Eva could distinctly tell the difference between the hunter’s blood and the demon blood. A clap of her hands and the doll should be crippled if not killed outright.
Hopefully, anyway. Before any of that, Eva would be blinking away to give herself some time to clap.
Just as Eva was thinking about good locations to blink to, the doll’s sword-arm shot straight up into the air. She didn’t have time to react before it came back down.
Eva winced, expecting to find herself split in two.
But the doll’s sword came down to the side, splattering a great deal of red blood into the pool of black.
In one swift motion, she slid it across the opening of her scabbard, stopping at the tip, and plunged it in.
With the doll’s sword put away, Eva breathed out her held breath.
Eva turned her attention to Arachne now that the doll had sheathed her sword. Ever since she had stomped on Arachne’s shoulder, she hadn’t tried to get up. That wasn’t to say that she was sitting still and content. Her fingers were scraping through the pool of blood as she clenched and unclenched her fists.
More, she had an almost constant low rumble coming from the back of her throat.
“Just sit still,” Eva said. “I’m obviously alive and fine. Ylva put me back together after killing me. And, thanks to her, I am no longer in danger of…”
Eva trailed off as she glanced back up at the doll.
Or where the doll
She watched for a moment as the doll approached the webbed fence, hopped straight over, and came down on the other side.
“Well, I think she has decided to let me go. Which is great news,” Eva said, looking back to Arachne.
“Ylva killed you,” Arachne snarled.
“And I’m still here. If you go off and attack Ylva, she’ll kill you. And maybe she’ll be mad enough to kill me. And if either of us die, I will be
Arachne’s teeth clicked together. She somewhat shrunk in on herself. As much as she could with a sword through her chest, anyway.
Which just brought Eva’s attention back to how close it was to cutting into her heart tube.
“Now, let’s get that sword out of you.”
“My legs are still bleeding. I can feel it. They should have stopped by now.”
Eva blinked. Apart from her initial shock at seeing how dismembered Arachne was, she hadn’t paid all that much attention to Arachne’s legs. She lost them often enough that Eva never considered them all that big a deal. Just a measure of how dangerous whoever she was fighting might be.
But now that she was looking, she could see that Arachne was right. The stumps on her back were still bleeding, as was her chest where the sword had partially come out.
Most of it was beneath the surface of the black pool.
Which helped Eva immensely. She solidified some of the blood around each of Arachne’s major wounds and even a few of the minor cuts and cracks in her chitin that looked like they were leaking.
She stopped her hands just before touching the hilt. As with the idol, this sword could be trapped somehow. Or worse, made of the same metal that hurt demons when touched.
Eva pulled back, choosing instead to call up the surrounding blood. The blood swarmed around the sword, swallowing it up in an inky blackness. Eva solidified a large portion around the hilt. As added security, she solidified more blood in a handle that extended well beyond the original hilt.
Even with all the crystallized blood, Eva still only grazed her fingers along the surface.
Really, she was probably being paranoid. Arachne had part of the sword buried in her and had gripped the hilt to get it away from the hunter. Though injured, most of that looked to be because she had been stabbed. Unless there was some enchantment that caused the blade to turn on its wielder, Eva should be fine.
As nothing had killed her yet, Eva gripped the handle with both hands and hefted the sword up.
And just about stumbled forwards, coming far too close to dropping it back into Arachne for her tastes. Even using her legs to do most of the work for her didn’t help much. The sword had to weigh twice as much as Eva did.
She did get it up enough to clear Arachne. Despite the demon’s injured state, Arachne managed to slide out from under the hovering tip.
As soon as she was out of the way, Eva threw it back down, fully encasing the rest of the blade in crystalline blood drawn from the pool it had landed in.
“How,” Eva groaned between sucking in gasps of air, “did that hunter manage to lift that thing.”
Even when it fell, some of the hardened blood cracked. Eva had to spend a moment shoring it up and ensuring that it wasn’t going anywhere.
