Chapter 83: Seris Ravenveil [2]
On the far side of the pass, the vampire army hit Nicholas, Leon, and Roselle like a dark wave.
"They’re moving!" Leon was already on his feet, mana crackling hard around his arms.
Nicholas tightened his sword hand and looked sideways at Roselle.
She hadn’t moved.
Her eyes were still on Seris. Still processing the thing she’d just watched happen — the transformation, the blood absorbing into pale skin, the ears, the uniform dissolving into something that had clearly always existed underneath. Two years of knowing someone, and none of it had reached this.
"Roselle." Nicholas’s voice came out tight.
She did not hear him.
"Roselle!"
Still no answer. Her lower lip had started to tremble.
"ROSELLE!"
The shout cut through. She blinked, turned toward him, and the look on her face was the specific look of someone whose mind had just snapped back into a body it had been absent from.
"I’m sorry," she said quietly. "I—"
"I know." Nicholas’s voice came down from the shout, firm but real. His eyes moved briefly toward where Seris and Augustus had already clashed in the distance. "This is hard to accept. I understand that." He looked back at her directly. "But she could have let that blood hit us. She could have protected herself and let us take it. She didn’t."
Roselle looked at Seris’s silhouette against the pale mountain sky.
"Whatever questions you have—" Nicholas turned back toward the approaching horde, the golden aura around his blade beginning to rise, "save them. We have an army of vampires a few meters away and closing."
Leon raised both fists, blue-white mana erupting around his knuckles. "Finally something I can actually—"
Nicholas looked at him sideways.
Leon looked at his glowing fists.
"...Right. I’m a mage."
Nicholas exhaled through his nose. "Sometimes I genuinely wonder how you ranked seventh."
"HEY—!"
The vampire front line reached them.
Nicholas’s aura erupted in a full roar of heat and he moved into it.
Leon sent a barrage of arc spells ahead of the charge to scatter the formation.
Roselle wove defensive arrays in overlapping strokes and pushed forward beside them.
On the other side of the pass:
CLANG.
The scythe met the sword and the shockwave tore through the snow like something had detonated beneath the surface. The impact pushed Seris back, her boots digging shallow lines into the ice, until she caught her balance and stood her ground.
Augustus barely yielded an inch.
He straightened slowly, the vicious smile settling across his altered face. "I have to admit. You’re stronger than I expected. For a vampire hiding in human clothes."
Seris said nothing.
Her grip on the scythe tightened.
’He’s considerably stronger than before.’ The transformation hadn’t just changed his appearance — his physical output had surged. The red mana coating his body pulsed continuously, reinforcing his frame with something that didn’t follow the rules of human strength.
She took a measured breath.
’I haven’t fed in a week... and on top of that, there was something mixed into that rainfall blood that’s making me weaker.’
A vampire of her standing, going seven days without blood — against an ordinary opponent it would be manageable. Against Augustus empowered by rogue blood magic, it was becoming the most dangerous fact on the field.
Her reactions were fractionally slower than they should be. Her mana reserves were draining faster than the pace of the fight warranted. She could feel it in the weight of the scythe, in the slight delay between reading an attack and responding to it.
’If this drags out, I lose before he runs out of energy.’
Augustus rested his sword casually over his shoulder and looked at her standing in the snow with the expression of someone enjoying a delay.
"What happened?" He tilted his head. "Don’t tell me that’s all the Vice-President has."
Seris held his gaze. Said nothing.
’He’s provoking me deliberately.’ She began to see the other side of it too. ’No. He’s actually holding back. He wants this to last.’
BOOM.
He vanished.
The snow where he’d been standing exploded into mist and he crossed the gap in under a heartbeat — the sword coming in from the right, crackling crimson lightning wrapped around the blade, a dark red trail following the arc.
’It’s fast.’ Seris shifted her weight left immediately, left foot sliding back, the scythe coming up in a hard parry.
CLANG.
The lightning-wrapped steel struck black metal and sparks burst outward in every direction. The raw physical weight of the blow traveled through her arms and she absorbed it without giving ground, using the point of contact as a pivot.
Her right leg whipped around in a tight arc toward his exposed ribs.
Augustus’s eyes dropped for a fraction of a second.
He released the sword pressure and twisted just enough to let her boot graze across his side instead of landing clean. His free hand came down like a trap closing.
His fingers closed around her ankle.
’Tch.’
"Careless, Seris!" The grin was all teeth.
He yanked her leg upward with a force that felt entirely wrong. It was far more strength than a demi-vampire should possess, and much more than the transformation itself could explain.
Seris left the ground entirely, the scythe slipping from her grip as the world inverted.
She tucked her limbs in hard, arrested the rotation midair, got her left boot down first—
BOOM.
She hit crouching, one knee nearly in the snow, the impact blowing a ring of frost outward around her. She pressed one hand to the ground and stayed in the crouch, exhaling sharp, and pushed her hair back from her face.
Augustus was already walking toward her. Sword over his shoulder. Footfalls heavy and unbothered.
"Is that really all?" He slowed as he closed the last few meters. "You’re a full-blooded vampire. Why does fighting you feel like I’m fighting someone running at half capacity?"
She didn’t answer that. Her limbs felt heavy as the exhaustion settled in. It was the steep price of maintaining her unsealed form at full power while completely starved of what her body needed.
He came to a stop just ahead of her crouching form.
"Come on." He lowered the blade slightly, the manic light in his eyes doing something that wasn’t quite patience. "At least give me something worth remembering before I finish this."
Seris began to push herself upright.
Augustus moved first.
His boot swung out in a savage kick aimed straight at her face with full force.
THUD.
His boot smashed into the side of her jaw. Her head snapped sideways with the force of it, and her body followed — spinning off the ground, crashing down onto the frozen terrain, rolling several meters through the snow before stopping still.
The bruise appeared almost immediately across her pale cheek, dark and swollen against white skin.
Silence around that section of the pass.
From the other side of the battlefield, Roselle looked up.
Her voice came out quiet and horrified.
"Senior Seris—"
Leon turned. His chest dropped.
"Vice-President!"