Page 96 of Elven Shadow

And if she couldn’t stop it this time, she wouldn’t survive again.

“Shit.”

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Rebecca scrambled backward, tripping over new piles of debris and rubble, her breath shallow as the beast’s looming shadow swallowed the dim light around her. Each step felt like it only delayed the inevitable.

The creature’s relentless pursuit wasn’t just physical. She felt it in her bones—an unnatural chill tightening in her chest and squeezing around her own life force, as if the creature wasn’t just huntingherbut somethingwithinher.

Of course she wanted to avoid the agony of its touch again; that was a given. More than that, though, she couldn’t let anything activate her magic again like the first homunculus had.

She’d survived it once; she didnotintend to have to survive it a second time. Or to fail.

Especially not before she figured out why it had had that effect on her and who the sadistic son of a bitch was who’d created these things in the first place.

She quickly regained her balance as the homunculus barreled toward her, just as imposing and larger than life as the last—larger than most nightmares, honestly.

She thrust upward with her spear to drive it into the center of the thing’s chest, twisted the spear shaft in both hands, and growled as she ripped the impossibly sharp blade straight down through the creature’s chest cavity and belly.

Halfway through slicing the creature in two, her spear met unexpected resistance right where the homunculus’s navel would have been, were it a truly living thing. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to throw her momentarily off balance as she tugged against whatever had snagged on her blade.

The blackened beast let out the same kind of creaking groan as its predecessor and reached toward her with a swing of its arm.

Rebecca reeled back in time to avoid its touch, then yanked down on her spear and continued the act of gutting her enemy from breastbone to groin—ifit had had anatomically correct features in the first place, or even guts. Without those, the end result was disappointingly anticlimactic.

The homunculus, now severed neatly in two, made no sound, offered no dying scream or spatter of hot blood across the floor. It merely paused for a moment, then fell in two different directions as its equally severed halves fully detached and toppled to the ground.

“Well that was surprisingly easy,” she muttered. “Could’ve gone with that move from the start.”

Rebecca waited another few seconds to see if the creature would revive itself, but there was no sign of movement. Scowling at the cleanly severed halves of one monstrous, mottled black and gray body, she stepped closer to stand over the motionless remains and spit on the closest half.

Then, after a quick twist of her wrist around the shaft of her Bloodshadow spear, the weapon disappeared, and she continued on her way down the hall.

It would have been more economical to keep her spear conjured and in her hand the whole way, but there was no telling who else she might come across in her mad dash toward the stairwell that would take her down to the garage.

The sight of Shade’s only elf walking around with a dark, glinting spear sharper than any forged blade of the physical realm—which also gobbled up all the light around it—was alarming in and of itself.

Not to mention that, with the current attack on Shade by as yet unidentified assailants, she’d likely just end up implicating herself in this whole thing before anyone else stopped to consider why someone like Rebecca would want to attack the compound in the first place.

Ifanyone saw her.

Before she ever made it to the staircase leading down to the sub-levels, Rebecca came upon three more of the same grotesque, animated constructions emerging seemingly from thin air in front of her.

The first came at her from behind a closed door on the ground level—or, more accurately, through it. Wood splintered and broke away from the door and its frame, spraying in all directions.

A quick, sharp sting caught Rebecca in the right shoulder, but she didn’t have time to investigate with another seven-and-a-half-foot-tall homunculus lumbering toward her, its arms freakishly long as it reached for her.

It wasn’t just the way this one had been built, either. No, this one’s long, sleek, pitch-black arms were literally elongating toward her as it tried to grab ahold of its newest target.

Snarling, Rebecca summoned her spear again and managed to take the third homunculus down with countless lightning-quick thrusts to any and all parts of its unliving body.

It didn’t stop moving until she’d practically shredded it to ribbons with her spear. After that, she didn’t stick around long enough to prove her theory that the creatures could only grow back a severed limb or two and not reconnect dozens of cubed pieces at whim.

The next one dropped from the ceiling and almost landed on top of her before she noticed its presence. The only reason she wasn’t squashed and pancaked to the floor was because she’d caught its reflection in the glass double doors of the building’s front entrance as she passed.

Rebecca darted forward at the last second and threw herself into a tumbling roll that couldn’t quite be called a somersault, but it got her out from beneath the homunculus’s surprise drop-attack all the same.

The floor rumbled violently beneath the creature’s every footstep; it had to be at least nine feet tall this time, with a hulking shoulder width that took up over half the building’s entryway.

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