“We have been betrayed.

The Hive queen launched an attack on our colonies together with an unknown starfaring species.

Three Titans were lost during the initial attack, and more than a hundred worlds were turned into uninhabitable sterile planets as the enemy ships burnt away the atmosphere, killing billions upon billions of humans.

The assault by what we considered our former friends, the Ze`nadar, was much more insidious.

They sent their colonies hiding inside rocks and space debris through getaways outside of our detection range, letting them float for years, getting close enough to assault a planet before unleashing its occupants on the world.

The Planetary defense forces were not something humanity had invested in until now, and few colonies were capable of facing the Ze`nadar onslaught as the population was put in the bellies of the Ze`nadar larva as with every scrap biological mass found on a planet.

The emperor failed to reach through to the Hive mother.

Vengeance was sworn. These invaders and traitors would be made into an object of terror to warn off any other such attacks.

The fleets were gathering, preparing to strike back at the unjust and unprovoked mass slaughter of our people and destruction of our colonies.”

- Elistar Iscariot, Grand Magister during the second Kingfisher dynasty.

Lily was dead. She left this life only moments before I burst into her chambers. Walking up to her, I could still feel the heat radiating from her body.

Her face was twisted in pain, and foam had come gushing from her mouth together with the glass of wine and a small paper packet containing a powdery white substance, leaving little doubt about her choice to leave this life.

Combing her hair one last time with my fingers, I removed the foam from her face and chest with the corner of her light blue dress. A color she seemed to favor on herself, if not in the decor.

Curiously, there were only two other things on her desk. A painting that was done by someone with incredible skill and a letter that had “Anna” written in Lily's neat hand.

The painting was not of her and her husband but rather of her and a woman I didn't recognize. They were sitting on a swing hanging from a branch. Green fields with yellow flowers dotted the landscape. I have to admit, they looked lovely, and they looked very happy.

Trying to memorize the woman I presumed was Anna in the picture, I stashed the letter in the satchel with my papers that I always kept with me.

Turning back to look at Lily, I couldn't really connect the bluish-purple face with the normally rosy-cheeked Madam. The lady of the house was with us no more.

Strangely I just felt apathy, maybe the situation hadn't caught up to my feelings yet, or I was just one cold asshole. I wasn't ruling out the latter.

Gently lifting the lifeless body from the chair, I carried her in my arms and gently placed her in her bed with the picture she seemed to love beside her on the pillow.

For a moment I stood over her, pretending that our relationship was more than out of necessity. That there had been true friendship there and she told me tales of Anna and her, Maybe that would have eventually happen, but I would never know now. The gatherer of countless memories demanding ever more.

Feeling the floor rocking under me, I knew I didn't have much time left, so with a quick salute to the body and the painting of her and her lady-friend. I started plundering her quarters for anything that was easy to carry and looked valuable.

Less than ten minutes later, I was running for my life through the hallway and out into the street. Behind me, the inn was swaying, cracking and listing dangerously towards the back until something gave, and the entire thing slid backward with an enormous crack where the inn garden used to be.

Shaking my head at the ignoble end of the establishment that had become a home for me, I turned and was about to start walking toward the safe house when i saw something that pissed me off.

Those bastards. A white, partly transparent dome surrounded the entire property. Even cracks running towards the safe house simply stopped as they made contact with the dome.

Looking around me, I could see the top of similar domes in several other places. I bet if I climbed to the top of a tall enough building, I would see thousands of them spread across the city.

It was a clever move to keep what was deemed important safe in such a situation, and I couldn't help but shudder at the cost, but it kept me from reaching my people.

I was carrying a wrapped sheet containing more than three thousand gold, and I had no idea about the amount of silver and copper was there, but it was a lot.

On top of that, I had a sheet containing a pile of jewelry I wasn't even going to try to evaluate and one containing as much dried meat, cheese and dried fruit as I could easily find on top of the two wine skins I had slung over my shoulders since I had no idea how things were inside the safe house.

Too bad I left my backpack with my guards. With everything strapped in place, I didn't really feel any restrictions on my movements, so I should manage in a fight.

I still had trouble accepting that Lily had gathered this much gold. For a commoner, it was an enormous amount. It was an enormous amount to have on hand, even for an Earl.

If we had lived in the empire, her life would have been quite different. In the backwater area of the continent, we lived on, a noble and a peasant couldn't have noble children, which is why so few marriages between the nobility and peasants happened.

Her marriage to Baron had been a bit of a scandal at the time. Not that they had any children, but the barony would have reverted to the king on her husband's death either way since there were no nobles left of the house.

I was starting to suspect the good Madam had moved assets from the lands of her late husband. Not that I blamed her. It was a shitty situation all around.

At least I would spend a tiny minuscule portion of the money to see to it that her people were taken care of, as in continuing with happy, free lives and not the being buried in the woods taken care of. That was the old Alucard. The new Alucard pretended to care about his fellow humans…a few of them, at least.

I was standing in front of the barrier when my group spotted me and came rushing over. Mira had been crying by the looks of it but looked properly pissed. Egmont and my guards looked ready to go to war. Nice to know someone other than me was annoyed at the situation.

The children and Hartwin seemed to be sleeping while sitting on the ground. Well, the children were sleeping. Hartwin suddenly opened his eyes and gave me a wink before he pretended to snooze again. Clever fellow. Just hope he has learned enough to arm my army later. I had lands to reclaim and more than a bit of territory expansion to do for my plans to fall in place.

Deciding against trying to touch the barrier that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I just gave them a wave and a surge. Sound wouldn't penetrate that thing. Nothing would.

I wonder how long this contingency had been in place and how much it had cost. Not even cracks showed inside the barrier as if the entire grounds of the safe house existed on a different plane.

Well, I was locked outside with whatever the donkey kicked to the nuts that had made the city shake and swallowed buildings like it was snacking on candied nuts. The smart thing would be to go and find the Duke's soldiers or the city guard.

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I was not feeling very smart at the moment. The thing that had been calling me for months was somewhere deep down under the city and had been eluding me for just as long. Despite the numerous day trips Mira and I took down there, it was still calling.

The thing is, I just happened to know about a place where something from deep down beneath the city had just arrived at the surface. It was almost enough to believe in fate, even if I somehow had pissed off some cosmic bigwig, and the fates had lost my thread according to some less then reliable sources.

Giving a last wave, trying to seem like everything was great. I signaled that they should wait for me here or through some pantomiming at the curries station. I hope that's what they got from my performance and not that I had a stroke. It's not like I wasn't used to getting incredulous looks at this point.

Retrieving five of my Voidlings, I set them to scout ahead of me, leaving one to watch over the group from Mira's shadow. They were perfectly capable of moving through the barrier, or to be precise, teleporting from a shadow inside the barrier to one outside the barrier. As long as they stayed out of direct sunlight, they could become completely invisible.

It was too bad it only took a person taking the wrong step to kill one of them when they literally stayed in someones shadow, but they did help me in combat if needed. Sadly, it was not how I had expected a nice black blob with tentacles sticking out everywhere to help in battle, but they did their best, I'm sure.

Walking on top the ridge of one of the new tiny hills and ridges that made up most of the previous roads in the city, I made it to the Hunter's Guild without any issue.

It had seen better days. Rubble lay where there had been houses, and most of the walls had decided to fall. The quarries would be working overtime in the coming years to repair the city. I would have to look into investment opportunities there. Someone with a quarry license had to have died during this insanity.

Climbing over the rubble, I was met with the aftermath of a battlefield. The first thing that stood out was a great wyrm with a body and draconian head lying mostly out of the hole it had created to reach the courtyard. At a guess, I would say it was almost ten meters in diameter and from what I could see, it didn't have any arms, and its scales were a mix of deep red and black in a pattern I couldn't make sense of.

Its body was a mess of wounds and deep purple blood. What really made it stand out was the head. It had been decapitated

in what looked like one stroke. The power to do such a thing was almost as frightening as the wyrm itself.

Most of the fallen were clustered around the wyrm. There were far too few humans dead for this scene to make sense. Sure, there were a few powerful individuals here, but was the guild guard really that well-trained? I only spotted three dead knights and about a dozen squires or pages.

Of the enemy, the dead were in the thousands, from what I could make out from the piles of dismembered and eviscerated corpses. Not to forget the ones that seemed to have thorns the size of trees spurting out of them. Hanging like macabre effigies put up by a primitive tribe to warn off intruders.

The most noticeable of the enemy were the scaled humanoids; they didn't wear armor or clothes from the look of it, but they certainly wielded weapons. More often than not, ugly two-hand weapons that were made to look like twisted swords and axes with spikes sticking out at unconventional places for seemingly no other reason than to look evil.

The second type of enemy I noticed was larger than a human and a lot more muscular. Unlike the first type, they had a rather long, thick tale. Their heads were adorned with curved thick horns, and the oversized hands ended in thick claws.

The third enemy I noticed was a short and stocky sort. Their arms were muscular and long, but their legs were thin and looked too short for them to walk on. The head of the creature was made up of a ridged piece of bone. Like the first two, the face was reptilian in features.

All of them had scales in color from olive green to almost blood red, and like the wyrm, their blood was purple. There was a lot of it, so I'm quite certain.

Since none of them nudged my brain into remembering a passage from the monster compendium, I concluded they didn't come from the same place as dungeons and incursions.

Well, no point in standing here with a finger up my pooper while getting lost in useless thoughts. There was spelunking to do!

I had ample room to move past the wyrm tail that was still in the tunnel. Touching its scales in passing made me think of glass or obsidian. I claimed no part of this prize, so I let it be. That and the stench of sulfur wafted from it with such strength that I had to stop myself from vomiting what little my stomach still contained.

The tunnel was smooth as glass all around and just steep enough that it was uncomfortable to walk down. At a guess, I would presume it was a bit steeper than twenty degrees sloping downwards.

Unlimbering my now six tentacles, I shot them around me into the wall. Their tips, now harder than steel, easily pierced the smooth stone.

I hung in the middle of the tunnel like a spider while I sent my Voidlings out to scout. Grabbing the sheet full of goodies, I started devouring as much as I could hold. I knew I would need all the energy I could get if what I saw before me continued. Wrecked and destroyed bodies lay strewn about as far as my eyes could see. There was a river of blood running from the guild grounds and down the tunnel.

After fifteen minutes, I had a much more comprehensive view of what I was dealing with.

Previously, we had only been able to find our way three levels down under the topmost sewer level. It was a no man's land belonging to smugglers and thieves but not the undercity proper. No matter where we looked. We couldn't find a tunnel or door leading further down.

As far as I could tell, the wyrm was one of many that had come up towards the city, but the one on the guild grounds was the only one that actually broke the surface. It was also the one that left the largest tunnel.

From what I could see, the wyrms seemed to have continued to the west towards the capital. Leaving a myriad of round tunnels interconnecting with each other in some parts and with what I hoped was the evacuated undercity and not just empty ruins.

Further down, there were massive caverns with a battle that was unlike anything I could have imagined. The enemies were fighting not only humans but also dwarfs, kobolds and some I chose to call the rounder and less beardy dwarfs.

The trouble was that it was from those caverns that I felt the pull in my pearlescent chicken egg and spirit.

Making sure my three sheets of valuables were properly fastened and tied down, I let out a sigh before moving downward on six tentacles far faster than my measly legs could hope to achieve.

The first cavern I reached was vast, the sound of battle deafening as golems of rock and metal were clashing with the wyrmlings, as I was calling them. Between and behind the golems, the beardless dwarfs were firing great crossbows into the ones that slipped by or managed to destroy a golem. Some were even darting in and out of the frey between golem legs to slash and stab with wicked-looking curved knives.

Seeing two rock golems falling at the same time just as the row of crossbows was reloading, I activated Jump while leaning towards the breach that wyrmlings was overrunning.

I landed among them tentacles first, piercing and crushing with my momentum. I started with activating Celerity, and then I was among them, not as a soldier but as a beast. Ripping and tearing apart bodies with my whirling tentacles. Piercing flesh and throwing their dead back at them.

It became a dance of twirling and sliding. Always moving. My tentacles finally in sync with myself as if they were my own hands.

Purple blood coated me as I found myself drawn deeper into the enemy ranks. Blasting groups of wyrmlings back with Push only to land among the fallen a moment later ripping and tearing like a crazed monster myself.

Finally, I felt a power approaching. Something as powerful or stronger than myself.

A large, weapon-wielding wyrmling came storming towards me. Its long, crooked blade held high.

A ball of fire left its mouth as it got close, but it was slow. One of my tentacles picked up a corpse and threw it at the ball. The detonation was shocking as the corpse exploded in a cloud of blood, but the fireball was no more.

Pulling my tentacles back and down, I let them roam the ground where they could strike from below.

I finally drew my sword and met the wyrmlings hissing with a roar of my own.

Behind me, the lines of the beardless dwarfs were tightening up, and a true slaughter had begun as golems bashed, smashed and crushed wyrmlings. Even the large clawed ones couldn't stand against these creations of rock and metal.

Activating Push, I sent the few remaining dragon people reeling, but it only succeeded in halting the Awakened one's charge.

Gliding forward as Sir Michael had taught me, I met the downward stroke with a swipe of my blade, sending it to the right side and down, only to slide to the right so its clawed foot didn't send me flying.

Using Celerity again, I strode forward, almost seeming to glide across the ground as I kept both feet on the ground at nearly all times. It had been a strange way to move at first, but with my increased strength and toughness, I had pushed myself to learn it.

A straight lunge at the right shoulder, followed by a slash towards its hip and a faint towards the Wyrmling face, only to spring my trap as the front of my blade moved up and across its knuckles as I pushed myself forward and kept the tip of my sword pointing diagonally towards its throat.

With a flick of its hand, it pushed my blade aside and bent to bite me in the face. I barely managed to jerk myself away in time as I kicked out with my right foot, making the Wyrmling step back into my tentacles.

The trap sprung as six tentacles smashed against the Awakened Wyrmlings barrier.

Out of balance, the Wyrmling was frantically flailing around itself with the enormous sword.

Waiting for the moment the blade passed by my face, I stepped forward and, like a bolt of lightning, struck under the wyrmlings chin, driving the point of my dark sword up into its brain.

For a moment, we stood there, and then it collapsed, freeing my blade as it fell.

Power filled me, more power than all the monsters I had slain until now combined, and I knew it was only a fraction of the spirit power I stole.

Unlike the dirty power I got from regular monsters and the destructive and addicting power filling me when I opened a tear to my domain, this was a pure power. Pure spirit energy that integrated with my own as if it belonged there.

With the tip of my sword, I had become a third more powerful then I had been moments before. It was intoxicating to feel so much energy coursing through me.