Lin stepped forward, the rubble grinding beneath her boots. The air in the ruined church was thick with the smell of old dust.
"So you made this old rundown church as filth is your laboratory."
She didn't wait for an answer. She was just a blur of motion. Her fist connected with Dorama's jaw with a wet, satisfying crack.
The force lifted him off his feet and slammed him into the stone wall. Cracks spiderwebbed out from the impact.
She didn't watch him fall. She turned, her knives flashing in the weak light, slicing through the crude bindings on the captives.
"Run. Now."
Some stumbled toward the shattered entrance, sobbing. Others didn't move. They just stood, their eyes empty wells, staring at nothing.
A low, wet chuckle echoed from the dust.
"How… dare you."
Dorama rose. Blood streamed from a deep gash on his scalp, matting his hair. He tilted his head, and his neck emitted a series of sickening pops and cracks as it realigned.
He caught a trickle of blood on his finger and brought it to his mouth, his tongue darting out.
"Tell me where's the boy you were with today? Ohh not here I pity you. He'll miss the main event."
He snapped his fingers.
The hollow-eyed victims who had not fled shuffled forward, moving as one. They formed a silent, shambling wall between Dorama and Lin.
There was no soul behind their stares. They were empty vessels, their life energy drained away. Puppets on strings of stolen vitality.
"Are you responsible for this?" Lin's voice was low, a deadly calm over a core of boiling rage.
"Responsible? Yes. They're my experiments after all " Dorama's smile was a gash of white in the gloom.
"They are my beautiful trials. My data. And soon, you will be my masterpiece."
Lin's world narrowed to a single, cold point of focus. Every instinct screamed. He's the source. "So it was you."
She exploded into motion. Dorama was ready. He flowed around her first strike like smoke, his movements eerily boneless. His foot lashed out, catching her in the ribs and launching her backward.
She crashed through the crumbling wall and landed in a roll on the rain-slicked grass outside, the cold night air a shock.
He was on her before she could fully rise, dropping from the broken roof ledge, a dark comet.
"Where is the sport in breaking an unarmed woman?"
Lin pushed to her feet, her hands finding the familiar hilts at her hips. "Who said I was unarmed?" With a twin shing, her knives cleared their sheaths.
As she spun them, the blades elongated, the metal shifting and flowing until she held two elegant, deadly short swords.
Dorama's pleasant facade shattered. His grin widened impossibly, splitting his face. His eyes flooded with a solid, hellish crimson. He moved. Not with speed, but with a wrong, dislocating swiftness. His fingernails darkened, lengthening into cruel, black claws that scraped grooves in the stone as he advanced.
Lin met his first claw-swipe with a crossed parry, sparks flying. She tried a counter-thrust, but he was already gone.
Instead of attacking her, he slammed his claws into the ground. Three waves of slicing dark energy erupted toward her, ripping through the flagstones and shearing a stone pillar in half with a sound like a dying giant.
The attack was a blur of lethal intent. Lin threw herself sideways. Searing pain bloomed across her back—a line of fire. One of her legs gave way, and she stumbled, catching herself on her sword.
"…!?"
"You look pale." Dorama stood calmly a few paces away. He raised his claws to his mouth, where a smear of her blood glistened. His tongue flicked out. He froze, his head tilting like a curious bird.
"The spiritual energy in your blood is faint.si it because you were poisoned. Viperis toxin, unless I'm mistaken." He swallowed, a shudder of pleasure running through him. "A rare vintage."
Lin's face became a mask of stone, giving him nothing.
"Your silence is confirmation enough." His eyes did something then—they twitched independently, a nauseating sight.
"Magnificent. The toxin has made your essence… pungent. You are worthy to be my uncanny harvest." His eyes locked onto hers, glowing with a deep, predatory red light.
Lin's mind raced, cold logic cutting through the pain. 'He sensed the fluctuation. Diagnosed the venom from a single taste. Could he be-…'
"You're a vampire aren't you."
"You guess right" Dorama said with a cold voice as grin crossed his face.
She forced her trembling leg to hold. With a sharp flick of her wrist, a fine, chain appeared from the hilt of her blade to the other blade. She didn't hesitate.
She lunged into the air, spinning her whole body. The chained blade became a whistling meteor. It didn't aim for Dorama—it struck the ground at his feet.
The impact was thunderous. The shockwave hit him like a physical wall, ruining his balance.
The following whip-crack of the chain brought the blade itself across his face, opening a clean slice on his cheek.
Dorama stumbled back, touching the wound. He stared at the blood on his fingers as if it were a profound insult. A low growl built in his throat.
"How dare you… MARK ME!"
A torrent of dark red, viscous energy erupted from him, which pulled Lin aback a step.
His face twisted, the wound on his cheek weeping fresh blood. His eyes solidified into pools of blood-red with pinprick white pupils. His body seemed to condense, his clothes hanging looser. He became a thing of wire-taut muscle and nightmare speed.
He vanished.
Lin felt the displacement of air behind her a millisecond late. She dropped, the claw passing over her head. She yanked the chain with all her strength.
Dorama, who had grabbed it, was pulled off-balance. He used the momentum, launching himself at her along the chain's path, a living spear.
Slice—
The world was a whirl of dust and pain. When it cleared, Lin was on one knee, breathing hard. Fresh blood traced paths down her back and leg.
Gritting her teeth, she spun the chain in a wide, defensive circle, creating a barrier of humming steel.
"Submit," Dorama hissed, his voice layered with other, older whispers. "Your end has been written. Secret Art: Blood Survants."
The ground where the crushed victims lay began to churn. Limbs, pale and slick, pushed through the rubble.
They rose—men, women, their faces slack and bloodless, their skin mapped with burning crimson veins. They moved with a single, jerking purpose.
They charged.
One of the women Lin had cut free minutes before, disoriented and terrified, stumbled into their path. "Please…stop this madness!"
The victims did not deviate. They washed over her. There was no scream, just a wet, tearing sound. When they passed, only a dark stain remained.
Lin's vision tunneled. The cold fire in her chest, the one she kept banked, roared to life.
"Forgive me," she whispered, not to the dead, but to her own resolve.
Her eyes ignited.
A blazing, radiant magenta light erupted from them, so bright it cast long, stark shadows. A visible aura—a corona of violent, heat-haze energy—shimmered into existence around her. The very air crackled.
She moved.
She was no longer a woman with a chain. She was the cutting edge of a storm. Every sweep of her weapon, every pivot of her body, drew a line of magenta light in the air. Where that light touched the Blood Survants, they didn't just fall.
They detonated, consumed from within by her overwhelming energy.
From the heart of the swirling magenta flames, Dorama emerged, shrieking with fury. His remaining arm bulged, distorted, the skin splitting.
It transformed into a gigantic, grotesque maw lined with rows of needle-teeth, large enough to swallow her whole.
Lin didn't flinch. Her will focused. The chain links of her weapons fused together with a series of sharp clicks. In her hands was no longer a flexible weapon, but a solid, double-bladed spear of dark metal.
She met his charge with a perfect, forward thrust.
Time seemed to hitch.
Dorama's monstrous arm separated cleanly at the shoulder. It flew through the air, dissolving into black sludge before it hit the ground. A fountain of dark blood sprayed from the stump. Lin's spearhead drove deep into the earth behind him, quivering.
"GHAA—!" Dorama's scream was raw, mortal agony.
Lin planted her feet, breathing in a controlled rhythm. She released the spear, leaving it impaled, and took a ready stance. The end was now.
Enraged beyond reason, Dorama lunged in a final, clumsy attack—but Lin was already gone.
He froze, mid-step. A network of precise, deep gashes opened across his chest, his arms, his thighs. Blood poured from a dozen new mouths. He looked down, bewildered.
Lin materialized behind him. She placed a boot on his back, yanked her spear free, and spun it once. The blades carved a humming, perfect circle of magenta light in the air.
"My experiment!" Dorama shrieked, bloody foam on his lips. "RISE! CRUSH HER!"
The ground directly beneath Lin erupted. A monstrous form, giggling with the sound of a hundred infants, clawed its way free. It was a colossal, malformed baby, its skin a patchwork of corpse-flesh and throbbing red veins.
Lin didn't look at it. Her entire being focused into her spear. A violent, scarlet aura erupted from her body, so intense the grass at her feet withered and turned to ash. The very ground smoldered.
"Divine Art," she intoned, the words resonating with power. "Crimson Moon."
The double blades of her spear glowed, condensing the aura into a blinding, magenta-white star at their points.
She hurled it.
"It's over."
"IT IS NOT OVER!" Dorama's body convulsed. He was changing, breaking apart. The stolen faces of his victims bubbled to the surface of his skin, forming screaming mouths. Hands, arms, torsos pushed out from his form in a grotesque, writhing mound of flesh and agony.
"THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING!"
The spear struck the center of the monstrous mass.
For a second, there was silence.
Then, a beam of pure crimson light, thin and hotter than the sun, lanced through Dorama, through the giant infant abomination, and into the sky. The light consumed them from the inside out. There was no explosion, only a silent, total incineration into drifting black ash.
The beam faded. The night rushed back in, colder and quieter than before.
"Finally," Lin exhaled. The word was a ragged, bloody thing. "You got… what you deserved."
The magenta light died in her eyes. The spear clattered from her numb fingers then turned into normal knives.
The world tilted, the edges of her vision darkening. Her legs simply stopped working.
She collapsed face-first onto the cold, scorched earth. The last thing she heard, fading under the roar in her ears, was the deliberate, crunching rhythm of footsteps approaching through the rubble.
"Not now…"