The books were far thicker than any one that she owned. Probably thicker than most Devon owned. From her cursory glance through them when she first arrived in the classroom, Eva was surprised to find them set up like any regular textbook. She fully intended to borrow one and read through it.
It wasn’t like she had signed any contracts.
“If you’ll all turn to chapter one, we’ll start discussing shackles in-depth.”
Far more in-depth than any lessons Devon had given, that was for sure. While she could read far faster on her own, at least something good would come of wasting her time with this disaster.
Catherine pulled out a thick piece of chalk and swiped it around the board, leaving an almost perfect circle in its wake. “Like most drawn magic, shackles all begin with a circle…”
And thus, the lesson was underway.
Chapter 004
Eva threw herself to the ground. A near invisible blade of wind skimmed over the tips of her hair.
That’s fine, Eva lied to herself as the ends of her hair drifted to the ground around her, my hair was getting too long anyway.
A second gust of wind curled between the ground and her body. Eva’s eyes grew wide as she felt the air draw in on itself. She felt a moment of panic before being launched up into the air.
The world spun. Sky turned to trees which turned to ground before snapping back to the sky. Bile churned in her stomach as she flipped end over end. A small, very unterrorized sounding scream escaped from Eva’s lips as she reached the peak of her flight.
Eva pushed herself as hard as she could, clamping down on her fear and focusing her concentration on the thing she had been trying to do since the start of the fight. She pushed her mind and her magic, trying to gain a slight advantage in the speed her perception.
For a brief moment, Eva felt something. A sudden moment of clarity made it through the blur of motion.
On the ground below her, Zoe Baxter stretched her arm out. The tip of her dagger glowed with crackling electricity.
In that continuing moment of clarity, Eva switched tactics. Her current strategy of uncontrollably flinging through the air was just not working out for her. Being wildly opposed to lightning bolts coming anywhere near her, Eva stepped.
All of her concentration switched to the act of stepping. Her body warped through space, moving from several feet in the air straight to the ground. She aimed for a cluster of trees that would hopefully obscure her from Zoe long enough to get back on the offensive.
To Eva’s surprise, she managed to land on her feet.
Phantom momentum sent her stumbling backwards. Eva landed flat on her butt with a thorned bush prickling at her back.
Eva stepped to her feet again, this time managing to stay standing.
Before anything else, Eva stepped directly to another crop of trees. Zoe would have heard her stumbling around. Her enhanced hearing wasn’t something to be dismissed easily.
To further combat the professor’s enhanced senses, Eva did something she hadn’t done in a long time. With a burst of pure chaos magic, Eva flooded her surroundings in darkness. Zoe still had her ears and nose, but sight made up such a drastic portion of human senses that it would definitely be worth it.
Even more so for Eva. A little darkness wasn’t about to get in the way of her sense of blood.
Unfortunately, it did interfere with her teleportation. Eva did not have enough blood to coat every surface of the forest. Even if she split the blood into fine particles and scattered it around, it would be too easy to miss a thin tree. She did not want to wind up with her leg destroyed by stepping into a tree.
As expected, Zoe compressed air around the area Eva had initially stepped to. She released it in an uncontrolled explosion of bark and wood just as the inky black darkness enveloped the area.
Eva’s first instinct was to unsheathe her dagger, jam it into her arm, form up a wire ball of blood, and launch a car-sized fist made of blood at her professor.
But Eva had something new to try.
She was supposed to have been searching through her books for a way to strike at Sawyer from afar. It didn’t quite hit her just how much she missed learning blood magic until she had started reading.
After starting at Brakket, Eva had weaned off the blood books in favor of proper thaumaturgy. Then she had lost her eyes and had to get Arachne to read to her. Because of the demon despising that particular activity, Eva barely managed to keep up in her classes.
Once she recovered her sight, Eva started off on the necromancy books she had stolen from Sawyer. What a bore. One would think that dead bodies, skeletons, blood and gore, and all that would be exciting. Even aside from the loathsome aspects of murdering everyone, the magic involved was simply uninspiring. All of it revolved around life, and how to instill that life into just about everything.
Not quite what she had been expecting. It made a certain sort of sense. However, Eva felt it would be far more practical to just acquire the help of regular living people rather than mess around with brain-dead zombies.
Blood magic, on the other hand, was something that just spoke to Eva. Every little tangent wound up all the more interesting simply due to how long it had been since she last read a blood magic book. Everything she came across had been just too tempting to skim or skip over.
As such, Eva had a number of things to practice.
Eva pulled out a large metal flask. Unlike most blood Eva used, it wasn’t her blood or Arachne’s blood. It was filled to the brim with the blood of an animal.
Normally, an animal’s blood would be useless. Even more so than her own semi-demonic blood. Animals simply lacked the worth that humans, demons, elves, and other magical creatures possessed.
This particular spell required animal blood from a large work animal. Cows, oxen, and donkeys would all work. Probably camels too, but they weren’t exactly on hand. Eva had selected a horse from a nearby farm. She hadn’t taken enough to kill the thing–it didn’t need to suffer for her experiments–but it might be lethargic for the next day or few.
As if animal blood wasn’t enough, it needed some of her own blood mixed in. Mixing blood tended towards diluting effects or otherwise making the blood worthless.
And yet here she was, making a cut on her wrist and adding to the pool.
Shaping the blood in the air, Eva formed a humanoid shape that wouldn’t look out of place as an ancient cave-drawing. Convinced that her amazing work of art wasn’t getting any better, she started channeling magic into the blob.
As she channeled, the flask-worth of blood started multiplying. It churned in on itself, exploding outwards with twice the amount of blood before collapsing in on itself again to start the process over. Eventually it reached her size.
And then Eva started feeling a little queasy.
Eva considered herself as far from squeamish as one could get. She blamed the turning of her stomach on the massive amounts of magic she was pouring into the human-sized column of blood.
Vague shapes formed on the surface of the blood. It started out as depressions in the blob. Before long, it morphed into more recognizable human features. A mirror image of Eva formed along the surface of the blood. Eva couldn’t see the colors due to the darkness, but she had no doubt it would look proper. If her blood sight only extended a centimeter beneath the skin, she wouldn’t be able to tell her clone apart from herself.
Eva gave her clone-self a poke. She could see that it was made up of nothing but blood. No bones or musculature at all. Despite that, it felt relatively solid. She wasn’t even holding it together with her magic anymore. It was entirely on its own.