Eat Them All: Book 3- Chapter 3 (Patreon)

++Many of a vampire’s greatest powers are ones they possess right away. It is often the fundamental powers of a bloodline that grant them the greatest strength.++

Book 3: Chapter 3

Tier 4 creature devoured, bonus Attributes gained.

+1 Strength

+1 Toughness

+1 Speed

+1 Celerity

+1 Charisma

Name: Reginald Smith

Age: 21

Race: Vital Arcanist [Inheritor Race, Tier 3]

Class: None

Attributes: 

(S)Strength 43/44

(P)Speed 43/50

(P)Celerity 43/50

(S)Toughness 42/44

(P)Charisma 43/50

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

Another day, another chunk of calcified power broken off from the world and settled into Reggie’s body. He put it away with the rest. 

“Enjoying yourself?” the Lady asked from beside him. He was standing over the mangled wolf spider, now at least a few stone lighter on account of all the bits he’d hacked off. Reggie had been enjoying himself, and obviously it’d been written on his face. He had to fight the smile back as he let the stolen might settle deeper in his core. 

“Thanks for the meal,” he grunted. 

The Lady smiled, and for the first time in a while Reggie got the feeling it was sincere.

“Genuine gratitude? I’m surprised.” He figured he was being slighted somehow, but didn’t care.

“I’m a lot stronger now.”

“How much stronger?”

“+1 to Strength.” The answer escaped Reggie before he could think about it. It was a good one. In fact, it was about the only one that wouldn’t get him killed. Even still, it was apparently an exceptional one. The Lady’s eyebrows shot up.

“You’d better not be lying to me, boy.”

“I’m not,” Reggie managed, squirming as he said it. +1 Strength from a wolf spider one Tier his superior meant his maximum Tier was 6—Hero. Higher than the Lady’s own. 

He’d just made himself into a long-term threat, but at least he hadn’t made himself a kill-on-sight sort of event.

Or so he thought. To his surprise, the Lady took a step closer and grabbed him by the chin. Turned his head one way and the other, narrowed her eyes, frowned. Thought. “You don’t have the look of a Hero.”

“Uh…what?” Reggie was on fire today, a veritable wordsmith. He could probably talk his way out of a sunrise. For once, the Lady didn’t seem to mind.

“Our elders have preferences and trends in who they sire. None of the Legends I know of, the Tier 7s, tend towards selections that look like you. Not in these parts at least.”

Reggie did not like being touched by people. Was that a schizophrenic thing?

Probably not.

[I agree with Sycily, I think you’re just used to people attacking you when they do that.]

It was nice to have the voices in his head assuring him what was and wasn’t a sign of madness. Almost as nice as it was when the Lady’s fingers eased off his jaw. There’d been an intense Strength hidden in that small hand, and feeling it against his skin was very much like having a loaded gun aimed at the side of his head. 

Maybe worse, Reggie wasn’t exactly at risk from gunfire anymore.

“We will need to track down your sire,” the Lady told him. It didn’t sound like a question. “You lied about the details you gave me?”

Ah, shit. She had a good memory too. 

“...Yeah.”

“Fair enough,” she shrugged. “You were scared I would drain your blood to raise my own permanent Tier if I knew the truth. Understandable.” 

He hadn’t been scared of that actually, hadn’t even known it was possible. 

“Yes.” 

The Lady nodded again, more to herself, then turned to her Knight. 

“You’re not to touch this one,” she told him sternly. “The blood tells, and this one carries the ichor of Kings and Queens.”

Reggie felt hatred from the Knight, and he knew, then, that one of them would kill the other. But not today, and maybe not for a long while. 

They had more pressing kills to attend to, anyway.

The Witchfinder academy was a lot farther away when you were running than when you were flying, even when the running in question would’ve left a racehorse breaking three out of four legs just trying to match a quarter of its speed. Still, they were moving quickly enough. Reggie actually managed to estimate their speed as a fraction of however fast you needed to be for sound to need catch-up time. It kept him occupied while he sprinted to what might’ve been his own grave.

Reggie remembered the Witchfinder’s academy vividly. The sight of it was pretty much seared into his memory, more than things generally were now that his brain had gotten all vampiric and clear. He’d known exactly what to expect in returning to it, and had tempered himself to see it.

He didn’t see it. In fact, he didn’t see anything even remotely like it. He didn’t even see a damned academy anymore, only the thing that had started growing on it. Reggie didn’t know where that phrase came from, ‘thing that had started growing’, but it was the only one that felt right. That felt accurate.

It was, he supposed, a castle that he was looking at, but nothing like any castle he’d ever seen before. Granted, not counting illustrations in books, he’d only ever seen the one. But this one wasn’t like that at all.

Squat and broad, and pitch black. It looked like it was made from glass rather than stone, glinting and lustrous but so dark that Reggie didn’t see much of a shine to it. The thing was weird too, looking smaller than any castle he’d ever seen. He only realised after a few moments of staring that it was growing from the front of the Witchfinder’s academy, bursting through the walls and poking out like some plague-swelling on the larger building’s skin.

“Damn,” the Lady whispered.

“Damn?” Reggie asked. “Damn what? Why damn?”

He didn’t know what was going on here, but he didn’t like the look of that castle and didn’t like the idea of an unexpected building having bad things on the horizon for him. Killing a wolf spider wasn’t feeling so impressive anymore.

“We need more men,” the Lady sighed. “We need more of everything. We need—”

—”to reconsider your positions,” came a voice from behind them. Reggie whirled around to find, of course, the Irazhtan, the first one he’d met. Staring at him with a blank face from, this time, a good ten paces away. Too far to sprint through before he could get off any magic, even if he didn’t know about Reggie’s Form of The Beast which, this time, he of course did.

“The Lady of Lorwick,” the Irazhtan nodded respectfully. “And her Knight. I have heard about both of you of course.” He did not elaborate on what, exactly, he’d heard. Just stood there and smiled. 

***

Velitheans, that was the vampire Lineage most of these soldiers made up. Velitheans meant pine. 

One of the bad things about living next to a grimwood was that it made normal wood harder to come by, and you already needed to be quite particular about the breeds of pine that would actually do their magical work on Velithean vampires. Fortunately, Ludvich was a career paranoid. He’d made sure Norvhan had a few of the trees growing nearby long before he settled in it, and promptly snuck out into the woods to find one now. 

It was burned down, torched to charcoal and smashed into crumbs. As were the rest. The vampires had clearly gotten to them first, and done…exactly what Ludvich would have in their positions. If he was surprised that they got to them so fast, that surprise didn’t last long. How fast would he find the trees, exactly, if his life depended on it?

Well his life did depend on it, he’d just been too slow to snatch up the necessary weapon. Ludvich didn’t give up that easily though. He sprinted back to Norvhan and gathered up a few of the most trusted thralls, as far as any addict could be trusted, with his problem. He invited his Witchfinder trainees, too.

It felt odd to be around them, Ludvich wasn’t used to proximity with those who actually liked him. The unnerving feeling of it was far preferable to the risk of this latest plan not working though.

“We need to find pine,” he told the group. Four of them, after the fighting, but four who were better than they’d been in training. Battle had tempered all of their nerves, and in the days since Norvhan fended off its attackers each had acquired far more skill at stealth and observation than Ludvich had trained into them. A lot of men were like that, trained almost compulsively after a fright, felt certain that something more was coming to threaten them and couldn’t help themselves but prepare to deal with it.

In this case, they had clearly been right.

“Pine,” more than one of the men echoed. “Why pine?”

“The vampires here now don’t like it,” Ludvich explained. He’d considered giving more detail about the specific weaknesses of different kinds, but had decided against it. If there were any traitors here, he liked the idea of them thinking pine was his own weakness too. Getting assassinated with a pointy stick gave him much better odds than if they showed up with muskets and pikes.

But that was a concern for later.

“Do any of you know where we can find it?”

None did, but all seemed intent to look. Ludvich had, after all, chosen them partly for balls.

“Should be some in the town, probably a fair amount. Ask around, examine it. I don’t know. Point is there’s lots of wood here and some of it has to be pine. We don’t need a lot, just…enough to make a knife, or something as big as a knife.” In truth, he would’ve preferred far more. Better yet, enough for crossbow bolts, though he wasn’t sure how effective such slow projectiles would be on vampires of this power.

Ludvich’s musing was interrupted again by another question, this one more hesitant and almost fearful. “Sir, uh…what about your blood?”

He was slow, today, was Ludvich. It took him a moment to follow.

“My ichor? What about it?”

“It makes people strong, right?” the almost-Witchfinder added. “Makes them Tough as well, they survive more and heal fast. They move fast. It’s just an all-round improvement?”

“You can’t be asking what I think you arem!” another of them scowled, looking as disgusted as Ludvich felt. “Seriously? That stuff, it fucking brainwipes you. Turns you into a slave!” His outrage was so strong that he seemed to briefly forget his company. Only after the words had already escaped him did he finally glance over at Ludvich, looking suitably nervous.

“Uh, sorry, about that, Ludvich…”

“No, you’re right.” Ludvich affixed the boy who’d spoken with one of his scarier looks, the sort that tended to have people scarpering in the other direction. Unfortunately, the drawback to training Witchfinders was that they tended to have tougher nerves once you were done. “Do you have any idea what you just suggested?”

The boy didn’t look away, he met his gaze and actually matched it glare for glare.

“Yes, I suggested giving us all a fighting chance. Enthrallment wears off, right?”

Ludvich hesitated. “It…does.”

“So what, you’re gonna refuse to temporarily do it, even if it means our deaths? You get to just decide that?”

Ludvich hesitated again. “My ichor doesn’t do what you think it does, only Reggie’s has that power.” 

Faces fell. “So that’s it then?” the Witchfinder asked. “We’re just screwed?”

“...Not necessarily,” Ludvich murmured.