Eat Them All: Book 3- Chapter 23 (Patreon)

++Clever monsters are by far the deadliest kind.++

Book 3: Chapter 23

Anne was Reggie’s second stop, after he’d made sure blasting crystal production was still well underway. The woman seemed better than when he’d seen her last, though she still glared as he approached.

“You left me,” she accused him.

“Yeah, I did,” he said. “Now you get to be the one who’s fucked over because of a judgement call.”

Oops, he’d meant to apologize. Well it was her fault for being such a bitch in the first place, even she seemed to realise it as her gaze dropped.

“We shouldn’t have treated you the way we did,” she said after a moment. “I…don’t think I was ever part of that. But I did defend it afterwards. I’m sorry.”

Well shit, Reggie hadn’t expected that. And he didn’t like just having all the anger punched out of him with an unexpected blow like that. He just stood there awkwardly for a moment.

Then he moved on, because he had work to do. “You’re alive?” Reggie asked. “Haven’t gone insane or killed yourself or started eating people? Cool. I’m gonna go and do other stuff now.”

His next stop was the blasting crystal production. Reggie wasn’t sure how effective this would actually be if werewolves were getting involved, he doubted it’d be too helpful even in cannon form, but more killing power for the town’s defenders was definitely not a bad thing.

As he’d have hoped, the stuff had been piling up slowly but surely. Norvhan was still sending the occasional caravan to Ilgran, and if they’d been forced to put that on pause when the Irazhtan showed up, they’d at least stockpiled a fair amount of crystal before that.

The militia had stopped being a militia some time ago and started just being replacement fighters for the enthralled soldiers, who Reggie now took the time to feed again. He moved around and saw to issues and straightened out problems, killing a few hours by working openly to run the town in all the ways he’d been forced to slowly, inconveniently do before. And by the end of it his conviction had redoubled.

He would kill the Irazhtan and free himself from Gilatar. But not today, and not for a while. He needed power first.

Fortunately, he’d just learned a great new way to get some.

“What Tier are werewolves?” Reggie asked Sycily when he was done.

Variable.

“The one who kicked my ass?”

I don’t know.

“Sycily, remember that thing we talked about? How you tend to be a bit…System-like in responding sometimes?”

Right. Sorry, it’s still new.

“It’s fine,” Reggie eased her. “I know you’re trying.”

Another pause followed.

I would guess it was probably Tier 4, maybe at the mid range. That is roughly average for their kind.

“Average? Holy shit, how are they not running the world?”

I can’t say that, it’s…complicated, makes my mind struggle. Sorry.

“You’ve already given me plenty.”

Reggie didn’t need to know any particulars right now, he could already infer plenty. Werewolves were rare enough that most vampires had never caught a direct sight of one, even though travel through their territory was semi-regular. They were also, evidently, powerful as shit, and Sycily’s estimate of their average Tier roughly lined up with Reggie’s own experience of fighting one.

Which meant that they were higher Tiers than him. If he started eating them, each one would be a big shot of power for him.

At this point, Reggie was still a while from hitting the ceiling for Tier 3’s Attribute gains. Once that happened he’d need to wait a few years to accumulate more power. Would maxing out his current Tier be enough to shake off Gilatar’s rule? 

He doubted it, unfortunately. He’d be gaining more than 5 Attribute points in most areas, but the gap between himself and the elder had felt a lot bigger than that. If he’d gained 10 across the board, he’d be more confident.

It’d been just under a year since he was first turned, which meant he had another four years before he could possibly hit Tier 4. That was the thing with vampires, apparently. Their blood had a higher ceiling than maybe any other creature in the world, but it took its sweet time in getting there. Even for someone like Reggie, with the biggest head start imaginable.

But he was getting ahead of himself in any case, because even feeding on the werewolves with impunity was a big enough ask. 

Oleri the elf had not, fortunately, killed anybody since she was unshackled by Ludvich. Reggie saw her and watched the same mix of hatred and instinctive deference that always played out on her face. But now the defiance was gone. She loathed him, but hadn’t the will to even try and act on that loathing. Her conviction was shattered, and with it her obedience secured.

Nice.

“We’re moving out for a fight,” Reggie told her.

“With what?” she didn’t even pretend to argue.

“Oh, you’ll love this,” he grinned. “A werewolf.”

The elf did not, in fact, love it. In fact she looked rather like a person who’d just been told she was to fight a werewolf.

“Just the two of us?” she asked, voice reduced to a fearful croak.

“Yeah.”

Reggie would’ve liked to bring more, but he was working on a timeframe. He’d rescinded his order to wake the Irazhtan at the end of the day and there was only so long he could hope to go before keeping him locked up triggered people’s senses for bullshit. If he could eat a werewolf before word got back to Gilatar that Reggie’s mission was complete, that’d be a nice advantage.

The elf didn’t slow things further with an argument, and Reggie didn’t waste time beyond that. He plucked her off the ground and carried her as he flew. Adjusting to the weight was, itself, a challenge, though yet another thing that he was glad to be practicing outside of combat. He didn’t know when he might need to carry something in a real fight, after all.

That he was carrying a squirming, struggling elf who seemed constantly on the brink of trying to wrestle free just added a complication which, Reggie hoped, would simulate the real deal more.

It wasn’t like he was too stressed about doing this, anyway. They were flying about a hundred feet above-ground. Even without his ichor in her, she’d probably not even feel a fall from this height. 

“There was only one werewolf, right?” The elf asked him as they neared their destination.

“I only saw one,” Reggie told her. “Don’t know if there were more. Do they hunt in packs or something?”

“Not normally,” she explained. “They’ve been known to group up when they meet others of their kind, but the whole species is rare enough that even having two in the same area isn’t too common.”

That was one piece of good news at least. 

“If I was on a proper Circumscriber’s mission to kill one,” the elf continued. “There’d be ten of us, you know that right? Ten Circumscribers, and at least one Wizard among us. We’d want to have Witchfinders to bait them out too.”

“Well, you’ve got me instead,” Reggie told her.

She couldn’t quite turn her head to meet his eye, but he could feel her lack of reassurance.

“You’ve got me,” he continued. “And you’ve got my ichor in you.”

“Your ichor makes me equal to two normal Circumscribers, maybe,” she replied. “Are you equivalent to eight?”

Reggie thought about that. 

“Shit, maybe,” he said after a second. He was more than 5 points ahead of this elf in almost every physical ability, and his healing was no small advantage. Add the magic on top of that…

Reggie wouldn’t want to fight eight Circumscribers at once, but he wasn’t so sure it’d be a losing contest for him if he did.

“Well forgive me for not being enthusiastic about flying in on a ‘maybe’,” she growled. “Are you always this unprofessional?”

“No, sometimes I take out whole teams of elves trying to attack me.”

He could actually smell her annoyance after that. It was really funny. It also led to a largely silent remainder for the flight, broken only when they approached the place Reggie had received his ass-kicking. 

“We’re here,” he whispered. “You know what to do?”

“Yes.” They’d discussed it half a dozen times already, both as eager as the other to make sure their as-yet-untested ally didn’t fuck up.

Reggie swooped down and dropped the elf to land gently on her feet, then remained hovering twenty yards up.

The area was absolutely wrecked. Reggie hadn’t gotten a chance to look at it before, he’d been busy trying to hold his guts in, but one glance now made it clear that something very powerful and very mean had had a fair amount of trouble fighting. He saw a fallen tree where he’d smashed through, two more where the werewolf had, big craters and dents in the dirt where inhuman footfalls had come down.

But no werewolf.

What there was, though, was a trail of blood.

Or rather, two. Reggie noted his own pretty fast since it looked about a year old. Vampiric ichor tended to degrade fast once taken outside the body, even for a vampire like him who wasn’t that much older than he looked. The werewolf’s blood easily stood out among the patches of congealed brown.

More like puddle really, Reggie really had been fucked up. But that only made it easier to identify his enemy’s trail.

The elf caught it too, maybe faster than Reggie did. He didn’t like her, but a trained Circumscriber was still a trained Circumscriber. Only a Witchfinder could’ve been better at this, and Ludvich was still watching the Irazhtan back at Norvhan.

Reggie stuck to just about the tops of trees as he flew. He had to cut the balance between being too high to drop down and help the elf when needed, and being low enough that he was at risk of getting ambushed himself. Using Oleri as basically bait did strike him as a bit cold-hearted, but then he figured it was the least she could do after murdering him and all.

And she was making swift progress in following the trail.

It led on a staggered sort of pattern along the forest floor, to where the trees were getting thicker and denser. Reggie figured that must’ve been the site of the werewolf’s shelter. It was where he’d want to stay, at least. Sun didn’t melt most creatures like it did him, but they still needed to hide from rain and wind. Generally speaking, the things that kept a vampire alive kept living folk comfortable.

The elf seemed to know it too, because she was growing more cautious by the step. As they continued on, Reggie realised another feature of the canopy in this new part of the woods. The branches were growing so thickly and long that they basically formed a great cage barring him from the forest below. He couldn’t see past them, nor could he even hover around them. With massive wings beating several times each second, he needed a lot more space to fly stably than with his blood manipulation.

Reggie was forced to make a choice, and he ended up choosing down. He dipped to within a dozen yards of the forest floor, where he was low enough that the branches weren’t yet at their thickest and he could still move without tangling himself up in them. The elf remained in his sight, though he saw one long ear prick as she turned to shoot a look back his way. Damn, so she could hear his wingbeats now?

If she could, then the werewolf very likely could as well. Elves might have had better hearing than vampires or they might not, but Reggie didn’t like that risk. He ended up reluctantly dropping himself down to deftly land beside the elf. 

“We’ll go further on foot,” he explained. She seemed to understand implicitly and just headed on with a nod.