Chapter 215: Battle for Salvation (IX)

The spikes centered on the demon… and pierced its body at several places. His lower body had been turned into a pipe with several holes. Golden blood spewed out from multiple wounds.

GROWLLLL!!

The demon let out a growl and shriek of agony. He didn’t care about anything right now and threw the sword in his hand at Filch with all the force his body could muster.

Filch snapped out of his daze and blocked the sword with his spear. Then he heard a rumbling sound… cautions he jumped a step back and suddenly a wall of hard brown roots seeped out of the ground, breaking the tiles and turning into a wall.

He was trapped between two walls. One that he had created and another that the demon had conjured.

’He is trying to keep me away, that means he is vulnerable right now.’

Filch didn’t waste any time and instantly thought of a solution from his current problem. It was rather simple.

He turned some rocks into a gauntlet and punched through the wall on his right. He entered the house whose wall he had just broken and carefully measuring the distance to overcome the wood wall he punched another wall of the house in the same direction.

The wall blasted open into the alley and Filch jumped out, and what he saw next made his eyes widen and his pupils contract.

The demon had forcefully torn himself out from the spikes… leaving behind skin and rivers of golden blood.

Right now… his body was on the ground and it was glowing with a bright green luster. The blood had already stopped flowing out and his skin was being repatched.

But what made Filch terrified was the fact that the demon had unfurled its wings and several roots were going out from his wings and connecting themselves to Withering beasts and dead human bodies around.

The demon was absorbing the life force of these creatures and regenerating his body.

His thoughts drifted to the puppets. They were humanoid shapes with correct articulation and perfect joints. He had never understood the mechanism of how such things could be made.

But seeing the scene in front of him… he understood exactly how wooden humanoids got built and sent.

Actually a better word would be… grew.

They were grown. The beings from which the demon was absorbing life force were slowly turning into wooden puppets as well!

And as he saw more, the more terrified he grew. The scope of the demon’s powers was every single organic thing around him.

His eyes moved to the ruined buildings around… there were dead timber in the collapsed walls. The root system of a long-dead tree threading through the broken foundation at the corner. The organic material in the very mortar between the stones.

This entire street was a potential weapon.

Filch exhaled slowly through his nose and said, keeping his voice even.

“The wooden dolls.”

Velrith was still.

“How did you sent them to the Inner ring?” Filch’s eyes didn’t leave the demon’s face. “You should not be able to cross the doors? Then how?” He paused. “Did someone on the inside help you?”

The green eye with its single vertical slit gave nothing away.

“Someone on the inside helped you get them past the gates,” Filch continued. “I want to know who.”

Velrith looked at him for a long moment.

Then he smiled and the street bloomed.

It happened in every direction simultaneously—pale flowers erupted from every crack and gap in the road, from the dead root system at the corner, from the dried timber in the rubble piles, from the gaps between the foundation stones.

They opened too fast, petals splaying outward with violent urgency, and from each one rose a fine mist.

Pollen.

Filch held his breath and drove both palms into the ground.

Stone erupted in a ring around his feet, severing the nearest stems before they could close in, launching shards at the sources rather than the demon.

The flowers closest to him crumbled under the impact. He scrambled through the gap, lungs burning from the held breath, and came up on the far side of his own barrier with his heart hammering.

He exhaled and pulled in fresh air from upwind. Enough distance. He could breathe.

He looked back through the pollen haze at Velrith.

The demon walked through his own flowers without slowing, the mist curling around him and dissipating as if it knew its creator.

He’d gotten his answer, Filch supposed.

Karvax had not moved.

He stood ten meters from Santiago with the patient stillness of something that was comfortable waiting. The two-slit eyes tracked the small flames gathering in Santiago’s right hand with the same dispassionate interest he’d applied to everything else tonight.

Santiago was running on almost nothing. The reserve that had been feeding his flames since the start of this nightmare scenario had been scraped so close to the bottom that each new flame felt like pulling fire from his own marrow.

But the flames still came.

Karvax tilted his head.

The script-patterns on his forearm rearranged and then Karvax extended his palm.

The discharge that came out of it was unmistakably golden.

Santiago threw himself sideways. The lightning—Jeanne’s lightning, with her exact frequency and quality, the same charge he had felt across weeks of standing beside her in battle—hit the collapsed archway where he’d been standing and blew a section of ancient stone into gravel.

He came up from the roll with ringing ears and stared at the smoking crater in the masonry.

“The first one the archer fired through the dust cloud,” Karvax said. His tone was simply informational. “I held it.”

Santiago’s jaw worked.

“She fired five arrows through that cloud,” he said.

“Two of them were useful.” Karvax’s palm shifted slightly. “I have one remaining.”

The script-patterns moved again.

Santiago’s right hand was already building what little he had left. A thin stream of flame danced between his fingers and he ran forward… closing the distance between him and the demon.

HE knew that it would not di much damage, but

…he launched it anyway.

The flame hit Karvax’s chest and spread across the skin with a sound like paper catching fire, then died. The demon didn’t step back.

He had absorbed the flames as well. Then his palm came forward.

The second stored bolt of Jeanne’s lightning discharged.

Santiago had moved a half-step left—just enough that it caught him in the shoulder rather than the chest.

The impact spun him completely around. His back hit the remains of a building facade. His right hand went numb. The shoulder that took the strike felt like it had been unmade and reassembled.

He cursed under his breath and straightened himself. he saw the demon coming towards him again.

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