Page 91 of Elven Shadow

She lifted the swirling orb of dark silver in her hand, its light flickering with brighter silver and seeming to pull all the other light in the hallway toward itself.

With a quick flick of her wrist, that orb elongated in the blink of an eye, stretching and thinning until she held not some formless, swirling collection of magic but the cold, hard weight of a Bloodshadow spear in her hand.

The homunculus took another step forward, arms still outstretched toward her.

She plunged the butt of her spear onto the floor. A deafening crack rang out, pierced by the ringing clang of a metal that was not quite metal.

Beneath the force of her magic, the hallway tiles at her feet rippled, as if made of water instead. The ensuing shock of power spiraling away from the butt of her spear raced across the floor toward the homunculus, leaving behind spidering cracks of dark, lightless gray spilling over into black.

The homunculus just kept coming, oblivious to the threat it truly faced against a Bloodshadow Elf.

Then again, a creature that couldn’t think or feel for itself had nothing to fear from anyone—even someone who had the power to end it forever.

In seconds, the snaking black lines splintering across the rippling floor tiles reached the homunculus’ feet and instantly peeled themselves away from the floor to coil up the thing’s bare, mottled-black feet, ankles, and calves.

Without so much as acknowledging the trap, the blackened creature tried to take another step forward only to find itself rooted to the spot by her magic.

The next time it jerked against the bonds holding it there, another metallic, gong-like clang erupted from the rippling floor tiles and the black streaks of Bloodshadow magic before the entire whole floor jerked forward as well.

Rebecca’s spear nearly tugged itself out of her hand as it yanked her forward off balance. She tightened her grip and grabbed the shaft with both hands now, just to be safe, while fighting the homunculus’s attempts to break free.

Holy shit, this thing was strong.

That normally wouldn’t have posed much of an issue, certainly nothing bigger than Rebecca could handle, but it did beg the question as to the creature’s creator.

If a homunculus like this wielded this much strength on its own, its maker had to be one hell of a powerful magical.

That maker also had to be relatively close to maintain control over the thing—possibly even inside the building with them now.

Rebecca didn’t want to stand here fighting in the hallway long enough to find out.

She doubled down on the magic racing through her spear, working faster than she normally would have with magic like this. But that was only because she didn’t know how long she could hold something as strong as this faceless monstrosity in her grasp without going full darkness in complete battle mode.

This wasn’t the time or the place for that.

The snaking black tendrils stretching across the floor and rooting the homunculus to the spot quivered, thickened, and intensified their grip around the creature’s impossibly muscular legs. It couldn’t keep walking toward her, but it could still swipe at her with its giant arms.

A sharp, counterclockwise twist of her spear severed coiling ropes of shadow from her conjured weapon, leaving Rebecca mere seconds to act before the homunculus was sure to break free.

She darted forward, lifting her spear along with her, and raised the glinting blade sharper than the end of worlds as she ran. Then she lowered it toward the center of the mindless beast.

Those black outstretched hands swiped at her just as she’d expected—clawing at her teal tank top and briefly snatching at her wrist. Two pitch-black fingers brushed against her wrist, and a piercing cold unlike anyphysical freeze she’d ever known coursed through her wrist, down into her fingers, and up her arm toward her shoulder.

Staggering against the searing burn of something so impossibly cold, so impossibly lifeless, Rebecca cried out with a snarl and whipped her arms away from the creature’s reach. Then she swung her spear.

The Bloodshadow blade pierced through the creature’s unnaturally black flesh, meeting no resistance at all before it cleanly severed the homunculus’s arm. The limb thumped heavily to the dirty tiled floor covered in glinting puddles.

The next second, Rebecca’s swing rose and fell again in a different arc before she thrust her spear tip into the center of the homunculus’s chest, right where its fake heart would have been. The creature let out another creaking groan like an old tree bending in the wind.

It wasn’t quite a scream. The thing’s mouth didn’t open. It was more like the noise came from every inch of the homunculus’s form all at once.

Newly slivered threads of black raced away from Rebecca’s spearhead embedded in the homunculus and coursed through the thing’s torso, brightening into the swirling metallic silver that ate at the light around it as it moved.

In seconds, those snaking lines would fill every inch of the creature’s animated form and harden into a substance more impermeable than reinforced steel to render it inanimate and completely useless.

That was the plan.

But before her Bloodshadow magic could complete its work, before it had raced any farther than across the homunculus’s torso, the pitch-black arm Rebecca had sheared off at the elbow rebuilt itself and started to grow back.

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