The jagged rocks of the plateau offered no comfort as the girl, trembling beneath my blood-grip, finally found her voice. she wheezed, her crimson eyes flickering with a mixture of terror and defiance
"Vanessa... Vanessa Katt, I'm just... a member... he's at the—"
The air suddenly thrummed with a heavy, rhythmic beat. My green eye darted upward just as a massive shadow blotted out the moon. A second pterodactyl roared overhead, but this one carried a mountain of a man. He clutched a spiked iron mace that looked heavy enough to crush a gatehouse.
As I gripped Vanessa's collar, didn't let her hypnotic magic touch my skin, I used inspect on the man.
Victor Katt
Skills: Fear manipulation
Vitality: 4000
Strength: 5200
Defense: 2000
Agility: 4300
Mana: 5000
Fear manipulation- able to manipulate fear onto the person's body just by looking at their eyes.
As I was scanning through his data more often, he screamed through the midnight sky like a predator.
"DON'T TOUCH MY SISTER!"
The man, Victor Katt, didn't wait for a landing. He leaped from the beast's back, the sheer weight of his descent turning him into a falling meteor. I tried to roll, but the impact was too fast. The mace caught me square in the side of the head with a sickening crack of bone.
I was launched off the cliff face, the world turning into a kaleidoscope of gray stone and black sky.
As I fell, Vanessa didn't miss her chance for revenge.
"Die, you monster!" she screamed.
She thrust her hands downward, conjuring a massive deluge of thick, black tar that coated me mid-air, pinning my wings and binding my limbs. Before I could even hit the ground, a spark of her fire magic ignited the sludge.
An inferno erupted. The heat was blinding. My cloak, my nightgown, and my very skin were scorched away in a roar of chemical flames. I hit a lower ledge with a bone-shattering thud, a charred, smoking husk of a person.
I lay there in the dark, the blood in my chest is boiling. But the Lifesteal I had taken from the pterodactyl and the cyclops earlier was still surging through my veins. I felt the agonizing, itchy crawl of cells knitting back together. New, pale skin stretched over raw muscle. I was exposed, naked and raw, but the fire had died out against the cold obsidian.
From the ledge far above, their voices drifted down in the mountain wind.
"Vanessa! Are you okay?" Victor's voice boomed, thick with protective rage.
"Yes... Brother. She's... she's dead, right? No one survives that."
I didn't give them the satisfaction of a reply. I stood up, my body slick with the remnants of the tar and new life. I focused my mana, the blood from my core pouring out to reform my Blood Wings. This time, I didn't make them elegant. I made them huge, jagged, and terrifying, a crimson shroud to cover my nudity.
I launched myself back into the sky, a silent, vengeful streak of red. I crested the ledge again just as they were preparing to mount Victor's beast.
The siblings froze. They didn't see a girl. They saw a scarred phantom rising from the abyss, wings dripping with boiling ichor. My green eye locked onto Victor. He had protected his sister; now, he would have to see if his mace could crush a shadow that refused to stay in the grave.
The air on the high plateau was thin and freezing, but I didn't feel the cold. The Lifesteal effect was still knitting my skin together, though I stood exposed, wrapped only in the protective, shifting cowl of my own Blood Wings.
I dove. My crimson sword, a jagged sliver of solidified crimson ichor, whistled toward Vanessa's throat. In any combat hierarchy, you kill the mage first. But Victor was faster than his bulk suggested. With a roar of effort, he swung his massive iron mace, the impact ringing out like a cathedral bell as it parried my blade. Sparks flew, illuminating the raw, new skin on my face.
"Stay back, Vanessa!" Victor bellowed,
Vanessa didn't hesitate. She threw a torrent of black tar into the air, her fingers snapping to ignite it. I banked hard to the left, the heat of the firestorm singeing the tips of my wings as I retreated into the darkness of the cliffside, creating distance.
We stood in a tense triangle of death. Victor held his mace low, his breathing heavy, while Vanessa's hands glowed with a flickering, hungry violet flame.
"You were sent by the Bureau, weren't you? A lapdog sent to clean up the Immoral mess?"
I stood silent, my single green eye fixed on them. My glasgow smile was a dark, carved line in the moonlight. I couldn't explain that the Bureau didn't own me, that I was here for a debt written in the ashes of the Flower Manor.
Vanessa stepped up beside her brother, her gaze scanning my blood-work with a terrifyingly clinical intensity.
"Look at her, Victor. That's not just magic. It's Blood Manipulation... advanced sorcery. To mold a limb and wings from your own marrow... that is the absolute pinnacle of the craft. She's a monster."
Victor's eyes widened as he leaned in, staring past my scars. he whispered, the rage in his voice replaced by a sudden, chilling realization.
"Wait, those green eyes. That hair... even through the burns... I know that look. She's related to the Shadow Walker, **Elias**."
The mention of his name hit me harder than any mace ever could. The blood in my chest pulsed with a sudden, agonizing heat. They knew him. They knew the man who had been my world before the fire.
Victor lowered his mace an inch, his expression twisting into a cruel, knowing smirk.
"So, the little sister survived Tata, is all over the bureau that you died, tell me, girl, does your brother still scream in his sleep, or did Cameron finally silence him for good?"
I felt my blood turn to ice. My wings expanded, the crimson ichor darkening to a deep, bruised purple as my mana began to spiral out of control. They weren't just knights, they were the ones who had watched my world burn.
The world slowed to a crawl as my brother's name echoed in the mountain air. My blood wasn't just my weapon anymore, it was my rage.
I lunged. My blood sword descended in a shimmering arc, and as Victor raised his mace to parry the heavy blow, I executed the trap. My left mutilated arm, the one made of translucent crimson ichor, shifted mid-swing.
With the use of the fifth evolution blood manipulation, the hand dissolved and reformed into a jagged, razor-thin dagger. As our main weapons locked with a shower of sparks, I drove the blood-dagger toward his throat.
Victor let out a grunt of surprise, twisting his torso at the last millisecond. The blade grazed his neck, drawing a thin line of red, but he countered with the raw brutality of a veteran. He hammered his boot into my stomach, the force of the blow folding me in half.
As I gasped for air, Victor didn't follow up with a strike. He did something worse. He lowered his head, and his black irises began to swirl like a localized storm.
"Fear!" he whispered.
He used his human skill, fear manipulation to control my fears clearly, It hit me like a physical wave of ice. My mind, already fragile from the trauma of the salt cellar and the Flower Manor and the fears within me, began to fracture. I saw the fire. I saw Miera's decapitated head and gouged out eyes. I saw the shadow of Cameron Gal looming over a broken Elias. My knees buckled, and for a split second, I wasn't an S-rank bounty hunter, I was a terrified girl in a burning room.
"Got you," Victor growled.
He swung the mace with everything he had. The iron spikes smashed directly into my face. My skull shattered with a sickening crunch, my vision exploding into white light and crimson streaks. Simultaneously, Vanessa's voice rose in a shrill incantation.
"Tar Creation!"
A deluge of boiling tar rained down on me, followed by a lick of flame. In that moment of near-death, my instincts took over where my conscious mind had failed. I wrapped my blood wings around my body like a macabre cocoon. The tar hit the wings, the intense heat melting the crimson feathers into a bubbling, protective sludge. My wings were being sacrificed, the ichor boiling away to shield my raw, naked skin from the fire.
I collapsed onto the obsidian floor, a heap of melting blood and broken bone.
Victor stepped forward, his mace dripping with my gore. He grabbed me by the throat with one hand, hoisting my limp, broken body up until we were eye-to-eye. He wanted to see the life fade. He locked his gaze onto mine, intensifying the Fear Manipulation, pouring every ounce of his dark magic into my single green eye.
"Look at me, little sister, see the abyss that swallowed your family. Die knowing you were too weak to even hear his final words."
The fear manipulation grew tighter, recalling all the past events in the salt cellar, where Dominik cut all of my left toes and feed it to me, such humiliation after I ate that toe, calling me a parasite of self cannibalism, I was depressed at this point, knowing that his skill manipulates everyone fears.
Suddenly, a sudden reminder echoed through my head, it was Plasma.
"Fight it Eirene, all of these fears was just an illusion. Focus on the combat." Plasma muttered
My broken jaw began to knit together with a wet, grinding sound. My hand, the one made of real flesh, slowly reached up and gripped his wrist.
I didn't make a sound, but the message in my gaze was loud enough to shake the mountain:
"You shouldn't have looked so close." I thought
The mountain peak erupted in a pillar of black fire. Vanessa's tar pool turned the obsidian ledge into a furnace, the flames licking high into the midnight sky. Victor watched with a grim, triumphant sneer, certain that he had finally incinerated the ghost of the Flower Manor.
But the fire was consuming nothing but air.
In the split second before the ignition, I had tapped into my newly acquired skill, it is the most deceptive trait.
"Eirene, now!"
I cast my Illusion of Cariñosa, a after image effect, leaving a shimmering, heat-distorted copy of my broken body in the center of the tar. While they gloated over the burning silhouette, I masked my presence entirely, moving like a ripple in the wind.
In this world, Cariñosa wasn't popular, humans who possessed this skill will learn this dance on their own, the scripture didn't have labels of dance steps of Cariñosa. Only experienced dancers who knew the steps will only perform this skill. But me, who lived on earth for nearly 17 years has mastered these steps easily, and still, I remembered all the steps easily. Making this human skill viable for distraction.
I appeared directly behind Vanessa.
She didn't even have time to gasp. My blood-arm, sharpened into a jagged piercer, drove straight through her back and out her chest. She screamed painfully, and to top it all off, I opened my fangs and drank a portion of Vanessa's blood.
[Drain Activated Extraction Completed consumed one liter of blood]
[DNA copied you can shapeshift into Vanessa Katt]
I didn't just wound her; I drank. Her essence flowed into me like a cold, rushing river, knitting my shattered skull and charred skin back together in a violent burst of regeneration. Vanessa's eyes rolled back, her purple rings shattering as her mana was forcibly siphoned into my core.
"VANESSA!"
Victor's scream was a guttural roar of pure agony. Seeing his sister's life-force being drained by a bounty hunter shattered his restraint. He didn't just use his Fear Manipulation, he detonated it. He threw his gaze into mine, screaming a taunt that echoed off the peaks, a psychic shockwave designed to paralyze my very soul.
The sheer volume of his grief and rage acted as a physical weight. For a second, the world turned gray, and my connection to my blood-arm flickered.
Victor didn't waste that second. He lunged, swinging his massive mace in a wide, desperate arc. He wasn't aiming for a tactical strike, he was aiming to pulverize the mountain itself. The iron head smashed into my temple with the force of a falling star.
The world went black.
I fell away from Vanessa, my body hitting the cold stone with a dull thud, unconscious before I even touched the ground.
"You monster... you'll pay for this," Victor wheezed,
Victor's voice trembling as he scooped up his sister's limp, pale form. He could see her chest still moving barely, but she was fading fast. He didn't dare stay to finish me, he knew that if I woke up again, he wouldn't have the strength to stop me a third time.
He let out a piercing whistle. His pterodactyl dived from the clouds, and with a grunt of exertion, Victor climbed onto its back, clutching Vanessa to his chest.
"We're going to Cameron, he's the only one who can fix this."
The beast beat its wings, carrying the siblings away into the southern darkness. I remained on the ledge, a naked, scarred figure lying amidst the cooling tar and shattered stone, the silence of the Caria Mountains finally returning as the moon began its descent.
I watched through a haze of pain as the shadow of the pterodactyl grew smaller against the moon. My fingers clawed at the cold obsidian, my heart thrashing in my chest like a trapped bird.
"Not yet. They can't leave yet." I thought
I tried to summon my blood wings, but the air only shimmered with a weak, sickly crimson mist. The wings had taken the brunt of Vanessa's fire and Victor's crushing blows, they were too complex, too mana-intensive to knit back together in seconds like my skin or bones. The blood in my chest felt cold and drained.
With a snarl of silent frustration, I forced my body upright. My legs shook, and my vision swam, but I molded my remaining blood into a blood bow. My one mutilated blood arm shook as it pulled the string, my one real hand arm straining to hold the arc steady.
Thwip. Thwip. Thwip
I fired three, four, five arrows of solidified ichor into the night sky. They hissed through the air, red streaks chasing the retreating beast, but the distance was too great. The arrows lost their momentum, arching downward and dissolving into red mist before they could even graze the pterodactyl's leathery tail.
I dropped the bow. It splattered into a puddle of useless gore on the stone.
I stood there, naked and shivering on the high mountain ledge, watching the only link to Cameron vanish into the southern horizon. Victor's words, "He's the only one who can fix this" echoed in my mind. They were going to Cameron Gal.
I let out a ragged, silent breath, my single green eye burning with a cold, renewed purpose. They thought they had escaped, but they had actually done me a favor. They had given me a trail.
I knelt and began to gather the scraps of my scorched cloak that hadn't been incinerated. I was broken, I was exhausted, and I was alone in the freezing dark, but I was still an S-rank bounty hunter.
"Next time…. Next time, there will be no brother to save you, and no sky high enough to hide in."