Focusing on herself again, Eva found her blood-based image of herself not looking quite as poorly as she had mere moments ago. Some of her charred flesh was… still charred. But not quite as badly as it had been.
She was healing. Slowly, but surely.
Not fast enough. She might heal, but if Arachne died in the meantime, it wouldn’t even matter.
Again, Eva pressed her fists into the ground. Even as the aches and pains increased, she didn’t stop pushing. Once she got to her knees, everything became far easier. Her legs still worked just fine, after all.
The blinding whiteness in her eyes was slowly fading away as well. Like looking straight into a camera flash, blinking it away seemed to work. Though, half the problem was probably just her lying face down.
Fumbling around her waist, Eva found her dagger lying on the ground. While she couldn’t feel much of anything aside from pain, the black metal was still cool to the touch. Even through her carapace.
Unfortunately, not much else survived the sky cracking. Her vials of blood were nowhere to be found. There was some half-broken, half-melted glass stuck to her stomach that must have been shielded partially by her body. Not shielded well enough to keep the blood safe.
Her eyes were still blurry and everything still hurt. Moving in to engage with her person was absolutely out of the question.
That didn’t stop Eva from taking her dagger and jamming it into her upper arm, slicing out a relatively large gouge. Blood spilled forth, drawn out by her magic. Some, she spread throughout the area to get a better view of her surroundings.
The first thing she noticed was a human-height wall between Eva and the fight going on with Arachne and the demon hunter. The second thing was that the doll was not fighting with them.
The doll was still standing off to one side. Eva hadn’t been paying that much attention to her exact pose, but she was still staring at the sky. She probably hadn’t moved at all.
There was still something fighting the demon hunter. Something Eva couldn’t detect with her blood magic. As she spread more blood around it, she started to get a better picture of just what it was.
Nearly twice as tall as Arachne, a mass of stone had taken the shape of a person. A very bulky person. Who didn’t so much have legs as it had a tornado of earth that it was propped up on. Eva wasn’t entirely sure why it needed a face. Given that the eye and mouth holes were just that, holes, they really didn’t provide much function. Another twenty arms would have been better. Just a relentless hammering of fists instead of the two it currently had.
But it had to be Genoa. She had probably made the wall around Eva as well. Fighting, as Juliana had insisted, from the dormitory building. She had to be. She wasn’t anywhere else around the battlefield as far as Eva could tell.
And with her eyes slowly getting better, she was able to tell a little more after peeking over the top of the wall.
The ground around her was… less brick and stone than it had been. For a certain radius around Eva, everything was glass. Everything save for a small person-shaped patch right where she had been lying.
Perhaps it was a good thing that she could only feel pain at the moment and not something more specific. If her surroundings had become hot enough to turn the landscape to glass, she didn’t want to know what her back looked like.
Though maybe she had been unconscious long enough for her slow healing to heal enough.
More importantly, a fight was going on.
The rock golem crashed down both fists on top of the hunter. He intercepted with his sword, letting the blade take the full brunt of the attack. His arms and legs bent ever so slightly from the impact. Whatever was keeping his armor undamaged was working to his advantage, keeping his limbs from snapping entirely.
Arachne skittered around to his side while he was distracted. Though fuzzy, Eva spotted long coils of her thread all wound up, ready to throw out and lasso the hunter.
Eva ducked back below the wall. The knight was preoccupied. With his back to her at the moment, he wouldn’t have seen her get up just yet. The other hunter might have. Eva didn’t know where she was at. But for the moment, Eva would operate under the assumption that she was distracted as well.
Rather than send out her blood in plain sight or in large flashy attacks, she formed up a few balls and sent it out slow and low to the ground. If she could get some underneath his armor, she could bypass all his defenses.
The blood didn’t make it far. With no indication that the knight had even noticed, her blood froze solid a few feet away from his legs. The balls rolled along the ground aimlessly, no longer directed by her magic.
Eva grit her teeth. The other one was here and she was watching.
But from where and why weren’t there icicles raining down on Eva?
“Nel,” Eva rasped out. She grasped for her cellphone only to have her fingers brushing against bare skin.
My new phone, Eva thought, wanting to slam her head against the wall. If the vials of blood didn’t survive, what hope had her cellphone. Maybe if it had been enchanted against heat like Wayne’s, but Eva didn’t know how to do anything like that.
Not that it would help now. A bit late for that.
The wall around her separated Eva from most of the plaza between the dormitories. It was open towards the Rickenbacker. If she wasn’t being attacked as she was, then the other hunter might not be able to see her.
She still couldn’t see well enough to pick someone out on the roof of some building.
She needed to get a message to Nel.
Wayne and Zoe, if they survived the initial attack, were probably evacuating students. Or keeping them away from everything. Or in the infirmary if they had been injured.
Genoa was fighting along with Arachne, though Eva wasn’t sure how much concentration that golem took. Probably best not to try to get her concentrating on multiple things at once.
But Juliana should be somewhere around. Eva couldn’t see any attacks that might be from her, so she had to be free to act. And she should have a working cellphone.
Glancing up towards the glass windows of the stairwell where they had been watching the doll from, Eva couldn’t see a thing. Both the glare from the glass and her own fuzzy eyes were contributing to the problem. Eva was counting on her still being there—or on Genoa not letting her daughter out of her sight.
Using her own blood, she formed it into a quick message.
Juli. Call Nel. Find other hunter. In area, watching armored guy.
She held it steady for a few seconds before wiping it away. Juliana hadn’t given any indication in return, but Eva wasn’t sure what she would say anyway. She just had to hope that Juliana got the message and would do something.
Just in case the first attack had been a fluke, Eva sent out several more orbs of blood. All from different directions.
As the marbles rushed towards the hunter, Eva pulled out another strand of blood. She considered making a clone of herself for just a moment, but the nauseating side effect was just too debilitating. Instead, she went with her tried and true spell of enlarged blood-fists.
Even if it did end up freezing, like the orbs she had just sent out, it might be enough to trip him up. Arachne and Genoa could capitalize on any opportunity she could create.
Peeking over the wall again, Eva aimed her spell and pressed her hands into the wireframe ball. Two dripping replicas of her claws manifested around the knight. They immediately started icing over, but their size meant that the ice had to work to encompass the hands.
So she still had some time.
Eva used her time to wrap her hands around the knight’s legs, leaving him exposed and stationary. Her hands were still freezing.
As she thought about it more, it might not be such a bad thing. Her control was failing. However, he would be stuck within several tons of ice.
Genoa’s golem hesitated. Arachne did as well, glancing towards the golem in a brief moment of confusion. The golem didn’t glance back.