Vina descended through a pool of her own blood but in a controlled manner. She remained seated through the initial descent, her agility and dexterity worked together to allow her control of her orientation. When she felt her momentum shift upward, she relaxed her legs and assumed a standing position. Forced up and out of the pool, she landed nimbly on her feet.
Sensing her surroundings through her blood sense, she quickly forged a sword from her own life essence, siphoning what she could from the fast-dissipating portal before having to tap into her own reserves. Between the exertion of inscribing blood runes into her body and the recent travel, she was keen on conserving every drop. She imbued more of her blood into the sword as the nearest creature advanced from the darkness. Despite the complete lack of light, her unique sense allowed her to discern its vitality. "Sixty-five health," she muttered under her breath, "I can handle these."
Vina didn’t scrutinize the creature; she felt its modest amount of vibrance. Although the room was shrouded in complete darkness, she also knew these creatures weren't shadowed by Stine. The creatures, with their surplus of legs and bulbous abdomens, were more akin to colossal fleas, and she was eager to thin their numbers. Activating her skills Blood Dance and Weak Points, she readied herself.
As the first creature lunged, Vina was ready. She immediately recognized the attack angle the creature had chosen. Vina knew the correct counter and executed it to perfection, landing two sharp thrusts before sidestepping. It mewled in a high pitched voice and lay on its side, bleeding out. The creature's blood pleaded to be utilized; she obliged, using it to form a claw on her damaged gauntlet hand. However, she was careful to not use the blood as she had done with Faer. Training her skills was her priority now.
The death wail of the creature seemed to mark the start of a battle royale. Every creature in blood sense’s range surged towards her, but Vina was prepared. She moved like a wraith amidst their clumsy leaps and lunges, her agility easily surpassing their capabilities. She struck prudently, landing her sword only when an opportunity presented itself, heeding Seassa's advice to favor efficiency over perfection.
As the creatures thinned and their pace flagged, Vina grew selective with her attacks. She activated her charge skill, darting across the room to skewer a creature. The last standing creature's taloned arm rebounded off her raised gauntlet, invigorating her. She gritted her teeth and waited for it to strike, and she once again deflected it effortlessly. “Come on!” she yelled, her orders amplified by Commanding Voice. “Faster!” she screamed at it. Her anger flared up; her past experiences of imprisonment in the darkness, the dreadful revelations, and her self-inflicted injuries to escape fueled her need for power, even if only for this fleeting moment.
With the creature finally spent, Vina seized one of its talons with her clawed hand, tossing it to the ground before delivering two final, fatal strikes. She activated her lantern, subconsciously directing the creatures' blood into its reservoir.
The red illumination confirmed her suspicions; she was inside a cave. The inscriptions on her bones had hinted at such a location being a potential destination for her initial arrival, a thought which sent a shudder through her. "Good thing I appeared in the prison first, not here," she muttered to herself, certain that her level one self would have not fared well here.
Vina’s gaze darted towards one of the tunnels as her senses picked up on something intriguing yet familiar. “Stigandorians?” she voiced her surprise in a hushed whisper. Since acquiring Blood Sense in Termily, her experiences had extended to Paliternians like herself, creatures, and the darkness. Each came with its own distinct degree of vibrance – paliternians emanating the brightest while the darkness embodied an abyss-like void. The creatures, not consumed by the shadows, reflected a diluted vibrance akin to her own. The weakest ones felt artificially crafted, while the most powerful were nearing regular vibrance levels.
But these six beings she now sensed were extraordinarily unique – so much so that she couldn’t find the right word for it. She had encountered this vibrance only once before, identifying it as Stigandorian, but her flustered state at that time had prevented her from fully comprehending its peculiarity. “Is it... bubbling, sizzling, sparking, popping?” She sensed an amalgamation of these attributes, making it all the more intriguing.
Anticipating their swift approach, she called upon the remaining blood in the room, forging a protective cloak around herself, insistent on preserving her own reserves. Positioning herself towards the cave's sole entrance, she prepared for their arrival, heralded by a sudden burst of light. A shadow darted across the wall, followed by a woman’s voice, but Vina couldn’t make out the words. A lanky silhouette rounded the corner, entering her space, swiftly followed by five others.
Bathed in the crimson light of Vina's lantern, she made out six humanoid figures. Their ashen gray and white hair was immediately recognizable and stood in stark contrast to their varied eye colors of copper and yellow. She recognized two men, three women, and one who she couldn’t tell what their gender was. Each harbored an array of concealed items, ranging from knives to mixtures, all laid bare under her Blood Shot Eyes. Intriguingly, they each had a single aspect hovering near their wrists.
“Sesti valis darimal?” One of the women intoned. Her tone sounded doubtful and Vina guessed it was a question, but for the first time, she didn’t understand what someone was saying. The woman’s voice, however, was almost distracting in its melodic quality.
Vina elevated her clawed hand, pointing above her, “Hello. My name and title floats above my head. Can you understand me?”
“Sasti sidirela Larathana.” The woman said, looking Vina in the eye. Fear began to fill her voice as well as her vibrance.
The person who Vina could not tell their gender spoke up from the back. “Lar parlas lare vant valis Vina.”
Vina's penetrating gaze settled on the group, her senses giving away their vitality, each only just about a hundred and fifty health. Their levels were quite low, and their fear was palpable. She really hoped she could work with these people to figure out where she was.
“Yes! Vina. Look at my title. I am an Asharaina named Vina. I mean you no harm.” Dismissing her blood claw, she let the blood dissolve onto the ground. Raising her now normal hand, albeit with still-blood-red nails, she spoke calmly, “See?”
As the confusion on their faces persisted, Vina took the opportunity to examine the nearest individual closely.
Stigandorian (Adult) Level: Private Title: Outworlder No further information
“How can they have aspects bound to themselves?" The questions swirled in her mind.
"Where are we? How far are we from the surface?" Vina inquired, striving to maintain a non-threatening demeanor. Despite their unfamiliar vibrance, she could discern the hostility and apprehension they harbored towards her. Just as the tension seemed to ease slightly, a window popped up before her.
World Bounty Notification: Haco, The First of the Twelve of The Watch, has placed a bounty on The Traveler known as The Asharaina: Vina Esca for crimes against The Watch. The following will be awarded: Information leading to capture - 10,000 Regals of the Watch Vina’s head and equipment delivered to The Watch - 30,000 Regals of The Watch Vina delivered alive with equipment delivered to The Watch - 50,000 Regals of the Watch Reward value may be exchanged to your local currency.
Vina finished reading first, “Oh fuck you, Haco!” she spat. The atmosphere in the room shifted as the six individuals exchanged glances. "Don't do this," she urged, sensing their shifting intent.
The woman who first spoke, spoke once again, “Uratayor viteliram.” She smiled at her party. “Kelir lar telis.”
Vina furrowed her brow, puzzled by the words she heard. Her perplexity was interrupted by the approach of a man wielding a hefty hammer. Instantaneously, she activated Blood Dance and reformed her claw. As he swung his hammer downwards, she attempted to deflect it. The man's strength and the weapon's weight overpowered her, forcing her to instead maneuver underneath the attack. She thrust her sword towards a gap in his armor under his armpit, only for a second man to block her attack.
Repositioning herself out of reach of the two armored adversaries, Vina reevaluated her strategy while attempting to account for all six individuals' actions. This was a new battlefield dynamic for her. While creatures often charged without a strategy, her attack had already been thwarted by this group's coordination. "I need to create some chaos," she thought, pulling at the remnants of blood in the room and quickly forming small pools behind the enemy lines.
Vina’s efforts went completely unnoticed by her adversaries as the two men maneuvered around her. The one whose gender she didn’t recognize reached a hand out to her companions and Vina could swear she saw one of their companion's muscles swell. The moment they stepped into a blood pool to empower another ally, a spike of blood pierced their unprotected foot. Their shriek distracted their companions, providing Vina the opening she needed.
Floating her sword in the air before her with her title, she summoned four throwing daggers, two in each hand, and hurled them swiftly at two assailants. Snatching her sword out of the air, she activated charge, rushing the second man who had intercepted her earlier. She slid under his strike at the last second. Then she struck out at his knee from behind as she passed him. As he collapsed forwards, she continued past their front line. With possibly two armored men trailing behind her, she activated Mobility, a precaution against any swift recoveries.
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Her Blood Sense alerted her that her throwing daggers had inflicted considerable damage on at least one of the outworlders in the back lines, the evidence of their spilling blood painting the floor. She reached out to the blood, perplexed when it failed to respond. Shrugging off her confusion, she continued her assault, striking at two others before Mobility sounded an alarm of an incoming attack.
Heeding the warning, she evaded the hammer strike, skillfully maneuvering around his attack. Activating Weak Points, she hoped the skill could find a vulnerability in his armor allowing her to retaliate.
A target illuminated in her vision, and she instinctively used her claw rather than her sword to exploit it. The long cuts she carved into the side of the armor surprised her, prompting new weak points to light up. She lunged forward with her sword, immediately feeling her thrust penetrate the man's ribs. Just as she retracted her weapon, Blood Sense alerted her to the threatening proximity of the group's leading woman. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted the woman's dual curved swords. With Avoidance's aid, she narrowly escaped, though not without sustaining an injury as a sword grazed her arm.
Vina stumbled back several paces out of reach, her eyes darting around the cave. The kaliter armor had absorbed most of the damage, but she could feel the cold sting where it had been cut clean through. Her hand wanted to instinctively cover the stinging wound, but she stopped herself. She needed to focus. She refused to let herself bleed. She needed that blood right now.
Her heart pounded in her chest as she took in her opponents. The dim light of their torches glinted off their weapons, and the chill in the air seemed to grow sharper. She caught her breath, her mind whirling. One of them, she had killed outright, but that still left five. She knew another one was incapacitated with a gruesome foot injury, and that just left a third clutching a stomach wound. One of the large men struggled with his weight distribution due to a wounded knee, while his comrade nursed a rib injury. Only their leader, it seemed, had come out unscathed from the initial clash.
"Thaba, Toleina valis moram!" cried the man with the rib wound, fear strangling his voice as he checked his dead partner.
"Sasti silim, Rolein.” Retorted Thaba softly. “Nepiril mixture! Tarn shal Drimmer, valis sastir charim?" asked the woman leading the group.
"Ser fenar valis narim dolram!" Tarn replied, their voice trembling. They clutched at their mangled foot trying to stem the flow of what Vina could now see was blue blood
Rolein popped the cork off of a mixture and drank it down while the others turned to Vina, who stood silent for a moment. The dim cave light cast harsh shadows across her face, rendering her expression unreadable. She could see their doubt, their suspicion crawling onto their faces. “What are they thinking?” Vina asked herself.
Her voice was steady when she finally spoke, trying to suppress her emotions. "Please stop," she pleaded, her words echoing ominously in the cavernous space. "If you keep fighting, you're all going to die down here."
Her words hung heavy in the silence that followed. She saw their desperation grow, and felt the tension thicken in the cave. The stakes were raised, the conflict escalating to the next level. Thaba whispered to her team, her tone harsh, “Ne-vrak lare zivna.” Then Thaba stared at Vina, simply uttering, "Cotorilin."
"What?" Vina asked, but her opponents were already mobilizing. They helped Tarn onto their remaining foot, and for a fleeting moment, Vina hoped the group had taken her warning to heart. Suddenly, they barricaded the entrance, each raising a hand adorned with a bracelet bearing a blood-red stone.
“You mother fu…” Vina began to utter, but the chamber erupted into a pyroclasm. The heat closed in around her, a living, blistering entity. The fire's cruel fingers seared her face and eyes, turned her breath ragged, and created a suffocating shroud in the enclosed space. Her blood cloak sprang into a defensive whirl around her, a thin yet vital barrier against the furnace that her world had become. However, it drew from her precious blood reserves at an alarming rate. Despite her innate 5% resistance to fire, the combined flames of her four assailants amplified the damage beyond her mitigations. The duration of their assault was uncertain, and with her blood stores perilously limited to the scant remnants in her pendant and her own veins, she knew she had to act quickly.
Shielding herself with her cloak, she ran headlong into the conflagration. Activating Charge, she launched herself into the air, surprising even herself with the height she achieved in the confined cave. She landed on Tarn, tearing the person’s throat out with a newly formed claw. Quick to follow up, she stabbed Rolein in the side with her sword, dropping him to the ground. When Thaba's swords swung down on her, she raised her claw to parry the dual strikes, finding that their strength was nearly equal.
The armored men stirred to aid their leader, but Vina maintained her distance, effortlessly blocking Thaba's every attack. Dismissing her sword, allowing its blood to pool on the ground, she concentrated on the twin swords persistently aiming to carve into her. However, a corner of her mind grappled with the challenge of the two armored men.
Up to this point, she had quite a bit of trouble reliably landing decisive hits on them. Her thrusting sword allowed for some armor penetration, but the effect was so minimal it may as well have been a paper cut. One of them was barely mobile, his stamina sapped by exertion and Hemophages, compounded by an injured knee. The other was still somewhat mobile. "Hopefully this works..." she told herself.
As her sword's blood slithered across the ground, the man in armor lumbered toward her, his focus solely on her and oblivious to the blood. Vina began to appreciate that stealth was unnecessary; no one seemed to pay attention to the blood on the ground except her. When he was ten feet from Thaba, she manipulated a globule of blood, lining it up with the tear in his armor. A moment later, she activated a Blood Burst.
The man, Plath, cried out in agony and bewilderment. His side was peppered with sharp fragments, no doubt maxing out his Hemophage stacks. As he collapsed under the burden of his injuries, Vina was confident he wouldn't be rejoining the fight soon.
Thaba turned her head ever so slightly, fear and concern washing over her face. For Vina it felt like slow motion. She reached out with her clawed hand and raked it down the woman’s chest armor while simultaneously activating charge. Her free hand clasped the woman’s neck, and she activated Blood Stained Hands while slamming her back first to the cave floor. Immediately Thaba began to bleed profusely from her eyes, nose, and mouth.
In a mixture of fascination and revulsion, Vina watched. This was her first use of the skill, and she had yet to comprehend its mechanism. Thaba's eyes fluttered in rapid succession as they filled with her own blue blood and overflowed like tears down her face.
Vina's voice echoed in the tense silence, "Thaba, it didn't have to be this way." Her words hung heavily in the air, tinged with regret. "We could've parted ways peacefully, but now..." She paused, a shadow crossing her face. "Now, if I let you go, I have to worry that you’ll reveal my presence, and I’ll have to kill more people."
Thaba tried to respond, but her words drowned in her own blood. The potent effects of Vina's two class abilities were absolute. Thaba was bleeding steadily, immobilized under Vina's claw and strength. "I should've advanced this ability to the third level," she lamented. "This is going to take too long." Without another way to expedite Thaba's end without risking her escape, Vina felt helpless. Her claw held Thaba still, her other hand continuing to inflict damage at Thaba's throat. "This feels like Ebba all over again," Vina reflected, her hand tightening, her hardened nails digging into Thaba’s skin.
When Thaba's life finally drained away, Vina swiftly and efficiently eliminated the remaining armored men. She turned to check on Rolein, but a quick review of her notification log showed it was unnecessary. She collected what usable blood was left in the room, irritated at the meager amount reclaimed. Lately, she felt like she was constantly running on a deficit. A quick glance at her stamina showed it was just over half-full. "At least one resource is pulling its weight," she muttered.
Bending down, Vina removed one of the bracelets that the six wore and inspected it.
Jewelry: Bracelet of Ephemeral Anchoring (Unknown Crafter) Rarity: Cross System Rarity Unknown Effect: Not of this system
"Ephemeral Anchoring?" she mused aloud. "Is this what Haco meant about travelers bonding with aspects?” Upon a second glance, she saw that all of the aspects on the bracelets had already shattered. She stashed one of the bracelets into her backpack for further inspection later, hoping Eilin would know more. She also found three healing mixtures and two stamina mixtures. After collecting the loot, she let her wound bleed and activated Blood Aid.
She made another attempt to command the outworlder's blue blood but met with no response. "What is going on?" she puzzled. Never before had she struggled to control the blood of sentient beings. However, the lantern seemed to have no issue absorbing the blood, and was soon greedily absorbing everything around it.
Vina opened her title and read it once more.
Title: The Asharaina. You have declared yourself the owner of the blood of this world. You are able to manipulate, control, and own all blood of this world as long as it is outside of a body.
"Owner of the blood... of this world, but not other worlds," Vina repeated aloud, realization dawning on her. "Trina, you could've clarified that detail." Then she gasped as a revelation dawned on her, "The creatures are from this world!" Still skeptical of her own conclusion, she looked at the corpses and the voraciously drinking lantern. Vina shook her head, trying to make sense of this new revelation. Everyone had told her the creatures didn’t exist until several hundred years after The Severing, the event that resulted in Trina being trapped.
Finding her way out of the cave was easier than anticipated. Leaving the alcove, she simply followed the upward path to daylight. Turning off the lantern, she stepped out into the sun and reveled in the brilliance of the daylight. After being trapped in the dark gloom for so long, the sun's warmth was a welcome sensation. Looking down, she noticed her hands were covered in blue, dried, and sticky blood. "Blood-stained hands... I guess that ability name was quite literal, Trina," she quipped. For the first time in a long while, she struggled to clean them.
Vina felt another Stigandorian vibrance approach her, but it didn’t feel hostile. She looked over and saw an old man carrying a pickaxe. He called out to her from a distance. “You uh… you got a bounty on ya.”
She sighed in relief at being able to understand him. “Is it above my head? Like a title?” she called back.
“Oh yes. It’s right beneath your title with a big red star.”
She rubbed her forehead in frustration. This would undoubtedly complicate things, but still, there was a man here willing and able to talk to her. "Are you going to report me?" she asked as she approached him.
"Me? Oh no, not at all. That’s a promise. I'm just a miner; I avoid trouble. Thanks for taking care of those creatures in there," he replied, dismissively waving his hand.
A notification popped up, confirming his promise. Vina gave a relieved smile. “Thanks. I’m glad I don’t have to kill you.”