Raphael approached like a shadow, no sound, no displacement of air that would register. All Blitz felt was a sudden cold at his back.
He turned on instinct, eyes sweeping for the opponent who had been absent from his field of vision for too long.
Nothing there.
Then Death Crow drove into his throat.
The blade went deep, the dragon blood on the edge igniting on contact, Blitz's blood at the wound site boiling immediately, the fluid there scorching away into ash and vapor, the burning spreading inward from the entry point in all directions.
The pain hit his rational mind like a physical impact, disrupting the control he'd been maintaining over the blood-spear formation. The spears went still in the air, suspended, waiting for a command that his fractured concentration couldn't deliver.
