Divine Magus: Awakening
Chapter 54: Blood Feud

Chapter 54: Blood Feud

A crimson blade weaved itself into existence.

"You seem quite proficient with a blade. So I thought to myself, ’Why not fight you with one?’. So let’s see how skilled you are." Minerva giggled like a little girl.

She leaned forward and with a thought, shot off to Logan.

He lifted his blade and it met hers with sparks.

Gripping his blade, space slightly flickered around it before a massive pain struck Logan’s sacral vertebrae.

His muscle memory had almost been his own undoing.

He had almost cast Dark Space and luckily, it had failed. If it hadn’t, he would have doomed himself.

Ignoring the pain associated with the failed attempt, he jumped back and used his body enchantment.

Shadows coated his blade and turned it pitch black.

"So that’s how you were able to sense my attempt. You have shadow magic. I haven’t seen one of your kind in about a decade." Minerva said absentmindedly.

’Shadow magic users?’ Logan took a mental note as he prepared for her next assault.

"Now, I have no personal issues with you and that’s why I’m playing with you. I don’t want to kill you." She stood straight before pointing the blade at Logan.

"But that doesn’t mean that you won’t die. Fight with all you’ve got because your life might just depend on it." She threw the sword at Logan.

Swinging his blade horizontally, he tried to block the incoming weapon.

Tried.

Just before contact with his blade, it turned into liquid.

Rather than be distracted, Logan vanished in a mass of shadows and appeared behind Minerva with his blade mid-swing.

The tachi cut through her head like a hot knife through butter.

He watched with cold eyes as her head fell off her body and she fell dead.

Logan, despite beheading her, didn’t turn his back on her, nor did he think that she was actually dead.

A minute passed and then another until it reached around five.

From a distance, Logan could hear a clash coming from Orion’s location, yet he still didn’t leave.

"How long are you going to pretend to be dead?" Logan asked the corpse in front of him and received silence as the answer.

"Really? Stop trying to deceive me."

Silence.

"I’ve met Soul King before, and it did the same shit." Logan sighed.

"Really?! That bastard keeps on stealing all my tricks, I knew I shouldn’t have fought him." The head pouted.

Strings of blood left the body and connected to the head.

Logan watched as her head attached neatly to her body.

"I was planning on surprising you when you turned to help your friends." Minerva cackled before stopping and clearing her throat.

"So what now?" She asked as he drummed her fingers on her arm.

There were two reasons why Logan was letting her waste time.

The first was that he knew he couldn’t win. While he wasn’t sure of her rank, he knew she was at least B-rank, which was far above his capacity.

And the second was that he was letting his World cores refill themselves.

Even if he couldn’t beat the blood mage in front of him, he could at least get him and Orion off the island and away from the woman and her companion.

"Nice try young man." Minerva suddenly started laughing.

"You really think I’ll let you refill your mana core or get off the island? I won’t kill you now but I will." She smiled eerily.

"Perhaps if you weren’t so young then I might have considered sparing you." She smiled as she eyed him seductively.

Keeping his shock and disgust respectively in check, Logan was concocting several plans in his head.

All of them led to a range from certain death to possible death.

Gripping the hilt of the tachi, Logan leaned forward and shadows flared.

He vanished in an instant, only appearing in the air, swinging his blade at the woman in front of him.

Letting out a small smile, Minerva waved her hand at the blade and caught it in between her fingers.

"Now, now boy, don’t get cocky." Her smile faded, and she flicked his head, sending him flying.

He collided with and broke the tree he landed on.

Getting up with a stagger, he looked her dead in the eyes.

Tracing the cut on her palm again, more blood started to flow out in a controlled stream.

"Someone like you, who despite being so young, is capable of silent casting, is very hard to find. Too bad you had to encounter me at this level." She sighed as multiple spikes made of her blood formed in her grasp.

With a thought, she launched them at Logan.

Shadows pulsed around the latter as he dodged gracefully each spike that aimed to kill him.

But during his attempt, he failed to notice her closing of the distance between them and so, upon dodging the last spike, he felt something pierce his stomach.

Looking down, he could see that her hand had gone through his torso.

"Blood Magic; Vampiric Drain." She whispered in Logan’s ear.

His body slowly became wrinkled and dry as his blood was being drained out of him.

Midway through her feast, she suddenly pulled her hand back in disgust.

"Your blood isn’t pure?!" She screamed before slapping him. This was the first time she seemed genuinely angry.

Logan fell to his knees as his vision filled with growing black dots.

"Mixing your blood with the essence of a beast?! Such disgusting practices must be pruned." She spat on Logan’s face.

Dragging him for about five hundred meters, he placed him in a relatively open patch that lacked many trees.

"You shall become a warning sign to the world for those who want to participate in something as vile as Body Enchantment." She seethed.

Blood flowed out of the cuts on her palm and started forming a structure.

A crimson altar formed from her blood and she threw Logan on it.

Forming a blade in her hand, she thrust it into the hole she had made with her hand.

Logan’s world went black.

Minerva turned away and failed to see Logan’s hair turn black.