Romulus charged forward the moment Mortarius spoke.

  Kate’s arrow whistled toward him simultaneously, and he felt it ricochet off his left pauldron with enough force to stumble his charge. Fangs bared, Romulus summoned his hemoforce and poured it into Lightsbane, igniting the runeblade in black flames crackling with crimson lightning.

  Two things became very readily apparent in the first seconds of the engagement.

  First, Kate was notably faster than him, and even with her retreating sideways or backwards, it would be very difficult to catch her.

  Second, he had no long-range options to use against her, and his health was already dropping from his constant infusion of power into Lightsbane.

  Lightsbane pulsed with feverish glee in his grip, and Romulus reviewed his options quickly while a second arrow sailed just past his ear.

  Where no options existed, the only rational recourse was to try to invent them.

  His research into the [Codex] came to the fore of his mind.

  His hemoforce roared through his Core, and Romulus extended his left hand instinctively, levying his Willpower to shape the Dark Mana his life essence fuelled into a condensed ‘lance’ of destructive energy thirty centimeters long. The action was as much instinct as it was calculated guesswork, and he fired the ‘lance’ of power at Kate when she loosed her third arrow.

  The arrow whistled forward and slammed into his abdomen, simultaneously to his magical lance narrowly missing Kate.

  Her third arrow did pierce his armor.

  Romulus felt the air leave his lungs from the impact force, and felt the agony of the puncturing arrow only barely muted by his [Pain Tolerance]. His eyes narrowed in focus, and he staggered backward from the feeling of his insides being shredded by the barbed head of the ammunition.

  No time for this. Focus!

  [Indomitable] kicked in enough for him to refocus on the fight.

  His hemoforce dropped by twenty percent from the wound alone, and Romulus saw an alert pop up over his health bar: an icon he recognized from the [Codex]. It depicted a blue mote of power split in half by a surrounding red circle, with a horizontal line bisecting the mote. The gothic text above it labelled the effect as [Nulled], with a ten-second countdown beside it.

  The Dark Mana surging through his veins instantly guttered out, though the connection to Lightsbane remained unimpacted. An effect of the Soulbond, perhaps.

  “You can silence me?!” he demanded aloud while his wound burned..

  “One of my new tricks,” the redhead replied coolly while nocking another arrow.

  “Of course you’re a mage-killer,” Romulus groused while watching her carefully and staying ready to move. He couldn’t catch her, so instead, he had to avoid taking damage—especially if each shot would nullify his only reliable means of attacking her at range. He was keenly aware of Mortarius watching silently, but that phased him less. The specter would give his counsel when the bout was done. What was more concerning was that his mentor’s prophecy had proven true.

  Kate was perfectly equipped to kill an Autarch.

  A Wight might have given her some trouble given their nature, but a Lich or, as evidenced, a Sanguine would be effectively shut down by her abilities. He had no doubt he would likely tear her apart in a melee, but forcing that situation was unlikely given the current circumstance.

  A fourth arrow pierced the air toward him, and Romulus reacted with Lightsbane, dodging right and swinging the blade to try to deflect the projectile out of the air. He missed by nearly two inches, but the timing was close, and something stirred within him that told him he was on the path toward potentially unlocking a new Skill.

  She might be faster, but I’ll bet I have higher Endurance. I need to drag this out.

  Romulus burst into another sprint at the same time as Kate released her fifth arrow, and he stumbled out of the way mid-run, feeling both the lack of his Dexterity and the burning wound from the arrow. He reoriented himself and charged at his best friend again a moment later. The timer for his [Nulled] status was down to three seconds by that point, and Romulus focused on dodging while it ticked down.

  Kate fired a sixth arrow a second after his hemoforce flooded him with power once more, and Romulus swung Lightsbane again while dodging, managing to clip the arrow's fletchings when it sailed past.

  It was barely a success, but it was a step in the right direction.

  A slight frown of consternation knit the redhead’s brows together as she retreated while he advanced, and Romulus smiled grimly. Firing arrows while moving was no easy task; even the most hearty humans would tire out quickly from the exertion. Kate was not high-level enough to have poured too many points into Endurance, so he presumed, and thus couldn’t easily maintain her pace for too long.

  That was his only real immediate advantage.

  Dark Mana coiled together in the air again as Romulus ran, and he drew down his hemoforce further to create three full lances of power, terminating the feed to Lightsbane at the same time—much to the sword’s pulsed irritation.

  “Sorry,” he said simply to the sword, before gesturing with his left hand and flinging the lances at Kate.

  All three constructs hurtled at the redhead, and she stopped shooting to dodge. The first two, aimed at her sternum and left leg, she dodged away from nimbly—but the third, aimed at her right leg, slashed through the meat of her unprotected thigh in a spray of blood.

  “Fucking ow!” she said reactively, and looked down at her thigh in shock. “What the fuck? That hurts!”

  She doesn’t have any experience with pain in Eternus?

  Romulus’ eyes widened, and he smiled grimly.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Now, he truly did have an advantage.

  His gaze shifted to her wounded leg when Kate got moving again, and he silently judged the distance. His range with Sanguimancy was limited to 5 meters, but with Kate’s injury, he had closed considerable space between them—wound burning with pain all the while, and hemoforce steadily dropping. He needed to end the fight if he could.

  Experimentation was the point of the fight, after all.

  Romulus extended his left hand again and reached out with his will and hemoforce, focusing on the blood staining Kate’s right thigh and still leaking from the wound. It was far deeper than he’d originally thought, but it was also within his range.

  “What are you doing, weirdo?!” Kate shouted while he focused on her.

  Romulus didn’t answer, and instead, he felt the moment a connection formed between him and her blood. He could feel a kind of pulse to the vitae, like an unheard rhythm or beat that belonged to the life essence alone. It was impossible to describe, but it felt less like manipulating an object and more like conducting a percussion piece by sheer force of will.

  Kate raised her bow to fire again, and Romulus acted.

  He didn’t turn the blood into an object or a weapon against her.

  He simply pulled more of it, and did so at speed.

  While his hemoforce ticked down steadily through his use of the magic, Romulus focused entirely on pulling more and more of Kate’s blood from her body to compress into a steadily expanding orb of deep, vibrant crimson. He was surprised that oxidation wasn’t affecting it, and it was an interesting factor—one he could investigate later.

  “You… you cheater…!” Kate said while stumbling at the blood loss, and firing her arrow wide, right arm grabbing drunkenly at her quiver thereafter. “That’s… that’s not fair…”

  “Neither is being able to silence me,” Romulus replied flatly while tapering off the blood drain to conserve his hemoforce and advancing toward her. Lightsbane vibrated urgently in his hand, but he ignored the pulsed warnings. He knew the sword wanted to get in on the action, so warning him not to forget was pointless.

  “Now, let’s end this and—” his words cut off mid-speech when Kate snapped upright with viperish speed, nocked an arrow she’d drawn while hiding behind her apparent fugue, and fired it all in the same two seconds. He barely had time to raise Lightsbane and throw himself to the side while turning his body.

  The arrow, infused with the same dark mana as the rest of her shots, punched through his abdominal plate and then out the back of it, entering and exiting his body with a gore-blessed passage.

  Romulus felt the air leave his lungs for the second time, and he stumbled in surprise at the force of the shot. [Pain Tolerance] roared to life at full force again, and he tried to take his mind off the wound. Lightsbane pulsed at him furiously in the meanwhile, and he realized then what the sword had been warning him about: Kate. Lightsbane had known she was acting weaker than she was.

  “My bad,” he muttered quietly while squeezing the sword’s grip, and mollifying it in the process.

  Romulus’ attention turned back to Kate, and he saw her panting with her jade eyes locked on him, but no longer running. There was a strange look on her face, and he followed her eyes for a moment to the wound in his abdomen. She appeared to be locked on it, and there was a pale set to her features that had nothing to do with blood loss. She looked like she was about to be sick, cry, or shout at him all at once—and it suddenly clicked.

  Kate didn’t realize how viscerally real Eternus Online was.

  This was probably her first real combat experience against a person.

  It was his, too, for that matter, but something about his change into Sanguine muted the natural human reservations he had toward such things. A kind of passive predatory pragmatism dominated his mind, and veiled concerns over inflicting harm. It was something he was subconsciously—now consciously—aware of and would merit further insight.

  That could wait until later, though.

  Kate’s eyes slid down to her bleeding thigh, and then she looked back up at him.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked with sincerity.

  “Yes,” Romulus answered, taking a stoic breath and advancing toward her again.

  “This is all way too fucking real, Dee,” Kate said while wobbling from blood loss.

  “I know,” he answered while advancing to stand before her.

  “This doesn’t count, you know,” she said defiantly, dropping her bow and her arms to her sides. “I didn’t expect... I didn’t anticipate…” she hardened the resolve within her eyes. “It doesn’t count.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile,” he said to her while lifting Lightsbane. “Winning is winning, Kay. You’re the one that likes to quote that shit at me non-stop.”

  The redhead scowled at him.

  “Using my own words against me isn’t fair.”

  “I learned from the best,” Romulus replied.

  “Not well enough,” Kate said grimly, and Romulus jerked at an impact, followed by a feeling of familiar coldness in his chest.

  His eyes lowered to see Kate’s right fist wrapped around a dagger sheathed in black fire, its hilt embedded above his heart.

  “Oh…”

  “I win again, Dee,” Kate said with a half-smile, “like you said, inch or a mi—”

  Her words cut off when Lightsbane slammed into her stomach, upward, to pierce out the back of her sternum.

  Kate’s eyes flickered downward, then up, and her lips split into a look of bewildered disbelief, followed by outright amusement—right before she vomited blood.

  Romulus snorted weakly.

  “Pussy,” he said chidingly.

  Kate dropped to the ground before she could respond, and Romulus crashed to his knees.

  “Guess it’s… a draw…” he said with unfocused eyes, and felt the strength to hold his head up leave his body, chin coming to rest against his armor moments later.

  A pair of sandalled feet entered his line of sight, and Romulus felt electrifying fingers lifting his chin. His vision momentarily refocused, and he looked up in silence.

  “Learn from this,” Lilith said, her body adorned in her skull-writhing silks. Darkness seemed to expand from her like a cloak of voidal energy, writhing with countless stars. Around her, shadowed figures appeared to hug the periphery—their shapes vaguely humanoid, and yet somehow wholly alien. “Grow from this. Master your Sorcery. You will both be made whole in time for your hunt, but you must remember your mistakes here, my champion. There will be no second chances against our enemies.”

  Romulus’ head tilted in her grip with an acknowledging nod, and Lilith smiled.

  “For amateurs, you fought well. Rest, my precious Autarch. I will grant your minds visions of your desires, as a reward for a truly passionate duel.”

  “We sucked,” Romulus mumbled in her grip.

  “You are inexperienced,” Lilith said softly while stroking his cheek with her thumb, “but your spirit is dauntless, as is hers. The two of you will bring glory to my name, and to your own, and that is enough.”

  Romulus frowned, but the Divinarch moved her thumb to cover his lips.

  “Rest,” she commanded in a double-timbre, and he felt himself rapidly losing awareness.

  The last thing he saw was Lilith kneeling to brush her fingers over Katherine’s face, before a vision of gossamer silk dresses and red and gold threads tempted him into dreams—and he fell within them gladly.

  When he awoke, it would be night.

  And the Hunt would begin.