CHAPTER 54

Riven began to push himself off the wall when he felt the bones in his arms snap back into place. The pain was immense, and he could barely breathe as he began violently coughing up fluid that his lungs had accumulated—but he managed to get to his knees.

He needed to speed up his recovery.

That’s when he saw the second vial of Sinner’s Blood he’d accidentally dropped on the floor. He reached for it, fumbling with the cork.

The second vial was drained in an instant, and just as the monster bellowed to charge Ben up against the wall with its horned head down, Riven knew that Ben was about to die. There was no way the slender man could take the many-ton monster crushing him against a stone backdrop…and in that instant, Riven’s heart twisted with hate. Visions of the school bus, of the dead children, of his sister’s wish that they find the courage to make a better life for themselves that last night they’d spent together scrounging for scraps of food… They all flashed through his mind.

He had failed to save the others, but he wasn’t going to let the satyr get its way.

Riven’s vision began to turn red, his muscles began to pulse, and a hunger for the satyr’s blood boiled over to envelop his very soul. Everything he’d been imbued with, from the way his magic worked at a base level, to the hate boiling up in his gut, to how the power felt when summoned and unleashed, was brought to bear. The way his muscles tensed and his mind warped with each casting came to light, and he applied all of it here and now.

Then something finally clicked, something primal that had been there ever since he’d been born but had never surfaced until now, and his entire life abruptly changed in that instant.

Riven’s mind blew a fuse, and the internal scream of hunger and hatred that overwhelmed him escaped his lips as a bone-chilling roar. Fangs ripped out of his mouth underneath his mask, and his eyes turned from their normal green to a bright crimson. His muscles tensed and ripped through skin as they toned and gained mass, only for his body to quickly regenerate the superficial wounds within seconds. His body’s skin tone became pale white, and it felt like a boulder had taken residence in his stomach as hunger clawed at his insides.

Just before insanity fully engulfed him and he lost his mind, Riven was able to scream out a single phrase toward his opponent: “Eat shit!”

He took a single step forward and lunged, streams of blood ripping from the walls, floors, and corpses around the room to fly in ribbons through the air toward him, condensing into blades of red ice along his outstretched hands and forearms in the instant it took for him to cross the room and collide with the demon who’d killed his minions. The strike, empowered by his blood mana, was devastating.

*BOOM*

The satyr roared in conjunction with Riven’s bloodthirsty screech of madness, and the two of them blew by Ben like a tidal wave of violence, ripping through the bars of a nearby cage and sending rubble into the air as the back wall partially gave way.

Riven’s mind was devoid of everything except the need to kill this creature and the extreme hunger building up inside him. Like a viper, he struck at the downed demon in the pile of stone over and over again, ripping out pieces of muscle and bone as the satyr—already on death’s doorstep—wailed and tried to break out of its confinement.

“RAAAAAHHHHHH!”

The familiar sound of a feral beast reached Riven’s ears, but he was too far gone to realize that it wasn’t the satyr making that noise—rather, it was him this time.

*CRUNCH—SNAP—BAM*

Riven’s head jerked back and snapped forward, headbutting the satyr’s mutilated face, which sent the huge demon jerking backward with a newly broken nose.

*WRENCH—THUD—RIP*

Riven’s hands, turned into clawed crimson gauntlets of ice with protruding blades coming out of his arms on either side, tore into the creature like a Gatling gun. His now-enhanced limbs shot forward like lightning strikes and deflected the desperate attempts of the monster to get back up, and before he knew it he was standing over the remnants of what had once been a powerful demon.

His heart pounded, his chest heaved, and his ears rang from the noise of the battle as he started to cough. Dust filled the room from where the warlord had been launched through bent and torn metal bars after Riven had collided with it in a rage. The satyr, or what remained of it, had been reduced to a shredded mess of bones and viscera within a crater in the stone ahead of him. Blood was splattered on the walls alongside scorch marks, and the remaining corpse was plastered into the indentation like glue on paper.

Riven remained there: panting, hunched over, and in a good amount of pain as two enormous wooden chests of platinum, gold, silver, and bronze coins bloomed into being in front of him—setting themselves down one after the other as the lids flipped up to reveal their contents. His body was covered in viscera, body parts, and blood, and gingerly he picked his mask up off the floor; it had fallen off at an undisclosed time in the conflict. His insides burned and recoiled with every movement he made, but the hunger…the hunger still persisted.

It was an extreme, compulsive feeling. Something that he couldn’t shake no matter how hard he tried. It clawed painfully at his gut and his mind, forcing his will to submit to it as it became an all-encompassing need.

He wanted to feed.

He needed to feed.

He needed blood.

Desperately, he got down on his knees and began licking up the satyr’s blood, but he quickly spat it out and let a primal hiss of disgust escape his lips. It made him want to gag, and the compulsion became even greater as he let out a scream of rage that it wasn’t what his body needed to satiate the painful, ruthless craving he was experiencing.

“Riven?”

Ben’s hesitant voice called out to him from behind, and Riven stiffened.

Fangs extended, Riven whirled with a manic look in his eyes—hungrily staring Ben down.

The other man shrieked in terror upon seeing the obvious change, and he didn’t take more than another second to start running, but he was far too slow. The last thing that Ben ever saw was Riven’s bloody, clawed hand reaching out for him—and then everything went black.