Chapter 82: Seris Ravenveil [1]
Seris’s stance shifted before Augustus finished his first sentence.
"What exactly is the meaning of this." Her voice cut through the mountain wind. "What are you doing."
Augustus looked down at her from the cliff edge with the particular expression of someone who has decided they’re done performing patience.
"You’ve grown arrogant," he said, his pointed ears shifting slightly with the wind. "You’ve even forgotten how to speak to your betters."
Before Seris could answer, a heavily armored vampire at his side stepped forward. "Your Highness. We don’t have time for pleasantries. We had an agreement."
Augustus shot him an irritated sideways look. "I remember." His eyes dropped back to the road below. "Once we’re done here, we march on the academy."
Nicholas took a hard step forward. "You’re planning to attack the academy with a vampire army?"
Augustus laughed. The crimson aura around his body pulsed with it. "Why not? I’m done pretending to be the dutiful prince."
Seris didn’t speak. Her eyes stayed on him but her mind was already moving.
’He must have gone straight to Korvath, reaching out to the rogue factions and pulling in the blood cultists.’ The picture assembled itself fast and ugly. ’This isn’t Father’s doing, he wouldn’t burn the covert operation this openly. Augustus went on his own, made his own deal, and took whatever power they offered him and came back for revenge against Alden.
And to finish what he started with me.’
"ATTACK!"
The vampire commander drew a broadsword and the order cracked across the pass like a thunderclap. The army erupted. Dozens of armored figures poured down the slopes, their heavy footfalls sending vibration through the frozen ground.
Leon’s exhaustion vanished. Pale-blue mana flooded his hands, complex circles forming in the space of a breath. "Looks like talking’s done."
SCHWING!
Nicholas drew his sword, fire coating the blade edge. Roselle raised both hands, weaving defensive arrays in rapid overlapping strokes.
Seris extended one hand.
Dark mana condensed in the cold air before her and a massive scythe materialized — raven-black, the curved edge catching what light reached the pass in a thin lethal line.
"Don’t let a single one of them reach the academy."
"Understood." All three answered without hesitation.
The front line of vampires reached the road.
And then stopped.
The first rank raised open palms toward the sky. Dense red liquid pooled in their hands, dark and viscous and wrong.
WHOOSH. WHOOSH. WHOOSH.
Hundreds of crimson spheres launched upward in long arcing trajectories, tracing across the grey sky before curving down toward the four people below.
"Don’t let those touch you!" Seris’s voice came out sharp and urgent, stripping the composure bare. "That’s high-density vampire blood — if it contacts bare skin it acts as a corrosive curse. Don’t let it—"
"How do we dodge a rainstorm?!" Leon stared up at the sky filling with falling red.
"We don’t." Roselle was already moving beside him. "We destroy them."
Leon’s mana erupted from his core and a translucent blue dome expanded over all four of them. Roselle pressed both palms into the spell’s edge and fed her own energy into it, reinforcing the weave where the pressure was heaviest.
"Hold the edges stable—"
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
The spheres hit the barrier in a violent continuous cascade. Each impact sent shockwaves rippling across the dome’s surface, the dark blood hissing and sizzling against the magic before burning off in red steam.
Nicholas scanned the gaps. "The ones going around the sides—"
"Nico, Senior Seris. Please handle them." Roselle gritted through her teeth, sweat already appearing on her forehead.
Nicholas charged the flank. His blade cut upward through a sphere before it hit the ground, the burning edge slicing it clean. Another curved around the rear — Seris was already there, the scythe cutting through it in one fluid arc, the dark fluid scattering harmlessly into the snowbank.
For a few seconds, the defense held.
Then Leon dropped to one knee.
Roselle’s head snapped toward him. "Leon?!"
He had one hand pressed to his chest, coughing hard, his breathing going ragged and fast. "Something’s wrong with my mana—"
Seris looked at the barrier overhead.
A thin dark layer was moving through the magic matrix itself — not hitting the surface, seeping through it, the blood dissolving the spell’s structure from the outside inward.
"Leon!" She moved immediately. "It has anti-magic properties! It is dissolving your barrier from the inside. Drop the spell!"
He looked up at the sky still full of falling red. "If I drop it now—"
"Drop it. I have a plan."
He met her eyes. Whatever he saw there was enough.
He snapped his hands back.
The dome shattered.
The blood rain came straight down.
"Senior—!" Nicholas raised his sword with nowhere near enough reach.
"Get down." Seris stepped directly in front of all three of them, arms spreading wide. "All of you. Now."
Leon, Roselle, and Nicholas hit the ground.
Pitch-black mana erupted from Seris in a single concentrated burst, creating a shadow barrier that sealed tightly around the three students behind her to keep them completely protected.
The falling blood struck the dark shield and ran off its surface like water off stone.
And turned toward the only unprotected target left.
It rained on her.
Nicholas looked up from inside the shadow barrier. His breath caught.
Seris stood between them and the sky, fully exposed, the crimson blood striking her skin — and instead of burning, it absorbed. Vanished into her, as though her body recognized it. Her hands shook with the sheer volume of dark mana entering her at once, and she felt the seal she’d maintained for months begin to crack under the pressure.
’I can’t let them die here.’ Her fingers tightened around the scythe.
’Even if I have to reveal myself.’
BOOM.
The shockwave tore outward from her core with no warning, violent and blood-red, hitting the air in every direction and blowing the dark clouds from the pass in a single pulse. The snow around her feet cracked from the pressure alone. The road surface fractured outward in a ring.
Her academy uniform dissolved. The fabric tore and reshaped — obsidian-black, gothic, crimson trim along every edge, the formal elegance of something that had always existed underneath the human disguise and was finally being allowed to breathe. Her silver-white hair surged outward in the violent wind, longer than it had been, moved by an aura rather than weather.
Her ears elongated. The human shape gave way to something unmistakably else.
Her eyes opened.
Burning ruby.
The blood rain stopped.
Absolute silence descended on the mountain pass.
Nicholas couldn’t move.
Roselle had both hands over her mouth, tears she hadn’t decided to cry pressing at the corners of her eyes.
Leon’s mind had stopped working entirely. "...Senior... Seris?"
The figure standing before them was not the composed, slightly mysterious Vice-President of Astral Academy’s Student Council.
It was a vampire noble. Full-blooded. The pressure coming off her was a different category of presence from anything they’d stood near before.
High on the cliff, Augustus’s smug expression had frozen.
Then his eyes went wide with something past surprise. The grin that spread across his face stretched past what his usual expressions managed.
"Wait." His voice dropped to a whisper. "You’re actually a vampire."
Seris didn’t answer. Her eyes locked onto him.
"All this time." His laugh sounded unhinged, but not because it was loud. It was barely held together, like he was completely losing control. "You were a bloodsucker." He shook his head slowly. "You fooled everyone. Even me."
BOOM.
He dropped from the cliff and hit the road in front of her. The ground shattered on impact, snow and stone blasting outward in every direction.
He straightened up slowly. His golden hair had come loose in the fall. His fangs caught the pale light. The crimson mana around him pulsed with each breath like something alive.
"You weren’t even human," he said, quieter now, his voice carrying a different register than it had used all day. "You were hiding under that pretty human mask the entire time."
He drew his sword.
The blade was coated in dried blood that hadn’t come from any of them.
He pointed it at her chest.
"Let’s see what you can actually do." He took one step forward. His eyes were burning. "As a full-blooded vampire."
Seris lowered into her stance.
The scythe trailed behind her as the crimson aura rose from her frame.
She looked at him with the eyes that had stopped pretending to be anything else.
"Come find out."
BOOM.
Both of them vanished into streaks of red — and the weapon clash that followed hit the surrounding mountainside hard enough to crack it.