Chapter 318: Trying to escape
Veronica was enraged, yes but she wasn’t a fool to believe she could put Ethan down easily. She was stolen off any communication and her magic was blocked.
So, her intentions currently was to get out of here.
But how was the question.
"Don’t just stand there and dance."
Ethan’s tentacles struck first, three of them lashing out in a fan meant to box her in from the left, the right, and directly overhead.
"Hmph!" Veronica read the pattern before it finished forming. She had faced enough beasts with multiple limbs to know that the moment you tried to dodge each strike individually, you were already dead.
The trick was never to outrun the attack. It was to find the one gap that all three strikes shared, and put your body through it before the gap closed.
She dropped low, twisting her hip, and drove herself under the crossing point of the left and overhead tentacles just as they converged.
The third, coming from the right, clipped her shoulder instead of her skull. Black ichor smeared across her jacket, burning through the fabric like acid.
She hissed but kept moving, closing the distance rather than opening it, because distance was what let a monster like this recover its aim.
"Getting close already? Bold." Ethan’s voice came out wrong, layered, as though two throats were speaking at once beneath the human one. "But bold isn’t the same as smart, Commander."
She didn’t answer him. Answering cost time, and time was the only resource he actually needed from her.
Her hand found the short blade at her hip, one of the few things she still carried that didn’t rely on Genesis to function.
It wasn’t much against something like this. A blade forged from PSC-grade alloy could cut ordinary flesh and ordinary bone, but a ghoul’s body had stopped being ordinary the moment the corruption took root.
Still, ordinary was better than nothing, and nothing was all she currently had of magic.
She feinted toward his center mass, watched three tentacles converge to intercept the feint, and reversed her weight at the last possible instant.
The blade caught the base of the nearest tentacle where it met his spine, a thinner joint than the rest, and she dragged the edge through it with everything her legs could give the motion.
It didn’t sever cleanly. Ghoul flesh was fibrous, stringy, resistant in a way muscle shouldn’t have been.
But it tore, black blood spraying in an arc across the pavement, and the tentacle went slack, twitching uselessly against the ground.
Ethan’s grin faltered for the first time.
"That’s one," Veronica said, finally speaking, her voice flat and businesslike, the voice she used when giving orders in the field rather than fighting for her own life, knowing how it irked him.
"You’ve got, what, fourteen more of those? I’ve got time."
"You don’t." His remaining tentacles surged forward, faster now, less controlled, as though her mockery had cost him some measure of the composure he’d walked in with.
Two came low, sweeping her legs, while a third dropped from directly above like a spear.
She couldn’t dodge all three. She’d known that going in. So she chose which one to eat.
The overhead strike took her in the ribs as she threw herself sideways, and she felt something crack beneath the impact, a sharp burst of pain that stole the air from her lungs for half a second.
But the sacrifice bought her the space to plant her boot against the ground and use the low sweep’s own momentum against it, riding the strike rather than fighting it, letting it carry her past Ethan’s guard instead of knocking her down.
She came up inside his reach, where the tentacles couldn’t fully extend, and buried her blade into the meat of his forearm before he could react.
He screamed, an ugly, doubled sound, and backhanded her with enough force to send her skidding across the asphalt.
She rolled with it, absorbing the impact through her shoulder rather than her spine, and came up in a crouch with blood running from a split lip.
"You’re bleeding," Ethan said, and there was something almost delighted in the way he said it, like a child noticing a crack in something he’d assumed was unbreakable. "I didn’t think Commanders bled."
"Everyone bleeds. The difference is what happens after." She spat, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and didn’t take her eyes off him.
"You’re relying on those things to do all your thinking for you. Fifteen tentacles and you still haven’t landed a killing blow. I hope you have a plan B."
His expression twisted, and for a moment the human features buried under the corruption seemed to strain against whatever was holding them, some flicker of the man he used to be trying and failing to surface. Then it was gone, replaced by something colder.
"Careful," he said. "I’m being patient with you. I don’t have to be."
Six tentacles came at her at once this time, no longer probing, no longer testing her guard. This was the real assault, and she felt the shift in the air before the first one even moved, the pressure of intent pressing against her skin like a held breath about to break.
She had no room to think in complete sentences anymore. Instinct took over where calculation left off, years of field experience compressing into pure reflex.
She ducked one, parried a second with the flat of her blade, let a third graze her thigh because the alternative was letting it take her throat, and drove herself forward through the gap that opened in the chaos, straight toward Ethan himself rather than away from him.
It was the last thing he expected. Every instinct told him to keep his enemy at range, to let the tentacles do the work from a safe distance, and so he hadn’t accounted for an opponent willing to walk directly into the storm to reach the source of it.
Her blade found another tentacle at its root, then a second in the same motion, a wide diagonal cut that opened both wounds at once. More black blood hit the pavement, hissing faintly where it landed, eating small pockmarks into the asphalt.
"Three," she said, breathing hard now, sweat and blood mixing on her jaw. "You want to reconsider that patience of yours?"
Ethan didn’t answer. Instead the remaining tentacles reorganized, no longer attacking in the wide, showy arcs from before, but tightening into something more coordinated.
He was learning. Slowly, clumsily, but learning, and that worried her more than his strength did. Strength she could work around and improve
The next exchange came faster than she could fully track. A tentacle wrapped around her ankle before she could pull free, hauling her off balance, and two more came down where she was about to land.
"Tch." She twisted midair, using her own falling weight to slam her blade into the tentacle at her ankle before the others connected, buying herself a half second that she used to hit the ground rolling instead of sprawling.
One of the descending strikes still caught her across the back, tearing through her jacket and the skin beneath it.
She bit down on the sound that wanted to escape her throat and kept moving, because stopping now meant not moving again.
She came up against the wrecked husk of her own car, using it as cover for the first time since the fight began, putting solid metal between herself and at least two angles of attack.
Ethan advanced, slower now, favoring the arm she’d stabbed. Ichor dripped steadily from the stump where a severed tentacle had been, and his breathing, if it could still be called that, had grown ragged.
"You’re not human anymore," Veronica said, watching him through the gap in the crumpled car frame, "but you still fight like you expect to win by intimidation. That foolish part of you that’s still Ethan talking. The rest of you should have known better."
"Shut up." The words came out strangled, distorted, less certain than anything he’d said before.
She used the opening. Vaulting over the hood of the car, she closed the last of the distance while his focus fractured between fury and whatever remained of his own instincts warning him to be cautious.
Her blade opened a fourth tentacle at the base, and a fifth an instant later, a two-strike combination she’d practiced a thousand times against far less monstrous opponents, muscle memory doing what conscious thought no longer had time for.
Ethan’s remaining limbs thrashed wildly now, less coordinated, driven more by pain than intent. One caught her across the forearm, opening a shallow gash, and another clipped the side of her head hard enough that her vision blurred white for a heartbeat.
She staggered but didn’t fall.
Falling never crossed her mind.
Through the ringing in her ears she registered the shape of the street beyond him, the wrecked cars forming an uneven wall between where she stood and the open road past the intersection.
If she could put enough distance between herself and Ethan, if she could reach ground where his tentacles couldn’t extend far enough to follow, she might buy the seconds she needed to find whatever had been suppressing Genesis in the first place.
It wasn’t a plan so much as the last coherent thought she had room for. But it was something, and something was more than nothing.
Ethan’s remaining tentacles began drawing back, coiling low like a predator gathering itself before a final lunge, and beneath the black blood and the ruined face, something that might have once been satisfaction flickered across what was left of his expression.
"Running low on ideas, Commander?" He smirked.
Veronica took a deep breath, ready to risk it all when suddenly, someone struck the back of her neck—
"Agh!"
—and her vision blanked out.
"I didn’t need help." Ethan growled but the two men who appeared didn’t find him even worthy to respond to that.
There were bleeding red and despite Ethan’s effect on zero Genesis, they wore an aura of gold, defying his law by their blessings.
"Take her and be done with it already." One of them said before vanishing.
Ethan clicked his tongue before advancing closer to Veronica.
Soon, a smile bloomed on his face. Well, the sooner, the better.
°°°°°°°
A/N:- Negative Chapters are hard for me to right but I am doing my best. Help me by leaving a comment or something