Fionn
The modern world had a lot of sayings, metaphors, idioms, and quotes that nearly everyone seemed to know, often without being aware of who had originated them, or thinking someone other than their original creator had come up with them.
Right now, there was one specific sentence that perfectly summed up his current circumstances.
“When it rains, it pours.”
Oh, and as for the strength of the rain, even the rather nonsensical phrase “raining cats and dogs” fell far short of the current deluge of chaos he was currently faced with.
He’d been busily finding people with magical potential, evaluating them to figure out whether it was a good idea to give them, specifically, access to the full power of the arcane, and about to invite Mr. Vogt to Ireland to use his abilities to directly transfer magical knowledge when an alert reached him.
It had taken a long while for this warning to travel down half of Ireland by modern standards, but it was blisteringly fast compared to what had been available in his day.
Something had emerged from the ground somewhere up North, slaughtered a whole lot of people, and was currently on its way down to Dublin.
And somehow, it had taken far too long for the message to be accepted as true and sent his way. It had still gotten to him faster than his hourly scrying would have, given the timing, but even so. The delay was frustrating, painful, had cost lives.
And it stopped now.
Fionn rose to his feet, grabbed his sword, which had been leaning against a wall nearby, and buckled it as he ran, then snatched his spear as he headed northwards.
Finding his target via direct scrying failed miserably, as expected, but he could easily find it by looking for where the various police and military reports put it.
[Flight] flung him skywards, carrying him towards his foe, hair fluttering in the wind, while fighter jets tore past in the distance, soon followed by distant explosions.
After several minutes, Fionn saw the target.
It was a figure, barely one and a half meters tall but covered in blood-red armor, standing in a blood-red puddle that was swiftly growing to a size where it might be considered a pond, and with scything blades of the exact same color ripping apart anything that came too close.
A foe, one that was almost certainly using blood magic. A monster, likely, considering what else he’d been fighting these days.
The lack of a nameplate, however, indicated something else. That this was not a System monster, and therefore, this issue might be something terrestrial, something he could gain at least some insight into.
So Fionn stopped in midair, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and began to draw in knowledge. Location information was still unavailable even with him being able to see it with his own two eyes, something else was blocking that, but other things became clear to him as Fionn launched himself at his foe.
And with every passing millisecond, he grew progressively more worried.
This wasn’t just “not a monster,” but another Ancient. Almost as old as him, in fact. A vampire called Abhartach who was functionally immortal. No, as far as history was concerned, literally immortal. Killed several times by everything from farmers to assassins, only “stopped” by being sealed his tomb with an enchanted sword stuck in his heart.
Abhartach had escaped, clearly had access to the exact same System that every other human did, and become ridiculously more powerful. Whether or not he had reached the same heights that Fionn had … that remained to be seen.
A hurled spear took the vampire through the heart, nailing him to the ground, then a [Lightning Bolt] slammed into the butt end of said spear and coursed through him, until Abhartach collapsed to the ground as a scorched pile of coal.
So, was Abhartach on Fionn’s level?
Apparently not.
The real question was whether the new firepower the Fionn of the System era brought to the table would be enough to do what the sixth-century Irish druids and wise men could not.
Fionn glared down at the pile of coal as he landed, drawing his sword, wary of a surprise attack. Could that already have been enou- … no, the pile was moving.
A [Force Punch] reduced the coal to powder, then a followup [Gust] scattered Abhartach’s remains all around … only for them to come back together several meters away, the vicious grin on the vampire’s face readily apparent even before the powder started to turn back into flesh and blood.
Fionn paused for a second, waiting for his foe to get solid enough again for his strike to not just futilely disperse his ashes again.
Abhartach solidified, his heart becoming a blood-red, wetly glistening, organ floating in the middle of a cloud of black dust, rapidly becoming covered in swiftly-growing flesh and cartilage but Fionn didn’t wait past getting a solid look at the core of his foe.
Flinging himself forward, blade leading the movement, he impaled Abhartach through the heart, skewering it, then driving the sword downwards, planting it in the ground.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
A single cast of [Shape Earth] caused the rock to open up and swallow the blade, sealing his foe’s heart and the sword piercing it in solid stone. He kept up the spell, flipping the heart so that if the vampire regenerated, he’d do so upside down. Not only had that been a part of the original sealing, but it was also part of how one generally kept the living dead, well, dead.
Fionn glared down at the spot Abhartach had vanished, all the while casting [Message] to contact the rest of the Fianna. If this was over, he’d send them back with apologies, but if this was as bad as he strongly suspected it was, he’d need them. And the sword he’d asked them to bring, since his spear was currently ash, and his sword buried in the ground.
He extended his hand at a twisted strut of metal that poked out of the ground nearby, likely a part of a destroyed tank, and used [Telekinesis] to yank it into his hand, ready to crush the vampire if he showed himself.
“Is he gone?” one of the soldiers who’d been fighting the vampire thus far called out from a “safe” distance.
“I don’t know,” Fionn replied, his magically amplified voice ringing across the field of battle. “Stay vigilant.”
Granted, the ash was staying put rather than swirling towards the site of Abhartach’s burial, yet …
The ground exploded and Abhartach leaped out of the new hole, his normal form visible for the first time since Fionn had arrived. He was a mere one and a half meters tall, with hair the color of spilled blood, combined with eyes that had black irises and crimson eyeballs while his skin was white as bone.
Yet none of it was as disturbing as the unnaturally wide smile the man was sporting, making it appear as though his head were about to split in half.
“So, who are you? A man in this world of fire-stick-wielding cowards who runs around with a sword, a spear, and magic, you’re not normal,” Abhartach asked, his grin barely moving even when speaking. He opened his mouth to ask something else, but Fionn didn’t even give him the chance.
He just flung the piece of metal, [Gravity Fury] massively increasing the impact of the strike, flinging the vampire into a [Gravity Field] he’d set up behind him.
The field pulling from below and the metal chunk crushing from above made for a truly effective trap, keeping the vampire pinned … for all of five seconds. Because it had been a little too effective, pulverizing Abhartach’s chest and allowing him to rise with a massive hole where his heart and most of his ribcage used to be, the rictus grin still on his face while bloody claws formed around his right hand.
He swept the claws through his left wrist, the spray forming into crimson needles that tore open his right wrist as well, filling the air with red mist, filling Fionn’s field of view. But he could still see it, that damn grin, floating in the mist.
“Well, that was rude,” the vampire laughed as the mist began to spread, surrounding Fionn and creeping in from all sides.
Fionn didn’t even bother turning around. He would not give Abhartach the satisfaction of frantically looking from side to side, or otherwise losing his head.
Besides, he only needed to keep this up for more than a few seconds, and Abhartach was unlikely to attack when there were still several meters between Fionn and the clouds.
So, he waited, anticipated, and then, cast the strongest [Gust] he could, dispersing the mists a split-second before Goll mac Morna crested the horizon. Not only did Abhartach fail to notice Fionn’s ally, but he was also caught sufficiently off-guard that another [Force Punch] was able to fling the vampire straight into the path of Goll’s sword.
The vampire’s head went flying and Fionn snatched the sword Goll threw to him out of the air, preparing for combat to renew.
His ally continued to slash at Abhartach, slicing him into ever-smaller chunks, but the moment any piece was no longer being actively hacked apart, the pieces began clicking back together … just like those damn legos had done far too many times in the Untersberg.
Fionn needed a strategy, and he decided to take a few moments to watch, observe, and think while watching the other arrive and start piling on.
Swords cut, spears pierced, and spells burned, and Abhartach healed through literally everything. Some things kept him down for longer, some things healed the moment their cause was no longer physically in the way of recovery.
And the rate of recovery didn’t seem to be slowing. Abhartach was hacked and slashed and torn to bits while he fought back with tooth and claw, occasionally hurling around blades of blood or raising the bloodstained earth into spears or barriers.
Fionn managed to impale the vampire through the heart once again, a sharpened earthen spire punching through the spine and coming out the front, continuing to rise with the ancient warlord trapped like a bug in a museum display case, still alive, still squirming, though this time around, he was swearing up a storm. It seemed Abhartach was no longer having fun, no longer grinning.
Yet it didn’t seem like he’d been holding back any, he’d been fighting, dying, and reborn at his full strength the entire time, he wasn’t cutting loose his true potential.
Nothing had changed save the fact that the Fianna had finally managed to wipe Abhartach’s damn smirk off his face.
A victory, but not one that really got them anywhere.
What now? This bloodsucker was not only functionally unkillable, he was entirely immune to the normal ways of putting down beings like him.
Tying them to the Earth, placing a stake through their heart to keep them pinned, one made of either metal or enchanted wood, placing blades across their necks so that they would decapitate themselves when they tried to rise, or simply burying them upside down … that was how one stopped the immortal. How one killed the unkillable.
But Fionn had tried all that, and it hadn’t worked. The entire Fianna had tried all that, and it hadn’t worked. The modern military had dropped enough ordinance on Abhartach that everything should have happened by pure happenstance at least once, and, something that surprised absolutely no one by this point, that was about as successful as just politely asking the vampire to stay dead.
Diarmuid would have made quick work of this foe, with one of his spears able to inflict wounds that never healed, but Diarmuid was dead, and it had been Fionn’s fault to boot.
And as for Diarmuid’s weapons, well, they had never been found. The other man didn’t like to use them to hunt, so he’d left them behind on that fateful hunting trip and when Fionn had gone looking for them so he could burry them with his friend, they’d been gone completely, having vanished into nothingness.
Something else that might have worked was Gae Bulg, weapon of Cu Chulainn, a man who’d been legendary even during Fionn’s first lifetime. The spear of mortality, a weapon whose use had been inevitably fatal. And even if it failed to put down Abhartach, the fact that the spear would grow barbs through every tiny facet of the target’s body should, at the very least, contain the vampire.
But that weapon was lost as Diarmuid’s armament, and he’d tried scrying for both, not only in his first lifetime but also his second one.
Which left him fighting the vampire with just his magic and his sword, hoping that Dietrich von Bern’s analysis Skills might be able to expose a critical weakness that Fionn’s more “grounded” scrying was unable to see.
At any rate, he had two choices. Continue to fight, trying out new things, until something worked … or surrender. Give up. Lay down and die.
And that was unacceptable.
So Fionn cast [Message], targeting Emperor Charlemagne, to be passed along to anyone who could even remotely be considered powerful. This was an all-hands emergency, and while declaring that he couldn’t fix it himself stuck in his craw, Fionn wasn’t too proud to ask for help when he needed it.
Even if it did feel like admitting defeat.