So, we were fighting a bunch of feral lesser vampires in the middle of a haunted castle to rescue the Pope. Well, a Pope. Each religion had their own high priest. Julius Caesar had been Pontiff Maximus and head of Poseidon’s religion.
"Die monster! You don't belong in this world!" I shouted, quoting Richter Belmont as I swung around a glowing energy whip that was composed of pure sunlight. Sunlight didn't hurt greater vampires AKA vampire nobles, but it caused the feral cannibalistic creatures in front of us to burn up like flash paper wherever I struck them.
Lesser vampires were basically somewhere between zombie and the cultured Dracula types that I'd met during my time in the Southern Kingdoms. Lesser vampires were stronger, faster, and possessed of a savage feral cunning but could barely string two words together if they hadn't torn someone to shreds that night. More 30 Days of Night than Twilight.
This group was a particularly repellent group dressed in rotting peasant clothes that stank of their previous victims. Their bodies were covered in crusted over gore and worse. Lesser vampires didn't change their clothes and when you disembowel someone, there's an emphasis on bowels. I'm running the risk of violating user terms for graphic violence but that's what they were wearing.
Yuck.
There were dozens of these things in Castle Bloodmoon (yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, I didn't name the castle). Currently, we were facing five. There were also skeletons, ghosts, regular zombies, iron golems, living suits of armor, and all the various other horrific shit that would have torn us apart if we had bothered to stay to fight rather than carried out a running retreat through the castle. Well it would technically be a running charge since we were going deeper into enemy lines. It was, by and large, a very stupid plan.
Of course, I was the one who'd come up with it.
My name was Aragorn "Aaron" Bartkowski, and a month ago I'd been just another corporate wage slave at Epic DungeoneeringTM's Michigan branch. Today, I was dressed in a set of leather armor with gold pauldrons on my shoulders. A pair of scimitars were at my side, glowing with magic that hungered for the blood of the undead creatures around me. I hesitated to draw them, though, because they were possessed of their own malign intelligence.
Battling the lesser vampires alongside me was my found family/adventuring party: Ania Rose the Assassin, Agata Rose the Priestess of Mokosh, Kragen Bloodstorm the half-vampire half-ogre berserker, and Sparky the Dragon. We were an eclectic bunch but the only possible salvation the Southern Kingdoms had left. There was also Jon the Falcon, previously Jon the Raven. Long story. Yeah, I was pretty sure the Southern Kingdoms were doomed.
"Aaron, look out!" Jon shouted, flying in circles above my head.
Jon's warning came just in time because coming out from a nearby hallway passage was a goddamn mummy, bandages and everything, that raked its fingertips against the side of my face. The agonizing pain of my skin bursting into boils was summarized by my bracelet's cold statistical analysis.
YOU HAVE SUFFERED 15 POINTS OF DAMAGE, YOU ARE NOW SUFFERING DEATHROT SICKNESS.
"Oh, come on!" Jon shouted, tearing at the mummy's face with its claws. "Mummies aren't Gothic! Why the hell are they in Fantasy Poland?"
"Move, milord!" Sparky said, the pony-sized red dragon growling at the figure before me.
“Not a lord!” I shouted back, already planning to move since 15 points of damage was nothing to sneeze at even with all the leveling up we'd managed to do. Having death rot sickness was also bad.
I rolled out of the way with my boots of speed that allowed me to avoid the crap follow-up attacks that were infamous for stun-locking protagonists in the Bloodmoon video game. Yeah, we were in a live-action version of that game now.
Jon flew out of the way of the mummy's follow up attack against him, only for the creature to be struck by Sparky's flame. The creature screamed as it became a (un)living pyre and proceeded to disintegrate before our eyes.
"Technically, you are a lord!" Agata said. "Very technically!"
The five lesser vampires recoiled and drew back from the burning mummy even as that gave Bloodstorm a chance to swing around his maul in a blow that decapitated one of the monsters. The vampire exploded into ash the same way the vampires did on the old Buffy the Vampire TV show, a bit of cartoonish special effects that almost distracted from the fact our lives were on the line.
"Agata, take the whip!" I shouted, tossing it to her. It would have been a complete dud and landed immediately on the ground if not for the fact that I gave it a boost with a telekinesis spell.
Agata was a beautiful raven-haired woman with pale skin and wore a blue robe that was covered in stars. It was incredibly impractical looking for combat, showing generous amounts of cleavage and emphasizing her figure, but she seemed to move in it like it was sports attire. In her left hand, she was carrying a Staff of Mokosh that marked her as a priestess of that god.
You might wonder why I tossed Agata, a woman who was a sorceress who worked as either magical artillery or our resident medic, a glowing whip made of light. The reason being that it was like my swords and a sorcerer's weapon. Unlike most magical weapons that were the same no matter the user, sorcerer's weapons were designed to function better the more intelligent you were. I wasn't sure how anyone had come up with this idea outside of a video game, but it meant it scaled well for me and Agata both.
Agata caught the whip with her own telekinesis and pulled it around with much more skill than I possessed to strike a lesser vampire in the throat before they fell upon me. It didn't kill the monster but sure as hell wasn't good for it. The lesser vampires were incredibly fast and didn't have the rot or decay that other members of their genus suffered to slow them down.
YOU HAVE SUFFERED 2 HP LOSS DUE TO DEATHROT
Yeah, that was going to be a problem as I could feel the rot spreading across my face and down my neck toward the rest of my body. Deathrot was one of the nastier status afflictions that could be found in the Southern Kingdoms and basically worked like a fast-acting poison that eventually reanimated you as one of the undead. We'd encountered an entire village destroyed by the stuff on our way here. There was no cure other than fire or magic. Thankfully, we had magic.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Pulling out my sword scimitars from their sheathes, both inscribed with holy runes as well as blessings of Mokosh, I was immediately blasted with feelings of intense anger as well as hunger. Words blasted in the back of my head as the swords projected out their desires.
BLOOD
MURDER
FEED ME
FEED ME
"Sure man, whatever you say," I said, not happy I was having to deal with semi-sentient swords of darkness. I'd named the swords Audrey and Audrey Junior after the characters from Little Shop of Horrors. Which may have been a mistake since I wasn't really sure the swords were separate entities or just fragments of the recently destroyed Chernabog.
Either way, I took the two blades and stabbed them into the chest of the nearest lesser vampire. The creature, which still dressed like a farmer, hissed in my face before the two swords glowed blood red and his body crumbled into ashes around the blades.
YOU HAVE RECOVERED 10 HP, YOU HAVE RECOVERED FROM DEATHROT SICKNESS
The remaining three lesser vampires seemed to understand the tide of the battle had turned against them, most of them already having suffered multiple injuries from the fight that were conspicuously not healing. They looked for a place to retreat but none existed. Their numbers reduced from three to two a few seconds later when Ania fired a light arrow through the forehead of another. Ania's magical bow, Lightbringer, was just as effective against the undead as the whip of light.
Agata whipped the remaining two with one strike, calling down a holy blessing of Mokosh on the whip to increase its power and they both caught fire before disintegrating into ashes on the ground. It was a victory but a hard fought one when we were trying to avoid getting in fights and I could already hear more of the monsters inhabiting Castle Bloodmoon coming our way.
Castle Bloodmoon was a more well-appointed version of Castle Dracula with hundreds of rooms full of monsters, beautiful furniture, and a dark ambiance that would have made your typical centuries-old Romanian warlord proud. It was the castle of Radu the Impaler (formerly Radu the Magnificent) and our attempts to be stealthily had utterly failed.
REWARD
+ 2500 EXP (Lesser Vampires)
+ 2500 EXP (Lesser Mummy)
+ 5 Collars of vampiric domination
+ 2 Potions of blood healing
+ 1 Gemstone (50 GP value)
"I can't believe you used to live here," Ania muttered, taking a brief moment to catch her breath.
Ania was a beautiful redheaded woman in her early thirties that was, for all intents and purposes, a ninja. Elves had trained her in the ways of the Dark Moon sisterhood, which believed the best way to win a fight was to kill your opponent without them ever being aware of it. Right now she was dressed in some anachronistic form-fitting body armor that made her look like she'd stepped out of Metal Gear Solid. There was even a set of night vision goggles hanging around her neck. It contrasted strongly with her katana, wakizashi, and mystical bow.
"Radu was still pretending to be his own descendant when we were married," Agata said, disgusted. "All of the upper levels were as you see them, fully functional, but the monsters were kept in the dungeons below."
The marriage of Agata and Radu the Impaler was one of the most harrowing and terrifying parts of the last Dark Undermaster novel before Lords of Dragon Keep, The Princes of Sorrow. So much so that the television show had received numerous complaints about it when it had aired.
Radu had been a young princeling sold off to the Turqish Empire when he'd been a young man and had suffered severe abuse at his captors’ hands. Whether that had triggered something inside him, or he'd always had bad wiring, Radu responded by becoming a serial killer and warlord infamous for his brutality. Ironically, this had made him a national hero in his homeland, and it had only been falling in love with his brother's wife that had turned the public against him.
Swearing himself to Veles to win her over, he'd transformed into a vampire, and he'd committed fratricide followed by attempting to turn her into his unwilling bride. Said girl, Elizabeta, had chosen suicide over transformation. As such, Radu and his homeland had been cursed with Castle Bloodmoon continuously being abandoned then reclaimed by people with more greed than sense.
"Yeah, well, they're on the loose now," Bloodstorm muttered. "I know we managed to take on one of the death lords and later slew a god but both of those were by the skin of our canines. I think it might have been better to level up some more before we went after the only vampire noble stronger than my father."
Bloodstorm was the son of Maelor the Black, the most powerful of all elven vampires and a former adventurer turned brothel owner. He was also the son of Baba Yaga and raised by a bunch of Rus Vikings as a changeling. You know, normal stuff for a fantasy hero. He looked like Idris Elba if the guy put on a hundred extra pounds of muscle, dressed for a part in Conan the Barbarian, and had two bull horns sticking out of his head. Jon had mentioned that actual Vikings didn't have the horny helmets, but Bloodstorm certainly did.
"How far are we to the throne room?" I asked, hearing another set of monsters already heading up the stairs after us. Unfortunately, I'd already used my WEB spell to hold back the last batch of horrible creatures chasing us. They'd been a bunch of car-sized eight-fingered hands severed from the wrists of giants.
"We're almost there," Agata said, looking down one of the halls. "We just defeated Radu's hunting hounds."
"His hunting..." I trailed off and remembered the collars listed in our reward. "Right. What was the mummy about?"
"I have no idea. That one is new." Agata headed back to the way we came and pulled a candlestick holder built into the wall. It dropped a portcullis that would hopefully keep the next set of horrifying creatures from reaching us.
"Will that hold?" Ania asked.
"Radu modified his family castle to contain countless traps and killing zones for his games," Agata said. "He was also more afraid of peasants coming to stake and behead him during the day than he was of foreign invasion. I learned enough of them to use them against our foes here."
"Why are we not going after him during the day?" Ania asked the obvious question.
"Vampire nobles aren't killed by sunlight," Bloodstorm said. "They are pretty cranky during it, though."
"We were herded here," I muttered. "He wants us to confront him."
It had been a running fight since daybreak, and it was now close to midnight. If not for REFRESH spells and the potions of spell restoration we'd been given, I suspected we would already have been killed off. Radu had the plan to exhaust us of our magic and hope before killing us.
I wasn't going to let that happen.
"That is his mistake," Agata said. "Radu tested me when we first got married by leaving for weeks at a time while asking me not to explore the downstairs. He left an enchanted key to open the door. He wanted me to open the door, see the horrors below, and justify his murder of me like all his other wives."
That was blatantly from the legend of Bluebeard from French folklore. I had to wonder if Radu had inspired it or vice versa. That was a weird element about the Southern Kingdoms, there were a lot of seeming fairy tale-inspired "adventures" and no one seemed to question them whether involving boggarts trying to make pacts for babies or wicked queens cursing girls on their birthdays.
"Did you live down to the stereotype of feminine curiosity?" Jon asked, once more showing he had no sense of tact.
"Hell no," Agata said, frowning. "I already knew he was a monster and spent the entire time plotting my escape. Now I'm plotting my revenge."
That was when a little girl screamed, her voice coming from someone no older than fourteen.
"It's the pope!" Sparky shouted, sticking out his tail. "We have to save her."
Okay, maybe this needs a bit of explaining.