So where did I leave off, oh I know I was about to fight a bearded woman hopped up on Satan juice. I gotta say my habit of messing around and jumping headfirst into situations really bites me in the a*s, but it was fun. Something tells me I’m not gonna enjoy this part nearly as much as the last.

The woman’s armor was ten feet of pseudo muscle shaped like a Viking with a horned helmet and everything.

I barely unholstered my gun and leveled it when Natalia appeared right in my face. She got three golden glowing bone bullets to the chest, and I got launched through the wooden stands surrounding the ring. My bullets barely reached skin, in return my threads grew a little frayed along my back. Her armor repaired along with my back.

Her wounds on the other hand were there to stay. It did not matter though as her wounds did not slow her down, not one bit. She pummeled me to the ground and made sure I stayed there.

Boy am I thankful for the fact that I no longer feel pain. This would hurt quite a bit if I did. I did need to do something about this before she somehow found a way to kill me. I was not as immortal as I would like to believe. Just because I can’t think of a good way to kill me, does not mean someone else can’t.

I would try to enter my shadow, but Natalia was wise to that trick. She had wrapped several strands of hair around my body to keep me on this plane. I tried to call the web I weaved around the camp but that was futile. Natalia simply had the better threads.

So, it was on to prison tactics. I turned Murder Weapon into an icepick and put it into her side piercing her left kidney. Her hair wrapped around my shiv and locked my only weapon away from me.

Well, there goes my best idea.

The next five minutes were spent storming the brain and braining the storm. Also getting a beating, don’t forget the beating.

I was about to use my last resort when I felt it. A heartbeat. Which is strange as I don’t even have a heart to beat. A blackish red heart overflowing with malevolence grew in my chest. Looks like I reached the critical point in my mantle development.

Mantles were what I termed as an identity that is conferred by the world’s will prompted by enough people attributing the identity with a person. Most mantles don’t really grant anything except a second true name. however, some mantles are multiversal identities that permeate various realities. When you are conferred one of those you are imbued with all the powers and weakness of said identity. or more accurately you form a connection with the concept and have the attributes of the identity infused throughout your body.

In this case it was Dracula. This was a little tricky as I was both too similar and too different to the identity. I feed off people, am near immortal, and look inhuman. The sticking point was I feed off energy, not blood. I also lacked a lot of subordinate traits: I wasn’t particularly aristocratic, nor prone to anger, nor indifferent to what type of victims I pursued.

This granted an opportunity to create a new mantle. I could just inherit the typical Dracula and become an extremely strong vampire, but that was the limit of this mantle as I refused to draw closer to the source of the mantle and become more like him. If I kept my current personality, I would be fairly weak as far as Draculas go.

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Instead, I could craft a new vampire progenitor mantle. This would start off fairly weak but offered the ability to forge my own legend and path. I would have to finetune the mantle later, but for now the natural formation of the new energy vampire progenitor would have to do.

To my good fortune I was able to get a temporary power boost from purging the excess power left over from rejecting the Dracula mantle. The excess power did force me to transform into my new vampiric true form and like all first transformations it was be driven by nothing except base instincts. So now my opponent had to deal with a rabid energy vampire temporarily halfway to godhood. I did not like her chances.

***

In a devastated circus tent a large red metallic Viking was pounding a midtwenties greenette into the ground. A huge blue fist rushed up from the ground and launched the Viking across the tent into the stands on the opposite side. The greenette stood up from the ground showing the world a new form.

The man’s hair and the entirety of his eyes turned blacker than black. The other major difference was that his shadow turned inverse and became a human shaped spotlight.

“I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!” the Viking screamed in a woman’s voice before charged at the man.

To say the man shrugged off the attack would imply that it moved him even a little. Hell, it did not even cause a depression on his skin. The man’s shadow turned into a sickly green translucent robed skeleton that reached out and strangled the Viking. The hair armor turned gray and flaked off with her throat following soon afterwards. The Viking escaped the hold and turned her hair into a pseudo throat.

She created a large crimson blade made of hair and rushed towards her opponent. The shadow turned into a translucent blue pirate holding an anchor and chain. The pirate swung the anchor shattering the blade and piercing the Viking’s chest.

The Viking fell to its knees and unraveled revealing a bearded woman. The man walked up to her and dragged her up off the ground by her hair. He then opened his mouth revealing four long abyssal metal caps over his canine teeth that he proceeded to bury into the woman’s throat.

The woman turned into a dried husk and then dust, leaving only a glowing red hair pile in her place. With his hunger sated the man transformed back into his more human form.

“Well… that happened.” The man said before throwing the hair into a starry void and then leaving the camp behind.

Being:

Body:

[Nascent Energy Vampire Progenitor]

Soul Tattoos:

[Celestial Weaving]

[Sand: Tier Three]

[Water: Tier Five]

[Faith: Tier One]

[Holy Water: Tier Three]

[Shadow: Tier Five]

[Necromancy: Tier Five]

[Rot: Tier ErRoR]

Special Abilities:

[Consumption: Tier Nine]

[Wound]

[Empowerment: Tier Nine]

[Empathy: Tier One]

Current Equipment:

Head:

[The Black Wasp Jackal’s Face]

Earrings:

[]

Necklace:

[]

Clothes:

[]

Rings:

[The Mentalism Ring]

[Mena’s Book]

[Petrifying Ring]

Bracelets:

[]

Shoes:

[]

Armaments:

[Beastly Heart]

[Murder Weapon]

Storage:

[Chi Organ]

[Spirit Shards]

[Various Utility Artifacts]

[Various Articles Of Clothing]

[Death Dogtags]

[Leech Muscles]

[Leech Teeth]

[Assorted Circus Corpses]

[Diabolically Empowered Hair]