Wolf of the Blood Moon: A Blood Magic - Book 3: Chapter 74.3: A Test of Blood And Fire Part III

Scarlet

Out of the corner of my eye, I find the bodyguards all tensing up from the entrance to the room alongside Tar. But none of them are moving despite that, which has me smiling slightly.

Then the drake charges towards me.

Well, now or never.

I activate Blood of Ruin. And to top it off, I release all of the blood in my blood storage as a flood towards the drake, pushing it away to build some distance between us.

Then I sit back and watch as droplets of blood are torn from my body, making me grunt, the extra pain from that not really registering much outside of flaring up the pain I’m already feeling. But I keep my eye on the large orb of blood that forms before turning black as if it was corrupted. Then I watch the whole process of the droplets forming, the spikes shooting out of the main corrupted spiky orb to the other spiky orbs, the corrupted blood of ruin – as Leonidas likes to call it – leaking to the other droplets across the lines, and the blood in the area both my own and the blood on the ground being pulled into the skill. I even see the drake’s blood being yanked out of its lost limb with the limb itself being pulled into the main corrupted orb, making the orb shoot up in size. Which didn’t happen during the last usages of the skill.

Guess this demon has more powerful blood or something?

I let out a grunt when the mana for the skill is pulled from me, making me grow weaker and weaker until I can barely lift my head to watch.

A loud cracking sound echoes throughout the area, following which the various lines and orbs of blood show cracks on their surface that quickly leak the blood of ruin, burning and corrupting everything in the chamber. Although I can’t help but notice the bodyguards vanishing into their blood realm while Tar vanishes to the in-between so as to not get hit by my skill.

At this point the drake truly looks frightened, but it can’t go anywhere since the lines of blood are blocking its escape.

I grimace both at my pain and exhaustion, and the fact that blood of ruin is just pouring all over me, flowing off of me without any effect aside from making me feel the incessant need to wipe my eyes and clear my vision. Only to feel irritation at not being able to lift my arm to do just that.

Damn, this is uncomfortable… like I’m taking a shower in blood while I can’t move.

The drake roars in pain and fear, but unlike the majority of the demons I’ve used this skill on, the drake doesn’t run away. Even if it did look to see if it could. Instead, after realizing it couldn’t run, it begins to charge towards me while trying to avoid the lines of corrupted blood.

Then another cracking sound echoes through the chamber, the main orb and the lines cracking once more and flooding the area with more blood of ruin as the drake begins charging through the stuff while roaring even louder in pain.

But it continues going, making me try to get up with a pained scream of my own, realizing that the thing doesn’t care that it’s going to die anymore.

It’s trying to kill me knowing it’s going to die.

I start burning my own blood to push myself up, screaming all the way despite Pain Diffusion being fully active, making me understand that if I do survive this, I’m going to be paying for it later in pain. But I don’t think about that right now, just pushing as hard as I can before I finally reach my feet, using the wall I’m next to as a crutch to stand on my feet despite a few shards of bone still sticking out of my leg and a rib sticking out of my torso scraping up against my armor.

Fuuuuck, this hurts!!! Why does this hurt so much?!

“Use Gradual Corruption Nullification,” Tar says, sounding worried but somehow confident I’ll win this.

So I do just that, and the skill quickly locks onto something in my body, making my eyes widen in understanding.

Its blood got into me, didn’t it? Its corrupted blood.

Mana begins to drain from me as the skill goes to work clearing up the corruption. But I doubt it’ll clear up fast enough for it to help in the battle. Not when level 10 takes seven minutes of the skill’s use to clear the corruption. So I continue pushing through the pain before using Blood Chains on the creature as it tries to push through the lines of blood of ruin, getting parts of its body corrupted and destroyed each time.

The creature keeps coming though, and soon enough it reaches within a couple meters of me. If it weren’t for the blood of ruin raining down everywhere, it would’ve just shot a fireball at me to finish me off. But when it tried that, the thing simply dissipated thanks to the blood.

I grimace before checking my mana and finding it at only about five percent left.

Fortunately Gradual Corruption Nullification barely takes any mana to use, so I use up some of that remaining mana to-

My thoughts cut off when a shattering sound echoes through the chamber, following which all of the blood flows freely to the ground from each and every orb, flooding the entire chamber and sending the drake straight towards me as its body quickly corrodes. But right when it’s about to reach me with its jaws wide open, I feel a massive surge of life energy enter me, my Blood of Ruin skill technically being finished and therefore giving me the life energy from Sanguine Effect. The energy quickly pushes my remaining wounds to heal at incredible speeds, allowing me to jump out of the way of the creature’s charge, leaving it to only bite into my shoulder and tear its one remaining claw straight across my other shoulder and down my chest, tearing off my entire left arm and severing my right in the process while also cutting through two of my hearts and making my scream go up a pitch for only a moment, just for it to vanish entirely when I find it hard to breathe.

Everything goes silent with the only sounds in the chamber being the rushing flow of blood as the last of the drake is destroyed by the blood of ruin and my mind is flooded with nothing but pain.

Then my vision goes dark, the last thing I hear other than the flowing blood being the sound of Tar and all of my bodyguards’ voices.