Cameraman Never Dies-Chapter 270: Start... Blood... Action!

Seraphis felt the world narrow to the weight of a single breath. The moon swelled at her back until it filled half the sky, a swollen coin with the smell of iron and rust that pulsed with an awful heartbeat.

The air smelled of copper and gunpowder; it was the smell that never faded from memories.

The clouds bled; it was not droplets of water that fell from that sky, but drops the color of fresh meat, and they struck the leaves and the ground with a steady, wet rhythm. They did not splash so much as sink, darkening wood and cloth and skin, like ink spreading through paper.

She gripped the hilt of her blade until the leather bit into her palms. It was a simple thing in design, a thing sharpened by the battle she endured as a child, as the outsider that was never welcome anywhere, even in her own clan. But now it felt like a different life.

It was enough. In this place and at this hour, it had to be. Around her, the blood that had been raining down pooled and rose as if commanded, the droplets answering the call of some small, hungry current that moved at Seraphis's will.

She moved first with the blade and then with the blood. The blood obeyed like a loyal servant — slender streams that snaked along the ground and climbed her arms, thick beads that slid over the blade and curled into hard, red wire when she willed it.

She plucked knives of rain from the air and hurled them like daggers, sent ribbons that wrapped and strangled, stitched walls of coagulated drops into shields. She did not think, not really; grief and the naked need to stop a woman with a bandaged smile made thinking useless. Her body remembered its own old laws. Her hands obeyed.

Mina moved with the ease of someone who had spent a long time watching others flail. She did not flinch at the sky. She did not flinch when the world seemed to turn into an organ. Her step took in no blood and left no stain.

A rain of red crossed her coat and slid off, as if it were nothing at all. Seraphis hurled spikes, the hard parts of the raindrops shaped into darts that flew fast and true; Mina stepped, and the darts thudded into the earth where she had been standing a heartbeat before, or vanished altogether, or simply folded like paper and were gone.

Mina's bandaged head cocked as she stared at Seraphis, not with fear but with a small, curious disappointment — an expression that made Seraphis want to make the bandages bleed.

The first strike cut a line of light through the air. Mina answered with a movement that could have been a shrug. The air around her dimmed briefly, as if something large and heavy had passed in front of the sun, and when the light returned, the dart had bent midflight into nothing.

Not to ash. Not to smoke. To the faintest absence, an absence that left a clean space where something had been expected and now could not be found. Seraphis's eyes widened at a partial realization. But she couldn't just stand and think.

Her hands closed and came away slick, but when she reached to form another handful of violent rain, the blood slipped through her fingers like oil through a sieve. It held for a second, and then the edge of that second thinned and vanished.

She swore one short, sharp word. The word was small and private and not even audible over the pulsing of the blood moon, but it steadied her. She clenched her jaw and pushed more of herself into the spellwork she had learned in darker, tougher hours: patterns to bind and rend and bind again.

Blood coalesced into midsized blades and a long, serrated chain that she swung with both hands. The chain hammered into Mina's forearm; the blades scored across fabric. For a breath, the bandages seemed to fray, dusted red like old plaster when a crack goes too deep. Mina made a soft noise that could have been a laugh or a throat clearing. She reached out and touched one of the cuts with a bare fingertip. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

The cut ceased to be a wound and ceased to be a thing. It blinked like a closed eye. The skin around the line went on as if it had never been rent. A place that a second before had been real and raw was now whole and ordinary. Seraphis's gut dropped with that small, impossible correction.

She felt the chain in her hands buckle like it had struck a rope of smoke. For a terrifying moment, she could not tell whether her own arms were with her or had been taken from her, whether the pattern she had called into being was still there or had been a dream. Mina cocked her head, and Seraphis realized the bandaged woman looked almost bored with the whole exchange.

Mina did not attack in waves. She unfolded and moved — precise, simple motions that were never wasted. She let Seraphis swing and burn and cleave until exhaustion began to knit itself into the muscles of her shoulders. She matched each strike not with mettle but with erasure.

A thing became, then didn't. The sound of impact thinned until it stopped existing. A shape of blood that had been a noose was gone so cleanly it was as if the noose had never been woven; the ground carried no blood where it had landed, and the smell of iron retreated like the tide.

Seraphis forced breath into the hollows of her chest and kept going. She was not skilled at waiting. She had tried once and learned the shape of patience; grief over the girl who was gone had peeled that patience away. She felt no urge to live, nor the will to fight, but there was something — a hope, a fragile emotion that fueled her fight. Maybe she could make sure Judge doesn't face this woman.

She became a tide that did not know its own limits. She struck faster, harder, and in the rhythm of the strikes, something started to pull back at Mina, something like error: a half-second lag when Mina had to tilt her head a fraction too much, a place where the fingers on the bandaged hand twitched. Seraphis seized on that fraction and drove a blistering flurry of blades into it. She felt them bite. She felt the bandages shudder.