Chapter 15: 15

Michelle and Snow walked together, both in silence, as they slowly reached the depths of the forest where thick vines were hanging from tall trees and the sound of birds’ singing penetrated the air. Snow was clearly unhappy because she didn’t like what Michelle was about to do, but she didn’t dare protest, as even though she had never experienced it herself, but the contract, she knew that Michelle’s wrath and killing spirit were horrifying.

When they were so deep in the forest that the vines were starting to obscure their movement, Michelle took out her magic weapon which was at the moment in the shape of a small pendant. She twisted her hand slightly and the pendant turned into a gleaming sharp small knife, similar to a scalpel.

Snow stepped back a bit to make space, and Michelle brought the tip of the knife to the back of her hand. She pressed it against her skin and slowly made a straight line from her fingers to her wrist joint, stopping there. Instantly, blood started flowing out from the thin but quite deep line.

Michelle took a deep breath and her nose was suddenly filled with an intense sweet smell which caused her to be momentarily dizzy. She let her hand down, leaving it to bleed, and closed her eyes to listen to the forest. It was early quiet, with the birds no longer singing.

Slowly, Michelle opened her eyes and with a slight motion of her hand, the sharp knife in her hand turned into a long and thin whip with sharp, sword-like edges. Then, Michelle glanced at Snow, and she transformed into her fox form, but only the size she had right after she was born, so she was about the size of an adult human, not her true size which was about the size of an eight-story building.

For a short while, the forest remained silent to the point that Michelle felt like she was deaf. But that all changed when an earth-splitting roar filled crashed against her ears. After the deafening silence, the roar was like a painful wake-up call, causing Michelle to wince a bit from the pain in her ears.

But she didn’t have the time to focus on that, because she felt the ground shaking beneath her.

She gripped the whip in her hand tighter and took a deep breath to calm down, cold mist leaving her mouth. Snow also prepared to fight, but she retreated a bit, as Michelle had told her that she wanted to fight alone and only if she seemed to be in danger could Snow interfere.

Constantly, the quaking kept getting stronger until Michelle and Snow saw a horde of magical beasts and even some monsters running towards them. All had bloodshot eyes and were clearly in a state of hunger. The weaker and smaller beasts weren’t running away even in the presence of bigger and stronger predators and the big predators didn’t seem to notice their usual food and prey.

Seeing that tide of frenzied beasts and monsters, Michelle frowned a bit and lifted her hand with the whip. With a single swing of her whip, she killed a bunch of smaller beasts, which were still bigger than herself.

Michelle was very quickly surrounded by the tides of beasts from all over the forest, but she nimbly dodged and counterattacked every single attack directed at her, but the movement caused more blood to spill out of the wound which in turn made the beasts and monsters even more crazy.

Seeing all this, all emotions left Michelle’s face and only a cold, nearly maniacal, smile remained on her face. Her eyes were gleaming coldly as she used the whip to open up the wound on her hand even more, letting it reach her elbow. She wanted to see the limit the beasts could reach because of her blood.

The sweet smell of her own blood mixed with the smell of the beasts’ and monsters’ blood was nauseating, but Michelle kept fighting. As more blood kept dripping out of her arm, she noticed that the movements of the remaining beasts she didn’t kill yet were turning sluggish, their eyes were no longer focused, and their nostrils were flared up.

Unlike the beasts, the monsters didn’t seem to be affected at the moment, but as Michelle kept on fighting and more of the sweet scent of her blood filled the air, even the monsters started showing the same symptoms as the beasts, but when the monsters started showing the symptoms, the beasts had already all fainted.

For some reason, Snow wasn’t affected by the sweet smell, but that was probably because of the contract she had with Michelle.

When even the huge monsters fainted, Michelle let the whip turn into a piece of thick cloth and used it to tightly bandage the cut she made over her forearm. She also had some other wounds, but they were much smaller, so she didn’t bother to bandage them.

Seeing that the sun was about to set, Michelle decided to return to the Archduke’s mansion, as she still had to meet up with Ivona the day after, and Snow remained in the forest to observe the movements of the men in black.

When Michelle returned to the mansion, the butler wanted to call the doctor to treat her when he saw all the wounds, but when she threw said not to, he didn’t ask anything and just had the maids prepare a bath for her.

Michelle lay in the bathtub and the water nearly instantly turned red from the wounds. Michelle took off the cloth she used to bandage her arm and washed it a bit before letting it transform into a thumb ring which she put on. She never left her weapon by the side and had it on even in the bath.

After getting out of the bath, Michelle got some bandages from a drawer in her table and bandaged all the wounds. Before bandaging the big cut she made on her forearm, she looked at it for a moment, wondering if it needed stitches, and decided that yes, so, without any anesthesia because the world didn’t have any, she used a needle she put over fire and a thin, nearly transparent thread, she stitched the wound and then bandaged it.

After that she went to bed exhausted. No matter how good she was at fighting, constantly fighting for hours against tides of beasts and monsters had taken a toll on her, and she slept deeply until the sun shone on her face in the morning.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep