“Try not to die. Your mother would kill me.”
“Me too,” she said after drawing in a labored breath. “She threatened me with necromancy.”
Eva smiled for just a moment. It disappeared as she turned away again.
The building had survived the attack for the most part. Half of the roof had collapsed. A good portion of the debris was glassed over similar to the bricks in the Brakket dormitory plaza. The edge of the roof looked to be relatively stable. Mostly because of the brick wall beneath it. It hadn’t collapsed and it wasn’t swaying. Even if Eva’s weight disturbed it enough to cause the whole wall to come tumbling down, the building’s roof was only three stories high.
She would survive a fall.
Eva blinked up to the top and froze again.
She hadn’t been able to see the top of the intact portion of the roof from below. It was a solid sheet of glass. No evidence of the ice wall remained. No chair. Not even splinters of the table. Even the neighboring buildings had their roofs half glassed. A good portion of the wards on them had failed entirely. At least, Eva could detect nothing from them.
Because the roof was a smooth surface, it didn’t take long to find one thing that had survived the destruction.
A simple idol. A statue of a woman in tears, holding her hands up to her face. It was small enough for Eva to carry. About the size of an extra-large water bottle.
But there was no way she was going to touch it.
There was a zero percent chance that it was not a trap in some way or form. The hunter might have teleported away after being knocked down. She might have actually gone through with the suicidal route and vaporized herself in her own attack. But no matter what, she wouldn’t leave behind a weapon of such a magnitude. Even if she assumed that Eva had perished in the attack, there were still other enemies of the hunters around.
And yet, Eva couldn’t leave it where it was. The hunter was gone at the moment, but leaving it behind to rejoin the fight against the armored hunter would let somebody else collect it.
Eva grit her teeth. She had accomplished her objective. The hunter wouldn’t be bombarding them with the idol anymore.
Unless it was a fake. That was also a possibility.
But for the moment, she was going to both assume that it was real and that the hunter had retreated.
Glancing back down into the building to make sure that Juliana hadn’t been attacked while Eva had been distracted, Eva found her to be sitting upright. Which she took as a good sign.
“How are you?” Eva called down.
“Achy. I could use a massage.”
“Just be glad you didn’t get boiled alive in that armor.”
“Yeah, thanks for that.”
“I need you to come up here and encase something in a solid block of metal. Can you do that?”
“Probably.” Juliana slowly got to her feet. There were a few choked off grunts of pain as she moved. Most of them happened as she tried to straighten out her back. Once on her feet, she placed her hands on her hips and arched her back.
The pops were audible even from where Eva was standing.
“The stairs,” she said once she finished stretching and had a moment to look around, “I think they’re gone.”
Eva jumped off the edge of the roof, touching down next to Juliana. “Don’t worry. I can carry you.”
Juliana immediately took a step backwards. Holding up her hands in front of her, she said, “I don’t think–”
“No time to argue,” Eva said, grabbing one of Juliana’s outstretched arms. She used the arm to help heft Juliana up into a fireman’s carry. “Don’t worry. It’s a higher jump than last time, but not as far horizontally.”
“Eva, I don’t–”
“Too late.”
Eva jumped back up to the roof. This time, she didn’t land right on the edge where the brick wall turned into the roof. It wasn’t a very wide landing spot. With a squirming person on her back throwing off her center of balance, Eva wasn’t feeling too confident balancing on a thin beam.
Especially with how she had nearly fallen off the roof the first time, only saved by the shackles.
The glassed over part of the roof that was still intact had looked stable enough.
Eva’s carapace-covered feet touched down on the smooth surface. She immediately froze.
Cracks spread out from where she landed. A spiderweb of lines appeared in the glass, accompanied by high-pitched snaps.
Holding her breath, Eva waited. She didn’t think that falling through the roof would kill her. Or Juliana, for that matter—though she had been banged around a lot, she was well protected within her suit of armor—but it could cause more of the roof to collapse on top of them after they fell through.
The cracking stopped shortly after Eva landed. She let out her breath in a sigh of relief.
“Let’s be careful where we step,” Eva said as she gingerly set Juliana down.
Juliana didn’t move from where Eva set her. “This doesn’t look very safe.”
“Probably not. The sooner you encase that thing in metal, the sooner we can both…”
Eva trailed off. There was something. Something in the air. A feeling she had not felt for some time.
And a feeling she had only felt once before.
Confusion settled in as Eva tried to puzzle out just what was causing the disgusting sensation in her stomach.
“Eva?” Juliana said, voice full of concern. She glanced this way and that as if she was expecting an ambush. “Are you alright?”
Waving her hand, Eva closed her eyes. The feeling wasn’t around them. It was coming from the direction of the school. Not a danger to them. No ambush to be worried about.
At least, not one from the sensation she was feeling. There was still the possibility that the hunter was still around.
“I’m alright,” Eva said, snapping her eyes open. “But someone else isn’t.”
“What–”
Eva was gone. Blinking away as fast as she could.
The feeling was something she had felt before. Right before her first real encounter with the hunters.
When Daru was being tortured. Given that Daru hadn’t ever turned up again, he had probably died as well.
Someone, some demon was in a serious state of injury back towards the school.
Clenching her teeth together, Eva felt her rage burning.
Only one demon had been in direct danger. Only one demon had been fighting with the other hunter.
“Arachne,” she hissed. “I’m not letting you die again.”
— — —
Juliana watched as Eva disappeared, leaving her all alone on the roof. At least the hunter was gone. And the thing Eva pointed out…
Thinning the metal armor on her legs gave her plenty to work with. She set to covering the disturbing little idol with metal. After a few moments, she had a shiny smooth tube. It looked like something that would be launched out of the main guns of a battleship. Except much smaller.
With that done, she tried nudging it with her foot.
Nothing happened.
She picked up the encased idol. Just in time for a small portion of the roof to crack and fall into the rest of the building.
I really need to get down from here, Juliana thought as a few more cracks spread across the top.
Chapter 024
Eva dropped out of the sky, seething with her fists clenched tight as she grit her teeth together. Her final blink had carried her over the makeshift wall of the Brakket dormitory plaza.
The first thing she noticed were the arachnid legs scattered about. Arachne’s dismembered legs. Perhaps the source of the disturbing feeling.
Or so Eva thought until she spotted the rest of the demon, the hunter, and the doll.
The hunter’s curved sword was buried in Arachne’s stomach.