Page 97 of Elven Shadow

After popping out of her roll to her feet, Rebecca spun around to watch the new homunculus rising to its full height where it had landed behind her, its shadow stretching impossibly long across the tiled floors.

“Holy shit,” she murmured, then glanced quickly at the ceiling—a portion of which now boasted a black, chalky outline of an enormous, relatively humanoid form.

As if the creature had plastered itself to the ceiling and stuck there, waiting for its next target and leaving a charred imprint of itself behind, burned into the ceiling panel.

“How is that even—”

She ducked beneath the thing’s powerfully swinging arm twice as thick around as a baseball bat.

The same creaking groan rose from this animated creation too. For some reason, it sounded like the thing was ordering her to stand still so it could mash her to a pulp.

Fat fucking chance.

After ducking another swing, she doubled over, charged her lifeless enemy, and summoned her spear one more time before she popped up into her full height directly in front of the thing.

It was a risky move, sure, but she’d slipped inside the creature’s reach, its arms outstretched toward her instead, and with both hands thrust the tip of her Bloodshadow spear straight up into the underside of the homunculus’s chin.

One more fluid thrust, and the spear tip went clean through before bursting through the top of the creature’s skull.

A keening, ear-splitting wail that couldn’t possibly have been confused for the constant screaming of the alarm siren rent the air.

At first, Rebecca thought it might be coming from the homunculus itself—a new type of nightmarish construction that lacked a mouth but could still mimic the most haunting tunes of war and death and agony.

But when she twisted her spear and flicked it aside, removing her weapon from the creature’s head before severing it clean off the monster’s thick, pitch-black neck, that head toppled, bounced once on the floor, and finally rolled to a stop.

The keening wail, however, continued.

It sounded like the age-old winds howling through the Endless Valley of her home world.

It sounded like the broken-hearted cry of mothers everywhere losing all the children they’d ever birthed in would ever yet create.

It sounded like life and death playing out their never-ending battle amidst the cosmos, and it clearly didn’t come from the homunculus lying motionless on the floor in front of her.

That blood-curling scream simply continued—the excruciating, agonized cry of a thousand souls scrambling for freedom, for release, for oblivion.

Tightening her grip on her spear, Rebecca gritted her teeth against the Blood-awful sound and diligently scanned the building’s entryway.

The noise was so powerful, so blindingly astringent in its intensity as it banged around inside her head that her eyes started to water.

Then her throat constricted, and another violent coughing fit made her double over right there in the front lobby of a building that no longer required a lobby’s purpose.

Open and exposed to literally anyone or anything that might have walked into that open entryway next, because she couldn’t breathe again. Her lungs seemed to be crushing themselves behind her ribs.

She gasped for breath over and over again, diverted from attempts to draw air only by hacking out more wheezing coughs that seemed to take more out of her by the second.

Then, without warning and for no logical reason, that terrifying, excruciated cry stopped. Just like that.

No more wailing. No more awful noise. The weight that had been closing in on Rebecca’s chest and necessary functions like breathing disappeared.

Her next inhale drew a massive, searing lungful of air. The dizzying power of relief and knowing she wasn’t dead—not yet—sent her crashing to her kneesin the empty lobby. She slapped both hands against the floor to keep herself from eating tile, taking her conjured spear with her.

The dark silver shaft slammed into the floor with a hollow, metallic gonging sound, echoing with surprising force through the air.

Rebecca sucked in another breath, and another. Her eyes burned again with the stinging relief of oxygen where it was most needed, and she finally caught her breath.

By the Blood, what waswrongwith her?

After a heavy sigh, she flicked her wrist over the spear before it disappeared inside her, returned to its place until the next moment of its summoning.

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