tumor filled the entire socket, pulsing with dense, concentrated magic that Veronica instantly recognized as the same she had seen in the rabbits, in the rats above, in every creature that man had used as a weapon throughout the night.

The mouth opened.

There was no prior movement, no tension in the neck or jaw. Just the mouth opening abruptly, as if something from inside forced it, and from between the teeth came a single word, with a voice that didn’t sound human, but like something pushed from far deeper within.

“Burst…”

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