BLOOD CURSE ACADEMIA - PREVIOUS DRAFT EDITION -

Chapter XCI (91) - The Guardian

A gust of wind buffeted him as he slammed into the side of the crevasse on his way down. But the fall still hurt. At least he managed to keep on his front at the point of impact, so Anata and Mort on his back didn’t smash into the wall. When he finally slammed into the ground, wind swelled up around him, like a cushion. But it didn’t stop him from releasing an audible oof as he smacked into the icy floor.

Osaki descended far more gracefully, the wind rippled through her kimono, giving her an angelic appearance.

“I think I broke a rib,” Kizu complained as he sat up. He gently poked at his chest and winced. It might only be bruised, but it hurt regardless. One of his teeth was loose now too. “Was that you controlling the wind?”

“Yes. Air currents go hand-in-hand with lightning. While I’m not powerful enough to fly, I can at least slow my fall easily enough.”

Kizu recalled months ago when he first saw Sene fight. She had used the wind to lift herself in the air and strike down her opponent with lightning. It made him wonder just how powerful Sene must be. He always considered her a big fish in a small pond, especially considering her average brewing skills. But perhaps his view had been skewed by the crone and her associates.

“Where do we go from here?” he asked.

Osaki looked over at Anata who was unstrapping herself from his makeshift harness. Once free of the belts, she stood up and pointed down an ice tunnel.

The good news was that each of the passageways they walked through were surprisingly wide. A few of the offshoot tunnels shrunk in size considerably to the point where they would require a belly crawl to pass through, but Anata never gave those more than a glance as she led them forward.

As they walked, Kizu examined the icy walls. They glowed an eerie shade of blue. The aurora didn’t offer enough light to reflect this far down. So, Kizu figured the walls must be enchanted like in the World Dungeon. He trailed a gloved hand along the surface testing the enchantment, careful not to accidentally activate the gloves' own enchantment. He didn’t attempt to break something as massive and complex as the glacier’s wall. Especially on his current blood reserves. But touching the smooth, damp surface helped him understand the enchantment a bit better as he examined it with his spellsense.

He stopped. A few meters deep into the glacier’s ice, he saw a human. Frozen in place, his expression one of outrage mixed with loathing. He wore the heavy furs that Kizu had seen on the local Kemon, but appeared completely human. In his hand, he clutched a wand, pointing it forward at an unseen foe.

I know him.

Though it sounded in his head, the sudden thought wasn’t Kizu’s. Rattled, it took effort to tear his eyes away from the frozen corpse and return to following Anata and Osaki. If they noticed him lagging behind, they made no sign of it. Mort however, looked back at him from on top of Anata’s head. He cocked his head and hummed in confusion. Kizu could sense Mort questioning why he decided to stop. Whatever had just spoken to Kizu, it had bypassed his bond with Mort. That worried him.

But if the mysterious speaker had anything else to say, it kept it to itself as he continued. He spotted a few other people frozen in the glacier, but no other words followed their discovery. He started to think he might have just imagined it. Or maybe there was a mental trap down here. Spells that directly attached to a person’s mind were extremely rare, but the crone had known a few. So, they existed.

They entered a large pocket in the center of the glacier. Kizu thought this cavern alone might actually be big enough to fit the entire academy within it. Tunnels from throughout the glacier all appeared to merge at this point. An ankle-deep spring of glacier water covered the floor, moving down into an adjacent tunnel. Kizu spotted slimy, thin, white creatures squirming around in the clear water. As long as his forearm, they lacked eyes, only lizard-like legs and a mouth.

In the center of the room, hovered a massive blue crystal. It hung in the air, a shard of ice at least four or five times his height. When he faced it, he felt the chill’s bite despite his potion. Anata and Osaki appeared to be drawn to the crystal. Osaki raised a quivering hand up toward it, as if beckoning it to come to her.

The guardian approaches.

Before Kizu had time to dissect the recurrence of the voice in his mind, he heard a snarl echoing down a cavern to his left. The same sound as the bear he’d killed earlier. Only this was more guttural, and the noise vibrated the glacier slightly.

“Osaki!” he shouted. “Fire lightning above this cave’s entrance, now!”

She did as he demanded without question, a bolt of lightning slamming into the ice above the tunnel. An avalanche of ice poured down from the point of impact as the tunnel collapsed. But Osaki’s action was tinged with lethargy. The spell hit too late.

Kizu quickly discovered the reason why the ice tunnels leading to this cavern were all so wide as a polar bear the size of a house smashed through the debris of ice. It wore hundreds of ancient scars and shards of rusty metal pierced its back.

It roared. The glacier shook again.

Kizu flicked off a chunk of ice debris from his shoulder. It took only a quick glance at the monster to discard the idea of jumping into it. Even if the thing stood completely still, he would have to bury his entire lower body into the thing’s head to reach the brain. And it was possible that wouldn’t even lobotomize it. He needed another strategy.

“Dire bear,” Osaki muttered under her breath. “Get ready for a fight.”

Osaki aimed her next blasts of lightning at the beast’s back, hitting the rusty metal protruding its flesh. But the blue lightning bolt spluttered out into nothing almost the moment it made contact.

The bear appeared unperturbed by the attack, and instead locked its eyes on Anata, the closest to the floating crystal. It charged.

Kizu jumped to Anata’s side, grabbed her, then jumped away to safety. He watched as the bear’s swipe slammed down on the ice where Anata had stood less than a second earlier. Too close.

“You said you just need your blood on that thing?” Kizu called to Osaki.

“Yes!”

He swiped Anata’s knife from her belt. Then he jumped beside Osaki and passed her the knife. The bear’s attention was back on them. Kizu reached out to jump Osaki over to the seal but met with air as she transformed into a fox and dashed off in the crystal’s direction by foot, with the knife clenched in her teeth. Kizu cursed and mentally readjusted his role from carrier to meat-shield defender.

Mort vaulted himself off of Anata and zig-zagged across the floor. Understanding his intention, Kizu overlaid his familiar with an illusion to camouflage him with the ice.

Snatching up ice debris from the floor, Kizu blasted them at the monster with elemental magic. He needed to draw its attention away from everyone else. So, he created a second illusion, this one a giant version of himself. This copy stood at eye level with the dire bear and looked far more confident than the real Kizu currently felt. It tilted its head back and laughed silently at the bear. Then it started to dance. Poorly, as Kizu himself had no idea how to dance. It really just flailed its arms and legs around wildly as Kizu puppeteered it.

“Hey! Oversized albino racoon! You’re sniffing in the wrong crap heap!”

Kizu didn’t even know what he was shouting, the words just tumbling out. But it worked as the bear turned all its attention to him. It opened its jaws, revealing three separate rows of jagged teeth.

Instead of spitting out acid or fire, like Kizu half-expected it to, it inhaled. All of the warmth in front of the monster dissipated, consumed by the creature. It didn’t breathe out cold, but rather, it sucked in heat.

Kizu jumped a few meters away and collapsed on the floor. His vision blurred as his eyes began to freeze over from just the moment of exposure to the monster’s attack. With shaking arms, he blindly unslung his pack and snatched up one of his heating potions. He downed it and let the warmth return to him.

He blinked and saw his illusionary-self flickering as the bear attempted to crush it under its weight. Thankfully, the illusion had bought him the moments he needed to recover. And Mort had enough time to spring up onto the creature’s fur. He swiftly scrambled up the side of the monstrous bear and found purchase near one of the rusted chunks of metal protruding its back.

Having discovered the illusion’s inauthenticity, the monster stood on its hind legs, raising its height to the point where its scalp scraped the cavern’s ceiling. It roared again. Then it sought out its next prey.

Kizu stood and prepared himself. Using Mort as a tether to guide him, Kizu jumped onto the dire bear’s back. He quickly wrapped the monster’s hair around his right palm and activated his glove’s enchantment to keep from tumbling off. Mort, in turn, jumped onto his arm and clung to him.

Then he and Mort launched into their plan. He channeled through Mort, using his familiar as a conduit to amplify his spell. His left hand burst into a blaze of flames. Kizu stroked the back of the dire bear’s fur, creating a streak of fire. The acrid stench of burning hair caused Kizu to cough, but he maintained enough control of the flames to keep himself and Mort from harm. The smoke still made him woozy, and the world swam in his vision for a moment, but he ignored the feeling.

Under him, he felt the monster tense with rage. He prepared himself for the creature to slam its back into a wall or roll over on the water covered ice. Instead, the creature’s attention returned to someone else in the room. Anata. Kizu hadn’t accounted for this. The bear was too dumb to realize the attack came from on top of it. It thought she was the perpetrator.

Anata stood near the far reaches of the glacial cavern where Kizu had deposited her at the start of the fight. If anything, Kizu expected the bear to turn around and resume its hunt on Osaki. But Anata stood in the direct line of sight of the creature.

Kizu jumped forward with Mort still clinging to his arm. He aimed for the dire bear’s head with the intention to blind the monster with more flames and then reposition Anata. Unfortunately, he overshot and landed on a snout the size of a tree trunk from the Hon Basin. It shook its head to shake him free like a tick. Kizu slipped down a bit but slammed his palm into the side of the snout with his enchanted glove before falling far. He hung there beside its mouth. Its currently closed mouth.

Kizu slammed his other palm into the where monster’s lips met one another and activated his second glove. Then he swung down and stuck his first glove next to it.

He jumped down to Anata’s side, selectively abandoning his enchanted gloves.

The monster attempted to open its mouth but found one side of its lips stuck together. It still consumed heat as it sucked in, but only to the right side of it. It thrashed around, its back still burning and unable to split its lips apart.

As Kizu jumped Anata across the cavern, his legs buckled, and he slid to the icy floor. Completely soaked from the cold water, he gasped. He tried to get to his feet again but lacked the strength. His vision smeared everything in front of him, blinding him. His blood, he realized, he was running out of blood. He cast too many spells too soon.

Anata didn’t have her knife, he recalled dimly. How could she help him without her knife?

Anata grabbed his hand and attempted to drag him off into a side tunnel. He was too heavy. His niece lacked the muscle mass to tug him more than a couple meters before the dire bear turned on them. At least she got his head out of the water. Even ankle-deep water threatened lives when the person couldn’t move.

Focusing, Kizu’s vision cleared a bit. Behind the monster, he spotted Osaki in her human form with her hands pressed against the giant crystal. Cracks slowly spiderwebbed out from her touch. Very slowly.

“Blood,” Kizu gasped, fighting off unconsciousness. “I need blood.”

Anata obviously didn’t understand. She raised one of his hands where his earlier collapse had opened a gash along his knuckles and showed it to him. Frozen blood mixed with icy debris stuck to the back of his hand. Everything around him started to dim. He felt himself sinking and looking up at Anata as if at the bottom of a well. Objects in his peripheral vision faded.

Mort darted across the arm like a bridge and bit Anata’s hand. She yelped and pulled back, but Mort had already thrown himself back at Kizu. The moment Mort rubbed his teeth against Kizu’s skin, the world exploded back to life with vengeance. Only two drops of blood, but still enough to jolt him awake.

To his horror, Kizu watched as the dire bear opened its jaws. Fresh blood stained its chin’s white fur while its bottom lip dangled from its upper. The pink and black of its now exposed gums glistened with saliva and blood.

Embracing Anata, he jumped them across the cavern next to Osaki. She barely glanced at them as they appeared next to her, her focus entirely consumed by the crystal seal.

“How long?” Kizu asked, placing a hand on the crystal for support as he staggered. The miniscule amount of Anata’s blood hadn’t been enough to fully recharge his supply.

“Maybe another thirty seconds,” she growled back.

“Either work faster, or come back some other time,” Kizu said, watching as the dire bear finally reoriented itself and found them.

It charged. The fire on its back, stocked by the beast’s momentum, grew into an inferno that released a cloud of black smoke in its wake.

Frantactlly looking from Osaki to the charging bear, Kizu decided they were out of time. He grabbed the Kitsune woman and jumped them across the cavern near a smaller tunnel to hide in.

But, before they had time to duck inside the hole to safety, the bear smashed head-first into the massive crystal. It shattered. Splinters of crystal showered the cavern. They glinted in the glacier’s enchanted lighting as they fell. The tinkle of shattering crystal shards crescendoed into a roar. Then silence.

The dire bear lay on the floor with its back still smoldering with flames. Kizu watched for any signs of life. The chest didn’t rise. No twitching movements. The eyes remained open, pierced by shards of crystal.

For better or worse, the guardian was dead and the Kitsune now freed.