BloodStar

Hours later, Xenia peeled the very last piece of skin from the man’s heel of his right foot. She held the piece of skin pinched between her two fingers and lightly tossed it onto a small mound of the man’s other pieces of skin previously composing his hide. The skin flaps ranged from very small to several feet in length such as the long continuous piece removed from his upper back down to his posterior upper legs.

Xenia smirked at the bloodied pile of skin and then moved her gaze to the man laying before her. She ran her hand up his body starting from his toe. She dragged her hand upwards stopping at his chest before lifting her hand and licking the blood off her palm.

The man lay still like a big piece of red meat with two stark white eye balls staring back at Xenia, “I hope you had your fun, lady. Because the fun stops here. You can’t breach the stone’s barrier, and… and… you’re dead once my boss gets here. I only wish I would be alive to see Warlord Ganon skin you alive.”

The man laughed for a moment until he was interrupted by coughing up his own blood. Xenia held her finger to his lips, “Shhhhhh. You’re ignorance knows no bounds. I’ll be back to celebrate with you once I have the stone in hand.”

She then left the man laying with no skin as she slowly walked to the back of the large cavern where a narrow conduit led her further back into a small chamber. As she approached, a glowing white light reflected off the walls until she turned the corner to see a concentric barrier of ki surrounding an inner circular area of 10 feet in diameter. Within this cordoned space, a small centrally located podium held a fist-sized, glowing-white, mana stone.

Xenia walked up to the barrier and removed her glove to run her finger along it. As she did, the tip of her pointer finger sizzled off, “My my. So he wasn’t lying. This is quite the barrier.”

Xenia raised her power level gathering ki around herself. She then punched the barrier forcefully only to have her fist disintegrate as she made contact. Her momentum carried her arm forward disintegrating her flesh and bone halfway up her forearm before she could stop.

She looked down at her right hand and forearm, or lack thereof, with wide eyes as she pleasantly gasped from pain and surprise. She bit her lower lip and moaned as she watched her arm reconstitute and heal itself, “What a pleasant surprise! Maybe there is someone worthy of me on this planet after all. Worthy to give me an heir, or at the very least, worthy to give me a good time on the battlefield or in the bedroom.

Without wasting a second, Xenia activated her Bloodlust state. Her hair turned a crimson red and her eyes followed. The surface vasculature of her body began to glow a deep red, and ki swirled around her body boundlessly shaking the ground below.

She then thrust her fist back at the barrier. This time her fist met the barrier with a standstill. She held her fist against the barrier maintaining a massive force behind it as she grunted and moaned until at last she withdrew her fist.

Although she was unharmed… so was the barrier.

Xenia ran her tongue along her teeth before sticking her tongue against the inside of her cheek. She folded her arms and tapped her foot, “How bothersome.”

She then turned about and marched back into the larger cavern. She made a direct path to the flayed man and barked at him, “Who made that barrier! Tell me!”

The man turned his stark white eyes and red meat-face towards Xenia and coughed up blood before saying, “What’s the problem? Couldn’t crack it?”

The man then laughed out loud before saying, “If that is all the power you have, you’ll never get through. Red hair, red eyes, red ki? Who do you think you are… a BloodStar?”

The man continued laughing at his own comments until Xenia bloodbent him quiet and yelled, “And what if I am? Tell me what you know of BloodStars!?”

She smiled down at him and then bloodbent into his mind, internally speaking to him, “I could dig it out of your mind if you prefer not to tell me.”

At the sound of her voice inside his head without seeing her lips move, the man quickly turned to comply. He had already been physically tortured, and he wasn’t ready to be mentally tortured as well.

“Everyone knows. The BloodStar Family lost the war. The BloodStar mana stone harvested from the BloodStar matriarch before her death sits under lock and key within the safest place in the world they say. The entire family perished, but some say one lone daughter escaped somehow through a portal to a different planet. The great empires of this world sent their own to hunt her down. But the connection was lost. No one has ever returned.”

Xenia wrinkled up her nose and smirked, “No one?”

The man looked Xenia up and down realizing she had the physical attributes of a BloodStar as well as the vicious tendencies to torture and kill, “You? No. No way. That would be impossible. No one has ever returned.”

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She smiled at him playfully, “I’ll be back. Stone in hand. Just you watch. As only a BloodStar can!”

Xenia returned to the small cavern housing the mana stone behind the barrier, and she held her hand out just in front of the barrier. She then created a void portal. She stepped through the void portal and immediately stepped out on the other side of the barrier within the cordoned circular area of 10 feet in diameter.

The air was hot within the barrier, and she slowly walked up to the podium. She reached out and grabbed the stone in her hand feeling its power surge through her body. She looked down at it with a proud smile and turned to walk back through her void portal still waiting for her.

She walked back to the larger cavern, stone in hand, and presented it to her skinned toy, “Now tell me, am I a BloodStar or am I a BloodStar?”

She playfully tilted her head and smiled down at him as he stared at her speechlessly. The man genuinely couldn’t believe a BloodStar had returned to this world.

Xenia gripped his bloody scalp, and said, “Now hold still. I quite liked what you told me, and I’ll be extracting every ounce of information you have.”

Xenia then bloodbent into his mind sifting through a massive amount of uncatalogued information. While she found it incredibly useful to read people’s thoughts and minds at present, she was not as practiced into diving deep into the depths of a human mind searching for information she didn’t even have the details for.

After several minutes, she realized the futility of her search sighing, “No matter.” She then turned her gaze to the man’s stark white eyes, “You have proven very useful to me, so I will put you out of your misery. How does that sound?”

The man didn’t know what to say. On one hand, he didn’t want to die; on the other hand, he didn’t want to live. The pain was excruciating.

Xenia never intended to await his answer. She climbed atop him straddling his body with her leather pants riding up against his muscle and subcutaneous tissue smearing blood all over her pants.

“Tell me. Were the BloodStars of this world known for their cultural practice of eating human flesh?”

Xenia was actively reading his mind and obtained her answer swiftly as she said, “So they were. Probably something you’ve never seen. Definitely something you’ve never experienced. But guess what? It’s your lucky day. I’m a hungry girl.”

She released him from her bloodbending allowing him to scream and flail against her as she plunged down and began to take bites out his chest muscles. Her first several ravenous bites tore through the pectoralis major, and she continued biting deeper into the pectoralis minor.

She leaned up to enjoy chewing her bites of meat and wiped her mouth with a swipe of her forearm before diving back in. This time, she obliterated the inferolateral aspect of his chest to such a degree that she was able to bite off a small piece of the serratus anterior muscle as it wrapped forward from the posterior ribs.

She raised back up, straddling him, as she moaned and chewed his chest muscle, “Mmm. Mmm. So good but just a little dry. Without skin, it’s amazing how quickly the human body dehydrates and dries up. And like a dry steak, all we need is a little bit of sauce to bring it back to life.”

The man was fearful for his life, yes; however, the fear of the unknown and the fear of being eaten alive smothered him even more as the monster atop him smiled down and nodded her head at him.

She dove down for his neck sucking on the side of his neck muscles gingerly where she had previously given him a hickey, “Feel familiar? Probably feels even better with no skin between us.”

She continued toying with her prey sucking on his lateral neck until she said, “But with no skin, that’s one less layer between me, a very hungry girl, and your precious and fragile and oh so vital carotid artery.”

Before he could respond, Xenia bit down hard on his neck and tore away the muscle and tissue protecting the vital vessel group below. Hiding between connective soft tissue and small muscles of the neck, she eyed the carotid artery, internal jugular vein, and external jugular vein like a hungry lion eyeing an injured and helpless antelope.

She took her time and kissed the rubbery vessel wall of the artery and veins, even taking the large caliber vessels in her teeth and playing with them running her tongue over them. She then took the carotid artery in her mouth and bit down hard.

A pressurized spray of arterial blood shot into her mouth, and she let go. Blood sprayed her in the face, and she moaned enjoying the blood running down her face before pouncing back at the hydrant artery and tearing an entire segment away.

Xenia grabbed the loose end of the artery and vaguely directed it to spray on the man’s chest soaking his dry muscle in blood.

As a pool of blood formed over his chest muscles seeping into and running over them, Xenia smiled at the man as he quickly faded into death, “Bon appetit to me. Bon mort to you.”

Xenia then continued biting and feasting on the man’s moist chest muscles enjoying her well-prepared, raw steak until both sides of his chest were completely barren of muscle all the way down to the underlying ribs.

She stood and bloodbent all of the accumulated blood on her mouth, hair, and outfit off of her and threw it against the wall giving her a spectacularly clean appearance for someone who had just eaten a man’s chest clean through.

With the mana stone in hand, she walked back to the rear chamber, “What to do with you? This barrier certainly seems safe enough, doesn’t it? Hmm.”

Xenia mulled over the idea of using this chamber as a storage space, an area for safekeeping. Back home, she had the entire BloodStar Empire to keep her belongings, and no one would be foolish enough to steal from her. However, on this new planet, she had nothing of the sort.

“For now, I can think of no better place.” She used a void portal to walk past the strong ki barrier and placed the stone back on the podium.

The important thing to Xenia was that she now had access to the mana stone, and she also had a storage space for important items. She pondered leaving BloodBane and Blood Scourge behind; however, she ultimately decided to keep those items on her self.

She turned around and left the chamber, walked through the cavern while admiring the dead men one last time, swam through the underwater tunnel, and snaked her way back out of the cave. From the entrance of the seaside cliff, she teleported back on board the Neptune to find Tiber still unconscious with her doppelganger ki clone snuggling him from behind.

Xenia snapped her fingers recalling her clone, and she then stripped out of her clothes leaving everything on the floor at the end of the bed. She then crawled into bed, snuggling Tiber from behind with a smile on her face.