Chapter 213: Battle for Salvation (VII)

Near the fallen gates of the Secondary Ring.

The silence that followed Velrith’s words only lasted a few seconds.

Filch sprinted, not towards the demons… but sideways. His hand dragging along the ground as he sprinted. Stone spikes erupted in a diagonal line from his fingertips.

They too were not aimed at the demons, but instead at the crumbling building to their left. The wall groaned as the spikes from the earth attacked it and then collapsed.

A cascade of stone and broken timber crashed down toward the three demons in an avalanche of rubble.

It wasn’t meant to harm them, it was rather just a means to scatter them.

Velrith stepped aside with a single unhurried movement, like a man avoiding a puddle. The debris crashed into the space he’d occupied a heartbeat before and raised a cloud of dust that swallowed the alley whole.

From the rooftop above, a streak of golden light punched through the dust cloud. Then another and then three more in rapid succession—Jeanne fired blind through the obscuring haze, relying on the last known positions of three targets that were three meters tall and hard to miss.

The first arrow struck something. A sound rang out like a sharp resonant clang, like gold meeting stone followed by a snarl.

The dust began to clear.

and behind the haze, all three demons were still standing.

Filch felt his stomach drop.

The first arrow had struck Karvax—the violet-eyed demon—in the shoulder. The golden point had punched through the script-patterned skin but hadn’t gone deep.

He reached up and pulled it free with two fingers, examining the golden tip before it vanished into thin air.

“Gold colored- lightening,” he said to Velrith, as if filing a report. “It has moderate penetration at range. The one right now even had diminished intensity… her reserves are clearly low.”

“Noted,” Velrith said pleasantly.

’He’s analyzing even now.’ Filch’s jaw tightened. They had hit one of them and all they’d gotten was more data fed back into the enemy’s intelligence.

He touched the ground again, feeling the cobblestones under his fingers, mapping the structure beneath into something useable.

He had to move.

The five slitted demon was already crossing the distance between them at a considerable pace. Having a large body was quite helpful while running.

“Burgundy hair,” The demon said conversationally as he closed the gap. “You rely too much on the resources around you. You know that?”

Filch dove sideways.

The demon’s fist came down where he had been kneeling and hit the tiles hard enough to send a shockwave rippling outward. The nearest buildings shook and cracks spiderwebbed across the white tiles.

Filch rolled away, touched a wall, and launched three stone shards in quick succession. They were not large, or killing-strike kind of projectile, but fast and aimed at the demon’s face.

The brown eyed demon leaned away from the first. Tilted his head aside for the second.

and finally the third caught him across the cheek.

A thin line of golden blood appeared and then… stopped. The skin knit itself together in seconds. The demon raised a hand and touched the mark, then looked at the residue on his fingers.

“Not bad,” he said. Then he smiled, and it was not a pleasant smile. “My turn.”

On the rooftop, Jeanne fired again.

She’d repositioned the moment the dust cloud rose, moving along the roofline with the trained efficiency of someone who knew that a stationary archer was a dead one.

Her quiver was down to seven arrows… her skill allowed her to increase their attack power and speed with lightening.

She counted without looking, the way you learned to count after enough nights where running out meant dying.

She nocked, drew and released another one.

The arrow sang down toward the violet eyes demon, who had separated from Velrith and was moving toward Santiago’s position on the street below.

The demon didn’t dodge. It raised its forearm, and the arrow hit the skin and simply… stopped. The golden light flickered against the script-patterns on its arm like a candle against stone, and crumbled.

’Its defense is different from normal beasts,’ Jeanne realized. ’Did he just absorb my attack?.’

She filed it away and drew again, aiming lower. Joints and the points where skin was thinner. She’d been watching since they emerged from the alley. Cataloguing.

“Jeanne!” Santiago’s voice from below, strained with pain. “Forget me—focus on Velrith!”

She looked toward where Velrith had been standing.

He wasn’t there anymore.

A cold weight dropped through her chest.

She spun, scanning the rooftops—

Velrith was standing ten meters to her left on the same roofline. He had climbed the building in the time she’d been watching the other two demons.

’Shit…’ Her heart panicked and her stomach retorted because of fear.

“The archer,” he said, tilting his head. “Karvax tells me your reserves are low.”

Jeanne didn’t answer. She raised her bow and fired point-blank.

Velrith caught the arrow.

“That would have been a fatal shot,” he said. His tone was almost admiring.

“I aimed to kill,” Jeanne said flatly, while trying to run away. But when she tried to move her legs her body stiffened.

She was not able to mover her legs!

Full of fear, she looked down and her pupils shrank. Her leg’s were entangled by soft spurts from the building.

Velrith moved.

She used the back of the arrow to attack the seadlings and threw herself backward off the rooftop before his hand could close on her arm, dropping two stories and landing with a roll that sent pain screaming up her already injured side.

She came up on one knee, breathing hard, one hand braced on the wet tiles.

Two stories. He had crossed two stories of rooftop in a single step.

And he landed in front of her with all the impact of someone stepping off a curb.

Santiago had run out of ground to retreat to.

His back was against a collapsed archway. His left arm was useless… its bone had snapped an hour ago during a Withering Beast encounter and the pain had settled from screaming to a low grinding throb that occupied a permanent residence in the back of his mind.

His right hand still worked and the flames still came.

But they were smaller now… but they were weaker now. He had been fighting withering beasts for some time now and he even considered that this was a foolish decision. But it doesn’t matter.

It was his decision.

The two-slit demon stood ten meters away, watching him with the patient interest of something that had nowhere else to be.

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