F Grade Healer Becomes Strongest Biomancer-Chapter 55: The Witch Elf

Mio

Mio didn’t hesitate.

[Spark]

The lightning surged through the obsidian arm and burst in a cascading bolt. The elf stepped aside. Green light caught in her yellow pupils. Behind her, the bolt punched a hole through two trees and kept going.

"Life energy magic." She rolled the left dagger between her fingers. "So you belong to that scathing whore."

"Don’t know what you’re talking about." Mio fired again.

The elf deflected it with her off-hand dagger. The bolt scattered into the ash, hissing.

"Gaian. The Devourer. She Who Hungers." She said the name like a curse. "Your kind has a lot of names for the thing wearing your soul."

The hunger stirred.

"I can’t afford to die here." Mio shifted her weight, the obsidian arm humming. "I’ve got a sister to go home to. So I have to kill you."

"You still have ties to your old life?" A pause. "Gaian’s gone soft."

The elf moved first.

The first dagger aimed at Mio’s throat. Mio caught it—obsidian fingers closed around the blade and stopped it dead.

The elf was already there, ripping the handle free, second dagger coming down at Mio’s left knee. Instinct brought the obsidian arm across her body. The blade skidded off the glass.

She threw again. Didn’t blink to it. Flat sprint, second dagger swiping low at Mio’s right ankle. Mio jumped it.

The thrown dagger hit a wagon behind her. The elf blinked to it—already mid-swing on arrival, throat height, full commitment.

Dagger lands. She follows. And she’s going for the throat or the legs. Nothing else.

Mio got the obsidian arm up. Fired Spark through the block. The elf took it across the hip, twisted away, threw again.

The pattern held. Left ankle. Right shin. Throat. Right knee. Throat.

She wasn’t reckless or angry. Throat to end it. Legs to pin her down for the throat shot. She’d killed someone who healed before.

A dagger caught Mio’s left calf and opened it to the bone. She shoved Vitalize into the wound before her leg gave out. Four hundred points of healing erased it like it hadn’t happened.

The elf materialized on a dead horse’s flank and Mio was already there—not where the dagger landed but where the elf would need to stand to pull it free. Spark. Point-blank. The discharge caught the elf’s right forearm and the flesh blackened on contact.

The elf dropped back. Looked at her right hand. Two fingers curled, didn’t uncurl. The blackened skin was climbing past the wrist. She watched it spread for exactly one second.

Then she drew the left dagger across her own forearm. One clean stroke above the elbow. Zero hesitation.

The limb dropped into the ash and she kicked it behind her without looking down.

She rolled her shoulder once Only one arm now. She didn’t slow.

"Ha." Mio flexed the obsidian fingers. "Now you’re just like me." She paused. "I mean, were."

One swing from twenty meters. Three cuts opened across Mio’s left shin. The dagger hadn’t come within ten.

Mio threw herself behind the overturned wagon. Afterimages cut through the wood and opened her ankle on the other side. She healed it.

Three more swings at the same shin. Mio healed it three times. Blood everywhere, but underneath it the leg held.

"You heal better than actual battle mages," the elf said, running her thumb along the flat of the remaining blade.

The edge drank the moonlight—went darker than shadow, a seam of nothing where steel used to be. Blinked. The dagger went into Mio’s side below the ribs.

In and out.

[Status: Grievous Wound — Healing Negated (0:30)]

Mio staggered. Shoved Vitalize into the wound. Green light left her palm and died on contact.

"Stop healing. It won’t work on that."

[HP: 1,847/2,940]

Mio spat blood pooling on her lips. "That’s it?"

She stepped forward and her foot slid. Dark liquid, everywhere—leaking from cracked barrels in the overturned caravan, pooling in the ash, soaking the wood. Chemical. Sharp and heavy, coating the back of her throat. Oil.

The elf was twenty meters out. Afterimages between them. Mio couldn’t close that gap. Not without a distraction big enough to cover the whole clearing.

Spark conducted through the obsidian arm. Life energy, but it arced like lightning. And lightning and oil—

Yeah.

Mio dug the obsidian fingers into the caravan’s undercarriage. Three hundred kilos of dead weight and oil. She lifted it over her head. The dark liquid ran down her arms.

The elf threw her dagger straight at Mio’s throat.

Mio dropped. Her knees hit the mud and she slid under the blade, the oil-slick ash carrying her forward. The caravan left her hands on the way down—three hundred kilos tumbling end over end, barrels splitting mid-air, oil spraying in a black arc across the tree line. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Spark left her fingertip mid-slide.

The bolt punched into the oil-soaked wreckage and the clearing went white.

Barrels detonated in sequence, oil igniting across every surface it had touched. The explosion lifted the elf off her feet. Ash flattened for twenty meters. Mio’s teeth rattled.

The elf hit the ground twenty meters out. Left forearm gone below the elbow—cauterized black. Got to her knees. Both arms ended at the elbow now.

Mio stumbled toward her, ears ringing, the wound in her side still leaking. The elf threw her legs up and whipped to standing in one motion—no hands needed, no hands left. Burns across her face. Both forearms gone. And she was still standing.

Mio swung first. Left hook to the chin. The elf rolled with it, drove her heel straight into Mio’s ribs. The air left her lungs. She dropped to one knee, vision swimming.

No arms and she still hits like that.

Mio got up. Swung again. The elf ducked, drove her heel into Mio’s bad shin. Her leg buckled.

[Spark]

The bolt scorched the ground where the elf had been rolling. She came up on her feet using knees and momentum alone.

Mio fired again. Missed. The elf closed the distance with a spinning kick that caught Mio’s jaw and sent her stumbling.

Her dagger was thirty meters away. Buried in the mud where Mio had slid under it.

The elf looked at it and blinked.

She was there. Knees in the mud, handle clamped between her teeth. Eyes gone somewhere else. Mio had seen that face before—in bathroom mirrors. In the cathedral.

Then the air went still.

[Reverse Lotus Dance]