Blood Curse Academia - Orientation

Chapter XXX (30)- The End of the Hunt

When Kizu woke up, he stared at the rocky cave wall in front of him, trying to process where he was. Then the memories came crashing down, bringing a throbbing headache with them. The rush of air and flailing limbs, followed by a brutal impact as his head smashed into a rock. Then nothing. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. He felt horrible, and he had a lump on the back of his head the circumference of an orange.

Remembering Ione, he sat up, his back aching, and scanned the rocky ground for her.

Luckily, she wasn’t far off. Kizu limped over to her prone form and was relieved to see her chest still rising and falling. Still alive. And, remarkably, so was her little blue fire-eater. It fluttered in the air nearby. It was making a rattling, cawing sort of noise that sounded like a plea for help. Kizu tried to speak to the thing, but it lacked the wits to do anything more than hover over Ione.

The good news ended there. As Kizu looked his classmate over, he realized her foot was pointing in the wrong direction. Broken bone pressed up from underneath the skin, tenting it. He winced and sucked his teeth. That would not heal overnight.

Not wanting to wake her, but also knowing they couldn’t stay at the bottom of a pit under an eccentric lady’s house, Kizu examined the area. The tunnel had definitely widened out at the bottom. At the top, the opening had barely looked wider than something a fox might dig. By comparison, he could probably fit his entire brewing class down here. That funnel shape meant climbing out would be extraordinarily difficult.

Even with his low light vision, it took Kizu a while to make out a soot-stained trail. He followed it, increasingly certain that it had been left by the bloodspawn as it dragged itself to safety. It led Kizu to a crevice that scarred the pit’s otherwise bare walls.

Before following the ominous trail deeper underground, Kizu stopped to weigh his options. He quickly came to the conclusion that he didn’t have very many. No one was likely to come looking for him anytime soon. They didn’t know he’d taken the job from the questboard and Ione had been pretending to be Sene at the time. His only hope for rescue would be the woman in the house above. Unfortunately, the typhoon’s wind and torrent of rain was strong enough that even their loud battle could go overlooked. Ironically, he might have been safer if Ione had left the house to burn. Then at least people would know to check out the area.

Even if he missed his combat test tomorrow, people would probably just think he’d gotten cold feet and hid. And as uncharitable as the thought was, Kizu doubted Ione was any more popular than him. No, waiting it out seemed like an overwhelmingly bad idea,especially considering Ione’s broken foot. He didn’t have the materials on hand to brew a healing potion or poultice, and he knew next to nothing about setting a broken bone.

Briefly, he considered attempting to enchant his shoes to allow him to walk up the wall. He quickly dismissed the idea. He could make them stick to the wall, maybe, but walking included unsticking them from the wall on demand. That would require nuance that he couldn’t trial and error without some sort of guide. And he didn’t have enough blood in his body to enchant individual handholds like he had when he had scaled the academy’s wall.

He closed his eyes and focused on his bond with Mort. He could feel his familiar sleeping, and for a second, the monkey’s dreams almost overwhelmed him. But he got a hold of himself. Tentatively, he pushed a mental image forward. Mort woke up. He tried to explain to his familiar that he needed help. That he needed Mort to go find Roba. But Mort didn’t understand the impression. Instead, he sent back the feeling of hunger. Then he scampered off in search of bugs to munch on.

“Well, that was a bust,” he muttered into the dark.

He tried to think of what other resources he had at hand. Without Mort as a conduit, his elemental magic was laughably weak. Illusions could make the place look nicer, but lacked any practical use here. He did still have a few vials of potions, but nothing that would help him out of this situation. Unless he wanted to end it all and cremate himself.

The best option seemed to be shimmying through the crack and following after the creature. Maybe it would lead him to a way out.

Not wanting to leave Ione behind in case the monster found its way back through another hidden path, Kizu lifted her up. She was surprisingly light.

Getting through the first crack was the hardest part. He took care to let Ione’s twisted foot dangle and did his best to keep it from bumping against the wall. He didn’t want to injure it any further.

After the initial tight squeeze, the passage opened up. It didn’t get much taller, though. Even while hunched over, Kizu still knocked his head on the cave’s ceiling several times. He could already feel the extra lumps forming on his scalp. It would probably look like a wart-riddled squash by the end of day. The worst was when the ceiling slammed into one of his already tender swollen parts. That nearly made him drop Ione. As it was, he slumped against the wall and pressed his face to the cold stone until he stopped seeing stars.

Some time later, a soft scraping sound interrupted his silent grumbling. Kizu froze. The noise had come from further down the passage. Carefully, he set Ione down and fingered a vial in his pocket.

The scraping grew louder as he crept forward. When Kizu reached a corner and peered around it, he saw the bloodspawn clawing at the wall in front of it. The leg that Kizu had hit with his potion was a blackened chunk of charcoal that dragged behind it like an anchor weight. But other than that very obvious blemish, and some less severe burns on its hand, the creature looked fine. Just a bit manic.

Suddenly, it stopped clawing at the wall. It tilted its head.

Kizu stepped forward. He needed to make this next throw count. This close to the creature, he wouldn’t get another.

“Wait!” the bloodspawn screamed. It dropped to the ground and cowered, arms folded over its head. “Don’t kill me!”

Kizu stared at it. The vial felt heavy in his hand. Groveling there in the dirt, with its blood red eyes and razor sharp teeth hidden behind its trembling hands, it looked entirely too human. Even still, its monstrous characteristics still shone through. Its skin was paler than even a Tainted, whiter than bone. Its hair, which tumbled down to its neck, was a translucent shade of white. But even as his eyes lingered on those inhuman features, Kizu couldn’t bring himself to throw the vial. It just looked too pathetic.

“Why?” Kizu asked, buying time to gather his resolve, and secretly hoping it would give him a reason to strike it down.

“I just want to live! Listen, I’m sorry about before, in the dungeon. I didn’t mean to threaten you, I was just so thirsty. It makes my mind not work right.”

“But you’re not thirsty now?” Kizu asked skeptically.

“No! I promise you, you’d know if I was. You don’t understand. It consumes me. The mere thought of blood makes me sick with need. I struggle to control myself - I struggle, but I do control myself. Even back then, I didn’t attack you, did I?”

“You seem plenty lucid now. So these last few days, what’s been quenching your thirst?”

“Not people, if that’s what you’re thinking!” the bloodspawn said quickly. “The vials of blood you dropped, they’ve been holding me over. I promise I haven’t hurt anyone.”

Kizu wanted to believe him. The monster looked so pathetic, more like a wounded animal than a fearsome nightcrawler. But he still gripped the explosive brew tight.

“What are you doing down here?”

The monster looked up at him. Its scarlet eyes glowed, reminding Kizu what exactly he was dealing with. But then the eyes watered, softening the red to a shimmering pink. The evil predator of darkness wept. Kizu half expected the creature to cry blood, but it was mundane tears that trickled down its pale cheeks.

“I remembered this place from a long time ago. It’s a caved-in branch of the dungeon. From before everyone came here. Before we met Otochi.”

“And you’re trying to open it back up?” Kizu said. He didn’t like the sound of that.

“Only to escape you! I just don’t want to die. Is that so much to ask for? My life used to be up there. I only want to live on the surface under the stars again. But if you won’t allow me that, I’d rather go back to life underground. Life of any kind is better than the alternative.” It hugged itself and whimpered in pain as it curled into a ball, clutching its charred leg to its chest.

Kizu wavered on the edge of mercy. Monster or man, he couldn’t kill something that only wanted to live. Who was he to make that choice? If it had been hunting people, that would have been something else. But was it right to strike someone down just because they might do something? By that logic, no one deserved to live.

Then he heard something scraping against the floor behind him. He whirled around and saw Ione dragging herself toward him.

“Don’t-” she started to say.

Kizu looked back to what she was staring at. The monster. While it had been crying and holding itself, it had grabbed something from up its sleeve. The bloodspawn let it fly, and as it spun through the air, Kizu had just enough time to register that it was his potion vial from earlier. The one that he had tossed too softly. The one that hadn’t broken.

It broke this time.

Thankfully, not on Kizu. Ione’s summoned creature darted through the air like an arrow, colliding with the potion and breaking it halfway to Kizu. The explosion rocked Kizu several steps back, but the flames never reached him. The summoned creature consumed it all with a look of ecstasy on its bulbous face. It fell to the cave floor with a soft burp, panting with its eyes closed as if it had just run a marathon.

The bloodspawn looked horrified by the result. Streams of tears still dribbling down its face, it turned away and quickly crawled back over to the wall. Then, on its knees, it began frantically beating its fists against the stone.

It had just tried to kill him, and would have succeeded if not for Ione’s quick thinking. Yet, even so, Kizu couldn’t help feeling pity for the wretched creature. It looked more like a trapped animal than the monster he had imagined it to be.

“Why did you leave?” he asked it.

It stopped clawing at the rock and looked over its shoulder at him.

“If you want to go back so badly, why did you leave? You had blood. You could have just stayed down there, right?”

“It was mine,” it said, as if that was explanation enough.

“You didn’t want to share,” Ione said from behind him. He didn’t turn to look at her, keeping his full focus on the bloodspawn. Still, he could hear the pain in her voice. Every word came out labored.

“You don’t understand.” The creature reeled around, its body facing them. “I’m not greedy. No. If I was greedy, I would be like Otochi. I won’t pick and choose who gets to come and go. I used the blood to leave, not to take control. I just want to be free. Is that too much to ask for? When we went down, I didn’t realize he would keep us there with chains.”

“Freedom,” Kizu echoed. Despite all that was going on, his mind spiraled into a tangent. Had he ever been truly free? At times, out in the basin exploring with Mort, he’d felt free - but he’d always known in the back of his mind that the crone kept him there. An ever present weight of shackles. He should have felt liberated the day the Elites found him, but instead here he was, chained to the island in place of the basin, and bound by the expectations of his family in place of an old crone’s magic. It seemed backwards.

“Yes,” the creature said, nodding vigorously. “I just want freedom. Independence. And I want that for my friends, too!”

“Your friends?”

“You see, that’s why I need to open this. Not to escape, but to free them all. They might be able to slip through this way without needing to consume blood first. This door might not require blood in your veins to pass through. If I could just open it from this side-”

“For some reason, freeing a dungeon full of bloodspawn seems like a bad idea,” Ione said.

“Do we not have just as much of a right to live as you and your friend?”

“Usually, prisoners are imprisoned for a reason.”

“I’m innocent! My one and only crime is existing! Is that so horrible? I didn’t do anything wrong! I just wanted to protect my home.”

Ione sat and began sketching idly in the dirt with her hand.

“In my experience,” she said as she finished, “They all claim to be innocent.”

She pressed a palm to her drawing. Brilliant light filled the crevices she’d created in the dirt. Blinking, Kizu was forced to look away. He returned his gaze back to the spawn.

The bloodspawn frantically reached for another vial. Not one of his potions, this time. This time, it was blood.

The monster crammed the stolen blood vial into its mouth and bit clear through the glass at the same moment that Ione finished her summoning.

Kizu didn’t have enough time for his eyes to adjust back to the darkness before he was shoved out of the way by a hulking creature. It bellowed a deep and dangerous roar. It looked almost like a bear, but bald and oversized. And it had two heads.

Looking up, Kizu only just made out the red glint of the bloodspawn’s eyes as it turned away from them, lunging at the wall while casting an elemental spell. The cave shook. New cracks split in the stone all around them while rubble and dust rained down from the cave’s ceiling. The bloodspawn slipped through a crack in the wall just as Ione’s summoned creature smashed into it.

Kizu’s heart dropped. But then Ione’s creature lunged with its left head into the crack after the spawn. The shoulders of the beast appeared to dislocate from the effort, giving it further reach. A human-like shriek came from within the crevice. The summoned creature grunted, heaving the bloodspawn back into the tunnel. For a moment, the creature dangled upside down, its blackened leg caught in the creature’s teeth. Then Ione’s creature bit down and wrenched its head sideways, tearing the blacked limb free.

The bloodspawn cried out and flailed as it hit the ground. No blood came from the stump of a leg. The inside of the monster looked dry, mummified.

Ione’s summoned creature laid a keg-sized paw on the bloodspawn’s chest. Even the rising screams from the bloodspawn couldn’t drown out the popping and snapping of its ribs under the pressure.

The spawn was still alive, even with every rib broken. Kizu thought it was trying to say something, but any words were scrambled by the pain and its punctured lungs. Those scarlet eyes met Kizu’s, and its lips twitched in a wordless plea as Ione’s hulking summon set its oversized paw on its head. Kizu looked away as the creature’s skull shattered.