I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood

CLANG!

The deafening screech of metal on metal detonated across the empty training ground.

Pandora’s greatsword snapped up at the last possible second, catching the lethal blow dead-center. Where the edge of her sword met the Raider’s translucent crescent blade, a shower of white-hot sparks erupted.

Raw, crushing force shuddered down the blade. Pandora’s boots skidded backward half a meter across the floor, the rubber soles shrieking against the composite flooring with a harsh, tearing screech.

“Speed and power... not bad at all,” Pandora muttered under her breath.

With combat fully engaged, an eerie, crystalline calm settled over her. Her breathing leveled out; her pulse went flat and steady. The only tell was deep in her eyes—a tiny, smoldering spark of exhilaration.

She didn’t give an inch. Her left foot shot forward, shifting her weight, and she whipped the greatsword out in a brutal horizontal arc! The blade carved a clean, vicious crescent of silver through the air.

The Raider was just as fast. Its aerodynamic frame contorted at an angle that would’ve shattered a human spine, twisting violently out of the way. Its crescent blade came up at a nasty angle to parry.

At the same time, the black, sludge-like symbiotes coating its body boiled into motion! They snapped out like a flurry of shadowy whips, lunging at Pandora from multiple vectors!

Pandora’s eyes flashed. She tapped a foot and sidestepped like a wraith, slipping through the paper-thin gaps between the lashing tendrils.

Momentum carrying through, she brought the greatsword down in a plummeting strike! The blade howled as it cleaved the air, biting deep into the joint where the Raider’s left shoulder met the crescent blade.

SCHLICK!

The sound of ripping leather. A dark-purple ichor with an iridescent sheen erupted from the wound, spattering across the floor. The moment it hit the treated ground, it vaporized, leaving only faint violet smudges.

But almost instantly, the surrounding black sludge surged into the gash, sealing it over. It knitted itself shut right before her eyes.

“For something called a ‘Raider’, its regen is absurdly strong,” Pandora’s mind raced. The boffins over at The Corpse Hall really dropped the ball on the naming convention!

Her hands didn’t stop moving. She laid into it like a thunderstorm, her strikes unrelenting. Every swing was precisely aimed at a vital point—the structural weak point at the neck, the articulation nodes in its joints, and especially the spot on its chest where those bright yellow energy lines converged.

The Raider gave as good as it got. The crescent blade on its left arm spun into an airtight defense. Every slash, every thrust came with an eardrum-splitting shriek, dripping with lethal intent.

Both of them were Rank-3. The tempo of the fight was blistering.

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The deafening clang of colliding metal!

The shriek of displaced air!

The wet, squelching noise of black sludge writhing, knitting, and regenerating!

It all blended together, turning the sealed training room into a concert hall for a brutal, chaotic symphony of violence.

..............

At this moment, if anyone had been watching the fight, they might have noticed something odd. A faint, almost imperceptible glimmer was flickering in the depths of Pandora’s eyes.

It wasn’t a reflection of the overhead lights. It was the physical bleed-off of a mental force pushed to its absolute peak, firing on all cylinders.

As a Rank-3 Wizard, her mental force had hit a seriously ridiculous ceiling for an Apprentice. It gave her battlefield awareness a razor-sharp, almost clairvoyant edge.

The trajectory of every incoming attack. Every micro-adjustment of its stance, every shift in its center of gravity. Even the directional flow and pooling vectors of the black sludge coating its body... All of it was laid bare under the crushing, high-definition lens of her mental perception.

This near-perfect battlefield awareness, paired with the combat instincts and reflexes she had hammered into herself during the recurring crimson-moon nightmares inside the Void...

...it meant that even as a newly promoted Rank-3, she was going blow-for-blow with a heavy-hitter like the Raider. In fact, she was slowly, surely, gaining the upper hand.

All of this in under three minutes. The Rank-3 melee had already reached a white-hot intensity.

The Raider suddenly kicked into overdrive! Its body became a smear of purple blur. The crescent blade lunged from a sickening angle—dead center in her blind spot—aiming straight for her left flank!

Pandora’s reflexes snapped back just as hard. A hair’s breadth from being gutted, she tilted her torso to the right. She pressed the blade of her greatsword downward, angling it perfectly to crash and grind against the flat of the crescent blade!

SCREECH!

The ear-rending shriek of grinding metal. Sparks showered the floor. The raw leverage diverted the killing blow off its original trajectory.

But the Raider wasn’t done. The black sludge symbiotes plastered across its back convulsed violently! They blasted outward like high-pressure water hoses, rapidly crisscrossing in mid-air. A massive, inky net plummeted straight down over Pandora’s head!

“Interesting,” Pandora growled.

She whipped the greatsword through the air in a frantic blur! The blade carved silver arcs, surgically severing the bulk of the sludgy tendrils. But a few of the tougher, faster tendrils slipped through the whirling wall of steel. They snapped around her right arm.

Ice cold. Viscous. Coating her skin in a revolting, slimy film. The tendrils immediately began to cinch tight, trying to lock out her elbow joint and kill her mobility.

But a split second later—Pandora’s left hand had already abandoned the grip. Her palm flipped. The Colt semi-automatic—custom-modified back at Echo Quarry with engraved micro-rituals—materialized in her grip.

At this range, aiming was a formality. Her overwhelming mental force mapped the target down to the millimeter, locking on with absolute precision.

BANG!

BANG!

BANG!

The muzzle vomited massive, orange-red plumes of fire. The oversized, custom-jacketed rounds screamed across the gap. They punched clean through the binding black tendrils. They punched clean through the dense, dark-purple meat of the Raider’s gut. And they punched directly into the dead-center of its abdomen—the junction where that thickest bright-yellow energy line fed into!

SPLATCH!

The wet, heavy sound of high-velocity penetration. The freezing tendrils spasmed. The entire golem jerked violently from the sheer kinetic shock. The impact forced it into a hasty retreat, relinquishing its grip on her arm to stumble backward.

Still, a fleeting look of disappointment flashed across Pandora’s face. If she’d gotten her hands on this magically-modified hand cannon back when she was Rank-2, it would’ve easily been one of her trump cards.

But right now? Against a Rank-3 flesh-golem built like a tank with absurd regeneration? The raw damage output from the micro-rituals etched into the gun just wasn’t cutting it. It was a bit lacking.

A few yards away, the black sludge symbiotes coating the Raider were writhing and pooling like mad. Right before her eyes, the messy, partial punch-throughs from the heavy caliber rounds were knitting shut. Purple meat churned. Wounds puckered and sealed.

Its featureless face seemed to be staring right at her, coiled and ready to spring for round two.