Chapter LV (55)- Poor Negotiations

Kizu should have known that the bloodspawn, with their decades of experience navigating the dungeon, would know methods of getting ahead and cutting off their escape. In hindsight, it seemed obvious. Like Basil had said, this was their territory.

Unfortunately, hindsight did very little for Kizu as the bloodspawn surrounded his party. The walls of the corridor bubbled and the spawn emerged from the stone itself, grasping wantonly with outstretched hands. Their red eyes gleamed behind the stone in that instants before they fully emerged. Fangs bared, they blocked both ends of the tunnel.

A quick glance over his shoulder told Kizu that there were close to a dozen in total. He noted that one in the back was holding a small bell, similar to the meal bell a butler might carry. That must have been what they’d heard just before the dungeon wall had started bubbling.

“Come now,” one of the bloodspawn said, stepping forward. It wore a kindly old man’s face, and it was smiling, lips closed so as to not show any fangs. It held out a gnarled hand. “Give us Anata and you can be on your way. I don’t know how the surface has changed, but we down here still believe the theft of a child to be a grave crime. Even so, all will be forgiven so long as our master’s child is returned to us unharmed. We’re not as horrible as you might believe.”

“It’s not theft,” Kizu growled. “You can’t own a person.”

“Kidnapping, then.” The old monster’s smile turned sardonic. “Much better.”

“I’m saving her! She’s my sister’s daughter - not your bloodbag!”

“She is Otochi’s heir. Surely you realize her immense importance to us. At any rate, she'll never fit in on the surface. It’s better for her to stay here with her own kind.”

Kizu relaxed. The spawn had a point. Anata looked bizarre in comparison to the average child on the surface. How could he expect her to function, after the life she’d lead, let alone make friends? And she knew nothing about Anna, anyway. She was useless to his search, useless to him. Useless as anything other than a blood-bag. And hadn’t he used her as just that? What made him any better than the bloodspawn? At least they accepted responsibility for her. Besides, did he really want another person leeching off of him? Didn’t he have enough problems to worry about already?

A smack to the back of his head brought him back to reality.

“You really need a countermeasure for mental influences,” Basil said. “That’s the second time today that you’ve been glamoured.”

Kizu rubbed his head. Then he looked back at the spawn. It looked significantly less kindly, now. Its eyes glared at Kizu like smoldering coals. Gnarled claws jutted from the fingers of its outstretched hand.

Bracing himself for another fight, Kizu unsheathed Sojan and rolled a stone pebble between the fingers of his other hand. A glance over his shoulder showed him that Ione had finished sketching a summoning circle on the ground. Her hand hovered over it, ready to press down and complete the summon. Basil had grown an extra set of arms on his back, but his body looked stretched thin from the effort. His eyes were sunken, his skin clinging to his skeleton.

For a minute, everyone stood still, all of them reluctant to make the first move. The tension was palpable. Kizu’s eyes locked with the bell-bearer in the back of the group. The nervousness in its eyes confirmed Kizu’s suspicion enough to act.

The stone shot from Kizu’s palm. It weaved deftly through the bloodspawn, and struck the bell cleanly from the monster’s hand.

The harsh note the bell let out shocked the remaining spawn, causing them to look over their shoulders as the entire tunnel shuddered violently.

Kizu dashed three steps forward, his bum leg crumpling on the third. But it didn’t matter - as he staggered, Kizu stabbed Sojan into the elderly spawn’s heart, twisted, and threw an explosive vial at the nearest bloodspawn over the elderly spawn’s shoulder.

After a moment of shock and outrage, the stabbed spawn’s eyes rolled around in its sockets.

“Not the better meal I was promised,” Sojan complained. But he didn’t get any response from Kizu or anyone else in the party.

The burning bloodspawn lunged screaming at Kizu, but he pushed Sojan aside and ducked just in time. It soared over his head, the flames licking his scalp, and smashed into Ione’s giant lizard. Anata yelped from its back as the summon’s tongue shot out of its mouth and coiled around the monster’s neck like a noose. Then, with a vicious jerk, the lizard tore the bloodspawn’s head from its shoulders.

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A massive two-headed bear, one head brown and the other white, emerged from Ione’s summoning circle. It flung itself into the swarm of spawn without hesitation, and it alone demanded the attention of three. Every swipe of its enormous paws tore through their flesh like tissue, and both of its snapping jaws bit clean through bone.

Basil barely moved. He had grown a second pair of eyes on the back of his head to match his spare arms. Whenever a spawn approached, he flicked a bit of slimy flesh from his fingertips at it. He seemed to aim for their mouths, mostly. On contact, the slimy flesh would explode with violent force. The ones that didn’t manage to dodge or block the blast died instantly, their skulls rupturing like overripe fruit. It was all Kizu could do not to stop and stare in wonder at the sheer power of the spell.

Another one of the bloodspawn broke him from his thoughts as it lunged across the corridor, reaching for his neck. Thankfully, Sojan brought his new body into the monster’s path, raising an arm and jamming it in the monster’s open mouth. He grabbed a fistful of the spawn’s hair with his free hand and held it down firmly when it tried to pull back, muttering complaints all the while about the waste of blood as the spawn struggled to free itself.

Kizu uncorked and downed one of his fire-resistance potions. It was icy cold on its way down his throat. Kizu shuddered, his insides feeling frozen. Then he channeled elemental magic, lighting his fist ablaze with searing blue flames. After weeks of practice, his midterm project was finally ready to be presented.

Whenever a spawn attempted to get close, he swung wildly, trying to slam his fist into it. It turned out it wasn’t nearly as effective as he’d thought it would be. Back in the time dilation chamber where he’d practiced the elemental attack, he had pictured himself as a one-man army, beating the spawn down with a flaming fist until they all turned tail and fled. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten in his pursuit of the magic that he still needed to land a punch. Between his bum leg and lack of fighting experience, he was forced to admit, in the privacy of his own mind, that a torch would have been far more useful. But the flaming hand did, at the very least, keep the spawn at bay.

They took down nearly a dozen of the spawn before one of them finally snatched up the fallen bell from the ground. Kizu had a bad feeling about it, but as much as he wanted to interfere, there were too many monsters between him and the bell. He tried to force a path through with his flaming hand, but as one spawn jumped away, another dove low, tripping Kizu’s bad leg. As Kizu stumbled and fell, he heard the chime of the bell.

The dungeon flipped, rolling like an alligator. It was only because he was already falling that Kizu managed to activate his enchanted glove and stick to the floor, now the ceiling, while everyone else tumbled head over heels.

Unfortunately, the spawn were far more nimble than Kizu’s companions. More than that, they’d started moving as soon as the bell rang, in anticipation of the dungeon's sudden shift. They were on their feet after only a moment, while Kizu’s companions still lay in jumbled heaps. The only silver lining was the fact that Ione’s two-headed bear had crushed two of the spawn in its fall.

From above, Kizu dropped his last two explosive potions over the heads of a group of the remaining bloodspawn, setting them all ablaze. He rocked back and forth while they scattered in shrieking agony, building momentum, and released his grip on the ceiling. He fell upon the skulking monster with the bell, slamming him to the ground. Kizu heard his leg brace finally shatter with the impact, but that was pushed to the back of his mind. The bell skidded on the ground away from them, out of reach of both.

The spawn sputtered and thrashed under Kizu. Its right arm was on fire and it seemed to have enough sense to try to use that against Kizu. That was all the sense it had left, though. In its panic, it never realized that Kizu was completely immune to the flames. Not even Kizu’s clothes burned as it jabbed him with the back of its arm, yowling in pain all the while.

Kizu kicked off from the spawn with his good leg, springboarding himself forward as he lurched for the bell. Just as his fingertips brushed against it, Ione’s summoned bear came crashing down on him from the side. Kizu rolled away, narrowly avoiding the massive creature as it carried on down the corridor like a skipping stone.

Mort leapt from Anata’s shoulder on the giant lizard’s back, aiming straight for the bell. A bloodspawn caught the owl monkey by his tail. Before it could do anything more, though, Kizu channeled a spell through his bond, lighting Mort up with the same blue fire he’d coated his fist with earlier. The spawn howled in pain, throwing Mort at Basil as hard as it could. Kizu managed to dismiss the spell before they made contact, but the impact still almost knocked the changeling off his feet. One of the blood spawn took advantage of the opening and bit down savagely on one of his arms.

Kizu cast around and, to his horror, saw that four spawn stood off to the side with the look of focused mages. A quick scan with his spellsense showed him that they had somehow linked their power together. They saw him looking and thrust their hands out as one, sending out a shockwave of force.

This time he wasn’t fast enough to anchor himself with his gloves. The wave of kinetic pressure lifted Kizu off the ground and hurled him across the dungeon corridor. He narrowly avoided being crushed a second time by Ione’s bear. Unfortunately, he didn’t manage to dodge Ione herself as they collided in midair. They hit the floor in a heap, and stars filled Kizu’s vision.

But when his vision cleared, Kizu saw that people and summons weren’t the only things that had been tossed around by the shockwave. The bell lay on the ground just beside him, gleaming in the low light. Kizu reached out and finally snatched it up. Heart hammering in his chest, leg a ruined mess, he took stock of the battle.

One of Basil’s spare arms had been chopped off at the elbow, and he looked like a strong breeze might snap off the other three. Sojan’s stolen body looked even worse. Two blood spawn currently were latched to his body, tearing him apart with their teeth and large chunks of the possessed blood spawn were simply gone - Kizu could actually see through him in one particularly grisly place. Anata still clung to the back of Ione’s lizard, which had somehow avoided the shockwave that knocked Ione from its back. She looked unharmed, physically, she had her head down and her body was shaking with what could only be a child’s hopeless sobs.

Kizu rang the bell.