Chapter 215 - Obstinate (Thank you for your support, David F!)

“Ugh…”

I bit my lips to control my pain… in the end, I couldn’t show my agony, I couldn’t give Rowan that satisfaction. Perhaps I was enduring well just groaning that much, or perhaps a simple groan was everything I could muster in that situation. 

Blood began to gush from the wound on my left side and I wondered for how long I could endure in this situation. Rowan was absolutely certain of his victory, so perhaps this was the moment.

“At least have the dignity to beg for your life. You are just a blood-sucking worm, but you can at least do that much, can’t you? Or have you been waiting for this despite your calm expression until now?”

“Hehe, hehe… hehehe… hahahahaha!”

“Have you finally lost your mind?”

“No, I just had this crazy idea… What if I turned you into the thing you hated the most before killing you? I guess just obtaining these powers isn’t the only things affecting my head, huh?

Rowan looked at me in confusion. In his head, it looked like I had already lost my mind, at least in a way that he didn’t expect at all. His victory was all but assured, at least in his head… it would have been if he had tried to kill me with all his might from the beginning, but his strength and the difference in skills made him underestimate me and think that I already had used all of my cards.

“I guess I will just chop your other arm and crush this delusion of yours.”

“No, you won’t.”

Rowan realized that something was off and then swung down his sword to cleave my head, but in the next moment, a scroll under my cloak was activated and then the blood that fell from my arm flew in all directions like countless bullets. The projectiles pierced Rowan’s unprotected skin with ease.

“Argh!”

It looked like Rowan was able to protect his head at the last moment with his arms. He didn’t suffer critical damage, and he didn’t lose his sight… Thanks to his lightning armor, the power of Crimson Burst also was a lot weaker, but at least it pushed him away by several meters.

When Rowan recovered, he saw the arrow on my right shoulder being pulled from behind. Then he saw Glacien helping me with that. He immediately stepped forward to kill us both, but soon he felt his body feeling weird, his body began to burn and his health began to fall quite fast, the pain spread through his body was like nothing he felt before… like his defenses were completely nullified.

Rowan was forced to grab some potions from his magic bag and then drink them. He drank several of them to decrease the pain, but it didn’t help that much. Without any other choice, he decided to drink a certain drug that he kept with him for emergencies, but the moment he opened the bottle and drank the liquid, he saw me standing with a weird stance… I was holding my fallen left arm with my hand and then pulling the bowstring of my hand crossbow with my mouth.

Before releasing the bolts, I used Shadow Step and collided against him. The impact made him stagger backward and drop the drug… then, he felt the sharp pain taking over his body. It felt like every single spot on it was stinging, like boiling oil was put on them. In the next moment, he looked down and saw several holes in his torso.

“... Monster…”

You received 75.000 experience points.

“If I am a monster, what are you? Asshole…”

Rowan fell on the ground and then my body relaxed when the battle was over, but that only made the pain much worse for me. I was losing blood fast, so I had to do something about it. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone… Glacien worked fast to grab the magic bag that Rowan had, and I could look for some potions there.

He used a few, but he still had a lot more… as expected of someone who was rich. I began to drink the potions, and the pain weakened, but I wondered what I should do now? Could I reattach my arm? While I was thinking about that, Glacien began to growl angrily at the direction Rowan came from and before long, I heard some footsteps. It looked like I wasn’t going to have any time to recover properly…

Eventually, the footsteps ended, but I didn’t see anyone. I immediately chugged down some mana potions to use Great Fireball.

“Wait. We aren’t here to attack you.”

That voice… it was the guy who I talked with before in the insectoids labyrinth. That dark elf whose name I didn’t ask. Something was off. Why would he be here? I expected that Rowan had come with some reinforcements, so this guy should have passed by them.

“Lady Renna sent us a message to come to help you… she had no choice but to tell them where you had gone and while she expected that you would have some time to escape, she didn’t expect that you would leave traces to help them find you.”

Before long, the dark elf man appeared in front of me and then another person showed up as well. It was a woman wearing similar clothes to the unseen arrows. Her presence made me think that she was the one who was following me a while ago.

“Leave. I don’t need your help.”

I was pissed, understandably so… I don’t like to let my anger get the better of me, but I couldn’t keep my cool-headedness all the time. I was no machine.

“If you want your arm back, you will need someone to stitch back to its place while you heal. We can help with that.”

“I said leave!”

My roar scared even Glacien. Perhaps it wasn’t my roar, but the fact that my eyes turned red and my fangs became more prominent. When that happened, my hunger suddenly came at full force and both of them got ready to fight. I took a deep breath to at least calm down my hunger… I could let all sorts of things happen to me, but not let that control me.

Both of them moved their arms to grab weapons behind their backs, but soon they relaxed a bit when they saw my eyes turning green again. I was starting to get sick of things… I wasn’t into complaining that much or blaming others for the things that happen to me, but I at least have the right to be wary of the betrayals of everyone, aside from Glacien.

“Please, calm down and think this through. You probably can recover your arm like a vampire, but you will need to drink a lot of blood. You don’t want to do that, right? We will leave as soon as we are done with that.”

I took another deep breath. He had a point. I couldn’t stitch my arm back to its place by myself, and I didn’t want to drink blood to regenerate faster. I had to compromise here and think about the bigger picture. In the end, I nodded and then sat down. Those two approached and then put their weapons away.

The guy grabbed my arm and then cleaned it with some water from a magic bag while the woman did the same to my wound and moved my shirt away. 

“The cut was clean, so this won’t be hard. Still, this might sting a bit and you shouldn’t move your arm too much while it heals.”

“Geez, I guess I should thank him for the favor.”

The guy moved my arm back to its place, and the wound began to hurt like a bitch… before long, the woman grabbed a needle without a string attached and then began to connect the parts. The needle began to glow, creating a line made of mana… I didn’t know that kind of effect, and it made me wonder how long the mana would last. Still, I could see the parts attached to each other.

She was quite fast, so it didn’t take long for her to finish. When that happened, the guy used a health potion and poured over the wound. The pain began to decrease a lot more, but I couldn’t move my left arm yet.

“Lady Renna was forced to cooperate because the empire has a very powerful clairvoyant, if she hadn’t agreed with their terms clearly, it would have been a problem and she would be monitored by the same clairvoyant again and again until the Aeloria Dominion reaches a point where we would either be attacked or dependent on the empire.”

“I don’t care. Now that you did what you wanted, you can leave.”

“Let me at least explain the situation while we monitor your wound. This will be useful for you too, since it will help you escape the empire’s grasp.”

This talk about clairvoyant seemed like shit, an excuse that someone just came up with to make things convenient for them to betray me. I didn’t like using excuses for myself, so why did I have to accept them when they come from others?

“Based on what she had heard, this person can check the actions of people to a certain and from a certain point. It shouldn’t be completely under their control yet, so the time to take advantage of it was now and make the empire think that she was on their side. They also didn’t want to cause trouble with other elders because of the situation related to the next rift.”

“... Rift?”

The guy began to explain to me what was the rift… it seemed quite insane that something like that could happen. People or beings coming from another world and then taking place in this one as the land expands as well. 

Still, that would make sense why this world has all sorts of weird beings… golems, ant-people, aquarians, beastkin and so on. Still, I had nothing to do with that. So, it seemed that Rowan wasted a lot of time coming for me and now Louise’s father didn’t have a guard, not like I couldn't care less.

“You are involved because this clairvoyant, for some reason, can’t see anything related to you. She imagined that the empire was thinking that you might cause trouble eventually and perhaps let the rift destroy the world. Do you have any idea why clairvoyance wouldn’t work on you?”

“How the heck am I supposed to know?”

I knew the answer. It was probably because I was reincarnated, but there was also the possibility that the reason was the fact that I was a half vampire and those are hard to find. I couldn’t assume anything yet…