▪︎ Chapter 108 ▪︎ “They’re iconic!”

The deer came at Lavinia from her right.

It was enormous, broad through the chest and nearly tall enough to look her in the eyes without lowering its head. 

Blood streaked one side of its body from wounds that should have stopped an ordinary animal, but the creature continued forward anyway, hooves tearing through the ruined earth.

Lavinia had enough room to turn the greatsword.

She didn't have enough room to safely cut.

Soldiers were moving behind the animal, and one badly placed follow-through with seven feet of impossibly sharp black metal could turn rescuing them into something considerably worse.

So Lavinia rotated her wrists.

The greatsword turned sideways.

She swung.

The flat of the blade struck the deer across its shoulder with a tremendous, wet crack.

Bones shattered loudly enough for Lavinia to hear them through the surrounding gunfire.

The animal left the ground.

It flew sideways, struck another deer hard enough to knock it down, then tumbled through the mud before disappearing beneath the rushing mass.

Lavinia blinked.

"Oh."

She glanced at the flat of her sword.

Nearly two hundred pounds.

Right.

Apparently not using the edge didn't make the weapon particularly gentle.

She had known that intellectually. The greatsword weighed more than many humans, and she was swinging it with strength no human possessed. 

Turning the blade sideways simply changed the nature of the problem. 

Instead of being struck by an enormous cutting edge, something was being struck by an enormous slab of supernatural metal moving at absurd speed.

Lavinia smiled faintly.

Useful.

Something moved through the smoke ahead.

Eight legs emerged first.

Lavinia's smile faded.

The spider climbed over a mound of dead animals, legs flexing around the uneven surface with disgusting ease. 

Its body was well above Lavinia's head. Another followed behind it, slightly smaller, then a third appeared farther to the left.

Lavinia clicked her tongue.

She didn't like those.

She didn't care that she was a vampire. She didn't care that she could tear one apart with her hands if she absolutely had to. 

Looking at something that large and knowing it was a spider offended several instincts she had apparently retained from being human.

And they were genuinely dangerous.

One of those getting into Oakridge wouldn't simply be an oversized pest wandering down a street. 

Civilians couldn't outrun something that size forever. Cars would crash trying to avoid it. People would stampede. 

Someone hiding in the wrong building might discover that a giant spider was perfectly capable of climbing walls and reaching upper floors.

And there weren't three spiders.

There were hundreds.

Maybe thousands.

Lavinia didn't know anymore.

"Absolutely not."

A bear charged her from the side.

Lavinia turned and kicked it.

Her boot struck its chest and stopped several hundred pounds of charging animal almost instantly. 

The bear lifted from the ground and flew backward several feet before crashing onto its side.

Lavinia followed.

She stepped forward, planted her foot, and rotated her entire body. The greatsword followed the turn behind her before she drove it upward.

WHOOOM.

The blade entered beneath the bear.

It passed upward through flesh and bone without stopping.

What remained of the animal scattered into the air behind the sword's path, pieces tumbling into the Tide as Lavinia completed the motion and brought the weapon around again.

For one ridiculous moment, the whole thing reminded her of a wave-survival game.

Enemies came from everywhere. There were too many to count. Killing one accomplished essentially nothing because another immediately replaced it. 

She had absurdly overpowered statistics, infinite stamina and a weapon that would have been considered hopelessly unbalanced in anything pretending to be fair.

Max-level character dropped into an early survival wave.

Except games didn't smell like this.

Blood saturated the air so completely that even Lavinia's nose was struggling to separate individual scents. 

Burned fur mixed with smoke and the chemical bite of explosives. Animal organs spilled across the earth. Severed limbs lay everywhere.

And occasionally, among them, Lavinia saw camouflage.

A shredded sleeve.

A helmet half buried in mud.

A boot that still had part of its owner inside it.

Her amusement disappeared.

The soldiers had been standing here for hours.

Humans.

Ordinary humans who could die because one spider leg found their stomach, because one snake got through their boots, because a hawk descended before they saw it.

They had stayed anyway.

Every corpse in military clothing Lavinia passed belonged to someone who had stood between the Tide and Oakridge.

Her grip tightened.

"Fine."

She lowered the greatsword.

Dozens of animals rushed toward her.

Lavinia leaned back.

Then she threw it.

The weapon left her hands with a violent rush of displaced air.

It didn't spin wildly. Lavinia sent it point-first, the enormous blade traveling almost horizontally through the Tide.

The first animal in its path simply came apart.

The second folded around the blade.

The third was struck by what remained of the second.

For nearly a hundred feet, the greatsword tore a corridor through the advancing mass. 

Bodies were pierced, shattered or cleaved aside as the enormous weapon spent its momentum one target at a time.

Then its point struck the ground.

The impact threw mud and pieces of animals outward as the blade buried itself at an angle.

Lavinia stared.

"That was cool."

Something else caught her attention.

Valerie.

For lack of a better term, Valerie was dancing.

Lavinia found herself almost awed by it.

Valerie's thirty-foot chain never seemed to stop moving. 

Sometimes she held it close, several feet of links wrapped loosely around one arm while the bladed end cut through whatever approached. 

Then she'd release another length, turn, and suddenly the weapon occupied fifteen feet of battlefield.

A wolf leapt.

Valerie ducked.

The chain passed over her shoulder, looped around the animal in midair, and tightened.

Valerie twisted.

The wolf changed direction so violently that Lavinia heard something snap before Valerie flung it into a charging boar.

She immediately released the loop.

The chain unfurled again.

A sweeping section cut through two smaller animals, wrapped around the leg of something Lavinia couldn't identify, and Valerie pulled.

The creature crashed onto its side.

Valerie stepped onto its body, ran across it, jumped, and flicked her wrist.

The chain climbed into the air after her.

She caught another section farther down its length, changing the effective reach in an instant, then descended into the Tide with the weapon spiraling around her.

Blood sprayed.

Valerie landed smiling.

"Show-off," Lavinia muttered.

Then she jumped.

Nearly a hundred feet disappeared beneath her in seconds. 

Lavinia landed beside her embedded greatsword, grabbed its hilt and ripped it from the earth in the same motion.

She blurred forward.

WHOOOM.

The sword crossed horizontally.

Three animals dropped.

Lavinia turned the blade vertically, stepped between two charging bodies and thrust.

The point punched through one animal and emerged from its back. 

She kept moving, lifting it from the ground before twisting the greatsword and throwing the corpse from the blade.

WHOOOM.

Another swing.

Blood coated the dark metal.

It sank into it.

Lavinia could actually watch the red disappear when she had a fraction of a second to look. 

Blood flowed toward the blade rather than dripping naturally, spreading into impossibly thin streams before vanishing into the black metal and the deep-red gems around the guard.

There wasn't much time to admire it.

Something struck her side.

Lavinia looked down.

A spider leg had gone through her.

The sharpened appendage entered beneath her ribs and protruded from the other side of her dress.

"Huh."

The spider shrieked and tried to pull her closer.

Lavinia grabbed the leg.

"No."

She yanked it from her body.

The wound began closing immediately.

The spider recoiled, but Lavinia still had hold of its leg. She pulled it toward herself instead, drawing the enormous creature off balance.

Her fist struck its body.

The impacted section caved inward.

The entire spider jerked sideways, legs scrambling uselessly through mud as a depression appeared in its carapace.

Lavinia released it, caught her greatsword with both hands and cut across its body.

The spider separated.

For the first time since she'd arrived, the Tide immediately in front of her seemed to hesitate.

Not stop.

Not retreat.

But falter.

Animals collided with one another as those behind continued pushing forward while those immediately ahead tried to navigate the ruined terrain and piles of bodies.

Lavinia stepped into the opening.

"Whoever said these things were twice as big lied."

She slashed outward.

WHOOOM.

A deer and something catlike disappeared beneath the blade.

"They should come out here and explain themselves."

She couldn't really blame whoever had originally made the assessment.

Lavinia herself had entered the Diverged Lands.

She had seen the animals there.

Most really did seem to follow the general rule. Roughly twice the size of their familiar Earth equivalents. Maybe somewhat larger or smaller depending on the individual.

Apparently she'd made the mistake of assuming that meant all of them.

It did not.

The enormous spiders had made that abundantly clear.

So had some of the bears.

And the birds.

Lavinia still couldn't quite accept that birds were apparently a significant military threat now.

Something screamed overhead.

She looked up just in time to see a massive bird dive.

Lavinia swung.

The flat caught it.

Feathers exploded outward as the bird abruptly discovered a new method of flight even after death as it disappeared into the smoke.

"Still counts."

A laugh reached her.

Valerie was nearby again.

The orange-haired vampire stood in a temporary clearing surrounded by bodies, her chain spread across the mud around her.

Then she lifted it.

One rotation.

The bladed links rose from the ground.

Two.

More of the chain followed, accelerating above Valerie's head.

Three.

The sound changed.

What had begun as a metallic hiss became a shriek of disturbed air. 

Valerie widened her stance slightly, both hands controlling different portions of the chain as nearly its entire length spun above her.

Animals continued rushing inward.

Valerie smiled.

Then she lowered the angle.

The chain descended.

The first creature it touched opened across the torso.

The weapon continued around her.

A wolf was cut nearly in half.

A deer collapsed.

A spider lost several legs before the following section tore into its body.

The circle continued uninterrupted.

For a full thirty feet around Valerie, the Tide was cut, crushed or thrown away. 

Blood and fur filled the air, and by the time the chain completed its revolution, there was a near-perfect clearing surrounding her.

Valerie let the weapon coil inward.

Lavinia stared.

Her lower lip pushed outward.

"That's not fair."

She stabbed her greatsword straight through a spider.

The point emerged from its back.

Lavinia lifted the entire creature off the ground, looked past it toward Valerie and complained, "I'll be able to do cool stuff like that soon."

Valerie's pointed ear twitched.

She turned.

For a moment she simply looked at Lavinia standing there with an enormous spider impaled on a sword larger than she was.

Then Valerie laughed brightly.

"Oh, Lavinia."

"What?"

"You're so pitiful."

Lavinia's eyes narrowed.

Valerie gathered the chain into one hand. "Picking a lame greatsword."

Lavinia went perfectly still.

The spider was still writhing on her blade.

"Lame?"

Valerie's grin widened.

"Lame."

Lavinia bristled.

"My sword is not lame."

Valerie flicked her chain around a charging animal's neck and pulled. "Mine does tricks."

"So does mine!"

"You swing it."

"I can do other things!"

"You stab things too."

Lavinia ripped the greatsword sideways.

The spider came apart and dropped from the blade.

"Shut up."

Valerie laughed again.

Lavinia launched herself forward.

The first creature in front of her received an overhead strike that split it from shoulder to hip. 

She tore the sword free, rotated, and cut through another without losing momentum.

WHOOOM.

"Mine is bigger than yours!"

Valerie bounded backward as a bear swiped at her, letting the chain loop around its forelimb.

"That's not a trick!"

"It is if you're jealous!"

Valerie pulled.

The bear's foreleg was dragged sideways. She stepped around it, allowed several feet of chain to slide through her hand and snapped the bladed end across its throat.

"I'm not jealous!"

"You sound jealous!"

Lavinia jumped.

Her wings erupted from her back.

She shot twenty feet upward, greatsword held behind her, then folded one wing slightly and rolled through the air.

The Tide moved beneath her.

Lavinia descended.

The greatsword came with her.

She slashed diagonally through a spider, continued through the boar beneath it and drove the point deep into the earth.

Mud erupted in a long furrow.

Lavinia released the hilt at the last instant, corrected herself and landed neatly beside it.

She immediately looked toward Valerie.

"That was a trick."

Valerie tilted her head.

"That was a swing while falling."

"I was flying!"

"A flying swing."

"You're awful."

Valerie giggled.

Lavinia grabbed the sword and pulled.

It refused to move for half a second.

She frowned, planted a foot beside the gouge and yanked harder.

The blade came free in an explosion of wet earth.

Valerie laughed harder.

"I hate you."

"No, you don't."

Lavinia opened her mouth.

Paused.

"Fine. But your chain is stupid."

"My chain is beautiful."

"It looks like angry jewelry."

Valerie gasped.

Lavinia grinned and rushed forward again.

For several minutes, the argument continued between impacts.

The Tide pressed forward.

Lavinia met it.

Her greatsword rose and fell, each committed swing accompanied by the heavy roar of air being shoved aside. 

She learned quickly where she could allow the weapon's momentum to continue and where she needed to arrest it. 

She learned that turning her wrists slightly during a cut changed how easily the blade passed through large bodies. 

She learned she could let the sword carry her through portions of a turn rather than fighting its mass.

She still wasn't trained.

But the weapon felt right.

Every minute she held it made that clearer.

Valerie advanced beside her in a completely different fashion.

Where Lavinia smashed a path directly through the Tide, Valerie occupied space.

Her chain moved ahead, behind, above and around her. It hooked, constricted, cut and crushed. 

Sometimes Valerie barely moved while thirty feet of weapon did the fighting for her. 

Other times she darted through her own loops and arcs, catching different links and changing the weapon's length so rapidly that Lavinia struggled to follow what she was doing.

Together they pushed farther from Oakridge.

Soldiers noticed.

The defensive line that had spent hours being forced backward was no longer retreating here.

For the first time, it was advancing.

Lavinia didn't realize that immediately.

She was too busy complaining.

"Greatswords are elegant!"

Valerie's chain wrapped around a spider's body.

"Uh-huh!"

"They're iconic!"

Valerie pulled.

The bladed links tightened.

The spider came apart.

"Very iconic!"

"Stop agreeing sarcastically!"

"I'm supporting you!"

"No, you're not!"

A stag charged between them.

Lavinia and Valerie both moved.

Valerie's chain caught its antlers.

Lavinia's greatsword struck its body.

The animal disappeared from between them in a violent spray of blood.

For a fraction of a second, the two vampires simply stared at each other through the red mist.

Then Valerie grinned.

Lavinia grinned back.

The Tide surged forward.

So did they.