Contrary to what she had expected, the fist did not toss her clear to the opposite side of the ritual circle. She jolted back from the initial strike only to suffer whiplash as the fingers closed around her and pulled her straight back to the waiting hunter.
Waiting with a blade set to pierce through Eva’s rapidly approaching stomach, that was.
Eva blinked out of the hunter’s grip just in time to avoid getting yet another hole in her. She reappeared just behind the hunter, turning her arms into razor-sharp claws.
The hunter didn’t give her a chance to strike. Spinning her blade around into a reverse grip, she thrust backwards with a mad cry of rage. Eva backed away just enough. The tip of the blade actually nicked a tiny cut in her chest.
Before dying, Eva hadn’t been concerned in the slightest about being stabbed, skewered, or otherwise injured. She had marched towards the hunter relentlessly. Which had allowed her to get close enough to knock the hunter down and punch a few teeth out.
Accepting no injuries this time around, she was finding it difficult to strike back.
Thankfully, Zoe had understood Eva’s interrupted order. With the hand of blackened fingernails, she used the hunter’s distraction to pull her wand from her pocket. In a strange set of prioritization, she vanished her severed arm and all the pieces of her damaged dagger into her holding space before teleporting herself, disappearing mere instants before the hunter’s extended arm could reach her a second time.
Crying out a shout of frustration, the hunter whirled to face Eva.
They danced around for a time. Blade slashed here. Blood exploded there. Fist extended. Claws raked. The liquid in her arms and legs kept forming tiny ice crystals, only to be rebuffed by the constant fire magic that Eva poured into herself. Annoying but necessary. If she had had more time, she might have tried to draw some heating runes into herself. Or simply try to cast some passive heating aura to counteract the hunter’s freezing aura. But either option would have taken just too much concentration during their back and forth.
Five full minutes of neither of them gaining a distinct advantage passed before Eva finally grew fed up. She wasn’t doing anything. Nothing lasting, at least. It was only a small consolation that the hunter hadn’t hurt her either. She wasn’t making any progress in killing the hunter, which meant that the hunter was winning. The more time wasted, the higher chance that Devon finished his ritual and decided to ignore Eva’s request to wait.
Something Eva was expecting to happen.
Not only was she wasting time, she wasn’t even getting that cathartic release in the process by pummeling the hunter into pulp.
Something had to change.
“Kneel.”
The hunter stumbled again. Just a slight stumble. Something so small that Eva might not have noticed it had she not been looking for it. Unlike last time, she did not fall to the ground in a heap of tangled limbs.
Instead, she looked up with some cross between a mad grin and a hate-filled scowl. “You tried that trick already,” she shouted as both Catherine and Srey returned to their knees. “It won’t work again!”
Eva clenched her teeth together hard enough that they might have broken had they not been demonic in nature. She didn’t really understand what she was doing when she shouted like that, but it seemed to work on all the other demons and it was similar to the thing that Ylva had done a handful of times in the past—which had never been resisted by Ylva’s subjects as far as Eva knew. Was it simply a matter of willpower? If Ylva were here, she would probably be able to force the hunter to get on the ground and lick her toes
Which was another point in Eva’s growing frustration with the situation. Srey and Catherine were still the only two here. Besides the passed out Saija. Srey hadn’t even thrown a punch. Catherine had looked fancy while dancing away from the hunter, but she hadn’t been able to attack back. Eva hadn’t seen any evidence that Catherine had tried, but she was assuming that the succubus’ enthrallment wasn’t working either. Perhaps if they had ended up doing one more of her treatments, she would have been able to properly fight back against a foe of this caliber.
But Eva had expected
