Gripping her hands into fists, Eva tried to push herself off the ground. She had wound up lying face down in the brick and gravel. She couldn’t feel it in the slightest. Something that probably didn’t speak well of her.
Oddly enough—or perhaps unsurprisingly enough—her hands and legs felt perfectly fine. Between Arachne’s carapace and her own blood shield, she had managed to get away without any damage that she could see through her blood. There might be cracks or warping, but she would have to wait to tell for sure.
Unfortunately, all the important bits were in the rest of her.
Eva paused in her fruitless movements for just a moment.
Focusing on herself again, Eva found her blood-based image of herself not looking quite as poorly as she had mere moments ago. Some of her charred flesh was… still charred. But not quite as badly as it had been.
She was healing. Slowly, but surely.
Not fast enough. She might heal, but if Arachne died in the meantime, it wouldn’t even matter.
Again, Eva pressed her fists into the ground. Even as the aches and pains increased, she didn’t stop pushing. Once she got to her knees, everything became far easier. Her legs still worked just fine, after all.
The blinding whiteness in her eyes was slowly fading away as well. Like looking straight into a camera flash, blinking it away seemed to work. Though, half the problem was probably just her lying face down.
Fumbling around her waist, Eva found her dagger lying on the ground. While she couldn’t feel much of anything aside from pain, the black metal was still cool to the touch. Even through her carapace.
Unfortunately, not much else survived the sky cracking. Her vials of blood were nowhere to be found. There was some half-broken, half-melted glass stuck to her stomach that must have been shielded partially by her body. Not shielded well enough to keep the blood safe.
Her eyes were still blurry and everything still hurt. Moving in to engage with her person was absolutely out of the question.
That didn’t stop Eva from taking her dagger and jamming it into her upper arm, slicing out a relatively large gouge. Blood spilled forth, drawn out by her magic. Some, she spread throughout the area to get a better view of her surroundings.
The first thing she noticed was a human-height wall between Eva and the fight going on with Arachne and the demon hunter. The second thing was that the doll was not fighting with them.
The doll was still standing off to one side. Eva hadn’t been paying that much attention to her exact pose, but she was still staring at the sky. She probably hadn’t moved at all.
There was still something fighting the demon hunter. Something Eva couldn’t detect with her blood magic. As she spread more blood around it, she started to get a better picture of just what it was.
Nearly twice as tall as Arachne, a mass of stone had taken the shape of a person. A very bulky person. Who didn’t so much have legs as it had a tornado of earth that it was propped up on. Eva wasn’t entirely sure why it needed a face. Given that the eye and mouth holes were just that, holes, they really didn’t provide much function. Another twenty arms would have been better. Just a relentless hammering of fists instead of the two it currently had.
But it had to be Genoa. She had probably made the wall around Eva as well. Fighting, as Juliana had insisted, from the dormitory building. She had to be. She wasn’t anywhere else around the battlefield as far as Eva could tell.
And with her eyes slowly getting better, she was able to tell a little more after peeking over the top of the wall.
The ground around her was… less brick and stone than it had been. For a certain radius around Eva, everything was glass. Everything save for a small person-shaped patch right where she had been lying.
Perhaps it was a good thing that she could only feel pain at the moment and not something more specific. If her surroundings had become hot enough to turn the landscape to glass, she didn’t want to know what her back looked like.
Though maybe she had been unconscious long enough for her slow healing to heal enough.
More importantly, a fight was going on.
The rock golem crashed down both fists on top of the hunter. He intercepted with his sword, letting the blade take the full brunt of the attack. His arms and legs bent ever so slightly from the impact. Whatever was keeping his armor undamaged was working to his advantage, keeping his limbs from snapping entirely.
Arachne skittered around to his side while he was distracted. Though fuzzy, Eva spotted long coils of her thread all wound up, ready to throw out and lasso the hunter.
Eva ducked back below the wall. The knight was preoccupied. With his back to her at the moment, he wouldn’t have seen her get up just yet. The other hunter might have. Eva didn’t know where she was at. But for the moment, Eva would operate under the assumption that she was distracted as well.
