Chapter LV (55)- No Deal

Kizu should have realized that the vampiric spawn, with their decades of lurking about the nearby dungeon, would know methods of getting ahead of them and cutting off their escape. In hindsight, it seemed obvious. Like Basil had mentioned, this was their home territory.

Unfortunately, hindsight meant very little for Kizu as vampiric spawn swiftly surrounded his party. The walls of the corridor bubbled, and the spawn emerged from the stone, grasping forward with outstretched hands. Their red eyes gleamed from under the stone 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 held a small bell. Similar in shape and size to what a butler might carry. He strongly suspected that was what he had heard earlier when the rifts in the dungeon wall had begun.

“Come now,” a spawn said, stepping forward. It wore a kindly old man’s face that smiled, lips closed so as to not show any fangs. Kizu suspected that it expected them to find it comforting. 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. And she’s my sister’s daughter. Not your bloodbag.”

“She is Kekkon’s daughter. And his heir. Surely you realize her immense importance to us. And besides, 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 with the normal children on the surface. How could he expect her to fit in or make friends? And she knew nothing about Anna anyway. She was useless as anything other than a blood-bag. And hadn’t he used her in the same way? What made him any better than the spawn? At least they took responsibility for her. Why would he want another person leeching off 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 to come up with a countermeasure to 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. Its eyes glared at Kizu like smoldering coals. Gnarled claws grew from its outstretched hand.

Preparing for a fight, Kizu unsheathed Sojan and held a stone pebble with 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 and he appeared skeletal.

For a minute, everyone stood still, all of them afraid of making 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 perfectly through the spawn. And smacked the bell cleanly from the back spawn’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 leg crumpling at the end. But it didn’t matter, he stabbed Sojan into the elderly spawn’s heart with one hand and threw an explosive vial at a nearby spawn with the other.

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

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

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The spawn who had just caught fire lunged for Kizu with its flaming body. But Kizu 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 lizard extended its tongue and wrapped it around the flaming spawn’s neck like a scarf. Then, with a sudden jerk, the lizard severed the spawn’s head from its shoulders. The disembodied head flew across the tunnel and knocked into a different spawn.

A massive two headed bear, one head brown, the other white, emerged from Ione’s summoning circle. It unleashed itself into the swarm of spawn. It alone took the attention of three spawn. Every swipe from its enormous paw tore through their flesh and each of its bites resulted in a crunch of bones.

Basil had 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 flung a bit of slimy flesh at it from his fingertips. He seemed to aim for their mouths. And, on contact, the flesh would explode with violent force. The impact splattered chunks of spawn flesh in every direction. For a moment, Kizu stupidly stared and wondered at the sheer power of the spell.

A new spawn broke him from his thoughts, as it lunged, aiming for his neck. Thankfully, Sojan leaped his new body into the monster’s path, raising an arm for it to chomp down on as a replacement for Kizu’s neck. Then he used his other arm to shove the spawn down further into his arm, not letting it escape. He muttered complaints about a waste of blood as the spawn struggled to free itself.

Kizu uncorked and downed one of his fire-resistant 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 blue flames. His midterm project now fully functional after weeks of practice.

Whenever a spawn attempted to get close, he tried to slam his fist into it. It turned out to not be nearly as effective as he had intended. Back in the time dilation chamber when he practiced the elemental attack, he had imagined himself as a one-man army, punching the spawn down with a flaming fist until they all turned tail and fled. In reality, he flailed at them with his arm like a whirligig, swinging his fist around in every direction. He realized a torch probably would have been far more useful. But the flaming hand did, at the very least, keep the spawn at bay, if nothing else.

After several spawn fell, apparently completely unprepared for the party’s tactics, finally one of them snatched the fallen bell from the ground. Kizu had a bad feeling about it, but as much as he might want to interfere, there were too many spawn between him and the bell. He tried to force a path through them with his flaming hand, but as one spawn jumped away, another dived under him, tripping Kizu’s bad leg. As Kizu stumbled, he heard the chime of the bell.

The dungeon flipped itself. It was only thanks to the fact he had stumbled 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 appeared far more nimble than Kizu’s companions. It looked as though they had anticipated the change in 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 appeared to have crushed two of the spawn in its fall.

From above them, Kizu dropped his last two explosive potions over the heads of the spawns, causing them to scream and scramble away while ablaze. Then he rocked him back and forth, gaining momentum, and released his grip on the ceiling. He threw his entire weight down on the spawn with the bell, tackling him to the ground. He heard his leg brace finally shatter with the impact as he landed, but that was pushed to the back of his mind. The bell skidded on the ground away from them. Out of reach.

The spawn sputtered and squirmed under Kizu. Its right arm was on fire and it seemed to have enough sense to try to use that against Kizu. Unfortunately, it seemed unable to fathom that Kizu was completely immune. Not even Kizu’s clothes burned as it jabbed him with the back of its arm while yowling in pain.

Kizu kicked the spawn with his good leg and used it to springboard himself forward as he crawled towards the bell. Just as his fingertips brushed against the bell, Ione’s bear crashed down from the side. Kizu rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding the massive creature.

Mort then leapt from Anata’s side on the giant lizard, his trajectory aiming for the bell. A spawn caught the owl monkey by the tail. Before it could do anything though, Kizu channeled a spell through his bond, lighting Mort up with the same flaming spell he had used on his fist earlier. The spawn yowled in pain, throwing Mort at Basil. Kizu managed to dismiss the spell before they made contact, but the impact still caught the changeling off guard. A spawn bit down on one of his arms.

Kizu looked over and, to his horror, he realized that four spawn stood to the side. A quick scan from his spellsense showed him that they had somehow linked their power together. They sent out a shockwave of force.

Kizu was physically lifted off his feet and thrown 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 her body collided into him midair. They hit the floor in a heap, Kizu having to blink away stars from his vision.

But people weren’t the only things thrown up into the air by the shockwave. The bell lay on the ground beside him. Kizu reached out and finally snatched it up. He took a quick glance over at the fray.

One of Basil’s spare arms had been chopped off at the elbow. He looked as if a strong breeze might end him. Sojan’s body looked even worse. Large chunks were missing. Kizu could actually see through him in one particularly large hole in his stomach. Anata still clung to the back of Ione’s lizard, somehow having avoided the shockwave that knocked Ione from it. But she had her head down and her body was shaking with what Kizu assumed to be sobs.

Kizu took a deep breath and rang the bell.