Bloodstained Blade
Chapter 95 - Getting Her Affairs in Order

When they returned to Evelyn’s domain. The first thing the Baroness did was make a perfunctory visit to her dead husband’s grave. After that, when she returned to Gilles Hall, she wrote two documents. The first was to her father, informing him of her visit to the capital and asking for permission to visit him in the castle.

The Ebon Blade didn’t understand why a daughter would need her father’s permission to visit him, but seeing as he had hundreds of living children and grandchildren, it was probably a protocol born of logistics more than security. Still, it was her second document that interested it far more.

The Baroness couldn’t walk around her manor with a giant black claymore strapped to her back. So, she most often kept it in the corner behind a dressing screen where it would be easy to access in an emergency. From there, it would while away the hours nibbling on any maids within reach, as well as any workmen visible from her window, but it was a thin gruel compared to the joy of violence.

+84 Life Force.

There was little it could do about the flimsy hiding place, but it made the Ebon Blade feel intensely vulnerable. However, those concerns were almost certainly overblown.

The guards entered her room on a regular basis, and once a visiting mage and priest met with her in her chambers to ask questions about the man she saw fleeing her bedroom after her husband’s death. Even in that case where adepts capable of detecting were right there, they didn't even bother to look for it. No one even considered it possible that the beautiful, petite widow could have played a part in the tragedy. It was simply a bridge too far.

They talked about the precariousness of that situation regularly, but though the blade was dissatisfied, it had no good answers, and its wielder urged it not to worry. “Soon enough, we’ll be on our way,” she explained. “Just another week or so until my father replies.”

While it sat there, impatiently, it could easily see everything that happened in her room, and she had to only reach a little bit past her writing desk to touch its hilt so they could talk. It was in one of those conversations that it told her how it had twisted the guard’s desire to protect her.

“How is that even possible?” its wielder asked.

The Ebon Blade explained, It was a favor gleaned from a grudge against a man that we killed in the inn. As my vengeance gets closer, my powers continue to grow.

It didn’t explain everything to her, because she didn’t need to know. In their solitude, they’d practiced with a few of its powers like Bolt and Amplify Blade, but it still preferred to hoard its secrets whenever possible. Still, what it told her piqued her interest enough to start making a list of everyone she wanted dead before she left her sleepy community.

We should be cautious, the blade argued. All of these delays… they were all to garner the advantages of stealth and surprise. If we start killing people in large numbers, it will attract attention.

“You said so yourself,” Evelyn said, obviously unswayed. “We may never come back here. I might not survive what comes next, and if it's vengeance you seek… well, I can’t leave these vengeances unfinished. We’ll just have to make sure they don’t find any bodies.”

The weapon wanted to argue with that, but not as much as it wanted to kill. It hated waiting day after day, inviting rust and capture. The names on her list meant nothing to it, but when she peered into her mind, it could see that a majority of the men, and all of the women on the list, were those who knew how badly her husband had abused her before his death.

+221 Life Force.

+9 Human Souls.

The rest were a mix of miscreants and former lovers. A few of that last group she actually fucked before she killed them, which the blade found distasteful. Given that her husband was dead, it wasn’t exactly a betrayal, but it was an odd choice.

Why would you love someone enough to couple with them but hate them enough to want them dead? The weapon asked itself several times during her killing spree. It didn’t really understand sexual desire in general, but its current wielder seemed to have a very twisted view of it.

Most of those murderous nights in the week before they journeyed to the capital started out the same. Eveyln would dress in dark clothes and then, using its strength, she would sneak out of her window and leap to the ground before meeting one of the night's targets. At first, some of these were scheduled trysts that occurred in the wilderness outside of town or at the properties of wealthy men.

+376 Life Force.

+12 Human Souls.

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Those who wanted her rarely questioned what she wore as long as it came off, and those who didn’t never had a chance to ask. It was here that the blade worried that its incessant whispers to her sleeping mind might have gone too far.

After a few days, when the first body was found, these little missions of vengeance became harder, but not impossible. She simply started burning down the buildings while the corpses of her victims lay inside. While that destroyed the evidence of direct murder, arson was an even harder crime to hide.

In their first few days together, after her husband’s death, Evelyn had deplored the idea of killing anyone, save a handful of people that she desperately wanted to die. Now she enjoyed people who had shunned or insulted her, as well as their servants if necessary.

+551 Life Force.

+17 Human Souls.

The blade didn’t judge this. It just tried to understand it. It wanted death and slaughter, and any soul it could devour was a good one, but what it needed more than anything was a reliable wielder, and Evelyn was growing reckless.

Sometimes she’d even lecture those who had abandoned her in her hour of need for their misdeeds before she struck them down. “You could have saved me!” she told her priest before she struck him down and left him there on the desecrated altar.

The blade enjoyed those moments almost as much as it hated her little romantic interludes, but either way, it grew more concerned, and one night, when that mage and priest who failed to notice it before ambushed her in the woods on the way back to her town, it was unsurprised.

“It was you? All along, it was you?” the priest asked, in obvious denial.

“Guilty…” Evelyn said with a smile, drawing it and taking a look around the clearing as a dozen men began to fan out.

The most important thing now is that no one lives to tell the tale of what happened here, the blade whispered.

“The Bloody Baroness,” the mage gasped as his men drew their weapons. “That’s what they’ll call you… They’ll—”

He never finished his statement. With no warning at all, Evelyn sprang forward, splitting the warrior standing in front of him in two with a downward chop that had enough reach that it cleaved through the man's robes and well as his ribs. The strike was not enough to kill the mage instantly, but it was enough to silence him until he drowned in his blood as everyone else joined the fight.

+74 Life Force.

+1 Human Soul.

The next two men to attack Evelyn did so from either side. Unfortunately, one of them seemed hesitant to strike a woman. The blade assisted her with a series of perfectly executed moves in the moment that followed, and she struck the one with a little too much mercy in his soul with its pommel hard enough to give him a concussion even as she used the blade to parry a blow from the other side before running him through.

After that, it was a melee, and blood ran on all sides. The priest called upon their God and gave the warriors that fought at his side some kind of battle prowess spell. That was enough to make them stronger and faster, but not strong enough that they could parry more than a glancing blow from the Ebon blade.

+109 Life Force.

+3 Human Souls.

As more and more bodies fell to the ground, footing grew treacherous and tactics became more haphazard. When mobbed from every direction, it was impossible to parry every blow, and its wielder was run through several times, once by two swords at once. She yelled in pain, but the expression on her face was one of feral joy, and even before her organs had finished healing, she’d ended the lives of every warrior that had laid a hand on her.

-74 Life Force.

+226 Life Force.

+5 Human Souls.

The priest blasted her once with a bolt of light that seemed like it was meant to purge her of evil. That froze Evelyn in place for a moment, but the blade continued to move on her behalf, and made short work of the man, and returning quiet to that bloody glade.

It occurred to the blade only when everything was still and it counted the corpses that there was a problem. One of them is missing, it whispered as it whirled around looking for him.

-35 Life Force.

+99 Life Force.

+3 Human Souls.

When it spotted the runner, it yanked at its wielder’s body so hard it almost pulled her off her feet. After that, the chase was joined. Despite the boy’s head start, though, it was over in seconds. At night, Evelyn moved faster than ever thanks to Speed of the Shadows, and even as she overtook him, she beheaded him.

+36 Life Force.

+1 Human Soul.

“Bloody Baroness,” she whispered to herself as she pulled the Ebon blade free of the last corpse and watched the blood that lingered on it get absorbed by the metal. “I quite like that sound of that.”

While the weapon enjoyed the fight and thought that the monkier was very appropriate given how its wielder was drenched in blood, it did not like how close they’d come to ruin. If not for its night sight, this last warrior would have escaped and ruined everything, and it admonished its wielder.

There will be no more killing here. The blade commanded. Not until we depart. It is too dangerous.

Evelyn agreed, offering no verbal pushback, but it could feel the disappointment in her heart and decided to urge restraint instead of murder from now on when she slept. She clearly needed no more reinforcement in that regard.

Despite staying in at night from that day forward, two days later, she received a message announcing that the Witchhunters were returning to her domain because they worried the Black Blade had returned to the area. That was enough to make her panic. She stayed long enough to draft a letter extending them every courtesy because the blade insisted, but after that, they moved their plans to travel to Severin by several days and made a hasty departure.