“Vance!” Anna-Lucielle screamed as she ran to and fro to avoid the falling rubble.
“Run, dammit, run, take cover!” I roared as I channeled all the Death energy I could muster into my weapons and armor.
The gushing torrent of blood started to subside, revealing a towering figure inside it: a Blood Giant. The Hooded Man had just transformed himself into a Blood Giant.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Blood Giant was twice the size of even the biggest Jotunn, a hideous ogre-like monster composed entirely of flowing blood. It leered down at me with his red eyes, and its two enormous hands, each the size of a large wagon, began to glow and crackle with crimson lightning. I knew what was coming, and I knew that, without a shield, the Blood lightning would splatter me into a million pieces.
As the Blood Giant raised his hands and took aim at me, I dived behind a broken pillar covered with thick vines. The heavy stone that made the pillar was a kind of obsidian like the rest of the ruins. A substance like this could be perfect for holding a magical charge since enchanted equipment was often made of obsidian. I channeled Death energy into the pillar until the stone could hold no more, then the Blood Giant unleashed his twin veins of lightning.
They smashed with a booming clap into the pillar and blew a crater big enough to serve as a pit grave for a village of giants. My improvised shield held fast, the Death energy absorbing the force of the Blood lightning, which was far beyond anything Rodrick had ever hurled at me.
I wasted no time in counterattacking; the Blood Giant, like all demons powered by Blood magic, was vulnerable to Death and Cold magic, and I intended to hit him with every ounce of Death magic I could summon.
“Suck on this!” I said as I jumped out from behind the pillar and flung tornados at the Blood Giant from my kusarigama.
The tornados tore into his blood body, ripping chunks of flowing blood out. They would do no real damage, but they were an effective distraction. Layna was darting between piles of rubble and broken pillars, racing to the portal, and I was preparing my next attack too.
Growling with anger, the Blood Giant swatted away the tornados and summoned another charge of Blood lightning. Again, I channeled Death energy into the pillar until the dense stone was saturated with it. This time, when the twin streams of red lightning hit the weakened pillar, it exploded in a shower of shattered fragments, and the Death energy only just managed to absorb the power of the lightning.
The crater grew, and I fell into it, hitting the ground with an acrobatic roll and thus avoiding any injury. A triumphant smile broke across the huge, ugly face of the Blood Giant, and he raised his hands to the sky, filling them with power for his most savage Blood lightning strike yet. If there had been a good supply of corpses nearby, I could have created a Death Titan, the perfect opponent to wipe the floor with this Blood Giant, but there were no bodies I could use. A Plague Storm would weaken him. Maybe enough to take him down.
“Fuck it, Plague Storm it is,” I said.
I used both Wind and Death powers to summon a raging storm that howled in a tornado of green-and-yellow-tinged black wind and bilious green torrents of rain around the Blood Giant. He howled in anguish and frustration as each drop of plague rain burned a fist-sized hole in his body.
He had to redirect his power, and instead of blasting more lightning strikes at me, he was forced to fight off the tempest I’d sent his way. His crackling fists punched holes in the whirling tornado.
Layna, meanwhile, had reached the portal and was furiously blasting webs around it, sealing it up tight.
I scrambled out of the massive crater and raced toward the Blood Gian. As I sprinted, I whirled my kusarigama’s chain in accelerating arcs above my head, preparing to beat the living shit out of this Blood Giant.
I reached him just as he finished fighting his way out of my Plague Storm, and he had no time to react to my first strike, a whipping lash across his enormous right leg.
The kusarigama chain sheared through the Blood Giant’s leg like a scythe through ripe wheat, and he roared out in pain, the thousand voices of the Blood God all screaming in agony at once as the lower half of his right leg was severed.
I jumped into the air, whipping the long kusarigama chain in an uppercut-like vertical arc. This time, it sheared off the Blood Giant’s left hand. The severed appendage crashed to the ground and exploded in a shower of blood. The Blood God’s thousand voices howled out again, but this time the monster tried to fight back, quickly shooting blood lightning at me with his remaining hand. I backflipped out of the way, and the lightning hit the ground where I’d been standing and blasted another crater in it.
He hadn’t hit me, but he had succeeded in putting a barrier between himself and me. I couldn’t smack him again, not until I got around the new crater at least. He started charging his remaining hand with Blood lightning, but before he could launch it, an arrow, glowing blue, streaked through the air and smashed into his chest. He screamed in agony and staggered backward, before another blue arrow smashed into him, and another.
This obviously wasn’t Death Magic, and the other other magic Blood creatures were vulnerable to was Cold Magic. Who was helping me? It didn’t make sense to dwell on it, not with the opportunity
