Russo fumbled with his keys, struggling to find the one that opened the door to the ceiling. A dozen people stared at us from the stairwell. At the bottom, Steve guarded the only hallway.
“There it is.” Russo said as the door unlocked. “Fucking finally. Jean would’ve known the key to this one.” Russo said.
He pushed the door, but it barely budged.
“Still locked?” I asked from behind him. Half my concentration had still been trying to sense my blood again. I had managed nothing as refined as the first time.
“Naw, kid. It’s blocked.” Russo said. Then he leaned forward and slammed his shoulder into the door. It budged open a little. Dirt and rocks slid through the door.
“Don’t tell me it’s in the ground.” Someone behind me said.
“What is it!?” Steve shouted up.
Russo pounded on the door again, and it slid open. Dirt and displaced moss covered the roof in a patchwork of purple and green. Above us, boiling black clouds occluded the sky. The sun was visible through them, but it was only as bright out as the brightest night.
Directly ahead of us was a castle of grim black stone, scraping against the sky, stories tall. Purple sconces hung from its walls, and great braziers decorated the top.
Around us, barbed hedges covered in purple leaves stretched out in a twisted imitation of a palace garden, the plants themselves seeming to writhe. I took a single step out, and the system dinged.
[Warning: You have entered a hostile domain. The controller of the domain seat may set environmental rules hostile to you.]
[Warning: Hostile settings: ambient temperature lowered, permanent nighttime, undead regeneration. Negotiate with the current controller or seize control of the domain seat to adjust the settings.]
People spread out behind us, standing in an open setting in the garden. A fountain burbled with what looked like blood, filling the air with an iron tang. On the distant horizon, sections of the city burned.
Steve followed up the stairs behind us.
Russo shut and locked the door.
Someone screamed, running into the hedge maze, breaking, and everyone else started shouting.
The man crossed under an archway in the hedges. The second he did, a gigantic, fuzzy hand grabbed his leg, dragging him into the dark.
“Shit — ” I shouted, rushing forward without thinking. I wasn’t the one with the gun.
“Don’t!” Steve said.
Russo ran with me, leveling the shotgun as he turned.
This monster wasn’t like the others. It was still a blood thrall, but bigger. Corded muscle covered its much larger body, and when it saw us, it screamed, spit launching out of its mouth and landing on my face. It was cold instead of warm. The sensation haunted me.
Russo fired buckshot, obliterating the monster’s chest. It screamed again, then collapsed. The man from the nursing program — still wearing scrubs — screamed, running towards us. I grabbed him.
He flailed and tried to hit me.
“Let me go!” He shouted. “I — we need to get out of here! I have to get back home!”
“You’re going to get us all killed if you go running around!” I shouted back at him. I was getting angry.
These people were acting stupid.
With my rising anger, I felt an increased perception of my blood — and the thrashing mans. He hit and kicked at me. I shoved him away — then he fucking bit me.
With a grunt and out of automatic reflex, I shoved the man away and subconsciously pulled back.
[Will Check Succeeded. Sanguine activated.]
I felt the man’s blood freeze for a moment, almost solidifying around my hands before flowing again. He made a choked gasp as he fell to the ground, eyes rolling back.
Jason was on him in an instant.
“Did he get bitten?” Jason asked, leaning to the ground next to him. He lowered fingers to the man’s neck, checking for a pulse.
“I don’t think so.” I said. “Just scratched.” I leaned over next to him, concerned. I had done that — pulled a man unconscious with just my touch.
Russo stepped past us, back into the clearing. I heard Steve shout something ahead.
“Is he going to be alright?” I asked Jason.
“I think so. What happened to him?”
“I think I stopped his blood.” I replied.
Jason sent me a piercing stare. I could feel an uncomfortable feeling in my veins. The black shadow in my blood ran away whenever my perception landed on it. And it seemed to grow every time I checked on it. I bit my lip.
We needed to get somewhere safe. Clearly, this garden wasn’t. Shadows moved in the corner of my eyes — whether that was from the flickering purple fires, or the writhing hedges, I wasn’t sure. More than that, though, it the hedges seemed to crawl.
I walked over to where Amber and Steve were having a shouting match.
“And how many of us can fit inside of a bank vault?” Steve asked Amber. “Will that lock even work without power running?”
“It would be safer than here. And it’s right next to the grocer.” She said. “And the gun store is almost a mile north, past the giant fucking castle in front of us. Would we even live long enough to make it there?”
“We’re not going to either of those places.” Russo said.
“Half the city would have the first thought to go to the gun store.” I said. “They’d probably lure every monster in the city with them… if the monsters are everywhere, and not just on our college campus.”
I took a moment to look up at the castle, then back at the skyline. While the city rose up on hills in one direction, in the other, it was below the hedges. I couldn’t see much happening in that direction beside the glow of distant fires.
“There’s a hardware store just south of the campus.” Russo said. “We go there.”
“What are we going to do? Kill these things with hammers?” Amber asked.
“No.” Russo said. “The store sells hunting rifles.”
The conversation went quiet for a second. Russo’s face screwed up in contemplation.
“They’d also have enough building supplies for us to board the building up.” Steve said. “Maybe a few buildings. We will need to gather supplies from a grocery store, too. Shit, we can’t have more than a few days’ worth of food and water. How long until the plumbing stops working…” Steve bit his lip.
“Alright.” Amber said, nodding.
Russo reloaded. And then we were looking for an exit, pivoting to move south. The hedges opened in four archways in different directions, leading into the dark, slithering maze of hedges.
“I’ll take point.” Russo said, his eyes glowing green. He no longer needed the little flashlight.
The black of night was becoming easier to parse for me as well. I wasn’t sure if there was enough of a trickle of sunlight through the terrible cloud cover or if my eyes were just adapted to the total lack of light.
Jason didn’t volunteer to go ahead. He was looking paler and paler. Two of the tallest, strongest looking men in the nursing program carried the unconscious one who had run away. I ended up in the middle of the group as we took turns down the hedge maze.
Nothing went wrong for the first few minutes. It was more unnerving than if we were cutting monsters down.
I broke the silence between us.
“What does your skill do?” I asked Amber. She was only a single step from me.
“What?” She asked.
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“We should know each other’s capabilities. I have poison resistance and blood manipulation.”
“Huh.” She said. “That sounds dangerous. For yourself. I have a skill that lets me see weak-points. And another that lets me stab weak points perfectly.”
“And you used it to kill a monster with a pencil?” I asked.
“The distance between the back of your eye and the frontal lobe is only a few centimeters.” She shrugged. “It’s really not that impressive.”
Nursing students are terrifying.
“You dare kill my children?” A voice shouted. It had all the wrong qualities of human, like the charming charisma of a populist politician. Most of us flinched.
I turned back.
There was a barely visible silhouette in the burning brazier at the lowest balcony of the castle. It raised a hand.
“As the owner of this territory, I command you to die.” The voice boomed again, echoing over the entire garden.
The hedges went from a writing speed to an audible, slithering speed as sharp purple leaves brushed against each other. The garden filled with hissing as the silhouette retreated. A dozen monsters roared.
“Run!” Steve shouted, abandoning his position at the rear to speed forward.
The path through the garden widened at the front… and at the rear, the hedges closed in, forming a blender of inches long, knife like thorns.
----------------------------------------
“Eli! Fucking run!” Steve grabbed my shoulder as we started running forward.
Everyone started shouting.
I looked back as the man I had knocked unconscious fell from being carried. The hedge maze’s blender moved toward us at speed. In a moment, it was on him. Someone shouted his name.
The maze closed on him, shredding him to pieces.
Everyone started running faster.
The hedge maze bent and turned, curving. Occasionally, openings would appear in the side.
“Don’t go through those!” Amber shouted, but it was too late. Two people slipped out.
We didn’t see them again.
A blood thrall — one of the big ones — shot through the parting hedges to the side of us, jumping on me. It bit my leg.
[Status: Poisoned. Seek immediate help. Affliction: Hemophagoviridae Strigis (Blood Thrall, Greater) 1:47 remaining until death.]
The hedge closed in behind me. Most of the group ran ahead.
“Shit — ” Steve cursed, lifting his gun. The students running through his line of fire screamed.
With a grunt, I grabbed the monster’s head, reaching out to its blood and seizing the blood in its brain. It thrashed for a moment. Then it went still.
[Will Check Succeeded. Sanguine activated.]
[You have slain a Greater Blood Thrall!]
[Level up! Point available!]
[Silver Chalice III has leveled to Silver Chalice IV!]
[Sanguine III has — ]
“Dismiss! Fucking dismiss!” I shouted.
The wounds closed as I kicked the monster’s head away and stumbled forward, throwing myself to my feet. I could hear the brambles closing behind me, a hissing noise joined by the terrible tearing of the meat that had gotten stuck in the garden.
I was panting when I caught up to the group. But the cold night air felt better. The level up had healed me. And it was getting easier to see in the dark.
“You fucking good, Eli?” Steve shouted as we ran forward.
“It’s leading us in circles! Amber shouted from ahead of us.
Russo started firing into the brush. The bushes themselves seemed to roar, like one giant, living organism, and the opening changed.
A gigantic, beautiful flower unfurled before us, crimson red and glowing. A mouth opened at its center, drooling spit on the ground and bending toward us. It was the size of a building.
A monster burst from the bramble to the front of us. The flower closed down, devouring the blood thrall. Russo didn’t stop shooting. The flower’s stem exploded into pieces as buckshot tore through it. Then the bramble opened, shooting us into the street. We kept running, crossing the road, the two dozen remaining students and faculty panting in the alleyway between the two shop’s next door.
“How many did we lose?” Amber asked, looking over our heads. She seemed to mentally count, then winced and looked away, pulling up her own leg. She had a cut from the plant.
Jason was on her in an instance, pulling out bandages for her.
“We need to keep moving.” Russo said, looking back at the garden. The bramble seemed to pulse and swell, like it was breathing. Snaking vines quested into the road, looking for food as the hedges grew taller. The hedge maze stretched in all directions around the castle, a living wall of defenses.
Amber grunted as they worked on her leg, pouring disinfectant and bandaging it. Then she stood. Steve looked nervously up and down the alley.
“Do you think the castle swallowed the hardware store, too?” Steve asked.
“No.” I replied, squinting down the street. “I can see it. It’s down there. And not on fire.”
There was an awkward silence. I turned back to look at them.
“Are his eyes glowing for you?” Jason asked, paling.
“Yeah. Red.” Steve said.
I flinched back, lifting a hand up to my eyes. My fingers were slightly red. I pulled out my phone, looking at myself in the camera. I was deathly pale. Almost as pale as Jason. I stared at him. Then I focused inward for a moment. It was becoming progressively easier as [Sanguine] leveled. The monster that bit me poured more poison into my leg.
The two poisons were fighting each other, warring in my body. Because of that, I could see both of them. Neither were hiding. I didn’t know what I was really doing, but previously, compressing my blood around the poison seemed to destroy it. Maybe I could grab it and expel it. I felt the cool wall of the building behind me as I leaned against it. People panted and cried, catching their breath and stabilizing themselves.
Reality outside slipped away as I fell deeper into the visualization, reaching my blood around the two of them, and compressing. The inky black in my veins warred even harder with each other. Then they stopped fighting, both seeming to sharpen.
[Poison refined.]
[Status: Poisoned. Seek immediate help. Affliction: Hemophagoviridae Strigis (Blood Spawn) 4:23 remaining until death.]
I winced as reality came back into focus. I had bought myself time, but somehow refined the poison. I had thought that the marker next to the poison was the name of the species that had inflicted the poison.
Now I worried it was what I was going to turn into. I opened my eyes to see Amber glaring at me. Steve had a hand on her shoulder. Amber seemed to calm, stepping back.
“Your eyes aren’t glowing anymore.”
“My skill let me push back the poison. But I need to get rid of it.” I said. I didn’t say that I had just refined it, or that it seemed to get worse, and not better.
“Are you good?” Steve asked, staring at me.
I hesitated before nodding.
“Russo! Let’s go!” Steve said, talking loud. A few of the nursing students surrounded Steve, talking calmly. He looked over and nodded.
“Do you still see the hardware store?” Amber asked.
With a grunt, I moved away from the wall, staring down the street. It fell away into blackness now. My body ached, and the air felt chilled against my skin.
“No.” I said. “Can you?”
“Skill doesn’t have that much range.” Steve said, eyes glowing green.
I grimaced. The poison was turning me into one of those monsters. Just like the student Amber had killed. No wonder she was so eager. I felt her stare at me as we moved down the alleys and around the sprawling compound.
A ton of buildings showed signs of damage as we approached. There were dark forms in the street of man and monster alike. Metal wrecks lingered in the street, lights still flashing. We walked around.
One intersections traffic lights still blinked.
But we made it to the hardware store with no other interruption.
Russo led the way, pushing the glass door open. There was a collective wince as the bells rang, and the quiet crying from the group turned into a louder sob. The thought that this might happen everywhere finally broke across my mind. I pushed it down for a moment, glad that I didn’t have any family left to worry about.
The store was dark. I heard radio static from the back as we stepped inside. I tried to stretch out my [Sanguine] skills perception, the sense of blood, wondering if I could find something — living or dead. However, the skill wouldn’t stretch outside my body if I wasn’t directly touching another.
There were goods, and supplies knocked onto the floor. We pushed through and passed them.
In the front, me, Jason, and Russo stopped at the door that was cracked open. An LED light was pouring blue onto the wall, highly visible for being the only thing in the store.
Russo nodded sharply at Jason, who disappeared.
The door to the employee room creaked open only a second after Jason disappeared, sliding inward.
The wood of the door exploded with the crack of a gunshot.
----------------------------------------
The wooden door to the employee entrance exploded into splinters.
“Stay the fuck back!” A woman shouted from behind the door.
His face was frozen in a silent scream, blood dripping from a torn shirt where the bullet had grazed him.
“Jason!” I said.
“I said stay the hell back! You — fucking — you’re not monsters?” The girl in the back of the store asked.
Jason collapsed to the ground, now cursing and sobbing. Amber stepped closer to the employee door, and other nursing students rushed over to examine Jason's wound.
“No shit we’re not monsters.” Steve said, stepping up. He was pointing his revolver at the employee. She was barely visible in the dark, illuminated only by the LEDs shining off the radio.
The employee set the gun down. Steve lowered his own, pointing at the floor.
“What the hell is going on out there?” She asked, glancing between Steve and the radio. It was just static, now, mixed with interference.
“The end of the world.” Steve said. “Russ said there’d be weapons here?”
“Russ? You have Russ with you?” The girl perked up.
“Bea.” Russ said, stepping up to the door. “We need to get moving guys. That gun shot may have attracted some of them. Bea, can you open the cases?”
“The cases? Yes! Yes! Of course!” She almost ran out of the break room, stopping as she got out into the hall. The dim outside light filtered into the hardware store, providing just enough illumination to reveal the shapes of numerous sobbing and injured people. She cursed under her breath before fumbling with her keys, opening the glass cases that held weapon racks on the walls and on locked display counters.
Amber winced at the display case.
“I’ve never fired a gun in my life.” She said.
“I’ll show you!” Bea replied, reaching into one of the display cases and pulling out a shotgun.
“Could I…” I asked, reaching out. She handed me the first one she pulled, pushing a second into Amber’s hand. It was a short barreled mossberg — I wasn’t sure on the exact model.
“Awfully cheery.” Steve said from behind her.
Russ stared at the window, glaring out into the dark. When he turned back to Bea, eyes glowing green, she flinched. She had half of a deranged smile still on her face.
“I thought I was going to die alone in there. Imagine my surprise when a half dozen people show up instead. You’d be smiling too.” Bea said. Now that I looked at her more closely, her eyes were puffy. She had been crying.
After a moment, she shook her head, leaning below the display cases and pulling out boxes of ammo. Steve was right behind her, rifling through the boxes she didn’t extract.
“Alright… who else?” Bea asked.
A few of the nursing students stepped up, and when Bea ran out of shotguns, she started passing around rifles.
“This is the Mossburg 500.” Bea said, slapping the rifle. Then she jumped. “No!” Bea shouted, grabbing the barrel of Amber’s and pointing it down. “Do not point it at anyone. I don’t care if its loaded or not. Fingers off the trigger.” Bea said.
“Okay, okay.” Amber replied. “I got it. The safety is on, right?”
“Yes, but still don’t point it at anyone!” Bea admonished her. “Look here.” She said, leaning the shotgun forward. Then she stopped, fishing around in her pocket and pulling out a flash light, setting it on the floor and pointing at the ceiling to illuminate the room. “This is the tang safety. It’s in the safe position.”
Bea walked a handful of nursing students through using the weapons. After she showed the safety and how to load this particular model, I slipped away. A few other students were rifling through the shelves, especially the batteries and flashlights.
One of the students on the ground waved me over.
“Here.” She said, handing me a flashlight and a roll of duct tape.
No monsters came for the hardware store as I taped the flashlight to the barrel of the shotgun. Ashes started to fall in the street as unknowable fires spread. People busted food out of their backpacks. The crying redoubled.
I felt the dread of a mental break that was yet to come, the need to keep pushing forward only forestalling it.
Steve plopped down on the floor next to us.
“You alright?” He asked me, pressing a cold pack of poptarts into my hands.
I heard Russo debating what to do with the limited supply of the store’s lumber, whether it was better to seal the windows with wood or leave them open so they could see. We couldn’t stay here permanently, obviously, he said.
I tore apart the first poptart, eating half of it and thinking. There was no way the whole world was like this, even the unoccupied parts. If guns were enough for the monsters, then huge chunks of the military would probably survive, until supply chains fell apart.
“Do you think its vampires everywhere?” I asked.
“It can’t be.” Steve said. He was staring out the window. “We need levels, Eli. We need so many levels. We should go back and kill that fucking thing now. There’s no way it can survive a whole squad of guns firing at it.”
“Can’t know if that’s true. We don’t know how any of this works.” I said. “I’m pretty sure I touched one of the monster’s and gave it a stroke. It’s hard to say there are no skills that will stop bullets.”
A few people looked up at me at that admission.
“You did what? You have stroke powers?” Steve asked.
“I got blood manipulation powers. And then I stopped all the blood in their head.” I said.
One of the people next to me stood up, moving down the hall, seemingly to help someone else, but they shot suspicious looks back at me in the quiet that followed.
“And you didn’t mention that until just now?” Steve asked.
“It just let me perceive my own blood at first. Speaking of which — I have another point.”
I opened the skill menu, hoping for something to delay the poison further.
[1. Sleep like the dead I] [Con +1]
[You know when your dad said he just needed a nap to recover a second wind? This is a bit like that, but real! Doubles all regenerations while sleeping! Warning: This also doubles negative effects! Increase constitution to counteract.]
[2. Dead God’s Dream I] [Wil +1]
[While resting, you are free of hunger and thirst, and poisons will not progress. Warning: This skill diminishes regeneration while sleeping. Warning: The more injuries the user has accumulated, the harder it will be for the user to rouse themselves. Increase Willpower to counteract.]
[3. Night Hunter I] [Per +1]
[You’ve tangled with enemies that seem to vanish before you. You’re starting to get a knack for tracking them down. Warning: Some things are best left unseen! Increase Willpower to counteract.]
[HAIL THE CATALOG]
The system showed me descriptions for a few skills I had already seen. [Dead God’s Dream] would be great — if I had time to sleep. I didn’t think I could even if I tried. Sleep like the dead similarly wouldn’t be helpful — regenerating was great, but sleeping in combat would only get me killed.
However, it did raise my constitution. I wasn’t sure if that would hold back the poison longer. I pulled open my full status.
[Eli Gray][Human][Level 3]
[Unlock class at level 5]
[Health: 14/14] [Mana: 0]
[STR 7][CON 14]
[INT 10][WIL 15]
[AGI 4][PER 5]
[Skills:]
[Silver Chalice IV][+4 CON]
[Sanguine V][+5 WIL]
[Skill point available!]
[Status: Poisoned. Seek immediate help. Affliction: Hemophagoviridae Strigis (Blood Spawn) 3:58 remaining until death.]
A timer until I died.
I didn’t see when [Sanguine] had reached the fifth level. I dove into the sensory perception that the skill [Sanguine] lended me, feeling the blood in my body. The poison felt stronger now, sharp, full of cutting edges that hurt just to perceive. It was growing, festering inside me. Even though the timer was longer, there was more of it. I chased it around, trying to contain it or seal it or destroy it. I was failing.
“We’re going to run out of food.” Russo said. I flinched. I hadn’t noticed him approaching us. He was standing over us now, leaning against the wall. His shotgun was dangling from a strap around his neck.
“How soon?” Steve asked.
“One, two days.” Russo replied. “Need to figure out water too.”
I couldn’t do anything about the poison as I was. I needed more skills. And to get more skills, I needed to kill more monsters.
“Let’s raid the grocery store.” I said. “Whose willing to go with us?”