Chapter 244: Blood and soil fusion – 2
The extracted materials fused under his bined essence control, forming a framework that was part biological and part mineral.
Then he surrounded that framework with blood essence shaped into artificial muscle fibers, creating a construct that moved with biological efficiency powered by essence rather than normal metabolic processes.
What emerged was a humanoid figure made from metal bones wrapped in blood-red pseudoflesh. It stood eight feet tall, moved with unnatural grace, and possessed strength that exceeded organic limitations because it wasn’t constrained by the need to maintain living tissue—it was just a bat construct, temporary and disposable.
The blood golem intercepted two guards with movements too fast for their armor to fully absorb. Its fists were solid iron wrapped in essence, hitting with force that dented enhanced armor and broke the organic tissue beneath.
The guards tried to fight back, their blades cutting into the golem’s form, but the construct simply flowed around the damage and reformed, learning from each injury.
[Technique: Magnetic Acceleration]
While the golem engaged two guards, Jorghan focused on the remaining two with a technique that bined blood manipulation’s fine control with earth essence’s magnetic field generation.
He manifested blood essence as small projectiles—droplets of crystallized blood shaped like needles, each one containing concentrated iron extracted from the environment.
Then he created a magnetic railgun effect using earth essence.
The principle was simple: generate powerful magnetic fields in sequence, each field pulling ferromagnetic projectiles forward before the next field engaged. Rail guns used this effect to accelerate metal slugs to hypersonic velocities without requiring conventional propellant.
Jorghan’s version used blood essence needles as projectiles and generated magnetic fields through earth essence manipulation. The needles accelerated from zero to supersonic speed in less than a meter, achieving velocities that made them essentially unstoppable by conventional armor.
The first needle struck a guard’s helmet with enough kinetic energy to punch pletely through the enhanced material, through the skull beneath, and out the back in a spray of alien fluids. The guard fell instantly, its brain—or whatever organ controlled its nervous system—destroyed before pain signals could register.
The second guard tried to dodge, moving with enhanced reflexes that would have worked against normal projectiles.
But Jorghan could adjust the magnetic fields mid-flight, steering the needles like guided missiles.
The projectile curved around the guard’s evasive maneuver and struck its chest, piercing through armor and organic tissue to destroy the heart.
*
Four guards down. Two remained, plus the leader, who was now standing from his throne, recognizing that his personal guard was being systematically dismantled by an opponent using bat techniques he’d never encountered.
The leader spoke, his voice carrying across the dome.
“Impressive work. I don’t know what that was, but it was truly impressive. You are really a trained warrior.”
Jorghan didn’t respond. He was too focused on the remaining threats, analyzing their defensive adaptations and calculating the most efficient methods for elimination.
The leader continued anyway.
“You’re burning through reserves faster than single-element bat would require. Eventually, you’ll deplete yourself, and then my guards will wear you down through attrition.”
“Then they’d better hurry,” Jorghan replied, “because I have more reserves than you’re calculating.”
[Technique: Tectonic Impalement]
Jorghan drove his hands into the ground, channeling both blood and earth essence simultaneously through direct contact. He felt the dome’s foundation—stone and metal fused together, designed to support massive weight, engineered to withstand stress that would collapse normal structures.
He found the seams, the weak points where different materials met, where structural promises had been necessary for construction.
Then he fed blood essence into those seams, the liquid energy seeping into microscopic cracks, expanding, and creating pressure from within.
Simultaneously, he used earth essence to manipulate the ground beneath the dome, creating uneven stresses that the foundation hadn’t been designed to handle. Not enough to collapse the entire structure, that would kill the imprisoned faeries still hiding in various sections, but enough to destabilize specific areas where the remaining guards stood.
The ground beneath the two guards fractured, but instead of simply opening into chasms, spikes of stone erupted upward with the speed of ballistic projectiles. The spikes were coated in blood essence that had been pressed and sharpened to molecular thinness, creating edges that could pierce enhanced armor through sheer precision rather than just force.
One guard was impaled through the abdomen, the stone spike lifting it off its feet before its weight pulled it downward, sliding further onto the improvised spear. It struggled briefly, its mandibles clicking with what might have been shock or pain, before going still.
The other guard managed to leap clear, its enhanced reflexes saving it from immediate impalement.
But the jump put it in the air, vulnerable to attacks it couldn’t dodge without ground to push against.
Jorghan manifested ferrofluid as a net, the liquid metal spreading wide, solidifying into a mesh that caught the leaping guard mid-flight. The net contracted with magnetic force, pulling the guard toward Jorghan with acceleration that built from the guard’s own mass being manipulated by electromagnetic fields.
The guard struck the ground in front of Jorghan with bone-breaking impact.
Before it could recover, Jorghan placed his hand on its chest and activated point-blank hemorrhagic resonance. The guard’s entire torso vibrated at frequencies that liquefied organs, turning solid tissue into homogeneous fluid that the body’s structures couldn’t contain.
It died without making a sound, its body simply collapsing as internal architecture failed catastrophically.
All six elite guards are dead.
The dome’s interior was a charnel house of alien corpses and structural damage, with blood and other fluids pooling across floors that had once been faery homes.
The leader stood alone now, its amber eyes showing something that might have been respect mixed with the first genuine fear it had experienced in decades of hunting supposedly superior species.
“You’re not normal,” it said.
“Not just a powerful sorcerer. Something else. Something that shouldn’t exist according to the natural order.”
“I’m what happens when you target the wrong people,” Jorghan replied.
“When you mistake sentience for food and kindness for weakness. I’m the consequence you didn’t account for.”
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