Blood Shaper

Book 4: Chapter 28

Kay let the last two simulacra dive into the fight against the armored assassin before heading toward the mage. In a duel, getting help was a faux pas at best and an admission of loss at worst, but this wasn’t a duel anymore; it was a fight to the death against a team of assassins. Getting the glowing barrier down and letting Eleniah and his guards in to clean things up was the best use of his time.

“Dammit!” The barrier mage thrust his hand forward, and a translucent pane of energy appeared in front of Kay’s stabbing halberd. Kay followed up with some slashes and a hammer blow, but the field held strong. The mage glanced at each of his companions before quietly cursing again. He curled the fingers on one hand toward the center of his palm, then punched out with it. A blast of visible magic, the same color as his barriers and his other, smaller magical attacks, rocketed at Kay.

Kay stepped back and braced himself as he formed a wide shield from the blood on his arms. That ended up helping his enemies as the attack wasn’t one to damage him but one to push him back. The wave of force slammed into Kay’s temporary shield and hit hard enough to toss him off his feet. He landed awkwardly a dozen feet back. As he pushed himself to his feet, he saw the mage lash out with more of the same attack, knocking simulacra flying and freeing up the heavily armored individual.

“New plan!” The mage shouted out, “We’re doing the field!”

“Right!”

Kay noticed that this third assassin was a man as well and filed that information away for later in case they got away. Saying to his guards: “Be on the lookout for three men and a fourth person of indeterminate anything!” wasn’t the best way to watch out for another attempt on his life, but it was something.

The armored man raised his shield up in the air at an angle so that the face of it was pointing directly down. It looked like a painful angle to hold his arm at, but he didn’t stay that way for long. The slightly curved tower shield began to glow, and he slammed it into the ground. A localized earthquake went off on the floor of the arena as the ground began to shake rapidly. A pointed wave of stone erupted from the floor, spreading out from the shield that was still in contact with the floor, as columns and walls of stone of all shapes and sizes began jutting out and growing.

Kay watched as an entire maze of stone grew around him. The arena went from a wide open floor to looking like a pile of debris after a disaster had been stacked and thrown about at random until it all lay still. For the brief moment that they were visible, Kay could see the mage and the crossbow user moving into position behind the armored man, who was still holding his shield down until the walls rose high enough to block them off. Among the maze-like expanse were also multiple stone poles that began jutting out from the floor and walls at random angles. As they expanded in length, some stopping shorter than others, small crystals pushed their way out of the narrow stretch of stone at the end of each pole. Kay immediately recognized them as a common form of light crystal. A brief moment after they appeared, each crystal began to glow with bright light, and several of them began to flash on and off, making it look like a wave of paparazzi had just shown up to take photographs.

Kay slowly panned his gaze around the new terrain and saw only stone, stone, and more stone blocking his way in every direction. Bright lights lit him up from several angles, and the intense saturation on the lit areas made it hard to see what was open space and what was a wall or a column blocking his way. In an interesting moment of both comparison and contrast, the areas of deep shadow from the walls blocking off the light crystals did the same thing in the opposite way.

Looking up showed him that some of the walls stretched up all the way to the top of the barrier and that most of the ones that did were in between him and where the assassins had been, which meant trying to go up and over to get to them was pointless.

As he quickly debated what his next move was, Kay mentally acknowledged the assassins’ skills. This is a good counter to what they know about me, and I don’t want to let out what my tier-five Class lets me do, so they’ve hampered me quite a bit with this. I can’t overwhelm them with my simulacra if I don’t know where they are, and I’d bet money that this maze is a standardized one they already know the layout of. It looks random to me, but I doubt it actually is. And…

Kay sidestepped, moving away from the source of movement he’d just caught out of the corner of his eye. The shadow user’s rapier went through the air where Kay’s arm would have been, and he could see the man’s eyes narrow in frustration above his cloth mask before he dove into another plot of shadowy ground. Kay had felt his simulacra seemingly burst like water balloons, starting with the one wrestling with the shadow user, then each of the others in quick succession.

The light crystals and the confusing layout make their ‘field’ the perfect setup for the stabby one to make hit-and-run attacks against me until they wear me down. The flashing lights also give him temporary shadows to pop out of so that I can’t set myself up in a defensive position and watch the shadows in front of me; they keep moving. These guys are good.

Several more attacks came from random directions and, at random intervals, aimed all over Kay’s body with debilitating strikes and attacks he was sure were meant to kill him in one hit mixed in with a number of smaller attacks of opportunity at limbs and open gaps. After multiple attempts to try and hit back, all of them either missing or being dodged, thanks to the assassin having the advantage in both timing and positioning, Kay decided to take a risk. Backing up, he put his back to a wall so that he was facing the largest concentration of shadows possible. That put a much smaller area that the assassin could dive out of in his blind spot. He hoped that it looked like he didn’t realize it was there or that he was prioritizing the most likely avenue of attack, trying to bait out a strike he could predict.

There was a pause in the attacks, and then things changed again. A volley of heavy bolts arced up and over the walls surrounding him, and Kay was forced to move to dodge several of them. In a shorter period than the crossbow user’s previous reload time, another volley came, then another, all larger and faster than previous evidence had shown was possible. There was either a previously unknown Skill in play, or something else had changed while Kay couldn’t see. Kay managed to cut down a swathe of bolts in each wave, but there were anywhere from eight to a dozen per volley, and he had to dodge a few each time. As he kept moving step by step to not get impaled by flying bits of metal, Kay knew they were trying to herd him. Immediately deciding to not do what his enemies wanted, Kay threw up a wall of blood that floated in the air above him. The next wave of bolts pattered like rain across it as the sharp, armor-piercing heads jutted through, glinting ominously at him.

I’m just going to fort up. They’re on a time limit, and I’m not, so I’ll just wrap myself up nice and cozy in a little house and-

The rapier-wielding assassin leapt out of a corner directly in front of Kay, the point of his blade aimed at Kay’s eye line. There was no time to get his arms in position to counter with a weapon, but he also didn’t need to. Spears erupted from the bottom of the floating wall, creating an impromptu spike trap descending from the sky that slammed the assassin into the ground, riddled with holes. Instead of dropping to the ground, dead and/or bleeding, the body dispersed into a shadowy blob that melted away like black mist.

Dammit, is that a cheat death or a fake? If-

Something slammed into Kay’s back with enough force to send him flying forward, tumbling off his feet end over end. As he flipped through the air, he made out the top half of the shield-slinging assassin poking up out of a shadow, his shield glowing with the same color as the mage’s magic, with the shadow jumper holding onto his shoulder. Kay slammed into a wall hard enough to crack the stone, and only his last-second reinforcement of his armor kept bones from breaking. Before he could get back to his feet, a bubble of energy wrapped around him. He pushed against it, but it pushed back, stretching like rubber until he couldn’t get it to give anymore.

“Hurry up!” The mage sprinted out from behind a wall and slammed his hand against the barrier. “We don’t have much time!” Two protrusions stretched out from the bubble, turning into funnels at the end.

“What’s the big deal?” The rapier wielder stepped out of a shadow next to the mage, “We’ve finally got him trapped; we just have to finish it.” He reached into a shadow against a wall and dragged the last assassin through while the armored man walked closer.

“We don’t have much time!” The mage insisted, gesturing with his free hand for them to hurry up, “My barrier is going to go down at any moment?”

The crossbow wielder, still silent, pulled two bottles, one full of dark blue, almost black liquid and the other containing a fluid that was a light green color, and poured them into the two funnels. The liquids quickly flowed down the tubes and stopped at the edge of the bubble, trapping Kay at roughly the same spot. The mage gestured, and the two liquids flowed into the barrier and began to mix. As the two substances began to combine, a dark green gas began to slowly puff up into the enclosed space, billowing up faster and faster as more of both liquids began to mix together.

Kay sent a pulsing wave of blood out that slammed into place around the gas. A river of crimson liquid continuously flowed from his veins into his shaped armor and out into the air to contract around the unknown gas and seal it away from him. His full concentration was on whatever this final move the assassins were making was, but he could just make out what they were saying as they argued.

“We need to make sure he dies. We can’t get paid without confirmation.”

“Fuck getting paid!” The mage screamed back into the rapier user’s face, “We need to leave so we don’t die!” He brandished his staff in the other man’s face. “I’ve only got one crystal left, and whoever’s out there has been breaking them in one hit! We need to leave!” There was a small blue crystal implanted into the wood of the mage’s staff that glowed faintly. Right after he finished talking, the crystal’s internal light pulsed, and then the entire diamond-shaped stone shattered into dust. The skin of the mage’s face above his mask went bone white. “We need to go, now!”

“He’s holding back the gas.” The crossbow wielder finally spoke, exposing herself as the assassination team’s only woman, “I chose a formula that can eat through blood, but it’s going to take a few minutes to kill him with the level of damage he’s shown he can take. We leave.”

“Fuck!” The shadowy man kicked the ground, “I hate this shit!” He whipped his head around to glare at Kay through the bubble. “You-“

“No.” The woman shot him a glare, “Cut that shit out.”

“Argh!” He grabbed the back of his head and shouted in anger before spinning around away from Kay, “Fine, you’re right. This is why we get deposits up front.” He took a deep breath and held his arms out from his sides. “Gather up we-“

With a massive cacophony that sounded like a glass being dropped and shattering but magnified a thousand times, the large barrier surrounding the floor of the arena and keeping reinforcements from coming to help Kay shattered into twinkling fragments that rained from the sky, echoing the glittery dust left behind from the mage’s crystal shattering.

The assassins lunged toward each other, huddling close while the shadow user wrapped his arms around his comrades. “[A Walk in the Shade]!” The man’s shadow grew, swelling like a massive balloon, and wrapped around the group, completely covering them and hiding them from sight. A second passed, and the bulging dome of darkness silently popped and vanished.

With the disappearance of the assassins, the smaller barrier trapping Kay vanished. Panicking slightly at the sudden change in status, Kay wrapped the two liquids that were about to splash onto the ground in more blood, then solidified the entire mass that contained them and compressed it into the smallest, toughest shape he could. The dark red sphere thunked into the ground as he mentally let go of it.

A flash of movement above him had Kay looking up. He saw Eleniah standing at the top of the tallest wall that the assassins had grown, rapidly scanning the area. He waved his arm and started waving at her. She spotted him a moment later and shoved off of the rock wall with enough force to shatter it. The ground where she landed cratered around him, but she ignored the damage and sprinted directly at him.

“I’m fine.” He insisted before she could even speak.

Her eyes desperately scanned him up and down. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. They hit me a few times, but nothing I can’t or haven’t already healed from.”

“I’m sorry.”

Kay pulled back and looked down at her, shocked by her sudden, defeated tone. “What?”

“I’m part of your team; I’m supposed to help when you get attacked like that. I couldn’t get through the barrier, and you were all alone fighting assassins with a tier-six mage and-“

“None of them were tier-six.” Kay interrupted, “The one that could jump between shadows was tier-five because he used a Class Skill to get them out of here, but there’s no way I would have defended myself this well if they had a tier-six. Kept myself alive, maybe. Kept them at basically a standstill and got away almost uninjured? No chance.

“They had to have been tier-six; I’d have broken a tier-five or lower barrier in way less than eleven hits; the fact that I didn’t means that the mage was at least one tier higher than me.”

“Oh, that’s what you mean. No, while they had me trapped over here, they were arguing about whether to stick around and make sure to kill me or run for it, and the mage was shouting that they needed to get out because someone was destroying his barrier in one hit and then some crystal he had broke, and that was his last one. He was probably using some disposable items to take the damage for the barrier so that it lasted longer.”

“That’s possible?” She asked quietly.

He shrugged, “I guess? There’s no way any of them were tier-six, though; they were way too scared of you coming after them after you broke the barrier for real, and they wouldn’t have been as cautious with me as they were if they out-tiered me.”

“Well, good.” Eleniah took a deep, fortifying breath before smiling at him. It was a much better look on her face, even if it was tinged with leftover worry and fear. “I guess congratulations are in order for surviving your first real assassination attempt.”

“I’m kind of pissed they got away, actually.”

“They wanted to kill you, and you lived; that’s a win in any book.” She chided him.

They both turned to look as Blood Guard and Wardens flooded the area, the main contingent of them rushing their way with a smaller group headed to the edge of the arena.

“Did that duelist survive?”

“Quenrev of Vaihren, if that’s his real name? Yeah, he was over in that direction, cramming himself against the barrier.”

“Great. Well, he ruined my day twice over now; let’s hope he can shed some light on who hired him and those assassins. That team seemed like professionals, so I doubt he really knows enough about them for us to hunt them down, but if we can pump him for info, we might learn more about who’s willing to pay for my death.”