Dion reached inward the way he had done up on that rooftop, down into the two systems threaded through him, and rather than slowing them as he had that night, he drove them.
His heart slammed once, hard enough that he felt it in his teeth and as if a sharp pain had impaled his chest, and his heart jumped into an extreme rhythm. The heat of rushing blood poured out along his arms and down through his legs, his vision pulled itself as every muscle in him drew tight at the same moment.
Dion wrenched his head sideways and the beak cracked into the floor where it had been, spraying concrete chips against his cheek, and in the fraction where its weight went forward with the strike, the pressure came off his wrist.
He ripped his arm free and rolled out from under it, and his body came up off the wet floor faster than it had moved all night.
The raven’s talon raked across the floor where his arm had been, tearing the tile up in strips, and its head came round with that yellow eye hunting for him, and it lunged again.
Dion brought the longsword up and slashed across its face as it came.
This time the edge went in that little bit more. It opened the thing from the base of its beak up the side of its skull, and blood sprayed out across the wet floor in a wide arc.
’It cut, but the damned thing’s skull is thicker than the wall it came through! Why now and not before?!’
The raven screeched and its head jerked sideways, and yet even with its face opened up it only shook the blood out of its eye and came for him again.
Within the moment that the thought came, immediately, an understanding rushed through his body. Dion threw himself backward, skidding back over the floor on his heels, and his attention in that brief opening was immediately diverted.
"Dion, catch!"
Basil’s voice had shouted for him, and as he briefly glanced over, the shotgun came skidding across the wet concrete and struck against his leg.
The bird had been flying straight for him in that moment, having re-adjusted.
At the same time, his free hand found the stock and swung the barrel up and jammed it into the joint where the wing met the body, and he pulled the trigger.
The blast tore through feather and flesh at that range, and the recoil kicked back up through his shredded palm so hard that his vision blanched white at its edges. The wing blasted off of the birds body, and the force of the shot drove the raven sideways with the ruined thing dragging through the water on the ground.
Yet even then, screeching in pain it hardly stayed down.
It steadied itself on its talons, and shook its head hard, and turned back on him with its good wing flared wide and its beak opening, and it charged, rushing with its legs.
Dion dropped the shotgun and took the longsword in both hands, and the bone ridges ground down into the meat of his palm as he did.
Seconds ago he understood what the difference in the swords cutting power had been.
Now, with mana actively flowing through his body, the blade was darker now than it had been at any point through the flock. The grooves had a red-black colour that oozes magical aura, and when he swung it at the charging bird, the edge went through the neck without slowing.
The head came free and thudded away across the floor, blood jetting out of the body that continued to drive forward on its legs for two more steps before it crashed down and shook the water across the concrete.
Dion stood pulling for breath, and the chronicle messages resounded in his head.
{You have felled a Level 25 Destitute Raven, harvesting its essences. Your Dexterity, Agility, and Perception have been nourished significantly.}
{You have earned an Essence Saturation + in Dexterity.}
{You have earned an Essence Saturation + in Dexterity.}
{You have earned an Essence Saturation + in Perception.}
Red streams flowed out of the raven’s corpse flowing through the air and into his body, with the nourishments feeling like such relives douses of essence.
Then the saturations hit, and the rush that they gave him largely dulled the pain he had been feeling.
And then he heard how quiet it had gone behind him.
Sixty people were staring at the space where he stood, surrounded by feathers and blood and the headless body of a monstrous raven.
Even the sick ones, curled against the walls with their stomachs turning and their heads splitting, had gone still as well.
Somewhere in the middle of them, a woman was saying oh god, oh god, he saved us over and over under her breath.
The teenager sat where he had fallen against earlier, and even despite himself, his enraptured attention lingered over his air-grabbing figure where it stood.
Basil stood at the edge of where the crowd had pressed itself, one hand braced against the wall.
Madeline had both of her own hands pressed over her mouth, and her eyes were wet.
The child was in the woman’s arms, and the bear was in his, his face buried against her shoulder, though one eye still watched the figure at the far end of the floor who had blood on his sword and feathers stuck in the blood on his arms and had not stopped standing since the first bird came through the windows.
She herself had her eyes wide, quivering with shock as she looked at him.
Having increased the flow of his blood so much, Dion’s body was much, much hotter than any normal body should be. Thus, standing in the rain, steam was wafting off of him as blood ran down from his arms and all the other wounds that had been inflicted on him.
Dion turned to face them only once he felt his eyes ease back to normal.
"You know... didn’t I ask all of you to go deeper inside?" he muttered through a wry laugh.
That was the brief moment where he allowed himself some kind of calm as they all gave way to guilty expressions.
Dion turned on his heel, and he rushed back to them, his voice low and strong despite how he looked. "It’s not finished. More of them will soon if we don’t find what they were here for!"
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