Eat Them All: Book 3- Chapter 5 (Patreon)

++It’s sort of hard to over-emphasise the “elder vampire fights are beyond compare” thing.++

Book 3: Chapter 5

Reggie had read about cannon explosions. Nasty things, they were. Some of the most energetic events in the world. Usually caused by some idiot overloading the already-massive black powder charges needed to fire a proper artillery piece, the resulting rupture of its iron barrel essentially turned the cannon into a multi-ton grenado. Men had been cut in half by individual pieces of shrapnel, or just ripped to pieces by the shockwave. 

This was worse. The ground beneath himself and the Irazhtan simply disappeared as Reggie felt hot pain run over his skin, and the air sizzled and dried out. The water was being boiled right out of it, he realised, flash-vaporized by the heat. If Reggie were a normal human, he’d probably have already been steamed to death just from that alone.

Instead he was just hurt, a lot. Then whisked up into the air, locked onto the Irazhtan with the talons of one hand while he tried to bring around the other and run him through. They were flying up, down, diagonally, cutting through the skies in jagged arcs and snarling, both of them fully animal by the time they hit their first tree. The tree got the worse of their impact, falling apart as a cloud of splinters while they tore away from it and kept grappling.

Up close, Reggie had the clear advantage. He’d also seen enough of the Irazhtan’s magic now to know that he would certainly not keep that advantage out in the open, where the vampire could unleash all the magic he wanted without risk of hurting himself. If he could just free his sword-arm he’d be doing plenty of damage. Maybe enough to win before they parted.

But no such luck, an impact with the dirt left them separated. Reggie bounced off the ground and bounced through a tree and stopped only as he hit a boulder. The boulder bounced off him, disappearing somewhere into the forest behind him as he scrambled up to his feet and started sniffing out his disappeared enemy. The Irazhtan’s location was given away by a single, subtle clue; the giant fucking fireball screaming out of the dark straight for Reggie. This time it connected.

For the second time in as many minutes, Reggie’s world became nothing but an explosion. This time he was far closer to its epicentre, and feeling a far more intense release of energy, than before. His skin cracked and hissed as the moisture dried away and the bones rattled, his legs stopped working. Something just broke inside his head. By the time it was over, he was already blinded. Stumbling around and snarling, swinging at random. He couldn’t see and could barely even hear, the Irazhtan’s laughter cut through him all the same.

“You won’t surprise me this time, Smith. I have already seen your tricks.” The voice rang out from behind Reggie, and he almost lunged for it. Hesitated. Then lunged the opposite way. The Irazhtan was no fool, and not for the first time Reggie’s paranoia proved itself an asset as he smashed into a solid body and heard his enemy yelp in surprise. They both went down again, but this time Reggie’s sword was free and with the room to work.

He couldn’t see the stab or its location, so his image of where the sword went was really more of a deduction. By the Irazhtan’s snarl of agony, Reggie guessed it was somewhere painful. By the gurgle it turned into when he twisted the blade, he figured it was near the neck. Lucky hit then, he didn’t intend to waste it. Reggie leaned down and bit hard on the first chunk of meat to get near his face, then started thrashing around.

Blood poured into him, it tasted like Promethean fire. Reggie was already pushing his ichor into the ruin his eyes had become and feeling vision slowly return. By now, he could even make out a blurry outline of the Irazhtan’s silhouette. Not precisely enough to see the limb move before it struck him.

He felt it easily enough, then felt clawed fingers close around his head. Reggie was confused for all of an instant before he felt the fire again, and his thoughts disappeared into the inferno and the only thing he knew was pain and fear. Instantly he scrambled back, instincts taking over, but his enemy retained his grip and the heat kept coming, melting the skin from one side of his face, charring muscle. In moments bone would be exposed, then shortly after that the fire would be eating away at his brain. Reggie wouldn’t last long after that.

The vision was getting better in his eyes, now he could just about make out the arm leading back from his enemy’s grip. He’d dropped his sword in the panic, so instead of steel he gripped the limb with talons, felt them break skin and dig deep into muscle as he yanked it up towards his mouth. A feint; the Irazhtan twisted and turned to keep from his forearm being bitten, and in focusing on that his grip relaxed slightly. Reggie took that chance to turn his own head and clamp down on a finger, maybe the thumb. 

It came free instantly, blood followed.

But for that moment Reggie’s mouth was unattached to the enemy, and with one tug the Irazhtan separated his talons from the arm they were biting too. Then telekinesis took its hold and Reggie went flying high, wind rushing in his ears and stinging his still-tender eyes. By the time he stopped his flight upwards into the sky, his sight had improved enough that he could almost make out the trees far below him if he strained them. In fact, he could tell by sight as well as feeling when gravity started dragging him back down to the dirt.

Reggie was spinning too fast to orient himself before impact, and even if he hadn’t been he doubted he’d have managed to fly away. When he was a dozen or so paces above the ground, force seized him and dragged him down all the harder. It was like fifty other Reggies landed on top of him all at once, and the poor forest floor was no match at all for the collision. Dirt shot high like detritus from a volcano and he swore the ground actually shook. Reggie went through the soil, found a layer of hard rock beneath and then went clean through that. By the time he turned, groaning, to gaze back up the way he’d come, he’d been imprinted in the earth deeper than a damned casket.

You need to move. Sycily, there in his head like always, urging him on. Reggie found himself listening to her more than he did his own fear, dragging himself out of the newly-made crater with the urgency of death.

But not enough, the Irazhtan’s telekinetic grip found him again and hoisted him up. Reggie thrashed around, panic taking him—he couldn’t move. Didn’t have anything for his inhuman limbs to kick off and propel themselves from, had nothing to grip and haul his body by; he was just suspended off the ground like a fly caught in amber. 

His eyes were mostly healed now, he could see the Irazhtan. See him standing fifty feet away with both hands up, trembling despite dead nerves as more magic than Reggie had ever controlled ran through them. His sword was gone, he had no leverage, he…had his blood magic.

And smashing through those boulders had gashed open his scalp.

Reggie dragged the ichor out and wrapped it around himself, then started grinding himself ahead with a snarl. Not enough. They were at an impass, Reggie’s blood acted more easily on him, while his opponent compensated with pure power. Form of the Beast turned into their tie-breaker. Just as he thought he’d be exhaused in place, his body shifted again. It didn’t enlarge and bolster its strength, like the last time his Ability had improved. No, this time something just shot out of his back, calling on a new wash of sensations as he felt air on new limbs, great flaps of flesh and membrane clawing at the air behind him.

Wings. His new wings burst free and began flapping that way birds did when they were too hurt to fly and too dumb to know it. Reggie clearly wasn’t the sharpest himself, because he didn’t give up any easier than they did. 

The Irazhtan was looking less confident now, Reggie could see it on his face as his eyes finished growing back and the distance between them shrunk even more. “I’m coming to get you,” he grinned. There was a note of hysteria in his voice that surprised even him, and seemed to scare the metaphorical shit out of the Irazhtan. Fine by Reggie, he could use every advantage he could get, and if his enemy was starting to freak out and panic then that was fine with him. 

Thirty feet between them, getting less by the moment. His wings were beating so hard Reggie feared they’d break under their own strength.

“You…know…it’s still not too late…to…join…us…” The Irazhtan’s words were strained, like each one spoken was another ton added for his shoulders to bear. His body trembled, and glistened with beads of red. Blood. Sweat. Reggie almost laughed. Apparently vampires didn’t only cry ichor, didn’t only spit it. 

In a few more moments, that sweat would have a lot of company from the rest of the Irazhtan’s veins.

Of course, that would have been a good event for Reggie, which meant that it violated the most fundamental laws of the universe and could never have been allowed to happen. Before he’d so much as halved the distance again, the world erupted. This time there was no saying what the scale was, it just enveloped everything in their vicinity without discrimination.

Reggie, being in the air and with two wings out to catch wind, was among the most strongly buffeted objects. 

He hit a tree, split through it, turned around and hit several more trees, each one splintering a shade less violently than the last until one was finally thick and far enough to catch him. Reggie still ended up beheading the poor thing, ruining what had to be centuries of slow growth in a single kinetic instant as the bark burst and pulped and fell away to let gravity do its work. 

For the second time that night, his vision was a mess of smeared colour. This time the problem was only partly his eyes. The ringing in his ears and the unresponsiveness of his limbs told him that shockwave had absolutely mangled his brain matter, and he spent long seconds just resting there enough to see it even partly recover. 

By the time his eyes focused on the battle unfolding ahead of him, Reggie had seen enough to be pretty sure he had no place in it.

There were fires as tall as the trees swirling around like water currents, spiralling infernos that would’ve melted steel and cremated humans. Shapes were moving in them; the Lady and the Knight, he thought. He reckoned the bigger figure was the Knight, unless sheer heat and burning had simply robbed him of his size. The Lady, to his shock, seemed to be moving faster between them. More significantly, too.

He saw flames part, then something streaked out that was big and jagged and smashed right into the elder Irazhtan. It disappeared from sight; bye-bye, too quick for the eyeholes of old Reggie and flitting around faster than he could’ve jerked his pupils about. He tracked only where it had been, following the churning dirt as craters erupted one way and the other like explosive mortar shells were bombarding the area.

Then he dropped his gaze to see the other Irazhtan, the younger one, crawling out of his own crater, ground smouldering around him where the flames had made it molten. They locked eyes, and Reggie knew the fighting was not done yet.

UPDATE: Eat Them All is going to be reducing its upload schedule to one chapter per week, posted on Saturdays. Thank you all so much for your support with this story so far.