Then he dashed into the darkness.
Yerin lowered her weapon as the air still crackled from her Final Sword—or at least, the version of it she could use in here. The stone wall was unscratched.
This was the downside of blood madra. If it didn’t have blood, she had a harder time cutting it.
Mercy dropped into a crouch, holding her head. “Okay. Deep breaths. They’ll come back for us.”
“If they can,” Ziel said. He glanced around to the few remaining exits; instead of being full of uncountable tunnels, the room was now mostly bare.
Orthos was pacing impatiently back and forth, but he still shot a red-and-black glare at Ziel. “We have nothing to guide us forward. We should wait here.”
Yerin held Netherclaw loosely in her right hand and glanced around. She had a bad feeling about this.
The labyrinth wasn’t shifting at random, she was certain. There was a will behind it. And while she had nothing to lean on but her intuition, she felt like it wasn’t watching Lindon at the moment. It was watching them.
“Stay sharp,” Yerin said. “Swords up.”
Mercy had her bow drawn and arrow nocked before Yerin finished the first word. Her back was to the group, and she scanned the darkness. “Did you sense something?”
“The body’s still here.”
Yerin couldn’t feel any hunger madra coming, but trying to sense hunger down here was blinding. She just knew that something was on its way.
Ziel started scraping runes in the Tomb Hydra’s blood, which covered much of the floor. Not a bad idea. Might as well build up some defenses, even if they wouldn’t last long.
Yerin’s spirit screamed a warning, and she activated the Endless Sword.
Half a dozen hungry ghouls that had been rising from the floor fell apart, but the aura was too weak here. Some living techniques survived, and there were dozens more. They flooded up around the dreadbeast’s body, forcing the sacred artists to fall back.
As they rose, the ghouls shredded the Hydra. They opened their wide mouths and took chunks out of its meat, devouring madra, aura, and flesh alike.
“I saw some swordfish feed in a river once,” Orthos said in solemn tones. “They stripped a bird the size of a house down to its bones in seconds.”
“Do swordfish live in rivers?” Mercy asked.
“Not swordfish. Swordfish. Their teeth are swords.”
“We should back up,” Ziel pointed out.
The hunger techniques did their work in seconds, and they did more than just strip the corpse down to bones. Even the bones were devoured, reduced to nothing. Leaving a swarm of pale ghouls made of madra scurrying over the spot where the beast had been, like ants after a feast.
The others retreated, but Yerin didn’t. She stood only a few strides from the hunger techniques.
She was feeling weak after that Final Sword, and even the Endless Sword had stretched her since she was using it in such an aura-dry environment. She knew exactly what it meant to spend more power here.
But something was watching her.
A silver-red glow shone around her blade as she activated the Flowing Sword. She only had traces of aura to complement the madra, so the technique wasn’t stable. But it was stable enough.
She struck each ghoul with her madra-clad sword, dispersing them to clouds of madra. It took her less than a second.
Puffs of death madra, and aura of every kind, leaked into the air as the ghouls died. They had fed, but hadn’t had the chance to return to their source yet. In that way, they were like the bloodspawn of the Bleeding Phoenix.
She didn’t like that comparison.
Yerin glared down at the floor. “We’re not backing down.”
She doubted it could hear her, but it was her actions that should send the message. When she didn’t get a response, she turned back to the others. “Huddle up and get our backs to a wall. If we don’t get hit again soon, I’ll dance a little jig.”
“I would be interested to see that,” Orthos said.
Ziel frowned into the distance. “You think it will keep sending the spirits after us?”
“No, but if there’s no way for a giant dreadbeast to stay alive down here, that means it came from somewhere else. They’ll make another one.”
“There’s no telling how long that will take,” Mercy pointed out. “Maybe it takes days! And this could be the last one; they can’t have bred too many.”
“If that’s true, you’ll get to see my jig. But…”
The walls blurred right on cue, once again making Yerin wonder what the controller of the labyrinth could see.