Eat Them All: Book 2- Chapter 59 (Patreon)

++Stories of slumbering ancients and ruins boasting long-lost knowledge are fun to tell at parties, but rarely true. All the same, it’s best to investigate each of them with the Witchfinders. One never knows when one might encounter dangerous knowledge, and it’s best to stay ready to shoot it.++

Book 2: Chapter 59

Reggie ignored the fight for a moment and focused on looking for his damned sword. It would’ve been nice to just rush in and help the Irazhtan out right away, but the sad fact was he could do literally nothing without that weapon. Even transformed, he’d not have trusted his claws alone to damage the vampire. 

In fact, he could barely trust the sword, it seemed. As he kept the Varkuun in the corner of his vision, Reggie could see those wounds he’d already inflicted actually closing up before his very eyes. Shit, was this how people felt fighting him? No wonder they were always so angry.

Well now it was Reggie’s turn to be angry, and if he was to be angry properly he needed a weapon capable of taking that anger out on the nearest convenient outlet. He saw the sword lodged in a wall—actually in it. Clearly it’d been sent flying when Reggie was and struck the surface tip-first, except unlike him it was a good deal sturdier than any mere stone. It was stabbed almost hilt-deep into it.

He planted a foot, yanked and dragged it right out, stumbling towards the still-fighting vampires just in time to watch the Irazhtan get half his fingers bitten off. Not good, the Varkuun’s mouth was full of blood now—that’d help him replenish ichor and heal.

Reggie circled around as he did before, but this time he came into the fight with a better plan. He’d already seen that trying to chop through more than a few inches of this enemy’s body was futile. 

Fortunately, there were plenty of body parts that didn’t measure more than a few inches thick. Reggie swung down with all his Strength and had to resist the urge to close his eyes right before impact, then felt a solid impact as the elven blade’s edge struck his enemy’s ankle right above the bone. Blood hissed out and magic metal sunk deep before lodging in something oddly stiff—the tendon, maybe.

The Varkuun definitely noticed this one. 

Reggie melted back from a clumsy blow, that still almost clipped him even as the leg it was leaning on collapsed abruptly. Before the Varkuun could recover, he was coming around for its other side and chopping down at an exposed elbow. Again, Reggie connected cleanly—Krieg had been an asshole, but he’d sparred with him while he had the chance and was seeing the benefit of that now. The Varkuun could do nothing but howl in rage and try to shuffle round and face him.

That might have been a problem had it only been fighting him, Reggie didn’t know if he was even faster than it on one leg, but the Irazhtan interjected himself at that moment with another jet of flames. This one, like the one he’d used to get through the door, was tight, forceful and blue-hot. The fire struck the Varkuun while it stood between them, and Reggie’s skin pricked just from the backwash of it, and he was shielded by something ten times his Toughness. 

More screams escaped the Varkuun, this time grating and sickly. Reggie felt a shiver run through him and wished the damned thing would just die faster. 

No point in wishing though, if he wanted that he had the secret to making it happen clutched tight in his grip. Before the Varkuun could overcome its searing pain, he lashed out another thrust for its neck. The wound he’d left before was probably three-quarters closed, but his aim was good and the elven blade sheared the meat right open. Then his enemy moved in a way Reggie hadn’t expected and the sword went spinning from his hand. 

The Irazhtan was clearly the bigger threat now that his blade was gone, because the Varkuun ignored Reggie entirely and whirled to open up his temporary ally’s guts with one swipe of those inches-long talons. Desiccated entrails hadn’t even hit the floor before Reggie himself pounced, fangs out and sinking right into the jagged wound he’d left in the enemy’s neck.

Drinking blood from a vampire was different. It didn’t pump and circulate, which meant that Reggie was stuck to using his Blood Magic just to drain it at all. This Varkuun’s Toughness made that difficult too, resisting his efforts to drag the ichor free like it was thick mercury he was trying to haul out rather than bodily fluid. The two of them stumbled around, Reggie on the Varkuun’s back and the Varkuun flailing at him while its good ankle scrambled around beneath it, and then they crashed into a wall.

Reggie kept his grip tight, he knew it was the only chance he had of survival. The Varkuun was fighting less like a person and more like an animal now, in fact it had been from the start, thrashing around so hard and fast that even Reggie’s vampiric Strength was struggling just to hold him on it. He kept drinking, siphoning off its blood one ounce at a time, and kept at it even when they both went down and started rolling about on the ground. Stone shivered and tiles popped, his skull glanced off something hard and his vision went bright red in an instant.

Still, Reggie kept his hold. How long passed, minutes? An hour? He had no way of knowing, in a way, without the constant drain of his Form of The Beast, he was doing better now in this contest of endurance than he might have, feeling the Varkuun run dry on strength a lot faster than him. They were still cutting it close.

Bones broke faster than Reggie could heal them. Second by second, his body was being converted into a sack of unsupported meat. He kept biting. The skin was scraped right off his back as they kept rolling around, leaving his own blood to ooze out and stain the floor. He kept biting. He could feel organs bursting under the strain of their fight, his innards threatening to turn into outards, his body on the brink of surrender. He kept biting.

After what felt like hours, the Varkuun finally started to slow, then weaken, then weaken some more. Reggie wasn’t being mangled anymore, just beaten and battered, and he could feel his body starting to fix itself faster now that it wasn’t contending with fresh wounds in-between seconds.

He kept biting.

Tier 5 vampire drained.

Secret Challenge Unlocked: Eating The Master. You have drained the blood of a vampire who possessed a Trait you did at a higher Tier. Reward: Trait Tier increase.

Form of The Beast III unlocked. 

Name: Reginald Smith

Age: 21

Race: Vital Arcanist [Inheritor Race, Tier 3]

Class: None

Attributes: 

(S)Strength 41/44

(P)Speed 41/50

(P)Celerity 41/50

(S)Toughness 40/44

(P)Charisma 41/50

Abilities: 

Blood Magic II

Form of the Beast III

Royal Presence I

Necromancy II

Traits: 

Enhanced Senses I

Regeneration II

Addictive Ichor II

Enhanced Magick I

Reggie wanted so much to be able to test out his new transformation, but that would’ve defeated the whole point of struggling so much in this fight. Instead he settled for just pumping his newly-replenished ichor into speeding up Regeneration II. He could already feel himself running out again by the time he was even mostly fixed up. 

“You drained it?” The Irazhtan was on his feet now, looking at Reggie with what seemed to be disbelief.

“...You were waiting for me to die so you could jump him and drain him yourself,” Reggie guessed. The Irazhtan didn’t shy away like most people would have when faced with that accusation.

“It is the way of things, the weak among us are eaten to fuel the strong. Now you are stronger.”

“Not as strong as him,” Reggie gestured to the rapidly-decomposing corpse at his feet. Did vampires rot faster if they were older?

“Yes you are, because he was stupid as well as powerful.

“What the fuck was his problem anyway? Why’d he attack us?”

“I…do not know. He may have been mad.”

“Mad? Like…what, like a schizophrenic?”

The Irazhtan frowned his way. “How do you know that word?”

Don’t tell him.

“I heard it somewhere in Lorwick, from the Lady maybe? Why?” Reggie knew that Sycily was often inconveniently uncertain about things, but he also knew that when she was certain, she was almost always right. It would be a bad idea to let the truth slip here.

“I see.” The Irazhtan seemed to lose interest after that, fortunately. “Let us move on, we have wasted enough time already.”

“Sure,” Reggie shrugged, glad to be changing the subject. “But what did you mean by mad?”

“...Some of our kind do not handle eternity as well as others. Our brains do not degrade, as humans’ do, but our minds have been known to…”

“Turn into frothing rage monsters and attack other vampires at random?”

“You have such a way with words.”

They ventured deeper, now a good deal more antsy than they were even before. Reggie could feel the newfound power in his blood, and it’d been a while since he’d gotten to enjoy such a feeling. He’d almost forgotten what it was like. One quick session of drinking and he could lift more, jump higher, hit harder, run faster, die slower. Ichor was magical.

His ichor was magical.

Reggie was of the tenth Tier, Inheritor. He still didn’t know what that meant. His Sire had been surprised to see it though, seemed like she’d suspected but not known that it was how he’d turn out. If she’d been unsurprised he would’ve assumed she was just of some eleventh Tier—not that he’d ever heard of one. Not that he’d ever even heard of the tenth, either. Tiers went up to seven, that was a known fact, and there were stories of an eighth among the very oldest of elves. Everything past that was unconfirmed fantasy.

And here he was at the eleventh. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise to grow so fast and have such a high ceiling. What was he inheriting, the world? 

Reggie was hungry.

They came to another door, and the Irazhtan took care of this one just as he had the last. Then they drew deeper still. By now, Reggie was confident he’d never been so far underground in his life. Not in the basement of that ruined castle he explored, not in the sewers of Lorwick, not when he was turned and buried. 

And he was certain that the Irazhtan was here for something specific.

“This is it,” the vampire promised Reggie. He seemed to be so anxious, now that they were closing in on whatever it was, that he’d forgotten to even keep pretending. Reggie watched as he led him through into a new chamber centred around a giant, stone box. There was a lid atop it, which looked like it must have weighed tons, and the whole thing hummed with power.

Reggie didn’t like it. 

“What is this?” he asked. “Some tomb, right? Is this a king’s crypt or something?” the Irazhtan had looked disturbed for a moment, fearful perhaps that Reggie knew he was up to something. Which, obviously, Reggie did, but Reggie was also smart enough to know that it was better to let people think he was stupider than smarter. Nothing got a guard lowered like being surrounded by idiots.

“I…Yes, I think so,” the Irazhtan was too eager to even lie properly. “Stand back, I must study it.” But he didn’t study it. Reggie watched as he moved a hand and sent the stone lid tipping over with a burst of telekinetic force, then, once the dust cleared, looked down at the thing lying within. 

Reggie didn’t know how, but he recognised the vampire for what it was at a glance. 

“Awaken, my master,” the Irazhtan whispered, blood trickling from his wrist suddenly and dripping down onto the sleeper’s lips.