Jian did not believe in holding back.
Even before the spear of blood slammed into Erichthonius’s palm, she was moving.
The shadow of the table beneath the Hero’s feet turned into a whirlpool, sucking him down like quicksand. Her hand slid behind her back and out from that same shadow, her knife slicing at his tendons. She crossed the room in an instant, her sword swinging towards his neck even as he turned to catch the spear
But a Hero was not weak.
He yanked one foot free and stomped down on her knuckles, driving her knife back into the shadows. He barely looked as he flicked his own sword up, catching hers in a flurry of sparks. He pushed her sword up out of the way and twisted his body, swinging his fist.
Jian caught the blow, but she couldn’t stop it. She realized her mistake as soon as her feet lifted off the ground. The fist of the Hero of Forges slammed into her like a hammer, and the stone wall behind her became an anvil against her back.
For a moment, both pressed against her, crushing her. Then the anvil cracked.
Jian exploded through the stone wall.
She hung suspended in the air, the ringing in her ears making it harder to see the ground rushing by in a blur. She was still confused when she hit the ground, skipping off of shattered paving stones twice before getting her feet under her. She skidded to a slow stop, her feet digging furrows in the stone.
She stood and stretched her back, feeling tattered pieces of her dress fall off as the blood seeped back under her skin. The sun was setting in front of her, and she reached behind her to pull her shadow forward. She wove it into clothing better suited for a fight, tight and form-fitting around her core with billowing sleeves to obscure the movement of her hands and feet.
She looked up at the hole in the mansion she’d left behind.
“Thank you, Lavinda.” Erichthonius said. Even this far away, she could hear him clearly.
The woman in question and her ‘sister’ stepped back from him, having fitted a gleaming bronze breastplate over the Hero’s loose tunic. He snapped the last piece of a bronze vambrace around his forearm as he stepped forward, the two haves melting into a single piece of metal as his qi forced it to remember what it was supposed to be. He accepted a large round shield from his attendants, half as tall as Jian herself and polished to a mirror shine. He stretched his neck to the side until it popped.
“Let’s get this started then. One.”
The sound of a hammer striking an anvil rang out, thunderous. It came from everywhere, shouting from the Hero’s soul and echoing from the city he’d created.
The stone beneath his feet cratered as he leapt towards her.
Jian smiled. Committing to a jump was dangerous. You couldn’t dodge in mid air. She opened her shadow wide, launching half a dozen spears in the instant he jumped.
Erichthonius just laughed, thrusting his shield forward to intercept the spears. Each one was packed full of enough qi to shatter stone, but as soon as they touched the round shield on his arm, they stopped in place. For a moment, both the Hero’s momentum and the spears were completely canceled out. Then, his shield flashed with light and the spears shot back towards Jian with the same speed she’d thrown them.
She threw herself to the side, rolling to her feet as she was pelted with fragments of shattered stone. A cloud of dust rolled past her with a wave, visibly parting where the Hero dashed towards her. He’d fallen straight down after reflecting the spears, but he’d crossed the remaining distance as soon as his feet hit the ground.
She brought her own sword up just in time to catch his swing.
The sound of a hammer striking an anvil rang out again, deafening her. Her feet were pressed into the stone by the weight of the blow. Her blade, the same steel jian she’d carried for eight years, cracked.
“Two.” Erichthonius said, smiling.
His bronze xiphos had changed. It had another, ghostly, image overlapping with it. It was another sword, a different sword, at least two hands longer and lacking the xiphe’s handguard. It almost resembled a more ornate jian.
She couldn’t place it, but it tickled her memory. It had weight. Spiritual weight.
He swung the rim of his shield at her, and she leaned backwards, letting it sail just over her head. She allowed her momentum to carry her, bringing her foot up in a quick kick that caught the Hero on his chin and sent him stumbling back. She pushed her palms against the ground, completing her backflip and dashing forward.
The sun was setting in the west.
Jian circled the Hero, putting the sun behind him. As she passed the spears planted in the ground, she slapped one with the flat of her sword. The blood rippled and splattered. It was sucked up by the blade like a drain, sinking into the cracks in the blade and covering the whole thing in a patina of crystallized blood.
Yes, that felt right. She was still getting used to using blood, could tell there was still so much more she could use it for.
She stepped onto the Hero’s shadow and swung her sword. He backpedaled, giving ground as he blocked each strike with his shield. On the third slash, it flashed again, reflecting phantom light and reversing the momentum of her sword. She felt it jerk in her hand and let it go, before the abrupt change in direction could rip her arm out of its socket.
A thin tether of blood stuck to the sword, swinging it around in an arc while she cut her palm with her knife. The blood from the wound instantly wrapped around the thin blade, strengthening it with her qi, a moment before the Hero’s blade crashed down on her with.
The sound of a hammer strike rang out a third time as the two weapons connected, but instead of stopping the swing, Jian let it push her down. She was shoved down into the Hero’s shadow as if it were water, twisting the direction of up and immediately shooting out feet first at a new angle. Her kick slipped under the Hero’s large shield and hit him in the gut like a spear with all of the momentum of his own swing. The bronze armor stopped her foot from punching through his chest, but it did nothing to stop him from getting launched into the air like a ragdoll.
Her own sword had swung on its blood tether in a long arc until it was behind and above the hero. Jian jerked and whipped the tether, pulling the sword towards the Hero’s back and flipping it around so that it came blade first.
“Three.” The Hero coughed, a smile on his lips.
The phantom blade forming around his sword snapped fully into reality, gleaming gold, and everything went to shit.
Wind exploded out from Erichthonius, knocking her sword away before it could reach him. The wave of force slammed into her, pushing her back down into his shadow as three lines of pain ripped open on her chest with a splash of blood.
Jian barely had time to register her own surprise, before she was swallowed by the shadow. She popped out from behind a tree a hundred meters away, holding her chest.
How had he cut her from so far away? The wind? How did a Hero of Forges wield wind? Bellows?
She felt herself panicking, breathing too heavily. She didn’t need to breathe, she reminded herself. The gashes in her chest started knitting back together as soon as she focused on them, her Life and Blood Resonances harmonizing with each other to make her recovery nearly instant. It didn’t even leave a scar. The blood left covering her peeled itself off, swirling and being pulled into the palm of her hand to form a new sword.
She looked up, wary.
Erichthonius walked towards her slowly, unhurried. He carried the golden blade loosely in his hand, the long blade almost dragging against the ground. A miniature storm had formed around it, dark clouds swirling down its length and flashes of lightning arcing between them and the blade itself.
“Behold.” The Hero said, lifting it above his head. “The sword of Hera herself, forged by Prometheus from the tail-bone of the Orochi. The Divine Cloudforger, which was used to hang Elysium from the Firmament.”
She didn’t have time to question how that was possible before he swung the sword down. Whether it was truth or lie, the outcome was undeniable.
He cut the wind.
A new line of blood erupted across Jian’s chest, from shoulder to hip.
A chunk of marble crashed into the ground, sheared off of the side of a building that had the misfortune of being behind her.
Jian wanted to run, she almost tried then and there, but no distance was safe from that thing. Even if she got away, she would be hunted like a beast. No, she was supposed to be stronger now. Strong enough that she could make choices. Strong enough to choose when to spare someone and when to kill them.
And she really wanted to kill the jackass in front of her.
She grabbed her blood that was still falling through the air, spinning it into a disc, and threw it at the Hero before falling backwards into the shadow of the tree.
When the disc reached him, the Hero cut it in half while holding his shield towards his own shadow, anticipating a surprise. However, each half of the cut disk cast its own shadow, and from each shadow shot a new disk. They each stabbed into the ground around him, casting four shadows. He couldn’t cover them all.
The Hero didn’t hesitate. He stabbed his blade into the new shadow on his right, the tip sinking into the stone it covered like butter, just as Jian rose from the left. He spun around, dragging the divine blade through the ground as if it were water, snapping it upward as she dashed towards him.
Jian’s left arm came off at the elbow.
Her sword buried itself in the Hero’s right leg.
She tried to yank the sword out, to rip his leg off completely, but the Hero screamed and lightning flooded her, jumping from his outstretched sword to her body in a hundred searing arcs. Her feet left the ground as the storm coating the sword exploded over her, throwing her into the air.
She heard a sound like shattered glass just before she smashed into a tree and snapped it in half, her body trailing smoke.
She yanked on a tether of blood spilling from her stump, pulling her severed arm back into place. She held it in place for a moment, focusing on the almost euphoric itch as her body healed itself and burnt skin flaked off her body to make room for new skin growing to replace it.
This was exactly what she’d always wanted from her Life Resonance. Immortality. Safety.
She looked up to see Erichthonius staring at the crumbled hunk of Bronze in his hand. The Divine weapon was gone, and the bronze xiphos it had been built over had shattered into dozens of pieces.
His leg was still bleeding freely, but he ignored it.
“I suppose three good hits is still my limit.” He said to himself. “I’ll have to waste resources after all.”
He dropped his shield to the side and snapped his fingers.
Lavinda walked up to him. Jian hadn’t even noticed her standing there.
“Thank you, Lavinda.” The Hero said absently, closing his hand around her neck.
“It was a pleasure serving you, my Hero.”
Jian felt a spike of danger. She dug her fingers into the ground and pulled herself into the nearest shadow. She had to stop-
“Three.” The Hero said to the chorus of hammers. Three strikes at once, as if each hammer had been poised, just waiting to drop.
Lavinda the woman disappeared, her clothes dropping to pile on the ground. In her place was a curved double-edged sword taller than she had been. The hilt alone stretched twice as long as the Hero’s forearm. There was a small chip in the blade a third of the way down its length.
Jian pulled her torso halfway out of the shadow behind the Hero, already thrusting a spear of blood at his back.
The Hero pressed his new blade against his wound.
“Burn.”
The blade ignited, glowing white as flames erupted down its length. The smell of sizzling flesh and harsh golden light flooded through the air, wiping away every shadow.
Jian was yanked back back down into the shadow as it disappeared, disoriented for a moment before being violently ejected. The fire had overwhelmed the light of the setting sun and the shadows of the four disks she’d planted in the ground now stretched out and away from the Hero. She was thrown from the closest of those shadows, rolling over the ground as she tried to push through the nausea.
She jumped to the side before she could clear her head, instinct pushing her to move.
The Hero’s sword slammed into the stone and erupted in a pillar of flame. The heat alone flash-dried Jian’s skin and she felt the spear of blood in her hand start melting even as it dried out and began to crumble in a confusing mess. The cracks in the stone bubbled, their edges starting to run together.
One.
She pushed more qi through her spear, asserting the shape she needed, and whipped it towards the Hero’s face. He leaned to the side contemptuously, letting it sail harmlessly past his head, and swung the massive sword up.
Jian tried to flee, but its light banished every shadow.
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She threw up a hasty shield of blood as she backpedaled, but the sword’s edge sunk into the shield and kept going, melting and burning its way through before she could even think of jumping into the new shadow it cast. Fortunately, the moment’s delay was just enough for her to lean out of the way, focusing entirely on her footwork to keep ahead of the cutting edge. As she moved her foot back, she unspooled a thread of blood.
She dodged twice more, each swing getting closer. The third swing cut off a solid chunk of her hair, the edges set alight. She grabbed the flame in her hair with her bare hand, smothering it and ignoring the burns it left on her palm. She couldn’t afford any stray light.
Then the cord of blood she’d wrapped around leg went taut, and she was yanked to the floor. She willed the cord to retract as fast as it could, pulling her between the Hero’s legs faster than he could react. She dragged blood-tipped claws across his calf as she passed, gouging four lines of red through skin and muscle.
He whipped around, swinging his flaming brand, but she’d already locked on to his shadow. As the light source swung around his body, so did his shadow, and so did Jian.
She still hadn’t fully recovered from the nausea of being forced out of a shadow, and the speed she whipped around with was almost too much to take. She would’ve vomited, if Immortality hadn’t fundamentally changed her biology.
Instinct, more than thought, guided her hand as she slammed a knife into the Hero’s shoulder, between his neck and the edge of his breastplate. She’d been aiming for his neck, but he’d reacted too quickly, leaning into the blow to change its angle.
He spun the oversized blade in his hand, a sheet of flame erupting like a wall between them, severing his shadow and Jian’s hand in the same motion.
Two.
She stumbled away, the pain in her wrist overwhelming. Her flesh boiled and popped at the stump, the heat so intense that it had gone past cauterizing to violently exploding.
She pulled the blood pouring from wrist into the shape of a blade. Fingers started rising from its base, her hand already starting to regrow. Her core gnawed at the rest of her soul, sucking up qi to fuel her healing, but she was slower than she had been earlier.
Hungrier.
Erichthonius leapt through the wall of fire, the flames breaking and flowing over him like water before clinging to his back, forming a slowly spinning halo.
Surrounded by light, he no longer cast any shadow.
With no avenue of retreat, Jian met him blade for blade. She slapped aside each cut, spending qi with every blow to force her blood-forged sword to keep its shape instead of evaporating.
She pivoted, throwing an easily telegraphed blow straight towards his face. He swung his sword, the edge biting into her own and threatening to cut through. She felt the blood struggle to stay together, about to melt.
She let it.
Her sword exploded forward, boiling blood splattering across the Hero’s face. He screamed as it covered his eyes.
Jian pulled a wave of blood from her shadow, packing it with unfocused qi and throwing it at him as she dashed to the side. Blinded, all he could feel was her qi coming at him.
Three.
The Divine Blade shattered with the sound of breaking glass as a typhoon of fire blew away everything in front of the Hero.
Jian drifted past it, barely singed, a new sword already swinging towards his neck.
It clanged against a raised vambrace.
He turned towards her, his eyes still covered in blood, but a smile on his face. Dense flames wrapped his fist as he drove it into her gut.
Oh, she thought, a Hero of the Forge wouldn’t need a weapon to wield flames.
His fist exploded.
Jian went flying.
She was thrown through the city streets in a fraction of a second. She hit a marble wall and kept going, leaving a shattered hole and a smear of blood behind. She crashed into a second wall, and tore through a wooden panel like paper, tumbling end over end across soft dirt before skidding to a stop.
She blinked stars from her eyes, looking up.
For a moment she didn’t understand where she was. Tall wooden walls stretched out to either side of her across a grassy field, with wooden struts keeping the walls propped up. Through the hole she’d punched through the wall, she could distantly see Erichthonius walking towards her. On his side of the wall, the marble city gleamed faintly orange. On her side, the grass rustled through an empty plain, covered in the shadows cast by the setting sun.
Was the rest of the city like this? Only a single building deep before it just disappeared? A façade, only meant to be viewed from the mansion at its heart?
“Warning. You have entered a prohibited area.”
Jian turned. Two Lavindas were standing beside her, their hands folded in front of them, looking identical to the one who had been turned into a sword only seconds ago.
What was going on?
“You will now be removed.” The two women intoned, their identical voices overlapping.
They opened their mouths, their jaws dropping so far they nearly unhinged, and the familiar sound of a hammer striking metal rang out.
Jian’s eyes widened as she threw herself to the side.
Fire spewed from the women’s mouths in a focused stream, so thin and dense it was almost a beam. It set the grass aflame and turned to follow Jian’s path as she circled the two women.
However, she moved faster than they could track, and before they could react she was beside them. She lopped one’s head off with a quick slash, crossing the remaining distance to the other in a single step and shoving the base of her palm into the woman’s jaw, pushing her head up and letting the fire vent harmlessly into the air.
The woman’s hand snapped back, coming apart on a hinge and laying flush against her forearm. A bronze blade shot out the stump, the whirring and clicking of gears clearly audible to Jian’s ears.
She had a moment of disbelief before the woman stabbed at her, flailing wildly.
What was going on?
The sound of gears turning pricked her ears and she spun around, blocking a second bronze blade in a shower of sparks.
The woman whose head she’d removed leaned towards her, pressing on her own sword arm. Inside her neck were exposed gears and shafts of bronze, turning and clicking against each other.
She spun, blocking the strikes from both women. No, not women, clearly neither was human, but she didn’t know what to call them. Whatever they were, they weren’t enough to be a threat.
Jian focused on them, tracing the path of qi running through their metal bodies. They didn’t have a cardiovascular system, but they had something similar. Wires of spun bronze and gold that carried their qi. They must’ve been based on the human body, because both had a solid core of qi where their hearts should be, and now that they were actively using it, it was easy to tell they were stronger than a mortal should be.
She coated her fingers in crystallized blood, sharpening them into claws, and punched straight through the first one’s chest. She closed her fist around the false heart and yanked it out, ignoring the way the bent bronze caught and tore her hand on the way out.
She circled around and did the same to the second in short order, holding one of their hearts in each hand.
Each one was a small nugget of jade wrapped in bands of bronze and gold. The qi inside felt like the smell of hot metal. It was only as much as someone at the nadir of the Liminal Realm could hold, but it had the same level of quality as the Hero’s. It was likely a piece of his own qi.
She drained them in an instant, feeling the qi fill her up with heat.
It was only a thimble’s worth to her bucket, note even a tenth of what she’d used in the fight so far, but she wouldn’t turn her nose up to free qi.
She’d left her focus off of the Hero for too long though, she had to-
“Roar, Coronacht.”
The world exploded.
Stone fragments and wood splinters filled the air like rain. A hail of arrows the size of spears punched through the walls between them like they were paper. One hit her leg and kept going, blowing a hole the size of her head in it, severing it completely. Another hit her shoulder and her arm went flying. Another almost hit her chest, but she caught it, a plate of blood flowing over her palm.
It dented the plate, pushing her hand back her chest and deflecting up and away into the sky, carving a shallow gouge in her shoulder on its way out.
She fell to the ground, gasping, the power she’d just stolen immediately disappearing as she used it up to heal herself. She connected her severed limbs with ropes of blood and rolled into the nearest shadow. She let herself sink into it, relishing the cool sensation of slipping into a space that shouldn’t exist.
She pushed herself through her vault, grabbing more blood to refill the gaps in her body, and emerged fifty meters away, pulling herself out of the ground like a tired swimmer from a pool. She shrunk into a hidden recess, confident she couldn’t be seen.
She needed to think of a way to put him down. Even a dagger through his collarbone hadn’t been enough. He could make any option he needed, there was no telling he couldn’t make some legendary artifact that could lead him straight to her.
That said, he was only making famous weapons, and the town itself was an eerie façade. Something fake rather than real. Maybe, it was just a copy, like the weapons, and the eerie army of Lavindas. Maybe, she wasn’t the only one that had lied about their Domain. Maybe, he wasn’t the Hero of Forges after all.
Maybe, he was the Hero of Forgery.
That didn’t immediately help her, a forgery could be just as effective as the original. He didn’t need originality to kill her.
It did give her an idea though.
She could try copying someone else too. The Lavindas’ flamethrower breath had been concentrated, condensed, and more powerful because of it. She’d seen something similar before.
If Yan Feng could do it with water, why couldn’t she do it with blood?
She pulled blood from her shadow, pushing it together in the palm of her hand. It pushed back, resisting her, but she just pressed down harder. She saw it shrink. It was only a little, maybe just by a tenth, but it was working.
“No more hide and seek.” Erichthonius’s voice boomed through the city. “The dawn has arrived.”
A light shot through the sky, rising to the east. Just as she lost sight of it, it erupted in blinding white light. The dawn’s rays swept over the city like a flood, banishing every shadow they touched. The ball of light hung in the air, unyielding.
With a sun setting in the west and rising in the east, the world lit up like mid day.
“Found you.”
Jian whipped her head up, towards the Hero’s voice, but it was coming from another Lavinda. She perched on top of the false building’s wood backdrop, her jaw slack as it projected a voice that wasn’t hers.
Jian leapt to the side the same instant an arrow punched through the wall. It destroyed her hand, ripping it off her arm, but she avoided the worst of it. She held the orb of blood to her side, unwilling to waste it, and leapt straight up the wall. She formed a blade at the end of her stump and skewered the automaton, tearing a newly healed hand out of its corpse along with its power core.
She turned and dashed across the rooftops, dodging the occasional column of destruction as an arrow punched through the building after her.
She’d broken line of sight, but the arrows were still too close for comfort. She focused qi on her eyes until they bled, swiveling until she found what she was looking for.
Another Lavinda,
She rushed forward, crossing most of the distance in a single leap. She forced herself to go from a mad sprint to full stop a few arms lengths away, grinning at the Hero behind the automatons eyes when an arrow split the air between them.
She leapt forward-
And stumbled.
The muscles in her leg seized up and she almost fell. Before she could, she pushed with her other leg, throwing herself through the air and into the Lavinda, batting aside its attempt to stab her and digging its core from its chest.
Feeling returned to her leg as she healed, but something was still creeping through her body, barely kept at bay.
Poison? When?
The arrows. It was the same leg that had been torn off in the barrage, and the arm she’d re-attached was beginning to grow numb as well.
She felt her blood running cold. Poison meant she couldn’t flee, couldn’t run away. She had to commit, had to kill him, or she’d die slowly.
Damn it, this is why she’d wanted Water.
“Good.” The Hero’s voice came from below her. “The venom is finally kicking in. It was difficult making the arrows to go with the bow.”
She leapt off the roof as another arrow sailed by. She grabbed the wall as she fell and pulled herself towards it, kicking through the wood and landing in front of another Lavinda.
She dug her hand into its chest and grabbed the core. Then she swung her fist.
She used the automaton as a glove, the dual layers of her crystallized blood and its bronze interior enough to protect her as she punched the next arrow, deflecting it.
She tossed the ruined Lavinda’s body aside to tear out its core, draining it and tossing the empty jade into her shadow. She could use it later.
She dashed through the buildings, using the shadows the walls provided to shield her from the two suns outside. She found the next Lavinda immediately, cutting it down and devouring it before it could react.
Her head was starting to swim, but she had the things’ scent now. They were all the same. Identical. The smell of hot metal and the taste of smoke on her tongue led her right to them.
The Lavinda tried to run, but she pounced on its back and carried it to the ground.
It snarled at her as she punched through its bronze chest.
“How are you still moving?” The Hero asked through his puppet. “The venom should have reached your heart by now. It’s called the Heart-Seeker for a reason, damn you.”
She laughed, the cackle almost unhinged.
“Another benefit of not having one.”
She ripped the core free and the light died in the automaton’s eyes, the whirring of gears slowing to a stop. She stumbled to the nearest window, ignoring the eerie lack of furniture in what was supposed to be a residence.
She fell to her knees and vomited, a liter of blood spewing onto the floor. She pushed out as much of the venom-tainted blood as she could, sucking in fresh blood she’d stored in her shadow to replace it. Even after that, she could feel some of the venom remain. It was already spreading again.
She peered over the rim of the window.
Erichthonius had recalled the last of his Lavindas. There were eight, but four collapsed to the sound of ringing anvils and left shields in their place. The remaining four Lavindas picked up the shields and surrounded their Hero. A massive bow was in his hand, cracks running up and down its length even as he pulled it to a full draw.
Jian smiled.
There, where two of the Lavindas stood too close, their shadows from each sun overlapped, making it just dark enough for her to use.
First though, she needed an opening.
She pulled the tainted blood on the floor up into the sphere she still held in one hand. She couldn’t remember how much she’d packed into it. Two liters? Four?
It was barely the size of her fist now.
She trembled with the effort of holding it together, but she smiled. This would be much stronger than Yan Feng’s version. She made sure she was standing in a shadow and planted a bar of crystallized blood she could use for leverage. Then, she popped up over the edge of the window.
She opened a pinhole gap in the sphere’s pressure, forcing everything through a hole smaller than her fingertip.
Erichthonius released the bow’s string and the metal bow snapped with a thundercrack, crumbling to dust as the arrow was released. As it traveled it split into two arrows, then four, then eight, then sixteen, without end.
A Lavinda tried to throw her shield in the way, to block the line of blood, but it was too slow.
The Hero tried to dodge, but he was too slow too. She missed his heart, but it still speared through his lung, carving through his breastplate and the flesh beneath it like soft clay.
Jian used the handle she’d created to pull herself into the shadow at her feet faster than gravity alone would allow. She still didn’t make it, and the arrow tore a chunk of flesh the size of her fist out of her shoulder as the barrage obliterated the building, but it was good enough.
She disappeared into her shadow and swam forward, her shoulder already repairing itself.
She felt a new shadow open up as the Hero collapsed to his knees, hunched over with his hands propping him up.
She lunged out from directly beneath him, knife slicing towards his throat.
He was smiling.
His eyes ignited, flame spilling out and banishing her shadow.
She felt herself yanked back, pulled into the shadow as it disappeared. She was thrown violently out of the only shadow nearby, the overlap of Lavindas she’d noticed earlier.
She tumbled across the stone floor, the nausea of the forced transfer compounding with the poison. She couldn’t tell which way was up.
A Lavinda jumped into the Hero’s hand as he turned, transforming into a massive hammer the instant they touched.
Jian barely had enough time to register fear before the hammer slammed into her and splattered the top half of her body into a red smear.