Which was probably the safest place to be, at the moment.
Storm clouds covered the sky, but the lightning cracked red. Crimson stripes were painted across the clouds as aura from the Bleeding Phoenix stained the world. Yerin’s head pounded at the feel of its spirit in the air; if she relaxed her concentration, she thought she might hear the Phoenix’s distant song. She preferred the headache.
The Dreadgod wasn’t close enough to fight, but close enough to be a disaster. There was an island nearby, which held a decent-sized town in the shadow of a mountain. The town blazed with madra of a dozen different aspects as sacred artists and constructs strained themselves to the breaking point to resist the army in front of them.
Like ants, red spots crawled all over the mountain. She could feel them clearly, even without a scan with her spiritual senses. Bloodspawn. They grew from blood and ate madra, either evolving on their own or returning power to the Dreadgod, and now they were laying siege to the town.
If that had been the only problem, Emriss Silentborn wouldn’t have called her. The Eight-Man Empire could have handled it. There were two of them here, and each of them could wipe out an army of bloodspawn with a brush of the hand.
One man in gold armor clashed against a giant sea serpent—a blue-scaled leviathan that gave off enough spiritual pressure that it weighed down Yerin’s soul. The leviathan had been corrupted by a scarlet ooze that covered its skin, a noxious parasite that infused its soul with blood madra.
A parasite that Yerin knew intimately. The leviathan had been consumed by the Blood Shadow, and now it was a husk of itself, moving only to attack and feed.
The gold-armored man plunged down with a blow from a two-handed cleaver that warped space around it, striking the leviathan’s scales and blowing a hole in the ocean. A towering wave threatened to drown the town until he reached out and soothed the aura, flattening the water again.
His partner, another man in gold armor, faced a monster of blood that plunged from above. ‘Monster’ was the best Yerin could do to describe it. The thing looked like a sack full of giant squids that had all melted together.
To her spiritual sense, it felt like a mashed-together blob of Blood Shadows with dozens of powers that fought each other in chaos, and the creature struck down from the clouds with tentacles carrying shining techniques of contradictory aspects.
Yerin would bet that this Blood Shadow would fall apart on its own before the end of the day, but at the moment it blazed with power that dwarfed even the men in gold. It felt like a true fragment of the Bleeding Phoenix, and a casual blow from it could level the town and the entire island beneath it.
In time, the two members of the Eight-Man Empire would no doubt win. Their personal power was enough to match their opponents, and they could draw energy from their six other partners.
But she wasn’t at all sure they could do it while keeping the town intact. Even now, if they hadn’t spared enough attention and held themselves back, the island would have been annihilated.
Yerin gathered all that before her unstable raft slid down the first wave.
Then she acted.
The black blade of her sword, Netherclaw, rang like a bell. The island was probably a mile away, but that was easy for her to reach now.
Plenty of bloodspawn carried weapons or shaped themselves into sharp edges, and some of them had sword madra of their own. Her Endless Sword technique also carried a touch of blood aura since her merge with Ruby, so it affected the Phoenix’s spawn better than it would have before.
Crimson madra and essence sprayed up from all over the mountain.
That would do for many of the bloodspawn, and would lessen the pressure on the town’s defenders, but it wouldn’t be enough to wipe the army out. Before the echo of the Endless Sword had faded, Yerin whipped her blade horizontally and sent out a Striker technique.
The Rippling Sword was a silver-and-red wave of madra that expanded as it flew, scraping the entire island clean between the mountain and the town.
In fact, it sliced a few hills and carved a gash into the base of the mountain. A small one. Yerin doubted the townsfolk would mind.
That swept the bloodspawn away from the island like a broom catching dust, but Yerin’s madra had attracted attention.
A red light grew beneath her, and scarlet jaws opened wide to swallow her and the remains of the ship whole. Rather than a Blood Shadow that had taken over a leviathan, this Shadow had taken on the form of a leviathan, but she couldn’t spot a hair’s difference between them in power.
Yerin leaped, and the force of her jump shoved the wreckage of the boat down the monster’s throat.