Without hesitation, Eva blinked.
She snapped into being back inside the office, just to the side of the hunter.
Eva dropped both of her firebombs as a boulder made of ice crashed down into the window right where she had been standing.
Window blocked off, Eva blinked to a corner of the room and uncorked a vial of blood. Her own blood, all of Zagan’s blood was lying frozen on the floor. She formed up a blood shield around herself. All in the time it took for the two firebombs to fall to the floor.
Heat and flames filled the room. Strong enough that Eva could feel a small portion of it through her shield. Much of the already wrecked room turned to cinders. What wasn’t burnable was crushed under the pressure of the two bombs’ shock waves.
Eva’s shield was included in that second category. Demon blood would have been able to stand up to the explosions. Only using her own blood, the shield cracked and shattered after only a few moments of staying up.
Luckily, most of the power in the explosions had already been used up by the time the fractured shield collapsed. All that was left was the fire and the heat.
Neither really bothered Eva.
Except, there was more left behind. One thing stood out.
A pillar of ice, stretching from the ground to the ceiling.
Eva didn’t need her blood sight to tell that the hunter was still alive within.
Uncorking every vial of blood that she had left, Eva formed it all into a massive ball made up of thin rings. The rings all circled around each other, gathering to form a frame of blood wires. Spell set, she plunged both hands into the ball.
Two car-sized hands of blood, mirrors of Eva’s claws, appeared in the room in front of her. Eva pushed her hands farther into the rings of blood. The larger versions of her hands moved together, one of them scraping into a wall and tearing it apart as it continued forwards.
The palms of her blood-hands hit the ice pillar. Eva gripped it and squeezed.
Cracks formed in the ice, starting as small fractures before growing into larger and thicker crevasses.
The hunter was actually panicking now. Her accelerated heart rate and more frantic movements within the pillar were unusually satisfying.
At least, it was until her blood claws started to freeze. They were huge, several hundred times the size of the small globs of Zagan’s blood that the hunter had frozen earlier. But locked around the pillar of ice, slowly crushing it, ice started to form on the palms of the hands.
Eva redoubled her efforts, pressing her hands together as hard as she could, forcing more and more magic into the ball of blood to keep the hands under her control for as long as possible.
The top half of the pillar broke off, collapsing into one of the hands. Eva pulled her real hand out of the ball as if she had been stung. The blood forming the hand fell to the ground, forming a large pool of inert liquid.
Glancing down, Eva found small amounts of frost shining white against the normally black carapace of her hand.
Eva grit her teeth and focused on her remaining hand, crushing the top of the already damaged pillar where it was more brittle.
With the hand still freezing over, it was fighting against time.
And Eva didn’t feel like she was winning.
Pulling her hand away from the pillar, Eva lifted it up and over the broken top. Curling the hand into a fist, she slammed it back down.
The hand fell apart, shards of blood and ice scattered everywhere. Most of it went into the pillar of ice through a hole at the top from where the upper part had broken off.
The shards rained down on the inside, each as sharp as knives, cutting into the hunter.
Unfortunately, that was all they were. Tiny knives. Inflicting nothing more than superficial wounds on the woman inside her makeshift shield.
A moment of silence passed. Eva started building up more compressed flames. Dropping them into the top might be her best option.
Rather than tossing the fledgling fireballs, Eva found herself extinguishing them as she dove to the side.
The pillar exploded outwards. Not in shards, but heavy chunks each at least the size of a large brick.
On the ground and curled into a ball, Eva clasped her hands over her head. Just in time to feel a brick of ice hit the chitin on her arm. It sent a hairline fracture up the carapace, but nothing more.
Eva remained on the ground for a moment after the last brick had struck the wall. Just in case.
A moment too long.
The hunter jumped on top of her. Bleeding from hundreds of tiny cuts, the woman clasped a hand around Eva’s throat. Her other hand grasped towards Eva’s face.
Seeing where the woman was aiming all too clearly, Eva used both of her hands to keep her open hand away. Eva could do without a little air for a short time. She had lost her eyes once already and that was beyond enough for her.
Having been curled up, Eva’s legs were crunched up against her chest.
Between her body and the hunter.
