*CRA...*
Leon's blood flew out through the air. It scattered into thousands of tiny droplets. And then, right before actually hitting the wall, all those droplets condensed in on themselves.
*CA...*
Leon's blood splattered against the wall. It formed a thin, vertically-high mark that infused itself on the wall.
A sudden gust of powerful wind blew towards the mark.
*BOOM!*
The force of impact against the blood condensed it just beyond the edge that it condensed in itself before. And with the blood particles broke right through their terminal density.
The tiny mana structures that Leon spent years to develop shattered.
'This attack on itself doesn't produce any flames,' Leon thought, leaping right into the cloud of dust kicked off by the destruction of the wall. 'Only when the air comes in, the blood ignites.'
Leon took a leap forward.
...
But it wasn't enough. And right as his feet touched the ground, the bloodmancer's shattered blood ignited, turning the residual mana in the air into fuel for the fires.
'No other choice,' Leon thought, gritting his teeth. He kicked himself forward again and raised his arms to his eyes.
Dash!
The flames couldn't distinguish between an enemy and an ally. They were just flames, a physical phenomenon, not some conscious being.
Leon leaped into the flames.
'It burns,' Leon dully noted when his hair and skin ignited, subjected to the blazing-hot fires created by his own blood.
Leon's flesh stood on fire. Yet, a slight twitch of his lips was his only reaction to the excruciating pain.
'Bloodmancy,' Leon thought, stepping on the building's floor for the last time before ejecting himself through the hole of his own making.
'Chains!' the bloodmancer gave his next order while simultaneously micro-managing the residual blood from his face.
The droplets turned into tiny daggers that then flew around, only to cut open the back of Leons's legs and the middle of his palms.
The blood surged out of the newly-made injuries, shooting towards the outer wall of the building. It coiled and twisted as it flew, quickly forming an extremely complex structure of tiny strands transformed into a hexagon-based tube.
"Ugh..." a small sigh escaped Leon's mouth when his blood solidified and hung him to the side of the wall. The sudden stop to his descent squeezed out his lungs, turning into the culprit behind his sigh.
'Not yet,' Leon thought, not sparing himself any time to rest. This time, however, his job was simple.
Leon cut his right hand free from the blood chain. He then flicked it upwards, sending one more drop of blood towards the hole he just escaped through.
'Burn out!'
All Leon's spells so far had served a specific purpose. And due to that specific purpose, the mana contained within his blood had to follow up an exact procedure to bring forth the effect Leon wished for.
This time, however, Leon's order was one of the simplest.
Leon flung a single droplet of his blood upwards. Then, the mana structures within reacted to Leon's order... simply by diffusing into pure energy and then allowing the laws of physic to do the rest.
'With that, I bought myself some time,' Leon thought, hiding his eyes by lowering his head at the moment of explosion. And then, right as the dust started to fall all over him, Leon finally found a moment to look around.
He was stuck to the wall, roughly twenty to thirty meters above the ground.
'I didn't even realize it's the middle of a freaking night,' Leon thought, gulping down his saliva to wet his dried-out throat. He then took a breath...
Only to sway on the blood chains that held him to the wall.
'Huh?' Leon blinked his eyes a few times, taking a short moment to regulate his breath. 'I'm anemic already?'
Back in his home world, Leon would rarely use more than a single drop of blood. In a world where the quantity of mana used was taken out of the equation by the extremely high level of quality one could raise it to, he rarely had to spare as much as two drops of his blood.
This world, however, was different. And even if the mana within the air was thin... It was everywhere. As such, the spells cast by the locals would end up way too powerful for Leon to risk playing it safe.
'I really need to find a place to rest, to recover,' he decided, looking all over the area in hopes of finding some clues.
'There is a city, a garrison... and a village?' Leon summed up his observation.
The presence of the city was, quite frankly, obvious. Even if not for the plethora of lights striking Leon's eyes out within the darkness of the night, he could guess the existence of such a place.
After all, no one would build a damned palace out in the sticks!
'But city... No, that's a bad idea,' Leon decided, turning his eyes towards his two other retreat options. 'A garrison is a no-go for obvious reasons,' he thought, turning his eyes towards his third and last option.
The village.
'Just where the heck is it?' Leon thought, gritting his teeth as he stared off into the darkness of the night.
Yet, just like one would expect from a village in a world where electricity didn't appear to be in use yet, there were no night lights to indicate its location.
'If I survey the lay of the land...' Leon thought, taking in all the clues his mana-enhanced eyes could pry from the clutches of the darkness.
And soon enough, Leon moved his attention to but a small, distant light, located below a massive ridge over which the palace stood and then quite some distance away, down the path of some local river.
'Judging by this light... it's a village square?' Leon attempted to figure out more details from the limited observation he could make.
"Haaa..." the bloodmancer then released a heavy sigh, only to slowly take in a long breath.
"I guess I have no other choice, do I?" he muttered to himself. "Well then," he added, only to kick himself against the wall, jumping as far as the length of his blood chains would allow.
Leon twisted himself around as much as he could before the tensing up of his chains forced him back against the wall.
This time, rather than gluing his back to the cold stones, Leon made sure his feet made contact with the wall first. And with his blood chains now entangled, Leon squatted down and closed his eyes.
'Now for the tricky part,' he thought, slowly deconstructing his chains by seemingly infusing them into the stones of the wall. The blood that the bloodmancer recovered would then trickle down the wall only to gather right in the gaps between his feet and the part of the wall Leon was standing on.
'More,' he thought. He ignored the pain coming from his joints when the now shorter chains threatened to snap his body into pieces. He ignored the threatening sounds of his joints snapping and his bones starting to crack. 'More!'
The blood chains that started nearly at nearly two meters of length now ended up reduced to just a quarter of that length. And then, an eight of its initial size.
'Now!' Leon's eyes opened up wide when he sensed his body reached its absolute limit. 'Break!'
The blood chains that allowed Leon to crawl on the wall like some sort of spider now disintegrated, turning into a thin mist of blood.
Left with no support, Leon's body instantly started to lean forward. In just a second, he now stood upright. The only out-of-the-ordinary element of Leon's stance was that... he stood up straight on a vertical damned wall!
'Propel!' he then thought, releasing the energy of the blood at his feet.
Leon's body shot forward at a speed no human should be able to endure. The air turned from an unnoticeable presence into a nearly solid barrier that pushed against Leon's face.
And worst of all, the sudden change of momentum squeezed his body to the point all the bones in his body threatened to crack.
'Fuck,' Leon thought while gritting his teeth. 'I always hated this way of moving around!'
When people dreamed about being able to fly, they always looked at the bright sides of doing so. Leon, on the other hand, did fly around a lot in his life.
And as such, he knew better than everyone what it meant to dive through the air.
The insects that just happened to fly through Leon's path turned into bullets that pierced his skin. A single bee was enough to open a hole straight through his flesh. A single mosquito sufficed to turn his eyes into a bloody mess.
'This is all way too hasty,' Leon thought, pulling himself through the ordeal with the sheer force of his fucking will. 'I can handle the pain to almost any degree, but this?'
Leon's nerves flooded his brain with alerts. The air pressed against his open eyes, threatening to squeeze them into his skull. And when those two things combined, his brain could hardly orient itself in space, leading Leon to the one state he hated above everything else.
A state where he wasn't in control.
'Wait a second,' Leon thought when sudden stimuli from his eyes pushed all the discomfort aside.
He jumped in the direction of what he expected to be the lights coming from the center of a nearby village. Yet, as he neared his objective, Leon had no other choice but to accept his own mistake.
Because it wasn't just a bunch of torches that attracted his attention before. And the village wasn't anywhere near as close as he expected it to be.
The village, in fact, was far further than Leon expected.
And the only reason why he could still see it from such a distance was the blaze that currently consumed nearly half of it!