The enemy claimed Sebastian was no longer vulnerable to psychic spells. Did Bella believe him? Believe whatever the enemy said? Of course not!
Did that vampire elder up there understand psychic magic better than she did? Bella believed no one understood psychic magic better than her!
She had her own standards for judging mutant abilities and spells.
The two sides were not even operating on the same level! The other side believed Sebastian had already become flawless. Bella did not.
So what if he could absorb any kind of energy? She took a deep breath, mobilized more than seventy percent of the psionic energy in her body, and unleashed a storm of attacks at Sebastian.
Not just psychic spells and instant-death spells. She also released every ice spell and water spell she excelled at, the lightning spells she had learned but rarely used, and the fire spells she had only recently begun to understand.
Her ice spears carried deadly poison. Her Fireballs contained delayed-explosion effects. She even added a trace of soul activity, something she had studied from the AllSpark, to her psychic spells. Creating life and creating souls were still realms far beyond her, but making something tangible or intangible briefly come alive for a few seconds was within her abilities.
The psionic energy inside a Mind Blast was absorbed by Sebastian, but before it could be converted, that energy began to transform in a way no one could possibly have imagined. Then, like a wild bison, it rampaged through the cells where his body was storing energy.
Bella kept up her assault for more than a minute. Some psionic spells were violent, some freezing cold, and others were bizarre from the inside out. She wanted to see exactly where Sebastian's limit lay.
"Hahahaha! I have to admit, your performance is spectacular. It's useless! The Blood God is invinci—" The vampire elder stopped halfway through his sentence. Bella reacted even faster than he did, grabbing 006 and instantly retreating more than thirty meters (about ninety-eight feet).
They had to run, because a series of explosions erupted inside Sebastian's body. At first the sounds were faint. Then they rolled like thunder, one after another, until his entire body burst open from his left shoulder down to his lower abdomen.
Thick blood and fat sprayed everywhere.
He was not dead. Or rather, he had not completely returned to life yet. His spine stubbornly supported most of his body, while his left shoulder and arm drooped downward. Gravity dragged on those limbs, making Sebastian's body look as though someone were slowly tearing him apart as the split widened further and further.
A blood-smeared arm suddenly pushed out from what had once been his stomach. Barbs covered the elbow. Then the hand reached into his abdomen and dragged out another, somewhat deformed head.
"...What does that mean? This isn't going to turn into some kind of disaster, is it?" 006 asked Bella uneasily.
"I thought I knew what it meant before, but now? I didn't expect this change. Back up another ten meters (about thirty-three feet)..."
Bella studied Sebastian carefully. The man really could absorb energy of any kind, but his body still had a limit to how much it could endure.
The vampires' blood pool had raised that limit enormously, but a limit still existed.
Bella had poured a huge mess of different spells into him, and those spells were not so easy to convert. It was perfectly normal for all that accumulated energy to overwhelm his body and make it burst apart. But the mutations happening now were not normal at all...
She suspected Sebastian had swallowed the battlefield's negative emotions indiscriminately as well. These mutations looked much more like something caused by that accumulated negativity.
So what should she do now?
"Blood God! Stop! Stop, I order you—" The vampire elder realized Sebastian had gone out of control and tried to reassert command, but before he could finish, an almost invisible beam pierced Sebastian's head. The blood that had been bubbling and boiling in the pool quickly closed the wound, but his process of absorbing outside energy had clearly been interrupted.
What was going on? Bella hurriedly turned around and saw an elderly Chinese man running toward them from far away with a banana in his hand.
The old man ran past Bella and even gave her a crooked grin. Then he turned toward Sebastian and started swinging the banana around with enthusiastic "hoo-ha-hey" motions. Beside him was a tall blonde woman holding a hair dryer, likewise gritting her teeth as she aimed it at Sebastian and mimed firing a gun.
With death staring him in the face, Sebastian finally recovered some of the awareness he had possessed while alive. He could no longer spare any attention for absorbing energy from the blood pool. He smashed a large hole through a nearby wall and ran for it. The elderly Chinese man and the blonde woman had no intention of wasting words on Bella or the others. Waving the banana and hair dryer, they gave chase.
Bella stared, dumbfounded. "..."
With a strange expression, she looked at 006. "Was I seeing things just now? Those two people who ran past looked completely ordinary. Were they normal New Yorkers?"
006 had nothing to say. He must be some kind of fake secret agent.
They made short work of the old vampire, and Bella destroyed the blood pool with a Fireball.
"You clean up the remnants here. I'm going after that guy!" Leaving 006 behind, Bella cast Haste on herself and shot after the "ordinary New Yorkers" as though she were flying.
The mutations across Sebastian's body grew increasingly severe. He seemed to have absorbed all the resentment, hatred, and killing intent on the battlefield. The formerly thin middle-aged man had swollen into a fat man weighing more than 250 kilograms (about 550 pounds), with his eyes, nose, and mouth all squeezed together. Looking like this, even Magneto and the White Queen would fail to recognize him. His own mother would not know who he was.
His strength had skyrocketed. He could leap tens of meters (well over a hundred feet) in a single bound, and every hard step left broad spiderweb cracks across the roadway behind him.
The bloated Sebastian ran at the very front. The elderly Chinese man and the blonde woman chased close behind, while Bella sprinted after them from the rear.
Huh? As she kept chasing, Bella noticed that an "ordinary citizen" dressed like a market-going auntie had joined the pursuit while carrying a cooking spoon. Then came a little boy of seven or eight armed with a water pistol. After that, several more characters appeared, every one of them looking like the most forgettable background extra imaginable, and joined the chase.
Their weapons were all over the place, ranging from toilet plungers to badminton rackets.
The whole crowd sprinted through Manhattan like contestants in some kind of long-distance race. As they ran, another Black man jumped down from an office building beside Bella. For an instant, she thought it was Nick Fury, but then realized it was not.
This man was a little shorter and thinner than Nick Fury. He wore a leather coat, carried a long blade on his back, and had sunglasses perched on the bridge of his nose. It was one-thirty in the morning. What normal person put on sunglasses, strapped on a sword, and went sprinting through the streets at this hour?
"You're... you're the one the vampires call Blade, aren't you?" Bella ran alongside the Black man, looked him over twice, and quickly recognized who he was.