Chapter 141: Fight Back
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Pain burned, then spread cold. There was poison in the needle.
Sekhmet’s jaw clenched as the toxin crawled through his shoulder like ice worms. His chaos energy pulsed, crushing it, burning it, trying to push it back out of his blood. It worked, but every heartbeat paid a price. He could feel the drain immediately, like someone drilling holes into his reservoir.
The spear assassin recovered and thrust again.
Sekhmet forced blood threads into the air, trying to bind the spear shaft mid motion. His blood control was good, refined from desperation and repetition.
But Chaos Rank Two strength was better.
The spear tore through the blood thread like ripping cloth.
Sekhmet twisted aside, but the spear clipped his side again, tearing fabric and skin. A clean cut, professional. Not meant to scare him. Meant to bleed him.
More blood.
More hunger.
More weakness.
He could feel his chaos energy dropping too fast, faster than it should. Not just from poison. From pressure.
Four against one was not a duel. It was a machine.
The blade assassin attacked from the left with a flat, efficient slash that aimed for tendons.
The grapple assassin attacked from the right, low and ugly, trying to lock Sekhmet’s waist and drag him down.
The spear assassin attacked from the front, controlling distance like a man fencing a dying animal.
The needle assassin stayed back, throwing death with fingers.
Sekhmet’s mind raced.
"I need one down. Not wounded. Down. Otherwise I cannot create space."
He focused on the grapple assassin, the closest, the one who kept trying to pin him so the others could finish the job. Sekhmet feinted toward the spear assassin, drawing the spear’s point half a step forward, then pivoted and drove his Blood Sword toward the grapple assassin’s thigh.
The anti blood coating resisted, but thigh armor was weaker.
The blade pierced.
Shhk.
The grapple assassin gasped and stumbled as blood burst warm, real, and angry. Sekhmet stepped in and slammed his fist into the man’s throat.
Wham.
The assassin choked, dropping to one knee.
Sekhmet grabbed his collar.
In that instant, hunger tried to take control. Warm blood pulsed under skin, close enough to taste, close enough to solve everything for five seconds and ruin everything forever.
So close.
So easy.
But Sekhmet did not bite.
Instead he formed a blood spike with his free hand and drove it into the assassin’s shoulder joint.
Crack.
The arm went limp. The assassin fell, not dead, but ruined.
Sekhmet released him and staggered back, chest heaving once. He had done it. He had removed one piece from the machine.
But now he was bleeding from multiple places.
Poison was spreading.
His chaos energy was dangerously low.
And the other three were still clean enough to kill him.
The needle assassin clicked his tongue softly.
"Good," he murmured. "You can fight. That makes it more satisfying."
Sekhmet’s eyes narrowed, and something in him hardened. He was not going to die in a random alley like a disposable rumor. Not after surviving worse places, worse hands, worse chains.
He made the decision.
Not to be heroic.
To be practical.
His fingers flexed, and his blood power answered.
Blood Summon.
He did not have a cup of blood. He did not have stored bags. He had the only resource that mattered right now: the blood he had already spilled, the blood on the wounded thug, the thin residue in the air, the iron taste clinging to stone.
The alley’s shadows shivered.
A wet, whispering sound rose like insects crawling inside a wall. (There was a reason he didn’t summon bats from his void land.)
Then the first minion bat formed, a small blood body with wings like sharpened petals. Its eyes were two pinpoints of crimson. It did not breathe. It did not hesitate.
A second formed.
Then a third.
Then more, spilling out in quick pulses as Sekhmet forced his control to hold them together despite poison shaking his nerves.
The assassin with needles finally reacted, eyes sharpening.
"Summoner," he muttered.
Sekhmet did not answer.
He only pointed.
The blood minion bats launched.
They did not aim to kill. They aimed to disrupt, to swarm faces, to slap weapons, to cling to forearms and bite just enough to cause flinches. Their wings beat with a faint, disturbing sound, like wet paper snapping.
The needle assassin flicked his wrist.
A needle flew, and one minion bat took it straight through its chest. The bat burst into mist.
But two more replaced it immediately.
The spear assassin thrust, trying to keep Sekhmet pinned.
Sekhmet sent three minion bats at the spear shaft. They wrapped around it like red leeches, their bodies thickening into sticky clamps. The spear’s motion slowed for a fraction of a second.
A fraction was enough.
Sekhmet shifted sideways and slammed his shoulder into the spear assassin’s arm, disrupting the line, forcing the spear tip wide. Pain flashed through Sekhmet’s ribs when the movement pulled his wound, but he ignored it.
The blade assassin charged in, blade angled to cut Sekhmet’s wrist, to remove the hand that controlled everything.
Sekhmet raised Blood Sword to block.
Clang.
The blood blade cracked, not fully broken, but fractured. The anti blood coating on the assassin’s weapon bit into the construct like acid. Sekhmet felt the instability immediately, like holding glass in a storm.
He shoved forward anyway, forcing distance.
The needle assassin tried to create it again, stepping back to throw freely, but the blood minion bats were already on him. One slapped into his face. Another latched onto his ear. A third clung to his wrist at the exact moment he tried to flick.
The needle flew wrong.
It struck the stone wall instead.
Ping.
The needle assassin cursed under his breath and tore the bat off, but when he looked up, there were more. Sekhmet could feel them through the summon link, like extra fingers he did not fully control, and the poison made that control sloppy.