From start to finish, the whole exchange took perhaps two seconds.
Lindon stared after the crashes and explosions coming from inside the building. He shivered.
He couldn't have blocked a single one of those strikes. He would have died in an instant.
He'd started to think of Jai Long as close to Eithan's level, but the first step toward Underlord was nothing compared to the real thing.
“I say we leave,” Lindon said, moving to help Yerin walk. She waved him away, though she winced at the motion and her arm was starting to swell. He stayed next to her, just in case.
Cassias was in even worse shape, his eyes distant. Fisher Gesha nodded to Lindon's words, scuttling off to the side entrance of the building—the sounds from Eithan's fight had already grown distant, but she was still careful.
Slowly, Cassias shook his head. “Not yet. There are more coming.”
Lindon scanned the ground, but no new bloodspawn had risen. It looked as though the blood from Yerin and Cassias' injuries had been exhausted.
“Not ours,” Cassias said, and pointed to the edge of the cliff.
Where Longhook had first appeared, there were now a host of featureless heads popping over the edge. They clambered up with their malformed arms, but these seemed somehow different from the ones before.
The others had been slightly angular, with sharp features and long limbs. These were still made of blood madra, and still had no faces, but their bodies were twisted and gnarled. As though there were a skeleton of wood underneath. There was even a pattern in the flow of their crimson “skin,” where Lindon caught an impression of fluttering leaves.
His guess was confirmed an instant later, when one of the bloodspawn exploded into a branch of crimson vines covered in scarlet leaves. The vines rushed across the ground for them, like a nest of hungry snakes.
Next to him, Yerin shuddered. Her skin was even paler than usual—although that might have been the blood loss—and she clutched her master's sword in both hands. He had never seen her so panicked before.
“No, no, no,” she said. “Not this time.”
With a desperate shout, she slashed her white blade at the grasping vines. Lindon heard a sound like a bell, and something sliced at the edges of his robes.
The vines splattered to liquid madra, which quickly began to dissolve.
So did the ranks of the bloodspawn.
Lindon caught her with his left hand as she sagged, exhausted, but his sudden motion pulled loose the scripted band around the stump of his right arm. Pain flared back again, dull but immediate, and his eyes lost focus.
He fell to his knees, taking her with him.
She shook for a moment, then her eyes fastened on the space where his right hand had once been. “Your arm,” she said, looking up to him with wide eyes.
He forced a smile. “Better than my life, isn't it?”
“Doesn't make it smiles and rainbows just because you lived,” Yerin said. “Heavens know, I’m sorry. I’m just…” She looked back to the splashes of blood and shuddered again. “I am sorry.”
In mortal danger they may have been, but her sympathy warmed him even as it caught him unprepared. He thought she would say he should just bear it and stop complaining.
“I've been down that road,” she said, rolling her sleeve up to reveal a scar around her left elbow. “Lost both of them, to tell you true.” Another scar ringed her right wrist. “And chunks out of both legs so they hung there, useless as rust on a blade. It's no joke. Nothing worse than an itch on a limb you’ve already lost.”
“How did you get them back?” Lindon asked. As interested as he was in the powers of a Remnant arm, if he could get his own arm back...
“Master had a pill for everything. He could regrow a limb faster than a flower. Expensive, though, so he always made me work for it.”
She stood on her own now, and despite the blood running down her face, she seemed more like herself now than she had only a moment before. Lindon's missing arm had shaken her out of whatever had taken hold of her.
He looked to the still-vanishing puddles of blood madra. “Pardon, but have you seen these before?”
She went still for a moment before giving him a single nod. That lost expression returned. “I’ve seen them. Too much of them, when this showed up,” she said, clapping a hand to her stomach. “I guess it's time to—”
Then she seemed to realize her belt was missing. She stared down, dumbfounded, and felt around her waist. “Where is it? It can't just...crawl off...” She was starting to breathe quickly, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
A moment later, her breath returned to normal, but her shoulders slumped. “It's still there. Coiled like a worm in an apple.” Her lips twisted in disgust. “But somebody bottled it up. Eithan?”
“Eithan.”
Another explosion in the back of the mountain led to a rising column of smoke. “Let's go. We should be ready to leave when he wins.”
Another bloodspawn poked its head up the cliff, and Fisher Gesha threw a web of purple light at it. It was jerked down the side of the mountain as though she'd tied a weight to its ankles.
Carefully, Cassias stepped up to the edge of the cliff and glanced down. Almost instantly, he staggered back.
“We have to leave. Right now.”
He marched back toward the entrance into the mountain, though every second or third step he swayed as though he stood on the deck of a ship.
Yerin and Gesha followed him, but a strange curiosity took hold of Lindon. He walked to the edge and peered down.
Dozens—perhaps hundreds—of bloodspawn were stuck to the side of the mountain. Some of them looked like gnarled trees, others like clouds of gas, and still others like a mass of jagged crystals. Most of them weren't moving quickly, but they all crept up the side of the mountain.
But beneath them, covering the hills, was an ocean of writhing red figures. Lindon couldn't begin to guess how many there were. An army.
He ran back, hurrying after the others. There were so many. So many. And if they fought, new ones would be created every time a human was injured.
They would be overwhelmed in minutes, dragged down and torn apart by monsters.
His exhaustion and the mental burden of losing his arm seemed to retreat in the face of a rising tide of panic.
One of the doors to the sanctuary had been blasted off its hinges. Red-stained sunlight streamed in through a hole in the ceiling.
A bloodspawn was forming right in front of them, from a tiny splatter on the wall. It was transparent as red glass, and it seemed taller and thinner than the others.
Cassias drove a spike of silver madra through it, but the bloodspawn didn't seem to mind the hole in its chest. It held its arms wide, trying to catch the Arelius in an embrace.
Lindon moved up, cycling pure madra.
His madra channels still pained him whenever he cycled, and he had to improvise a different pattern to use his technique with his left hand. He usually used his right.
But a second later, he had driven an Empty Palm into the bloodspawn's midsection.
It popped like a bubble, spraying him with liquid madra. The madra burned slightly, tingling against his skin, but it started to evaporate almost immediately. No one commented; they were all on high alert as they moved through the red-lit halls, heading for the entrance to the complex below.
So many walls had been blown out by the battles between the two Underlords that Lindon wondered about the sanctuary’s structural integrity. As he watched, a few boulders bigger than his head crumbled from a hole in the ceiling, smashing into the ground.
The wind, whistling through the walls, now sounded ominous.
After an agonizing minute or two of navigating through the fractured halls, they finally came upon a door at the end of a hall. Debris was lying against it, holding it closed, but at least they hadn't run into another bloodspawn. Lindon would count that as a success.