Chapter 224: Blood in the Empty Hall
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The blood blade cut across Alex’s forearm. It did not slice deep, because half-god bodies were reinforced. But it drew blood.
And that was the real goal.
Alex’s eyes flashed, amused and irritated at the same time. "You cut me," he said.
Sekhmet did not answer. He pulled the blood he had cut free into thin threads, trying to bind Alex’s wrist.
Alex laughed and surged his aura. The threads snapped like wet string.
"You are young," Alex murmured. "Your blood is loud, but not yet, not deep enough."
Sekhmet felt his own hunger answer that insult. The blood god Will be pressed harder against the system’s restraint.
Ninety five percent. It did not feel like before. It felt like a predator licking the inside of his skull.
Across the hall, Sofia and Natasha split cleanly.
They did not angle toward Sekhmet anymore. They went where instinct told them to go.
Sofia’s crimson eyes locked onto Lady Seraphiel. Something sharp and ancient flashed across Sofia’s face. Not fear. Not yet. Recognition. The kind that old predators reserved for something they knew could actually kill them.
Natasha chose Elena.
It happened without words, almost elegantly, like hunters assigning prey through instinct alone.
Sofia moved first, fast as a silver blade pulled through moonlight. Her claws cut through the air and her blood control spread outward in a fan of razor-thin crimson darts, each one sharp enough to punch through a lesser vampire’s skull. They screamed toward Seraphiel in a beautiful, murderous arc.
Lady Seraphiel did not retreat. She lifted one hand.
A thin ring of radiant chaos energy formed in front of her fingers, delicate as jewelry and heavy as judgment. The blood darts struck it and vanished into steam and red dust, erased so completely it looked as if the air itself had decided Sofia’s attack was offensive.
Sofia was already inside the distance. Her claws slashed for Seraphiel’s throat.
Seraphiel turned her head a fraction, letting the strike pass close enough to cut a few strands of pale hair, then answered with the back of her hand.
The hit cracked across Sofia’s jaw with terrifying simplicity. No wasted motion. No grand windup. Just force, accuracy, and the casual violence of someone operating several levels above the fight.
Sofia flew sideways and smashed into a stone pillar hard enough to fracture it.
At nearly the same instant, Natasha lunged at Elena.
Her style was colder than Sofia’s. Less elegant. It was more practical. Blood needles burst from her skin and hardened in midair, then shot at Elena’s chest, eyes, throat, and knees in a pattern that was meant to force errors. Behind them came Natasha herself, claws low, posture narrow, aiming to slip through any gap the blood storm opened.
Elena stepped in instead of back. Her palm struck once.
A condensed burst of chaos force exploded from her hand and shattered the front line of needles into red mist.
Natasha’s claws flashed for Elena’s ribs.
Elena rotated at the waist, letting the claws scrape cloth instead of flesh, then drove her elbow into Natasha’s side.
Natasha hissed and twisted away, but Elena followed her with the same calm she had shown from the start. There was nothing theatrical in Elena’s fighting. She moved like a woman who had long ago accepted that monsters were real and that bones broke the same way no matter how old the monster was.
Sofia pushed off the broken pillar with a snarl.
Her silver hair whipped around her face as she attacked Lady Seraphiel again, this time with blood control woven into her claws. Crimson threads spiraled around her fingers, lengthening the range of each slash. Every swipe left thin red marks in the air that pulsed with refined half-god pressure.
Seraphiel’s eyes turned colder. She stepped through the claw storm with an impossible speed. Her fingers traced a narrow line through the air, and radiant chaos energy unfolded in smooth arcs around her wrist and forearm. Sofia’s blood threads struck those arcs and broke apart with sharp sizzling sounds.
Then Seraphiel struck. One palm to the sternum.
Sofia was blasted backward across the floor, boots carving deep lines in the stone.
On the other side of the hall, Natasha changed tactics against Elena. She stopped trying to overwhelm and instead tried to bind. Blood chains uncoiled from both arms, twisting like living snakes as they lashed toward Elena’s wrists and ankles, trying to pin her in place before the next killing strike.
Elena’s eyes narrowed by a fraction. She caught one chain with her bare hand.
The blood metal hissed against her skin.
Then Elena crushed it.
The chain burst apart between her fingers.
Natasha’s expression finally shifted. For the first time there was something ugly in it. Not just hostility. It was irritating. Elena had stopped being an obstacle and become a problem.
"You," Natasha hissed.
Elena’s voice remained flat. "Me."
Above them, the lantern flames trembled from the pressure of the other duel.
Sofia rose again, lip split, a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth, and laughed once through her teeth. "So it is really you," she said, staring at Seraphiel. "I wondered if the old rumors were true."
Lady Seraphiel gave her no answer. That silence was somehow more insulting than mockery.
Sofia’s smile sharpened. Then she exploded forward.
Her body blurred into a silver streak. Claws, blood threads, pressure waves, and refined half-god speed came together in a sequence fast enough to make the lantern light stutter. She attacked Lady Seraphiel’s throat, heart, ribs, and eyes in one savage chain.
Seraphiel met every strike. A turn of the shoulder. A slight lean. A deflection with two fingers. A short elbow that forced Sofia off-line.
It was not just that Seraphiel was strong. It was that her movements made Sofia’s violence look young.
Natasha’s duel with Elena grew rougher by the second. She drove in hard now, using cold precision instead of flashy pressure. Her claws flickered low, trying to cut tendons. Her blood control condensed into short spears meant to force Elena’s guard open. She moved with the ruthless efficiency of someone who had survived by ending fights quickly.
Elena accepted the pressure and gave it back. Her forearm smashed aside Natasha’s wrist. Her knee drove toward Natasha’s abdomen.
Natasha twisted away, but Elena’s next strike was already there, a straight palm that hit the center of Natasha’s chest and sent her skidding backward over the containment lines.
Natasha’s shoes tore across the stone. She stopped, breath sharp, chest rising once.
Elena did not chase wildly.
She simply stepped forward and reset her stance, stable as a fortress wall.
Sekhmet caught flashes of all of it while fighting Alex. Just enough to know that Elena was not being overwhelmed and that Lady Seraphiel was handling Sofia directly. Then Alex’s claws came at him again and the rest of the world narrowed into blood and teeth.
Later, as Sekhmet’s bloodlust rose more and his battle with Alex turned savage, the two parallel duels reached their own brutal peaks.
Sofia tried to force Lady Seraphiel back with a burst of blood authority so dense it made the air taste metallic. Hundreds of tiny blood darts formed around her in a glowing halo and fired at once.
Lady Seraphiel raised her hand.