Chương 42: 18-1.Blue-Blooded Beast (Venor)

The sound beyond the corner cut off all at once. The corridor went so quiet I could hear my own swallow, the tiny click unnaturally loud in the stillness. The torch flame flickered once, and the shadows twisted with it—like something was pressed against the far edge of the light, waiting with infinite patience for us to walk into its reach. I tightened my grip on the sword hilt and stepped forward half a pace.

"I'll check first," I said quietly. Alvira leaned against the wall, pale as moonlight dredged from black water, but her short bow came up steady, arrow nocked and aimed at the corner with lethal precision.

"Don't go too far."

"Coming from you, that sounds almost extravagant."

"Cedric."

"Right. Shutting up." I pressed my back to the wall and slowly extended the torch around the corner. What lay beyond wasn't the narrow passage I'd expected, but a half-collapsed subterranean cavity. It looked like part of the mall's bottom level had been violently torn open, dragging chunks of natural bedrock down with it to form this jagged hollow. Shattered tiles, twisted rebar, burst pipes—all tangled with raw black stone like the Old Civilization's bones had been dumped in a mass grave and left to rot.

The dripping sound had been coming from here. Had been. Now there was only wind. Thin and faint, like someone breathing slowly through distant cracks too far away to see. I was about to signal Alvira forward when something under my boot made a tiny, brittle sound. Crack. I looked down. My sole rested on a fracture line almost buried in dust. The next instant, that crack spread outward like a spider's web, and the entire floor groaned with a sound that got into your back teeth.

I had just enough time to think the timing on this is genuinely personal before the ground gave way completely.

"Alvira!" She moved faster than I did—lunging toward me the moment the stone began to drop. But our luck had clearly gone off duty. Her hand had barely found my shoulder when the section beneath her feet collapsed entirely. Stone and rusted metal poured down like a sudden storm, and we went with it, swallowed by the dark along with everything that had been floor. The fall was short. The landing was not.

My back slammed into an angled rock face first, hard enough to knock thought clean out of me, then bounced off into a tumbling cascade through the debris. Elbows, knees, shoulders—each took their turn against unforgiving stone. By the time something solid stopped me, my vision had gone black and my breath had been knocked completely out. When awareness crawled back, my mouth was full of rust and grit. I coughed, spat the debris clear, and pushed myself up against the rough stone wall.

Every part of my body reported damage at roughly equal intensity, making it hard to identify which was worst. But hands and feet still responded when I asked them to. No ribs were trying to escape through my skin. My head appeared to remain attached. Acceptable. I shook stone fragments from my hair and turned immediately.

"Alvira!" The torch was gone—lost somewhere in the fall. The only light came from a sickly blue glow that barely sketched the space in outlines. It wasn't lamplight or magic. It was something worse—like moonlight that had drowned in stagnant water and forgotten what warmth was. Alvira had landed in the rubble not far away. I crossed to her quickly, dropped to one knee—and she drew a sharp, compressed breath that made her face go even whiter.

Her expression, normally cold enough to form frost, was drawn tight with pain in a way that was more alarming than any visible wound. Silver hair clung to her face with dust and sweat. The shoulder plate on her left side was visibly dented, probably crushed by falling stone. Her right ankle had swollen enough that the distortion showed through the boot.

And her longbow— The weapon that seemed more essentially her than anything else she carried—was broken in two pieces, the shattered halves jutting from the rubble like a small memorial. Something cold settled in my chest. Alvira saw my expression and spoke first.

"Don't touch the shoulder."

"I'm not disarming a trap. I know where to put my hands."

"... Cedric."

"I know. Not the time for jokes." I meant it, but when things get genuinely bad, if I stop talking entirely, fear fills the space faster than anything else. I was repositioning to help her up when her hand shot out and locked around my wrist. Not hard. But urgent.

"Don't move," she said roughly. I followed her gaze. In the shadows ahead: the carcass of something like an enormous worm, half-buried under collapsed stone, the exposed portion rotted to pale, sickly white. Disgusting enough on its own—but what made my stomach clench wasn't the corpse itself. It was what was covering it. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. A pool of blue. Not metaphorical blue. Not a trick of the light. Actually blue.

The substance moved across the dead flesh with horrible slowness, pulsing in rhythms that could almost pass for breathing or dying spasms. Each time it swelled, the tissue beneath hissed and sank another fraction, eaten away into charred, weeping craters. The smell that drifted from it hit like rust and rotten medicine forced into the same bottle and uncorked under your nose. My hand tightened on my sword.

"... That's blood?" Alvira stared at the blue mass, voice dropped to barely a whisper.

"Blue-blood beast." I looked at her. Her lips had gone colorless. Her dark green eyes were colder than I'd ever seen them.

"Ancient elven records describe them. Not magical beasts. Not standard corruption variants. Their blood is toxic—and not just to living tissue. Stone, soil, water, flesh—wherever it bleeds, everything begins to die."

"Sounds like a strong contender for 'thing I least wanted to encounter today.'""Congratulations," she said flatly.

"You've won." I wanted to respond with thank you, my life finally has an achievement to its name—but the darkness cut off that luxury. A wet, grinding growl rolled out from behind the rubble. The sound was wrong in a specific way—like forcing a rusted saw through soaking leather. Coarse, dull, adhesive, with an undertone that had no business coming from anything alive. Then a black stone was simply thrown aside, cracking apart when it hit the ground. Something stepped out.

The first thing the blue light caught was a forelimb. Charred scales, five elongated claws on joints that were grotesquely thick—each step leaving wet, glowing corrosion marks in the stone. Then shoulders, spine, skull. The overall shape suggested wolf, but only in the way rubble suggests architecture. The back arched unnaturally outward, several ribs pressing visibly through the skin. The muzzle was too long, teeth permanently exposed, eye sockets sunk like holes that went somewhere they shouldn't.

Beneath that burned hide, a network of bioluminescent blue vessels pulsed in slow alternation—the entire creature lit from within by something cold and wrong. The light it cast turned the cave walls corpse-pale. It also raised every hair on the back of my neck.

"Cedric," Alvira said quietly.

"Do not let its blood touch you."

"That's valuable advice. I'd also like to know how to fight it without getting blood on me."

"Survive first. Optimize later."

"Very you." The beast had no interest in giving us more time to discuss tactics. It dropped low, a wet rattling building in its throat, and lunged. I shoved Alvira toward higher rubble and stepped forward with my buckler—not to absorb the hit, but to read its movement. The thing was unnaturally fast. Blue light strobed and the claws were at my face before I'd consciously registered the attack. I raised the buckler on pure instinct.

The impact traveled from my hand through my arm into my shoulder and arrived at my back teeth.

"It's this strong?! Do your elven records mention whether it's open to negotiation?!"

"No!" Alvira's response was immediate as she raised her short bow. The moment the arrow left the string I knew her condition had deteriorated badly. The shot still had speed and precision, but her ruined shoulder pulled it fractionally off target. The arrow caught the beast's foreleg along the outside edge instead of punching through. Blue blood sprayed. I watched droplets hit the cave wall and explode into hissing chemical smoke, eating perfect circles into the solid stone.

The surface didn't just chip—it melted, oozing downward like heated wax. My scalp went cold.

"Hitting it is worse than missing!"

"That's why I told you not to get the blood on you!"

"If it was that important, maybe lead with it louder!"

"I assumed you could extrapolate!" Even facing death, we still had energy to argue. Some partnerships develop their own gravity. The graze wound sent the beast into pure rage. It shook its wounded leg, pale blue vapor rising from the corroded stone, then all four limbs fired and it came again. I couldn't afford an exchange—I grabbed Alvira's uninjured arm and pulled us both sideways. The claws swept close enough to catch my cloak. The fabric immediately began to dissolve with a chemical stench.

There was no clean way to cut this thing. Too shallow did nothing. Deep enough to matter meant wearing its blood. This wasn't a monster—this was divine malice specifically designed to punish melee fighters.

"Alvira!" I dropped low, pulling her behind me.

"Can you still shoot?"

"Yes."

"The eye?"

"If you give me the moment."

"Then I'll buy one." The beast came in for the third time. I didn't retreat. I stepped into it—half a pace forward—and as its claw came up I twisted sideways, driving my buckler upward into the strike. Claws shrieked across the shield face, blue droplets scattering at my feet and immediately smoking. In the fraction of a second while its weight committed to one side, I slipped along its flank and brought the flat of my blade hard across its jaw. Not a cut. A strike.

I'd rather my arm go numb than have that blood anywhere near me. The beast's head snapped sideways with a garbled roar. In that exact moment, Alvira drew a breath so shallow it barely moved air. The bowstring sang like wind through winter branches. An arrow wrapped in faint green light crossed my vision and buried itself in the beast's right eye with cruel precision. The creature's head wrenched backward and it produced a shriek that tried to tear the world in half.

"GRAAAAAAAH—!" The sound detonated through the space, raining debris from the ceiling. The beast thrashed—and then something worse happened. The blue vessels beneath its hide all flared simultaneously to blinding intensity. Not like blood. Like fire. Like something inside had lost all containment and was using the body as a lantern, burning outward from within. The entire cave went cold-white. Looking at it sent needles of pain through my skin. My throat dried. My stomach lurched.

The roots of my teeth began to ache. Behind me, Alvira suppressed a dry heave.

"... Don't look at that light too long."

"You're telling me now?!"

"It's my first time seeing one do this!" Fair. Reasonable. Entirely unhelpful. Blind in one eye, the beast went completely mad—careening through the rubble, each impact leaving luminous trails of corrosion. The entire nest was being painted in toxic blue. That was when I saw what lay behind it. Past the mound of bones, rotted flesh, and unidentifiable debris that formed its nest—a narrow crack in the rock. Dark, easy to miss. But dust near it was moving. Wind was coming through. An exit.

Not necessarily to the surface. But somewhere else. Down here, that was luxury.

"Alvira!" I kept my voice low.

"Behind it!" She'd already seen it.

"There's airflow—that leads out!" The beast seemed to register our shift in attention. It wheeled toward us, trailing its blazing light like a walking catastrophe. At this rate we wouldn't be killed by teeth—we'd be irradiated where we stood. No cutting. No prolonged engagement. One option left. I pulled my sword back, raised the buckler, and dropped into a low stance. Alvira recognized what I was about to do. For the first time, genuine panic entered her voice.

"Cedric, you—""Hold tight."

"You're insane—""Is this really news to you?" I drove forward into the blue light. No heroic resolve in that moment. Just one simple thought: I am going to eat something hot today and nothing is stopping me. BOOM. The buckler connected with the intact side of its skull. The impact felt like using my entire skeleton as a bell. My arm went instantly numb. My chest took the shock like a direct hit from a warhammer.

The beast rolled sideways—and one claw raked across my chest, leaving a line of burning chemical heat through my armor. Pain turned my vision dark at the edges. Not dark enough. Still breathing. I used the recoil momentum and threw us both sideways, rolling hard across the nest's edge. Back, shoulder, elbow—everything found new things to hit. Graceless and painful, but it got us past the beast before it could recover. The crack was right there.

Narrower than I'd hoped, jagged stone on both sides, room for one person to squeeze through sideways at best. But this wasn't a moment for aesthetic standards. My only concern was that if Jessi ever found out what position I'd been in during my escape, she'd have three years of material.

"Go—" I spat blood-tinged saliva, got my shoulder under Alvira, and pushed us both through the gap. Behind us, the beast's roar rose to something structural. The blue light spiked to blinding. Debris rained. The corrosive stench and burning cold pressed at our backs as I threw myself forward on pure instinct. The ground disappeared. The crack opened onto a steep slope covered in loose stone. Of course it did. Today's geography had clearly made this personal.

Before I could finish cursing, we were sliding—Alvira and I and a cascade of rubble all moving downward together. Stone, cold air, darkness, and pain arrived simultaneously. The only fixed point was the weight in my arms and the sharp breath she drew against my ear. After that, there was only falling. The beast's furious howl followed briefly, then stretched thin and was swallowed by the deeper dark below.