The explosion filled the entire cavern in an instant, a detonation so brutal and so close that the ground shook and several fragnts of rock fell from the ceiling, striking the floor with echoes that multiplied across all the walls at once.
Veronica was already in the air when it happened, pulling away with a jump she had executed purely on instinct before her mind had fully processed the command. She landed several ters from the epicenter, crouched, daggers ready, her eyes shielding themselves from the dust and debris cutting through the air in every direction.
Guts. Bones. Fragnts of flesh and cloth rained down across the cavern floor with a grotesque abundance, covering the rock in a damp, dark layer that faintly shimred under the residual magic still lingering in the air.
Her body didn’t have a single new scratch. The transformation had been enough for her jump to take her out of the range of the heaviest shrapnel, and the spiritual copies had absorbed what remained before it could reach her. Physically, she was fine.
But when she breathed, sothing wasn’t.
The blood vapor that had filled the air after the explosion had already entered. There was no way to avoid it, not in a closed cavern with that concentration of blood magic floating in every breath of available air. She felt it in her lungs before she could clearly identify it, a light but defined weight, as if the air inside had changed texture.
The transformation slowed its advance. Her heightened regeneration kept the infection contained, delaying it, preventing it from spreading at the speed it would have in a normal body. But it didn’t stop it. It kept advancing, slowly, with the patience of sothing that knew it had all the ti in the world.
"My lungs feel heavy... For now I’ll be fine with my transformation, but once it ends..." Veronica checked the state of her magic without moving, calculating. "(I guess I’ve got about fifteen minutes before my body starts giving out. If I manage to kill that bastard, maybe his spell will end. That’s the only thing I can bet on.)"
It wasn’t a comfortable plan. It was the only one she had.
Her five spiritual copies closed in around her without needing orders, forming an instinctive periter while she finished assessing the situation. The cavern was still filled with rabbits collapsed on the ground, all unconscious, all with their tumors dimd and their eyes closed as if sothing had cut the thread that moved them.
The silence lasted just long enough to beco uncomfortable.
Then ca the laughter. Thick, mocking, echoing through the rock walls with a resonance that made it impossible to tell exactly where it ca from, as if the entire cavern itself was producing it all at once.
From a small hole in the ground, almost imperceptible among the bodies of the fallen rabbits, a kit erged. Small, about the size of a closed fist, with fur perfectly split half white and half black, divided by a nearly perfect line running from its head to its tail.
Its eyes were red. Not the dull red of the other rabbits, but a bright, intense red that far exceeded the glow of any other creature Veronica had seen all night. And in its fur, whether near or far, there wasn’t a single visible tumor.
The laughter ca from its mouth.
"You’ve already lost, woman." The voice the rabbit used was the sa she had heard all night, deep and calm, with that tone of soone enjoying the situation far too much. "You already have the disease inside your body. No one will save you. No one! Except , so surrender and I’ll spare your life. If you refuse, I’ll take your body anyway, but if you accept, at least you’ll keep your consciousness. Hahaha!"
The rabbit didn’t stop laughing even as it spoke. And then, one by one, every rabbit collapsed on the cavern floor opened their eyes at the sa ti.
They stood up. All of them. The ones with tumors, the ones closest to the explosion’s epicenter, the ones that looked the most damaged. They rose with a synchronization that had nothing animal about it and began laughing with exactly the sa voice, the sa tone, the sa rhythm, filling the cavern with a single identical chorus that echoed in every corner until it beca unbearable.
Veronica didn’t move. She looked at all of them, then at the bicolor one, then back at the group, processing what stood before her with the sa cold clarity her transformation gave her when instinct took over analysis.
They were all part of the assassin. Every rabbit, every kit, every creature in that cavern was an extension of the sa spell. Which ant the body that had exploded wasn’t the real one. The real body existed sowhere outside, intact, controlling all of this from a calculated distance.
"(This spell is like a magical parasite. If I rember correctly, spells like this operate through a spiritual connection, similar to mine.)" Her eyes moved across the cavern, asuring distances, counting rabbits, evaluating the density of the magic they emitted. "(Just like my pack, the connection between a creation and its caster has a limit that scales with the spell’s level. Based on how many he can control at once, his spell is already in C-rank or maybe B. That ans the main body has to be within two hundred ters or he’d lose the connection.)"
She paused. Her eyes returned to the bicolor rabbit.
"(Either that... or there’s sothing here amplifying the range.)"
She studied it more closely. No tumors. Brighter eyes than all the others. It had co out of its own hole when the rest were already down. It wasn’t a combat rabbit, not a projectile, not a vessel for poison. It was sothing else.
She leapt to grab it. The rabbit dodged with agility that had nothing to do with a newborn creature, weaving between the bodies of the others with a precision that confird the spell’s full attention was focused on that specific body.
"What are you trying to do, woman? No matter how many rabbits you kill, you’ll die anyway." The bicolor’s voice was sharper than the others, more direct, with a hint of irritation that hadn’t been there before.
Veronica landed on her feet and watched it run through the crowd with a smile that ca naturally. "So that’s it, right...?" she said quietly, unhurried, letting the bicolor think she was speaking out loud. "At least let kill that little black-and-white one... After all, it’s just another rabbit, right?"
The silver fur covering her body began to move more intensely, responding to the magic slowly building beneath the surface as she spoke.
The bicolor rabbit stopped laughing.
The rest of the rabbits did too. The cavern fell silent in less than a second, a silence so sudden and complete that it clashed absurdly with the chorus that had filled the space just monts before.
The bicolor moved. Without warning, without sound, slipping between the legs of the other rabbits and disappearing deeper into the cavern at a speed that didn’t match its size, trying to vanish into the crowd before Veronica could track it.
That said everything.
It wasn’t a combat rabbit, not a vessel, not a decoy. It was an anchor. A signal repeater that extended the spell’s range beyond its natural limits, allowing the assassin to control the entire cavern from a distance that would normally be impossible for a spell of that level. If that rabbit died, the signal would be cut and the rest would lose direction.
Veronica whistled once, and her spiritual copies received the order instantly, scattering across the cavern in different directions and beginning to track the ground, walls, and holes while continuing to eliminate any rabbits that tried to block them.
But the bicolor was already underground. The holes in the cavern floor were dozens, small, scattered without apparent order across the entire surface, and the rabbit could be in any of them—or moving between all of them at once if the spell allowed it.
The remaining rabbits didn’t wait. After a brief stillness, they launched again, this ti with more precision than before, the flesh missiles choosing tighter, harder-to-dodge trajectories, as if the spell had adjusted its aim after studying her movents all night.
The copies absorbed the first impacts, two of them dissolving under bone shrapnel before Veronica could reposition them. She had three left. Ti kept running, and her lungs grew heavier with each breath.
She gathered magic in her throat. Slowly compressing it, blending the beastly energy with the volu of her voice until her chest vibrated with the effort of holding it all in before releasing it.
She stepped toward the largest hole she could find and planted herself in front of it, feet apart, head tilted toward the opening.
"ROAR!"
{{Beast Magic: Silver Lion: Bone-Shattering Roar}}
What ca out of her mouth wasn’t just sound. It was a wave of spiritual magic compressed within a volu of air so violent that small stones on the ground were blasted aside and the cavern walls creaked as the vibration traveled from one end to the other.
The roar entered the hole and traveled through the entire network of tunnels beneath the cavern floor, following every branch, every curve, every split, without losing strength because the spiritual magic pushing it filled the space instead of dissipating.
The tunnels returned a result almost imdiately. Ten white rabbits were launched out of different holes in the ground with such force that so nearly reached the cavern ceiling before beginning to fall, spinning uncontrollably, stunned and disoriented by the wave that had expelled them from their own network.
Among them was the bicolor.
Veronica identified it before it hit the ground. She marked it ntally, discarded the other nine in an instant, and leapt toward it while it was still in the air, calculating the landing point with the precision granted by her transformation.
"Now I’ve got you, you piece of shit!"
Her three remaining copies had already been destroyed by the last wave of flesh missiles before she could give them any further orders. She was alone, without her pack, without her spiritual shield, her lungs heavier than ten minutes ago and the transformation tir nearing the limit she had set for herself.
But the bicolor was falling just ters away, out of control, and that was all she needed.
The rabbit twisted midair. Its mouth opened, and blood poured out—not spat, but forced out by imnse internal pressure—staining its own black-and-white fur as its eyes shone with an intensity greater than anything it had shown before.
"Mutate..." the rabbit said, its voice no longer mocking but tense, strained, like sothing that took real effort to say.
{{Blood Magic: Blood Parasite: Abomination}}
The ten white rabbits that had fallen to the ground with it began to change. Their bodies twisted, bones cracking from within as their forms stretched and warped in directions no rabbit’s body should ever take, blood magic pouring out from every tumor at once as if all of them had received the sa maximum-charge command.
Veronica landed ters away from the group and watched them deform, feet planted firmly on the ground, daggers clenched in her hands, assessing what stood before her with the seconds she had left already counted.
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