Blood Armor was thrown nearly 200 meters before the crystallized blood spear in his chest turned liquid again, flying back toward Rafael without him noticing.
After hitting several boulders and dead trees, he managed to get up again, looked at the enormous hole in his chest, and began running back to where Baron Bones was.
During the run, he realized the wound was bleeding excessively, as if under a powerful negative effect of "Bleeding." Not only that, but the blood gushing from the hole in his chest wasn't running down his abdomen. He floated eerily and flew at high speed toward where the Red Sage was fighting.
Controlling his living armor, he inserted parts of it into the wound to stop the bleeding and continued running. When he was less than 50 meters from the battle, a huge mutant Firewyrn appeared, blocking Blood Armor's path and spitting devastating red flames in his direction…
***
Curses, soul-attacking spells, and many great spells that used bones. No matter what the Necromancer Master Baron Bones used, Rafael remained unscathed.
Rafael knew he could end this fight at any moment. But he still decided to use it to see the limits of his new power.
Blood Control couldn't extract blood directly from inside a creature. It was only possible to control blood that was already outside the body. He could also increase the bleeding of any wounded target, even if he wasn't the one who caused the injury.
The crystallized physical form of blood could go head-to-head with metal weapons and even block powerful advanced spells, but this would begin to drain the blood used, causing it to disappear and diminish over time. But he could easily replenish this blood using his own.
There was a limit to this replenishment, and that limit was tied to his innate Regeneration spell. Which was now much more powerful and had a much longer duration. There was only one weakness to Regeneration, but it wasn't something he needed to worry about at the moment.
"Baron Bones is too weak…"
Rafael sighed as he received another mid-level curse and wasn't affected at all…
With his new, improved resistances, only curses and poisons that reached a high level could have any effect on him.
Baron Bones' undead army was too stupid without the Senior Lich controlling them and couldn't do anything to contribute to this fight, so they continued swarming the Mummified Giant or fighting the Shadow Souls to protect their master…
The old Necromancer was shocked to finally realize something sinister; since the beginning of the fight, Rafael hadn't taken a single step!
Desperate, he abandoned his plan to capture and control the Red Sage and began to fly away from the battlefield, abandoning Blood Armor without a second thought.
But to the surprise of Rafael and Baron Bones himself, as soon as he floated about 3 meters off the ground, the Master Necromancer's entire body was obliterated!
All that remained of Baron Bones was his powerful cloak, a delicate and familiar black cape, the bone-encrusted staff, and a strange necklace. They all fell slowly to the ground, not far from Rafael.
Rafael approached and placed all the items in his inventory, but realized that the strange necklace could not be stored. This was the first time he had encountered an item with such a peculiarity…
Before he could see the details of the necklace, he saw Baron Bones' soul appear in the sky, preparing to flee. But at that moment, the strange artifact used to control the puppets appeared beside his translucent soul and began to devour it using the roots of the macabre translucent tree.
"AHHhhh"
A blood-curdling scream escaped the mouth of the millennial Necromancer as he was devoured in seconds by the strange tree.
After devouring him, the tree floated and shot off in a certain direction, showing it had a life of its own. Rafael put strength into his legs and leaped several meters high like a red blur, trying to catch the strange Relic before it escaped, but his hand passed through it as if it were ethereal and possessed no physical form.
He sighed and watched as it fled unrestrained towards the horizon… The tree still had some bodies hanging from it like fruit, showing that other puppets were not on this battlefield.
"So Baron Bones wasn't the true owner of the Relic?"
"Such a side effect of devouring the owner's soul after death is fitting for such evil and powerful magical effects…"
As Rafael slowly fell from the sky using Gravity Control, his newly enhanced senses saw what had caused Baron Bones' death.
Small, microscopic black insects flew everywhere in the Shadowlands; they had shiny black carapaces resembling scarab beetles and were attracted to any flying creature.
"Is this the source of the flight ban in Stygai? How did it spread throughout the Shadowlands?"
After muttering to himself, Rafael controlled all the remaining blood and created a giant blood spear, piercing the eye and exiting from behind the Mummified Giant's head.
The giant stopped moving, knelt, and with a tremor fell face down to the ground before finally disappearing as if by illusion. All that remained as proof of his existence was his giant, rusty axe and a piece of oily bandage about a meter long.
Rafael swept the two items from the giant into his inventory and collected all the corpses from the battlefield. When he finished, he looked in the direction where Vulcan was fighting and saw the Firewyrn coming towards him.
"Where is Blood Armor?"
Vulcano gave Rafael a confused look at his question, and began attacking and killing the Shadow Souls who had begun to ignore him due to the influence of Rafael's charm...
Rafael lamented, thinking he had let one of the attackers escape...
Despite being able to use his charm to fly through the skies, Rafael began to feel a kind of weakness, and his right hand began to tremble slightly...
He knew these symptoms were a side effect of changing races so quickly, while also not being in his ideal condition due to several injuries...
"Let's go, Vulcano!"
After climbing onto Vulcano's back and urging him to run to Asshai, Rafael began to observe the strange necklace again. Suddenly, he felt a sense of familiarity. As if something he was looking for was very close in two different directions.
"System…"
After giving some specific orders to the system, new notifications appeared:
[Congratulations! You created a new innate Blood Affinity spell!]
[Blood Clone](-)
-Allows the creation of two blood clones that can only use racial spells, Body spells, Mind spells, and Blood affinity spells!
"It's much better than the previous version made through a ritual, since it allows the use of other affinities, the Blood innate spell also allows me to have two at the same time…"
Soon, two clones identical to Rafael appeared, one fled westward into the Shadowlands, and the other went towards the mine entrance where the ambush began. Rafael was worried about Liza's well-being…
His main body continued towards Asshai mounted on Vulcano's back, who now ran with his short legs, sometimes just crawling like a snake, while following his master's instructions, guided by the familiar feeling brought by the collar, making small detours. It didn't take long for him to finally find Blood Armor…
But the Blood Armor he found was already just a corpse. Its abdomen and limbs were completely mangled, and the expression on its face, even after death, was full of terror…
Beside the corpse were three figures, two standing motionless. Rafael immediately recognized the pair that had almost killed him when he entered Stygai. The first was a black-hooded monster wielding a scythe almost as tall as its own body; the Reaper of Stygai. The other was a tall woman whose face resembled that of a mannequin. She was in a hidden mode, but Rafael's astral vision was now very strong, and he could see her perfectly. The tall woman wore a huge, long, traditional red dress with a corset; she wore thin stockings, but was barefoot, and had a capeline hat of the same color as the dress on her head, which obscured part of her featureless face..
Rafael no longer felt fear upon encountering these two again; he was now confident he could kill them and even gain some benefits since they were high-level undead creatures… But his current situation wasn't the best; the tremor in his right hand continued to increase, and he knew he needed to rest to let the side effects of the rapid racial change pass…
Furthermore, the third figure was the one that gave him the most sense of danger… Unlike the other two monsters standing motionless, the third was kneeling on the ground, feasting on Blood Armor's corpse in a disgusting and terrifying way.
The man had short black hair combed back with white sides and sideburns, pale white skin, and a medium height common among the Asshai'i. He was dressed in an elegant black frock coat, like a common butler.
His hands forcefully tore chunks of flesh from Blood Armor's body, then picked small pieces of the hard carapace of his living armor. Before gathering them together and plunging into the enormous hole in the Blood Mage's abdomen and devouring everything in a single bite.
While chewing, he displayed a face full of pleasure as if he were eating a rare and delicious dish.
As he finished chewing, he looked at Raphael and Vulcan, noticing their arrival, and smiled, nodding as if greeting an old friend, revealing pearly white teeth with tendrils of blood between them…
****
Special thanks to the Patreons:
Sage's Supporter: Jan, Vinnie, frimorigo, Parsa, Scott Robertson, Pato Senalima, Lily Monarch, and Adriele Rodrigues!
Magic Apprentice: Axel Bour, Gabriele Sulpizio, Takatchi, mandeep singh, Austin, Kobe Robertson, Paul Gaslac, Niteo akuma, 704Corleon, Rodrigo, WhoisMitch, Leery Falcon, Grave Walker, adam, Evil King, and Emotional!
Senior Magic Apprentice: Cole Bromley, Avacus, and TabbyRabbit!