Eat Them All: Book 2- Chapter 42 (Patreon)

++It is good that vampires are so isolated, for many reasons. Chief among them, perhaps, is that it limits learning opportunities in a species that already gains power far more easily than most.++

Book 2: Chapter 42

The foliage rustled, but not properly. Not normally. Ludvich knew an organic sound when he heard one and this was certainly not that. Too…what, regular?

Yes. Too regular, too clean. Which meant it was artificial, deliberate. Listening closer, he heard that it was almost oscillating. Someone tugging, then relaxing, then tugging again on a shrub. This part of the grimwood was near its outskirts, and presented by far the most cover. It meant you needed wits more than eyes to keep ahead of your enemy.

So far he’d been enjoying a tremendous advantage over his trainees simply because of his hearing and, to a lesser extent, his sense of smell. That was to say nothing of his newest power. Wild Thing I allowed Ludvich to command animals and, by focusing and staying still, shift his consciousness into theirs for a moment. It didn’t let him puppet their bodies remotely like he’d known vampires to do, but it did allow him to share what they saw.

He didn’t use it now. The trainees wouldn’t be going up against that when the elves arrived, and he didn’t want them learning unhelpful or actively impeding habits to deal with it by training with him. 

He only wished he could suppress his physical senses too.

Ludvich didn’t head for the rustling, it was such an obvious distraction. Instead he grew close enough that he could’ve heard as a human and paid attention to its tempo, figuring out some timing to it. When the rustling was at its strongest and loudest, that was when it was being pulled. The gentle shifts were when it was being allowed to spring back. 

So string, then. It was on the end of a string, being tugged. Too far for Ludvich to tell which direction the tugging was coming from, as a human at least, so he didn’t risk guessing. 

Instead, he started circling right around it with a wide berth, keeping low and quiet, moving slow enough that his own strides were near-soundless.

Ludvich knew that patience was still his big advantage over the trainees, and it would especially show itself against the elves. Men sweeping through an area in force got cocky and sloppy, they didn’t take their time as they needed to. 

Nothing beat a man more thoroughly than having him certain of his own victory. 

His trainees were learning, whatever string they were using now was either thin or buried enough that Ludvich couldn’t see it being tugged, but they still had a long way to go before they could even dream of getting the better of him. He was running out of time.

Sudden irritation sent Ludvich moving faster, and his sweep of the area took only a few more seconds.

Then he froze at the feeling of a gun barrel pressed up against the side of his head. 

“Got you this time.”

Ludvich stood there, taking a long moment to realise what had just happened before he finally looked over to the side and saw one of the trainees, Eryl, squatting just beside him. He’d been covered in mud and leaves, obscured at the base of a bush just outside Ludvich’s search radius. 

Waiting for Ludvich to be lured past him as he searched the space around that rustling shrub.

Behind and around Eryl, more of the trainees were closing in with grins on their faces. 

“We got you!” Eryl repeated, drawing the gun back and, Ludvich saw, not seeming to quite believe his own eyes. “Ha! What do you have to say now, you old fuck?!”

Ludvich wasn’t entirely sure himself. He’d spent the last three weeks essentially just terrorising these boys as best he could, ensuring they were miserable through every waking hour and desperately applying all the pressure he was able to muster in the hopes of hardening them.

Well, now they’d hardened. Enough so that he’d genuinely been taken off-guard. Could any of them have hoped to beat him by themselves? Probably not, not one time in a thousand.

As a team, though…

“Let’s keep training,” Ludvich grunted. He saw the trainees’ faces fall, anger bubbling up, then realised his mistake. They needed to know they were making progress. “...And see if another week is enough for all of you to beat me more often than not.”

He’d never been good with people, and it was no surprise to see these ones were less than reassured by his attempt at reassurance. Ludvich got the feeling his cheeks would be burning, if his body still circulated blood, and he just spat at his feet in frustration and got moving. 

Despite his fumble, the overall mood of things made a sharp improvement following that. There were really only so many ways such an obvious success could have been interpreted by his trainees. 

Ludvich could only hope they enjoyed a lot more successes soon. Allies who could get the better of him as a group one time in fifty weren’t going to be of much use, however good a sign of progress that was.

***

“You were really unable to translate all of this?” The Irazhtan asked, staring pointedly at Reggie’s pile of ‘impossible’ tomes and looking as though he were considering even then whether he ought to be using smaller words.

“I don’t speak those languages, or read them,” Reggie snapped. 

“Why?” the Irazhtan asked. 

It was actually a contender for the most ridiculous question Reggie had ever been asked, and for a few moments he just stood there staring and trying to wrap his head around the fact that something older than Norvhan had bothered to utter it.

“Why would I?” Reggie asked. “Do you know how hard it is to learn languages?”

“Extremely easy.” 

“Not when everyone you know wants to kill you and you need to steal most of the books you read.”

The Irazhtan paused at that. “Are you exaggerating?”

“...Yes,” Reggie replied, not sure where this was going. “Only most of the people I knew wanted to kill me.”

“And yet you still acquired this much linguistic knowledge. Fascinating.” The Irazhtan didn’t seem fascinated though, he moved on from Reggie like he’d forgotten he existed.

Reggie just sat there beside him and watched as the vampire started reading through the books himself. When Reggie did this, he’d mainly just been looking for highlights. Krieg had wanted information, but he’d not had any interest in full transcriptions of it all. Just notable things that gave insight into his sire’s opinions, passtimes, activities or goals. 

The Irazhtan seemed to be gathering much more than just that, though. Reggie watched as parchment, gathered from who-knew where, lay itself out beside him, along with an inkpot and quill. While his hands were busied flicking through the books, the quill itself moved independently.

Reggie watched, thought back to the Irazhtan’s ability to throw things without touching them, and drew the obvious conclusion. He was writing. 

Writing every word he read, as he read, all without missing a beat. Judging by the rate at which lines were appearing on pages, he was doing it fast too. His Speed was nothing to crow home about, but that Celerity was worth remembering. Almost inhuman 

No, not almost inhuman. Just inhuman. That quill was moving in a way that Reggie doubted the Irazhtan’s own hand could, taking full advantage of its added flexibility and lack of a physical grip. 

It wasn’t exactly a good use of Reggie’s time, not with so much else that needed doing, but he couldn’t help but feel enraptured just seeing it. After a few moments of his watching in silence, the Irazhtan finally spoke.

“What powers do you possess?” he asked him. “And what is your Tier? Your permanent Tier, I mean, it will help me narrow down who your sire is.”

Ah, shit. Reggie had been silently dreading questions like this, he still didn’t know nearly enough about vampire society to confidently answer them. Not while being sure he wouldn’t unknowingly give up some tidbit that would paint a target on his back.

He took his time in considering this one, as much of it as he could without arousing suspicion.

“I’m Master Tier as well,” he said at last. Sycily had told Reggie that it was rare, but not amazingly so, for a vampire to be as high as that. He’d have normally preferred a lower Tier, but he figured that the higher it was, the easier it would be to explain his growth rate. 

Granted, no matter what, the Irazhtan would see through him eventually all the same. A Master vampire would be gaining a new Attribute point at literally one sixth the speed Reggie himself did.

Shit, maybe he should’ve risked claiming to be Tier 6 instead. 

“Unusual, for a Tier so high to be found in a vampire so young.”

“I…didn’t know that,” Reggie shrugged, making a show of being open and a tiny bit lost. If he was thought to be ignorant, then he’d be assumed too ignorant to tell convincing lies. 

Or so he hoped.

“What was your Sire like? Describe them.”

Reggie paused for a moment.

Sycily, what Tier was my Sire likely to be?

I do not know.

Well shit. Reggie was on his own for this, then. Was it possible he’d just randomly spawned as an Inheritor-Tier and jumped five or more Tiers above the woman who turned him?

Possible, yes. Likely…he didn’t know. And if his Sire was Inheritor-Tier herself, or even close to it, then she’d almost definitely be recognisable by appearance, right? Unless she was disguised.

But he couldn’t take that chance. 

“Local, I think,” Reggie said slowly. “Though she might’ve been doing an accent. She was fast and kind of gruff, like she was always in a bad mood. Short, tough. Do you know her?”

A pure fabrication, that description, so he was surprised when the Irazhtan got a thoughtful look on his face.

“I know of several vampires who may be responsible then. Are any of the following names familiar to you…” Reggie pretended to try and recognise the list he was recited, then shook his head. There was no benefit to pretending he did, as far as he saw it. It would only box him into being called out for not knowing specifics he should have about whoever he claimed to have been sired by.

And that was assuming each name on that list was real, rather than a fabrication made to figure out if he was lying. Could never be too careful with the undead, they were all lying bastards.

He would know, of course. Being a lying bastard himself.

“What abilities do you possess?” the Irazhtan pressed. 

“What’s with all the questions?” Reggie snapped, figuring that now was as good a time as any to whip out ye olde ‘I’m bothered by this interrogation simply because I’m easily bothered’ card. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t nearly as easy to deflect as Krieg. The Irazhtan’s focus remained as coherent as a sunbeam, and just as problematic for Reggie’s continued unlife.

“I am assessing what you are capable of.”

“Why?”

Reggie tried to fake a confidence he didn’t feel as he stared the Irazhtan down. He was pretty sure this wouldn’t turn violent, which was the only reason he felt comfortable risking this kind of provocation. With Krieg busy overseeing the mines, Reggie would be lucky to last five seconds in a fight. Even with Form of The Beast still stuffed up his sleeve.

“Because it is not often that I encounter someone able to teach himself to read, let alone read semi-fluently in several other languages besides the one he was raised to speak. I am strongly considering offering you tutorship in the arcane arts.”

Reggie didn’t quite start salivating, but it was a near thing. Good that he resisted, too. 

Blood made an awful mess of things.