The black smoke had made it impossible to see below a certain point. The girl had affectively stranded him in the trees and blinded him as well. His eyes turned red as he activated a sensory skill that allowed him to sense anything that possesses blood. It took him a while but he managed to see the girl because of the blood coursing through her vains. She was closer than he thought and was even planing to strike the branch he was on.
He prepared eight blood disks then waited. As soon as the girl made her move, he did as well. Black smoke started rapidly engulfing the tree in all directions with the girl literally flying up the tree within the black smoke. Using this chance the boy jumped off the branch while simultaneously sending four of his blood disks to attack her. He already knew he lost the blood he controlled when they entered the black smoke so he filled them with a lot of essence to cause them to survive longer and sent them out. He landed on the branch of another tree and tried his hardest to hit her but she was too fast and he lost control but that was all a distraction. Suddenly the tree he was on before broke falling in the direction of the girl. That's what the other four disks were doing. The girl managed to get out of the way but the force of wind caused the smoke to clear up a around that area.
The girl was tired of the boy's tricks and hatched a plan of her own. All the trees other than the one the boy was on started getting engulfed in the black smoke as the forest slowly disappeared around him. Everywhere he looked was pure black smoke and it was disorienting. With his sensory skill on he could see her but her movement were too fast and unpredictable. This forced him to make a decision, he was no longer going to go easy on her. He suddenly erupted in an aura of red as the sky reddened.
Off in the distance in another part of the forest, Adam and Nathaniel saw the dark red clouds gathered at a specific location in the forest, got curious and decided to investigate.
In another part of the forest, Alsvid had just recovered from his fifteenth attempt at a dungeon raid and was catching his breath from the fifteen consecutive deaths he experienced when he and Kage noticed the dark red clouds and Kage decided to check it out, Alsvid followed despite Kage's advice to relax.
In another part of the forest, a lone man noticed the dark red clouds and decided to investigate, he was tall, muscular and handsome with generic black hair and dark brown eyes. The man jumped into a nearby tree branch then continued to ascend to the sky on branch at a time until he reach the highest branch and jumped out of the forest into the sky where a giant dragon appeared under his feet and flew in the direction of the clouds.
As the red clouds formed, it started to rain. Ordinarily this wouldn't have been a problem but the girl learnt pretty quickly why it was a problem. Due to the sudden rain the wind started acting up and that was bad for her smoke as she hadn't imbued it with essence, meaning it was a normal black smoke that made anything disappear. There was a lot of it and the wind had no general direction so the smoke wasn't going anywhere. The main and biggest problem was the fact that it wasn't raining water, it was raining blood, the blood was acidic and as the girl came to realize with this attack, the boy was after her life. She gathered black smoke around her body to form a sort of shield as all blood droplets that came in contact with it would disappear. The nice thing about her apparition was whatever she devoured would turn to essence so the boy was basically giving her free essence.
The boy had only used this skill three times in his entire apparition life and this was the fourth time. Just like the other three times it was against enemies that made him feel like he had no choice. In total he had used this skill five times, the first was its creation. The other four times was against increasingly worse circumstances. His second time using it he was trapped in a dungeon and things just got worse.
The girl thought she could survive this until she realized her feet felt wet. Looking down she saw a pool of blood covering the entire area and it was only growing larger. She had drained its essence and acidity but the wind was messing with her ability to absorb the blood itself.
The boy was not worried about her little shield because he knew exactly what skill he had cast. It was an adaptive skill that guaranteed the death of the enemy if used in a confined space.
She desperately tried to control all the smoke so she could started absorbing the blood when suddenly, a heavy drop of blood pierced through her shield. She quickly repaired it. A few seconds later it happened again and slowly increased in frequency as the droplets adapted to her shield.
The boy despite his imminent victory was not happy and there was a dire reason for that. In exchange for the guaranteed death, the skill drained him off all stored blood and if he were to run out of stored blood, it would drain his. The skill would only end if he died or the enemy died. Its name, blood sacrifice.
The girl realized too late that her shield was useless as the sensation of her skin getting peeled off begun.
The smoke started to clear as the girl fell into the pool of blood in agony only to realize a second later that she couldn't breath, she was going to die an agonizing death.
**********
[Helpful Information]
All apparitions have specific rules on how they work, usually it relies on the user's imagination but if a user were to deviate from these simple rules, the concequences could be fatal.
Vote for my book if you like it and thank you so much for reading.