BLOOD CURSE ACADEMIA - PREVIOUS DRAFT EDITION -

Chapter XLIX (49)- Anata

The box was bigger on the inside. Not massive, but large enough for a plain looking bed and some floorspace. The walls thrummed with a soft vermillion light.

The lid of the box closed above him, sealing him inside. The moment it clang shut, he felt his bond with Mort sever. The split to his soul knocked him off his froggy feet. It took him a moment to recover. When he did, he stared up at the ceiling. Even with just his base knowledge of enchanting runes, Kizu was still able to recognize a few from his sister’s divination book. Enough to guess that the box he was in was sealed off from the outside world. He would have a hard time reaching anyone on the outside while sealed down here.

Relief washed over him. That meant Mort wasn’t dead, he reassured himself, just cut off from him. While unnerving and uncomfortable, them being separated was far from the worst case scenario.

Kizu guessed that a tree frog's strength wouldn’t be enough to move that heavy metal lid above him. So, he hopped around the room, exploring the prison.

A pale, scrawny girl slept in the bed, curled up in a ball under a thin blanket. Kizu quietly hopped to the bed and hid under it. The last thing he wanted was a child vampiric spawn to wake up hungry and find him as a tasty little snack. But she didn’t wake up. She barely made a noise.

When the potion’s effects wore off and Kizu was back in his normal body, he crept out from his hiding spot to look at the girl.

Kizu judged her age to be maybe seven or eight years old. But he didn’t have much experience with children. Her raven black hair looked smooth as silk but was tangled up in knots. She looked doll-like with her hair juxtaposed with her pale, blemishless face. She still didn’t move. It didn’t even look like the girl breathed.

Kizu looked up at the metal trap door on the ceiling. It was out of reach; but thankfully, he had arrived prepared. He took out his enchanted gloves. Doing his best to make little noise, so as to not wake the vampiric spawn child, he activated the enchantment to allow them to stick to surfaces. Painstakingly climbed up the wall and onto the ceiling. He pushed against the door. Nothing. It didn’t even budge. Kizu cursed quietly. He debated trying to melt it with an explosive potion. But the room wasn’t large. His fire-resistant potions wouldn’t matter much if he suffocated to death from the smoke.

Kizu took out Sojan and tried to pry the door open with the enchanted knife. He figured that something as heavily enchanted as Sojan wouldn’t snap from the attempt. While correct on that assumption, the action still yielded no results. It was sealed so tightly that he couldn’t find any purchase with the knife.

A quiet yelp broke his concentration.

Kizu looked over his shoulder. Down below him, the vampiric spawn girl had woken up. She stared up at him with big intense mismatching eyes. One red, the other black. She clutched her blanket to her chest, as if expecting it to shield her from the stranger.

“If you try anything, I’ll burn us both up,” Kizu threatened. “Do you know how to get out of here?”

The girl shook her head, shrinking further down under her blankets.

Kizu immediately felt guilty. The girl looked absolutely terrified. He doubted she lied. She looked as much a prisoner down her as he was.

“Listen,” Kizu said, climbing down awkwardly. “I need to get back out there to help my friends. Are you sure you don’t know how to escape?”

The girl shook her head and looked down at the floor. Then she mouthed the word ‘no’ although no audible noise came out. And as she did, Kizu caught a glimpse of a single sharpened canine tooth. Not two fangs, like the other spawn he had encountered. He stepped forward to better examine her single scarlet eye. Maybe she was some sort of defective spawn?

“Can you speak?” he asked the girl.

She looked up at him, meeting his eyes with her big mismatching ones. But she made no sign of answering. Kizu took that as another no. So, he was stuck in a box with a defective mute vampiric spawn.

“Are you going to try to eat me?” Kizu asked bluntly.

The girl cowered back and shook her head violently, looking horrified by the suggestion. Then her eyes widened as she looked at Kizu. She crossed her arms and pushed herself away from him, burying herself further in her blankets.

“I won’t eat you either,” Kizu reassured her. “The people who put me down here want to drink my blood though. Drain me dry. You’re certain they don’t feed you any blood?”

The girl looked very confused. She glanced at a small nightstand nearby. Kizu went to it and opened the top drawer.

A knife, the steel a blood red, sat on top of a black handkerchief with the name Anata embroidered on it in crimson thread.

“Anata,” Kizu said. “Is that your name?”

The girl nodded.

“And this knife?”

Anata reached for it, gesturing for him to pass it to her.

Kizu kept a hand on Sojan, just in case, as he handed her the knife, hilt first.

She sliced her hand open.

Not knowing what else to do, Kizu scrambled to grab the knife from the girl. He silently cursed his stupidity, handing a dangerous object like a knife to a child. But Anata smiled as he snatched the knife away from him. Then she pressed her small, bloody hand against the back of his hand.

His vision swam at the contact. All around him, his senses flared up. The stale air suddenly became fragrant with the fragrance of his sickeningly sweet sweat, the slight mildew scent from the bed’s blankets, the smell of iron from the girl’s bleeding hand. He could taste the odors. His own saliva tasted bitter in his mouth as he absorbed everything around him. And the sounds overhead. Even trapped inside the magically sealed box, he could hear his own breath like a horn, alongside the skittering of an insect crawling on the wall and the wringing of Anata’s hand as she twisted it under her blanket in nervousness. This was all alongside the rapid beating of the girl’s heart. He felt his balance unlike ever before as gravity tied his feet to the floor, every slight shift of his weight altering his relation with gravity. It even seemed as if he could measure the exact amounts of sleep and hunger and thirst inside him.

But, most of all, he felt the sheer power of Anata’s blood affect his spellsense. Unlike before, he could sense the magic within him as well. He had a complete understanding of the amount of blood flowing through his veins. He knew, without a doubt, that just that little bit of contact had somehow renewed the blood inside himself that he had spent. He felt it accelerating the growth and multiplying his current blood. Not only that, it felt more potent. Stronger than ever.

The euphoric experience lasted less than a minute in total. Even still though, his blood was left renewed from her touch. The smear of blood on the back of his hand had completely been absorbed by his skin’s pores.

“You’re…you’re not vampiric spawn, are you?”

She stared at him blankly, obviously confused.

“You almost seem like the exact opposite,” Kizu said, examining her. “They take blood, sapping out the magic and life of their prey. But you give blood, renewing magic and amplifying life.”

Anata continued to stare at him, bewildered and clearly not understanding. Her hand still dripped blood on her sheets.

“Here,” Kizu said, ripping off the cuff of his sleeve. She stiffened as he bent over her.

“I won’t hurt you,” he assured her. “Just stay still.”

She winced as he bound the cloth around her palm tightly. It wasn’t as clean as maybe a bandage should have been, but it looked better than using any of her things. As he let go and wiped off the blood with his other sleeve, he frowned. Her hand was covered in scars. Some thin white lines were faded by years of healing. But others looked almost as fresh as the one he had just bandaged. He continued studying her. The scars continued all the way up to her sleeve. And Kizu had a suspicion that they didn’t end there.

“How long have you been here?” he asked her.

She stared at him blankly.

“Have you ever left this box?” Kizu said, rephrasing his question.

She shook her head. Then she stopped and frowned. She mimed sleeping, closing her eyes and putting two hands by her ear.

“You leave in your sleep?” Kizu asked, confused.

She nodded vigorously.

“What do you see when you sleep?”

Anata pointed her finger at his chest.

Suddenly, Kizu remembered another figure with one red eye which had been haunting him since his arrival at the academy. The one that had led him to his necklace and the Atlas of the World Dungeon. And, he remembered suddenly, a figure he had seen when he drank that divination wine of Emilia’s.

“You spoke to me,” he said, remembering. “You said ‘please.’”

She nodded again vigorously.

“Please, what?”

She bit her lip, her fang piercing it and it bled slightly. Then she pointed straight up at the ceiling.

“The trap door?”

She gestured up again. Indicating higher.

“You want out of the World Dungeon?”

She didn’t nod her head this time, instead just focused on Kizu with her big eyes, pleading.

Kizu looked away. Ashamed. “I shouldn’t. I came down here to help someone else. I likely need to keep going down deeper. I don’t even know where I’ve jumped to. It will likely be incredibly dangerous to get where I am going. And I don’t know how to return here to get you after I finish my search.” Not to mention the fact he didn’t even know the way back up to the surface without his atlas.

The girl looked stricken. She once again tried to bury herself under her blankets, this time to hide the tears trickling down her cheeks, but Kizu still saw them.

Guilt gnawing at him, Kizu tried to put her out of his mind. He reached into his pack and started doing a quick inventory. His fingers lingered on his spare set of chalk. With his connection to Mort temporarily severed, he doubted that he would be able to discover his sister’s location outside the box. Especially with all the fancy enchantments that were etched to keep any divinations from escaping. But still, Anata had just renewed his blood. He saw no reason to not, at the very least, attempt to reach out.

He sketched on the stone ground the complex ritual sigils. He barely glanced at the divination book for reference, now knowing them almost by heart now, having practiced hundreds of times. By now, he needed the divination book more as an anchor for the spell than as an actual source of information.

Closing his eyes, he channeled into the spell. His eyes shot open. His sister was close. Closer than he ever could have imagined. He frantically looked around himself. Then he realized where the spell directed him.

A small lump of a child sobbing silently under the blankets. His divination spell had been guiding him to Anata.