Chapter 123: Life Drain
Just as a fragile smile touched my lips to encourage him, a black shadow lunged from the periphery, striking me with the force of a runaway carriage. I was thrown to the damp stone, the air driven from my lungs, every bone in my body screaming in protest.
The thing pinned me, its dead weight a suffocating shroud. I stared up into the empty, glowing sockets of a drowner. One had slipped past the chaos, a lone predator drawn to the weakest of the herd. Our neighbours, after all, were not as strong as Jared, nor were they armed like the ruffians. They were no match for these things; their desperate battle was a losing one, a chorus of distant screams from their barricaded hovels.
The drowner’s jaw gaped, a maw of yellowed, broken teeth descending toward my throat. I remembered the torn flesh of the ruffians and threw my left arm up in a desperate, instinctual block to protect my throat.
Crack!
A sickening sound, a wet crunch of bone and sinew. A pain so profound, so absolute, exploded in my arm that I thought for a moment the limb had been torn clean from my body. The drowner’s teeth, cold and sharp as river stones, had locked onto my wrist.
Jared struggled to rise, his face a mask of helpless fury, but he had just been revived and the magic had left him a broken doll. He collapsed back to the ground, and I was alone.
“Aaaahhh! Let go of me!” I hammered at its rotten face with my free hand. Each blow was a wet, pulping sound, sending sprays of foul, black corpse-water across my own skin.
But it was useless. The creature held fast, its teeth grinding, chewing on my arm with a mindless, relentless hunger. Every movement was a fresh agony of tearing flesh. Its free hands clawed at me, their nails like broken shards of glass.
It hurts! God, it hurts! I tried to summon my magic, to call forth the fire or the worms, but there was nothing. The scarlet ray had left me an empty vessel, and the maggots were a distant, crawling horror I could no longer command.
My last resort was to claw at its face, to try and pry its jaws open with my bare hands. As my fingers sank into its putrid flesh, I felt a sudden, chilling emptiness, and then a cold, clear stream began to flow from its body into mine, a current drawn through the palm of my hand.
At first, it was a trickle, then a torrent. It was a cold, dark energy, like swallowing a lungful of icy water that spread a deathly chill all the way to my stomach. I shivered, a violent, ague-like tremor. But the pain in my arm began to fade. It was a while before I realized the drowner had gone still. The skin I was clutching, once soft and waterlogged, now felt like old, dry bark.
I looked down. The thing was a husk, a desiccated mummy. The corpse-water had vanished, its bloated flesh now withered and tight against the bone. The blue light in its eyes had gone out. It was truly, finally dead. I pried its jaw open and pulled my arm free. A chunk of flesh was gone from my wrist, and blood, dark and shockingly red, streamed from the wound.
It’s over. I frantically took a cloth to press on the wound, hoping to stop the bleeding. But even if I didn’t die from blood loss, I would very likely get infected, bitten by such a filthy drowner, I might soon become a drowner myself. The thought of the witch turning into that… I didn’t want it!
Just as I was at my wit’s end, another piece of knowledge came to my mind. Drowners were not contagious. To create more of their kind, a drowner had to drag a person into a mana-polluted water source. Just being bitten was not something to be afraid of.
Phew, so being bitten won’t turn me. But even so, my situation was very bad now. The blood wouldn’t stop at all. The fresh blood stained the ragged cloth I was using to press on the wound, stained my clothes, and continued to drip down, forming a pool of bright red blood beneath me. When I had blocked it just now, it was my wrist that had been bitten. It seemed my artery had been torn. Now the blood was flowing like a torrent, and I couldn’t stop it at all. I could feel the life draining out of me, a warmth spreading across my skin that was not warmth at all, but the coming of a final, irreversible cold. My vision began to blur at the edges.
Am I going to die? No, not yet. Not now.
Jared was still helpless. If I died, the other drowners would be on him in a moment. I could see them now, shambling closer, their attention drawn to the scent of fresh blood.
Damn it, if I could just cast one more spell… how did I kill the first one?
I subconsciously raised my bleeding left hand, aiming it at the approaching dead. Unknowingly, my posture was a perfect, chilling echo of the witch’s. I remembered the feeling, the cold, dark stream. And at the same time, a primal instinct, the desperate cry of a body bleeding out, screamed for more. For blood.
Hiss! I saw it. A wisp of energy rose from the nearest drowner. It was not the vibrant, crimson mist of the living I had seen at the execution ground before, but a turbid, inky blackness, like a drop of poison in clear water.
It flowed into me, the same bone-chilling current that now immediately banished the encroaching darkness behind my eyes, pushing back the weakness, the cold.
The drowners collapsed to the ground almost instantly. They had long since lost their lives, their corrupt bodies moving entirely because of mana. When I sucked away their remaining mana, their false life also ended once more. If you only used physical attacks, drowners would be very difficult to kill. As long as their form could retain the necessary mana to maintain it, the drowner would not stop moving. But the mana in these low-level undead was so little that I could suck it all away in an instant.
The witch’s spell, Life Drain. The one I had wanted most of all, because I had seen with my own eyes how she had used it to silently kill many people in the heavily guarded execution ground, creating chaos and escaping. In a moment of pure, desperate terror, I had learned it without a teacher. And I was glad of it. Without this dark gift, I would already be dead.
I didn’t stop. I continued to pull, to drain, turning the fallen drowners into withered husks until I felt a sliver of strength return. But it wasn’t enough. I turned to the other drowners, the ones still tearing at our neighbours. I reached out my hand, recalling the feeling, and pulled the mana.
Clumps of black mist tore free from their bodies, and they collapsed in heaps. The neighbours, who had been moments from a screaming death, stared in stunned disbelief as their attackers simply… fell. The joy of their impossible salvation was a slow, dawning thing in their terrified hearts.
Not enough. Not enough at all. The blood is still flowing. The dead have nothing left to give me!
A voice, a seductive whisper from the deepest, darkest part of my soul, coiled in my mind. It told me to turn my gaze to the living. In my eyes, they were no longer just people. They were fragrant, tempting delicacies, their bodies glowing with a warm, crimson light.
As long as I reach out to them, I can get what I need. I can survive. I raised my hand, and aimed it at the living, who thought they had escaped death, but were completely unaware of the true monster that was about to befall them.
Comments (0)
Please login or sign up to post a comment.