Chapter 112: Purifying Fire vs. A Thousand Parasites (3)

The rocks began to fall with an irregularity that made everything worse. There was no pattern, no predictable direction, just massive chunks of the burning ceiling breaking loose at random points and crashing down with the weight of something that had been held up for too long and no longer had any reason to keep doing so.

The killer moved between them using flesh tentacles that sprouted from his palms and stabbed into the walls or into elevated rock fragments that hadn’t fallen yet, keeping himself suspended above the burning ground with the same methodical skill as before, cutting each tentacle before the purifying fire could reach it and creating a new one before the previous one stopped being useful.

But the flaming rocks changed the equation. They fell wherever they wanted, without warning, and dodging them while also avoiding Ebony’s attacks and keeping his tentacles away from the fire below became a combination of problems that was starting to be genuinely annoying even for someone with his resources.

Ebony didn’t stop. She jumped toward him, got dodged, got hit by a falling rock or injected with a spore, healed, and jumped again. The cycle was brutal, and visibly so, because her face no longer hid the pain from each impact, tears slipping out on their own from the strain of absorbing hits that would have knocked anyone else unconscious, but her body kept responding and her legs kept driving her forward.

“Heal.”

A burning rock slammed into her right shoulder and threw her to the ground. She got up before the dust could settle.

“Heal.”

A spore reached her neck and started pumping venom. She burned it off in the same motion as she stood.

The killer watched her from above with something that had crossed the line between calculated admiration and genuine enjoyment, the expression of someone getting exactly what he expected and finding it even better than anticipated.

“You’re fun, girl!” His voice rang out over the crashing rocks and the constant crackling of green fire. “I knew I wasn’t wrong about you.”

Ebony took another hit, this time in the back, and absorbed it without falling. Her body had reached a point where the pain was constant and uniform instead of specific, a general pressure covering everything from her shoulders to her knees, something her healing spell reduced each time she cast it, but never fast enough to reach zero before the next hit came.

“(You bastard… He’s just playing with me.)”

She thought it as she dodged one rock and took another to the side.

“(No matter how much I attack him with rocks or directly, he’s not using anything lethal. He’s seriously underestimating me.)”

Another spore. Another burn. Another heal.

“(Screw it. I don’t have to win. I just have to make sure he loses.)”

She reached inside her clothes while still moving and pulled out the crystal. It was what remained of her shield core, the thunder crystal they had recovered, small, irregular, with broken edges but still holding intact magic inside, vibrating with an energy completely different from the purifying fire, something sharper, louder.

She clenched it in her fist and looked at the ceiling.

“One last time!”

She jumped with everything she had left in her legs, using every remaining ounce of strength in that single motion, launching herself toward the cavern ceiling with the crystal extended forward, her trajectory aimed at the point where the cracks were densest and the rock weakest.

The crystal touched the ceiling and shattered.

{{Armament Magic: Thunder Shield: Resonance}}

The discharge exploded outward in all directions at once, white lightning racing through every crack in the ceiling, following the path of least resistance, spreading through the network of fractures Ebony had been building throughout the fight as if it had been designed specifically to carry it to the limit of every fissure.

The cavern ceiling gave way instantly.

Not in fragments, but in entire sections, massive blocks that began to fall with a roar so deep it was felt in the chest before it was heard. The ground shook with every impact, and that tremor didn’t stay confined to the cavern, it traveled up through the earth and reached the surface, shaking the stone path near the mansion’s entrance hard enough to crack the garden ground.

Inside the mansion, on the second floor, Lucian opened his eyes.

Daniel too, jolting upright with the disoriented expression of someone who had been unconscious for too long and whose body hadn’t caught up yet.

In the cavern, a massive slab broke free from the ceiling directly above the killer. Not a fragment, but something the size of a room, falling with the deceptive slowness of something enormous and heavy that is actually moving far faster than it looks.

The killer stopped laughing.

He brought his hands together and began gathering flesh between his palms, forming a dense, reddish mass aimed at the falling rock, preparing enough force to deflect it or stop it before impact.

Ebony appeared at his side.

She hadn’t signaled the movement, hadn’t taken visible momentum, she was simply there where she hadn’t been before, her arm and shoulder burned by the lightning released when the crystal shattered, and a smile on her face that carried no trace of exhaustion despite everything beneath it.

She opened her hand. In her palm were shards of the broken crystal, small, jagged, still carrying the last remnants of thunder magic that hadn’t fully discharged before.

She threw them into the killer’s body from less than a meter away.

The shards pierced the white fabric and sank in, and the magic inside them discharged the moment they made contact, small but concentrated bolts of lightning running through the man in the crow mask with enough intensity to force every muscle to fire at once without his control.

The mass of flesh he had been forming collapsed instantly. His hands stopped responding for the duration of the shock, brief but long enough for the massive rock to continue falling with nothing to stop it.

“Smart girl.” His voice came out strained from the electricity still running through him, different from anything he had said before, less controlled, more human. “I guess you win in the end. It was a good game. Too bad your life ends here.”

Ebony looked at him. She wanted to yell. She had enough material built up over the night to insult him for minutes without repeating herself, and a good part of her wanted to do exactly that. But her body had no spare air for speeches, so she raised her hand, flipped him off with a cynical grin that needed no words to say exactly what she thought, and focused on catching her breath.

The massive rock kept falling.

The killer raised his hands toward her with what little motor control he had left after the shock.

Then he removed his mask.

What was underneath wasn’t the decayed face of the previous killer or the aged look of any vessel. It was a pale face with the specific pallor of something barely alive, red veins glowing under the skin like rivers of blood magic running from his neck to his temples. His eyes were black. Completely black. No iris, no white.

“I was joking.” He said it with what remained of his normal voice, and the laugh that followed was different from all the others, shorter, sharper, edged with something no longer enjoying itself but executing. “Now you’re really coming with me, girl.”

“Coagulate the nightmares.”

{{Blood Magic: Summoning: Red Queen}}

A worm burst from the killer’s chest. Not small like the ones he had used all night, but enormous, as thick as a tree trunk, forcing its way out from inside his body with a violence that should have been fatal to anything containing it.

It hit the ground and began to change. The tissue multiplied, reorganized, piled onto itself at a speed too fast to process step by step, forming mass upon mass until it became a body, enormous, made entirely of glowing veins and flesh that hadn’t fully decided its final shape.

It took the form of a woman. Gigantic, with hair made of black worms moving independently, and eyes of such intense red that they lit the space around her with a sickly glow that rivaled the green of the purifying fire. Her skin, if it could be called skin, was a surface of living tissue pulsing with every beat of the magic keeping her standing.

The massive rock reached her before it hit the ground.

The Red Queen caught it with both hands, absorbing the impact with a force that shook the cavern floor in a way different from all previous tremors, deeper, more final, and the rock shattered in her grasp without crushing anyone.

The killer stood behind his summon, clothes torn, red veins glowing through every rip, looking at Ebony from behind that massive figure with black eyes and his composure fully restored.

“Now let’s start the real fight.”

Two bodies fell through the hole in the cavern ceiling. They landed with the clumsiness of people who had jumped without fully calculating the landing but decided getting there mattered more than landing well. Lucian got up first, his legs still marked by the acidic burns from earlier, eyes scanning the cavern in the instant it took him to stand. Daniel landed half a second later and stayed crouched, staring at the Red Queen with an expression somewhere between horror and reluctant curiosity.

Ebony glanced back at them over her shoulder without fully turning, the same cynical smile still on her face even though everything else showed pure exhaustion. The same smile she had given the killer, now directed at her allies with a different edge, the kind of expression from someone who had just received exactly the backup she was waiting for.

“Yeah.” She said it while looking back at the killer and the towering mass of veins and worms shielding him. “Now your beating starts, you piece of shit.”

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