Chronic Toxin

The night wind swept up gravel from the ground and brushed over the battered village square.

In midair, the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit, having just crossed the barrier between grades, let out a piercing shriek.

It had always bullied the weak and feared the strong. Even though it had forcibly squeezed into the threshold of Special Grade by stealing blood, the treachery and cowardice carved into its bones had not changed with its evolution.

Though fury surged within it at Kamo Chitsubaki's undisguised provocation below, it did not lose its head.

Its broad fleshy wings silently spread through the air.

It turned into a blurred black shadow, too fast for the naked eye to catch, and began circling at high speed along the upper edges of the square.

A war of attrition.

As it circled, the monster used its terrifyingly increased speed to deliberately create whistling sounds from every direction, attempting to disrupt its prey's hearing.

Patiently, it searched for gaps in the Blood Armor while continuously gathering the mixed cursed energy around its body into the sharp tips of its wings and claws, building strength for its next fatal strike.

For Chitsubaki, standing at the center of the square, this state of restrained aggression was undoubtedly an exceedingly brutal trial.

She was already injured.

After successive domain clashes and intense drawn-out battles, her reserves of cursed energy had long since run dry.

Now, she had to forcibly maintain [Crimson Blood Manipulation: Blood Armor], pushing both her mind and body to their limits.

With every second that dragged on, the scales of victory tipped another fraction toward the monster in the air.

Lu Ping, hidden in the shadow of a broken wall, watched everything coldly.

He did not act rashly. His fingers remained firmly wrapped around Nue's Feather, which crackled with lightning.

The moment that high-speed black shadow exposed even the slightest opening in Chitsubaki's defense, he would let it taste lightning piercing straight through the core in its head.

Unexpectedly, Chitsubaki, at the center of the storm, made an exceptionally bold move.

She slowly lowered her eyelids and simply closed her eyes.

In this rapidly shifting fight to the death, abandoning sight entirely to track a Special Grade Cursed Spirit known for its speed was no different from offering up her throat for slaughter.

But that was merely a tactical disguise.

Lu Ping sharply noticed an extremely faint resonance rippling through the dark red Blood Armor covering Chitsubaki's body.

It was an advanced application of the Three Great Families' cursed techniques.

She was not using pure cursed energy to perceive the outside world at all. Instead, she had focused all her attention on the blood she had lost.

Though the blood stolen by the monster's ambush had already entered its body, it still carried faint fluctuations of its caster's cursed energy.

Through that tenuous connection, Chitsubaki constructed an extremely crude yet absolutely precise positioning network in her mind.

She did not need to know how dazzling the monster's flight path was. She only needed to confirm one thing—when and from what angle it would launch its assault.

That was enough.

The stalemate lasted a full three minutes.

At last, the high-speed afterimage in the night sky showed the faintest trace of disorder.

It had only just completed its evolution. Even with the immense cursed energy of a Special Grade, it could not conceal its psychological weakness.

It began to grow impatient.

The frustration of being unable to take down its prey, coupled with its instinctive wariness of the boy hidden in the dark who could fire a surprise attack at any moment, made it decide to delay no longer.

It did not want to risk complications.

A sharp howl suddenly rang out overhead.

While moving at high speed, the monster opened its gaping maw and violently spewed out a portion of the filthy blood within it that had yet to be fully assimilated.

Those droplets of blood, mixed with corrosive cursed energy, transformed into a dense red net and came down from above, flying straight at Chitsubaki's face.

[Blood-Blinded Eyes].

The blood net would block the prey's senses and disrupt her final defensive judgment.

Yet that was not the true killing move.

At the very instant it spat out the foul blood, the monster's true body had already used the cover of night to appear directly behind Chitsubaki as if it had teleported.

Its claw, brimming with violent cursed energy and glinting with a ghostly blue poisonous light, tore through the air with a shriek as it smashed straight toward the unsuspecting sorceress's exposed back of the head.

If that blow landed, even if it failed to shatter her skull outright, the severe concussion would be enough to make Chitsubaki instantly lose her fine control over her technique.

Once the Blood Armor collapsed, the battle would be over.

Just as the foul blood was about to splash across her cheeks, Chitsubaki's body suddenly swayed in an extremely unnatural manner.

Her upper body tipped slightly forward as though she had lost all strength, as if the taut string she had held for so long had finally snapped.

At the sight, wild humanlike delight appeared on the monster's ugly face.

It held nothing back. Its swinging claw unleashed all its power, determined to smash its prey's head to pieces.

Life and death were often decided in a single instant.

At the moment when the sharp spike was only three inches from the back of her head.

That body, which appeared exhausted and on the verge of collapse, violently completed a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn at a speed that completely surpassed the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit's dynamic visual limit.

There was not a single unnecessary evasive movement.

Chitsubaki's hands carved two savage dark red afterimages before her chest. Carrying the indestructible power of the Blood Armor, they slammed together viciously in front of her.

Bang—!

A thunderous explosion echoed across the empty square.

The scene seemed to freeze at that moment.

The Blood Bat Cursed Spirit's face, filled with shock and unwillingness, along with its enormous head containing the source of its core cursed energy, was forcibly crushed into an indistinguishable pulp between the two palms encased in heavy Blood Armor.

Pure violence brought instant destruction.

The immense vitality of a Special Grade vanished in an instant, like a machine whose power had been cut off.

The enormous headless body, having lost its center of control, dropped limply onto the cold stone slabs with a dull boom.

Before its remaining consciousness completely returned to nothingness, its auditory nerves received only one cold sentence:

"Blood from a [Crimson Blood Manipulation] user is deadly poison to cursed spirits. You've really got nerve sucking it."

Watching the monster's remains at her feet rapidly carbonize and scatter in the wind, Chitsubaki's tense shoulders finally relaxed.

She let out a long breath of stale air tinged with the taste of rust and dispelled the Blood Armor from her body.

In the end, she had won this gamble.