Chapter 83: Five Red Lines

Rhos looked toward the approaching swarm.

The first locusts reached the building, crashing through a fence below, others landing against the side of a neighboring structure, while several more continued feeding without acknowledging the young man’s presence above them.

He reached at his waist and drew a dagger.

Biting his fingers every time he needed blood was not only slow but also unnecessarily stupid. There were better ways of going about it.

Rhos held his left hand in front of himself and carefully drew the dagger across his palm. The cut was shallow and pain stung through his skin as blood surfaced along the wound.

Before gravity could pull the first drops downward, he willed it to stop, suspending the crimson droplets above his palm.

He raised his injured hand and allowed the blood to collect into a small suspended mass. There wasn’t much of it, and Rhos absolutely had no intention of opening a deeper wound than this.

“I’ll just make due with this”

The nearest locust climbed onto the roof, its mandibles snapping to tear through one of two humans for kilometers.

Rhos dipped the fingers of his uninjured hand into the suspended blood. He had done this before multiple times, but it still felt strange.

Blood outside his body shouldn’t have felt like anything. Once it left the wound, it should have become nothing more than liquid spilled into the world.

Instead, his spiritual energy reached through it, giving it vigor.

Rhos swept his arm outward in a broad horizontal arc, prompting the blood to follow with the flow.

As his fingers moved, five crimson strands extended from the suspended mass, one trailing from each fingertip. They became thinner as they lengthened, stretching across the rooftop until each resembled a narrow red thread.

Through experimentation, Rhos discovered he could reproduce Morri’s Totem Ability to a limited degree through Soul Bond.

It was through this he learnt that the power to manipulate a liquid had ridiculous potential.

A liquid had no fixed shape. That limitation was also its greatest advantage. It could become a whip, a projectile, a shield, a blade or something thin enough to slip through gaps solid weapons couldn’t reach.

There were countless possibilities.

The real difficulty was creating enough force to make those shapes dangerous.

Blood was still blood, it didn’t naturally possess an edge. Throw ordinary liquid at chitin and all you would accomplish was making the insect wet.

Though it didn’t mean that could not be changed.

Rhos compressed the blood with spiritual energy until each thread became unnaturally thin and dense, maintaining the structure through concentration.

When the first locust finished pulling itself over the edge, the five crimson lines crossed its body. Chitin was harder than flesh so he naturally met a bit of resistance.

Fortunately, it did not hold out for too long as the creature’s body separated into pieces before striking the rooftop.

‘Not enough, I’ll have to adjust the sharpness and speed’

With the threads of blood still attached to his fingertips, Rhos continued to move. He flicked his wrist downward and mutilated another locust that climbed over the roof’s edge without much difficulty.

“Good enough”

So he said with a grin, watching three more come to him at opposite sides. The first locust was split diagonally from its abdomen through its thorax by the threads. The second lost both wings and half its head.

And the third managed to duck beneath two threads before another wrapped around one of its legs. He tightened his fingers and pulled, slicing through.

The creature stumbled. Rhos stepped forward and crashed his fist directly into its head.

It was a hard punch so its chitin cracked as it flew backward from the roof and disappeared over the edge.

‘This is great!’

It was completely different from fighting with a conventional weapon. A sword, axe, or spear had a fixed length.

The blood threads flowing through his fingertips right did not. He could attack something several meters away and immediately shorten them for close combat.

He could alter their direction mid-swing, wrap them around obstacles or spread his fingers to change the distance between every cutting edge.

Combining that with his red deer traits, it made this way of fighting very effective.

His body flowed between snapping mandibles while the crimson threads followed every movement of his hand. Each motion became an attack. A wide turn of his shoulders cut through three insects simultaneously.

An upward flick severed the underside of another locust. When one early reached him, he shortened the threads instantly and drove them through its head at close range.

Dark insect fluid sprayed across his jacket as the dead locust collapsed beside him.

“That’s disgusting”

His voice disappeared beneath the deafening buzzing of wings. Rhos looked over the swarm and thought back to what Arlen had told him.

The scion had told him to call for him should he need assistance.

Rhos’s breathing grew heavy and the shallow wound on his palm continued providing blood. To not weaken himself due to blood loss, he made sure to extract too much of it while assisting his body’s natural regeneration which was already taking effect.

There was also his control in blood.

The threads varied slightly in thickness. Maintaining several simultaneously required far more concentration and the amount of spiritual energy needed to keep them compressed enough to cut through reinforced chitin wasn’t insignificant.

Even so, this was not enough to abstract him!

Across the rooftop and surrounding street, the remaining locusts fell uselessly to the ground in pieces the more he moved between the insects.

He constantly changed direction while his blood threads followed the motion of his hand.

With a change of strategy, he wasn’t trying to overpower their armored bodies anymore. He targeted joints, thinner sections of chiting and the gaps between plates whenever possible, allowing precision and momentum to accomplish what raw strength would have made difficult.

The slaughter dragged on for a bit longer, until the buzzing eventually stopped.

Rhos remained where he stood, chest rising and falling beneath his jacket.

Around him lay the remains of the swarm. Their severed legs, wings and segmented bodies were everywhere.

He had won.