- [The Banshee's Blood - Adventurers' Guild] -
“Get your charms here!” calls out the voice, a figure holding up a few rattling satchels. “Anti-Vampire charms here,” she explains, shaking the small collection of pouches. They are small, colorful fabric sachets no bigger than two fingers together, filled with some kind of loose, rattling metal. “Filled with silver things, it’s guaranteed to keep any vampire away!” she explains, her other hand waving out to the crowd.
“Do they work?” asks a cautiously curious voice from across the counter.
The adventurers’ guild barkeeper looks across the counter at him. “How else do you think I manage to stay open outside of the Vampire Lord’s castle?” she explains, leaning in over the wooden barrier between them.
Another man next to the first nods to himself, scratching his chin. “That is a good point,” he adds.
“Very!” adds the barkeeper, her hooded face shrouded as she leans her neck his way in a rather frightening manner. But she’s not so bad once you get used to her. She’s just a little… odd, is all. But maybe you have to be in order to run a business like this.
It’s only been a few days, but she’s starting to win the favor of many adventurers.
“Can you guarantee it will work?” asks the first man.
Miss Schwester nods, clasping her bony, thin hands together as a single gleaming eye looks out from beneath the hood his way. “I can promise you… young man…” she wheezes out, leaning in toward him now. “— that anywhere you carry the charm, a vampire will not bite you.”
The two men start talking to each other.
“…In that specific location,” adds Miss Schwester quickly, beneath her breath.
“What?”
“Nothing,” replies the guild’s only employee. She leans back. “So what will it be?”
“We’ll take two,” relents the adventurer, sliding some coins across the bar.
“Miss Schwester!” calls a weak voice from the side. The macabre woman turns her head, looking at a haggard, young girl who stumbles in and then flops against the counter. Her face is anemic and whiter than a bed sheet, and her legs have failed her. One of the patrons there catches her, helping her stand. The weak sorceress looks up at her. “I don’t feel so good… do you have anything?”
The barkeeper slides the trinkets over to the other two before grabbing her own head to turn it at an angle, as if the muscles she had weren’t flexible enough to do so on their own. There’s an audible cracking that causes several faces to wince.
“Foolish girl!” hisses the barkeeper. “You were warned not to return to the castle twice,” she says, studying the adventurer who looks to have gotten herself killed twice now in short order before she fully recovered. She’s lost a lot of blood at once. “The walls have gorged on your blood.”
The girl looks around herself, seeing that nobody is listening too closely. She waves a finger and Miss Schwester leans in closer. “I found a secret passage,” whispers the sorceress, holding a hand up to her mouth as she whispers into the side of the woman’s hood. “I thought I could clear it first before anyone else finds it,” she says, before pulling back. The anemic adventurer cups her hands on the counter and rests her head in it. “I really need the money,” she explains in a tone of quiet desperation.
There is a shuffling of fabric.
Before she can look up, Miss Schwester’s hooded face is down next to her’s. A bony finger reaches out, scratching the top of the girl’s head. “Family?” guesses Schwester, whispering back, her long, crooked finger running over through her hair. She knows the girl’s story because adventurers have an openness to them about nearly everything. It isn’t rare for children from poor families to risk their lives as adventurers because it’s the only way to make money. Either they succeed and help their loved ones, or they die horribly in a dark hole below the world and help their families by being one less mouth to feed. “What a good child you are…” whispers the barkeeper with a hiss. The adventurer lifts her head. “But you should give up.”
“…Huh?” asks the adventurer.
There’s a clanking.
A brown leather bag of coins is slid across the counter in secret. Schwester lifts the girl’s cupped hands and puts it beneath them. “You tell me where this… 'secret passage' is,” instructs the creepy bartender. “— And then you take this and go to bed. Leave tomorrow and never return,” she explains. “I will buy this… service… from you.”
The girl looks down at the bag, opening it, her eyes going wide. She quickly pulls the drawstring back shut, glancing around nervously to see if anyone had seen.
“Why?” asks the weak sorceress quietly, clearly interested, given the way she’s sunk her nails into the fabric pouch.
The back of a long, pale, icy-cold finger runs along the adventurer’s face. “It would be a shame,” starts the whispering barkeeper. “If you got lost inside the castle and never returned…” she says in a quiet, breathless voice as all around them the guild is full of noise and activity. “This is no place for you.”
She thinks for a second and then nods, quietly stuffing the pouch of coins down her shirt before leaning back in and telling the barkeeper where the secret passage into a seemingly untouched area below the castle is — some sort of mine. It looks to lead toward the castle’s basement, bypassing the main gate area. But she’s never gotten far enough to confirm.
Nearby, other people talk amongst themselves. The guild is full of faces, all in various states of energy. Most are pretty pale and tired, given that they just about all lost blood to get here. But some have recovered after some food and rest and are ready to delve back into the castle. A group of bards is playing music together, but their song is accompanied not only by drunken laughter but by the banshee wailing of the wind outside of the guild that won’t leave them any peace. Its voice almost forces their played songs to become more somber and melancholic with its presence, as every time they try to play something lively and energizing, the contrast is just too much.
“I heard that there’s a trick wall on the second floor,” explains a voice. “If you crouch by it for three minutes and then spin around twice before jumping, it’ll open up,” says a man, looking at his friends.
“’Bet you looked like a real jackass doing that,” replies his group member at the table, the others laughing.
“I didn’t actually try it!” he counters back.
“What a bunch of crap, where did you hear that?” asks the sharp-faced woman at their table, a necromancer, who has found quite an unusual time adventuring in a place like this. She crosses her fingers together and rests her chin on them, her elbows on the table. “I spoke to a ghost. It told me that everyone who sees the Vampire Lord falls in love with him because of his dark hypnotic magic,” she explains. “So if you ever encounter him, you need to close your eyes and walk backwards toward him.”
“…Won’t he just bite you then?” mutters a man quietly as he thinks.
“How are we supposed to fight him backwards?” asks someone else at the table.
She taps the side of her head. “The mirrors,” she explains, looking rather smug. “Why do you think there are so many mirrors inside the vampire’s castle?” she asks, sounding quite sure that she’s onto something. “His mind-controlling magic doesn’t work if you look at him in the mirror.”
The others at the table let out a series of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ as if they had just undergone a revelation, nodding to each other. The necromancer smiles confidently.
A new voice chimes in from the side, from another table. “…I thought vampires didn’t have reflections?” she asks.
They all fall quiet, looking back at the necromancer.
“Well… that’s obviously b-because…” she stutters, desperately hoping to protect the newfound social respect she just earned three seconds ago.
Necromancers are not seen fondly in the public eye, given their craft. They are, as casters, extremely powerful and useful adventurers who many a group are more than willing to take with them into the dungeons of the world. But outside of them, they are quickly ostracized and even scorned. Necromancy, like some other forms of magical affinity, is something someone is born with a gift for. It makes for a difficult life. Sweat beads on her brow. She never got to sit at a table with people inside of a guild before. She can’t lose this.
“— That’s because you need to buy a ‘Vampire Revealing Bracelet’,” notes Miss Schwester’s voice from behind the counter. The hooded woman stands there, presenting a small bronze bangle toward the crowd. “Only nineteen Obols if you pay now in full, or in four lump installments of six if you don’t have the means this instant.”
Everyone looks at each other, and then a second later, there’s a rush as chairs are thrown back and some many dozen people jump to their feet to rush the bar to buy theirs.
The necromancer sighs in relief, holding a hand over her heart.
She got away with it and gets to be a normal person with friends for one more day.
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- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -
An hour later.
Inkume sits there on his throne, sipping directly from a bottle of blood from the cellar, forgoing the use of a glass like anyone else who is up drinking wine by themselves in the dark at midnight does.
On one hand, he’s holding a small bronze bracelet he had been playing with. He swirls the bottle around in his other hand, having a weird taste in his mouth after that last sip. Smacking his lips, he looks over from his book and into the dark, green glass.
[Experience Points Gained] You have drank the diluted blood of a starry-eyed farm girl with a radiant personality and dewy skin, mixed together with a ghost’s ectoplasm! Given the dilution, it’s magical properties are currently weak but offer great potential. However, you are able to extract the full potential from the remaining blood essence as fear has filled it with power.
*★✧+- [LEVEL UP!] -+✧★* You are now level 110!
NEW ABILITY [Apex Metabolism] Passive Ability • Your blood digestion has become more efficient. You now require {10}% less zinc!
A pair of googly, vibrant eyes is floating around inside of the swirling, red mixture.
“…Snatch,” says the Vampire Lord, hearing the jackal’s chuckling laughter coming from the inside of the bottle filled with oddly sweaty-tasting blood. “Why are you in there?” he asks quietly, lifting the bottle up to his eyes.
The ghost, crammed inside the container, swirls around. Her eyes float to look at him, her voice coming through the glass neck with an odd reverberation. “I wanted you to drink me, Master,” she explains. “So I can be closer to you than anyone else, forever.”
“…Ah…” notes Inkume.
He holds the bottle up and overturns it. The ghost starts to slowly slip out. First just a goopy lump of her releases from the small opening like a slimy glob, but then the rest of her starts to follow until she floats there on his lap like a melted wax figurine, bubbling and panting. She slowly starts to reform into a whole shape.
“You can just ask me for a hug, you know,” notes the wickedly cruel Vampire Lord.
Snatch’s jagged mouth cries out in anguish. “I only wish to understand the Master better,” she explains, looking at him. “Why would you sell the humans tools to destroy you?” asks the ghost. “Is it me? It’s because you hate me and you’d rather die than be stuck here with me, right?”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
She’s talking about the fake trinkets being sold at the guild.
“Please, Snatch,” remarks Inkume. He sets down the bottle and begins to shape her together with his hands, pushing and pulling on the goop of her substance like she were a clay doll he was making — at some point she bites him though, laughing and panting to herself. Inkume shakes out his oddly damp hand. “It’s not real,” he replies. She looks at him, confused.
“So it’s just a bunch of nonsense?” asks Snatch, after a quiet moment of thinking.
The Vampire Lord sits there on his throne, one leg crossed over the other as he idly spins a bronze bangle around his finger. “Correct,” says Inkume, looking at the little thing. “This?” he asks, showing her a ‘Vampire Revealing Bracelet’. “It’s just an old pipe fitting from the spares in the basement. I had the blacksmith shape them to size,” he explains. “It was probably from the bath or something,” he mutters.
“But… what about the charms, master? Isn’t there real silver in them?” asks Snatch, worried.
“Silverfish,” notes Inkume. “The bags are filled with dead silverfish from the old corridors. I had some random ghost who I ran into collect them for me.”
He’s using the adventurers’ guild to spread misinformation amongst the intruders. All sorts of false rumors about the castle and its monsters are being propagated there, diluting the usefulness of any true information the adventurers might have about his castle and its weaknesses.
“What?!” yells Snatch, distraught immediately. She clutches her face. “But I- But I-!” starts the spirit, her chest starting to heave as she fails to breathe in tune with her rising panic.
Inkume holds out a hand toward her.
She’s jealous because he asked another ghost to collect things for him. Snatching and collecting creatures is her favorite pastime.
“I can’t have you crawling around collecting bugs, Snatch,” says Inkume.
“…But I love crawling around and collecting bugs, Master,” mopes the ghost quietly.
“I know, Snatch,” he adds, nodding solemnly as he rises to his feet. “But then I wouldn’t have your company now, when I want it most.”
She pants, reaching out to take his hand with a sweaty, droopy grip. “Are we… Are we taking a bath together again, Master?” asks Snatch hopefully, her other hand clawing into the side of her face as she pulls on it.
The Vampire Lord opens his mouth for a second, stops himself, and then shakes his head. “No,” he replies. Her giant, sharkish smile begins to melt into an obvious frown. “I apparently have a mine below my castle, and I would like to see it.” Inkume looks at her. “We need metal and materials for the monsters to be stronger than they are.”
Her face changes. Snatch lowers her gaze, looking around the dark throne room as something bothers her. “What?” he asks.
The ghost looks back at him. “…I don’t like the mine, Master…” explains Snatch. He raises an eyebrow. “It’s where my bones were,” she quietly relents and admits. “I don’t want you to see them,” confesses the ghost. “You’ll see how misshapen and ugly they are.”
Inkume nods as he turns and walks down the throne room with Snatch still latched on to him like a parasitic worm. The wiggly ghost rises and falls like a swimming lamprey as she drifts after him. “You saw mine already. So it’s only fair,” he jokes.
Snatch wheezes and laughs at his crude joke, referring to their shared bath. She hides behind him. “Are… are we married now, Master?” asks the breathless entity, playing along.
“The others would get too jealous. It would be a problem,” replies Inkume dryly, laughing her off as they go back and forth on their little rapport. He’s gotten much more comfortable in these situations, he’s noticing. For him to be talking to so openly and naturally with someone, joking about these sort of intimate topics… it’s been a long month, hasn’t it?
“I’ll kill them all for you, Master,” says Snatch, except all of a sudden he’s pretty sure she’s not joking anymore. She sounds very serious.
Shaking his head, he heads off toward the basement. “It would be better if you didn’t,” replies the Vampire Lord.
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There's a resonance in the air.
“Is this it?” asks Inkume, knowing already that it is. But he’s trying to keep Snatch from clawing through his arm, given that she’s gripping it so tightly that he can’t feel the blood going through it anymore.
— Not that he has any, but the spirit of the idea is there.
“Yes, Master,” replies the ghost.
Harmonic frequencies can be heard humming around the darkness. They’re soft in volume, but high in pitch. It’s like a wind chime, like glass being clinked about in the distance in another room. The tones travel through the surprisingly warm, damp air with ease.
The cave ground is rocky and uneven, with outcrops and bulges in the stone everywhere, making footing difficult. Most of the mine has collapsed in on itself, leaving only few paths available. Old, metal rails still jut out in various places where carts had once been pushed along, but the crushed metal frames now stick out of the rock slides like the bones of trapped skeletons.
He had found the entrance down in the basement of the castle. It wasn’t obvious at first. But there was a wall down there in particular that was, quite literally, doing its best to stay together. However, as he walked by, it began rattling nervously.
That wall was a living object, a monster pretending to be a wall. It had gotten giddy in his presence and betrayed itself.
A few tickles later, it fell apart, revealing a secret passage into a cave system.
— Of course, he had Snatch handle the tickling. Tickling the employees isn’t Vampire-Lord-appropriate behavior, especially during work hours.
“What’s your opinion on this?” he asks her.
He’s already made up his mind to repair the mine. It seems critical to have raw material to help the forge and his monsters. But he wants to ask Snatch so that she feels listened to and validated; he’s found it's the best way to keep her stable.
Besides, she was right about the skeleton pit before.
Inkume stands on a ledge, looking down at a black precipice below. Water runs through the cave system, falling down into the darkness. The walls are lined with jagged, glassy crystalline structures that hum and vibrate every time a droplet strikes them, before releasing a crackling spark that lights up the darkness for just a second. Then the darkness retakes the ambiance.
It’s some kind of magical reaction. The crystals seem to be charged with power of some kind.
Typical. Every fantasy world has its magical crystals. He’s not really surprised.
“It would be best to restore the mine, Master,” concedes Snatch. She quickly lifts her head. “And then for you to never return to it! Ever!” she adds on swiftly.
“Don’t you want to find your bones?” he asks.
“No!” snaps Snatch very sharply as she pops up back over his shoulder. The quick rigidity of her tone is very unusual for her, given her usually awkward and unsure personality. She looks at him and then away. “…They’re probably gone. It’s better this way,” says the ghost in her gravely voice. “I hated them,” she mutters.
Inkume watches her for a moment and then nods. It’s her call.
Silently, he holds his hand out over the abyss, power collecting around his fingers and leaking downward into the blackness that greedily swallows it.
Things around him begin to shift and change. A blast of air rushes out from the gaping chasm, blasting upwardly against the jagged high roof of the cave in an instant. Super-heated air bellows up and all around the systems, his cloak and hair billowing behind him. Snatch cries out, holding onto him with both of her arms around his torso as the gale threatens to blow her away.
Metal railings, bent centuries ago, groan and screech as the rusted metal begins to uncoil and unfurl itself into strong lines and curves. Rocks begin to roll and tumble as a quake loosens a lot of the hardened sediment, opening many crevices and holes in the cavernous walls.
The crystals all around the abyss shake and vibrate, the humming rising in frequency into a nail-biting collective swarm-pitch that would shatter any glass present in the underground. Sparks and energy fly off of them as small crackles of electricity shoot from one to the other.
And then comes chittering and chattering.
From the holes in the walls emerge figures — small creatures, monsters. It looks almost goblinoid at first, but then the features seem less humanistic and more… creaturey. They’re small, only reaching his knees in height, and run around in a manner that is anything but chaotic. Their heads are sharply elongated — almost reptilian — but their skin isn’t scaled. It’s smooth like a person's and off-gray in color. Their eyes are large but fully black. Their ears are big and long, but not like an elf’s, rather being wider in proportion than the former.
They’re like a mix between a goblin and some kind of off-budget garden gnome.
And they set to work immediately, even in the midst of the chaos. They organize amongst themselves to begin shifting boulders several times their own size using metal rods as levers. They pull out old, dank wood from hidden stockpiles and begin reinforcing the mine cart tracks. And others set to work immediately, grabbing long picks and starting to dig away at the deep rock below the castle as they start their toil to extract ore and crystals.
[{Restored} Black Crystalshard Mine]
{Kobold Spawning Zone}
A deep, old mine below the castle. It is filled with magical crystals and a unique, unusually dark ore of an unknown source. It seems almost unnaturally black and leaves an inky, watery residue on the fingers.
Room Effects:
• Kobold spawn rate increased by {100}% in cavernous areas.
• [Black Ore] and [Magical Crystals] will regenerate here at a steady, consistent rate at random locations throughout the mine.
• [Raw Materials] can now be dropped by your monsters and treasure chests.
The room is active. Monsters are currently spawning here.
~ [Cave Kobold] ~
A Cave Kobold.
Kobolds are most commonly known as being mischievous spirits that live in houses. Unlike poltergeists, who are often malicious or deeply emotional against their living co-inhabitants, kobolds are simply playful tricksters. They will play pranks on any people they live with, but they will never hurt them. Given their good nature, oftentimes the denizens won’t have them exorcised from their homes by a priest, as they are said to give the structure life and character. There have been reports in some cases that people even grew to consider the kobold a part of their family, and after moving, the kobold seems to have moved together with them. This hints to the fact that these spirits are free to choose where they bind themselves, unlike traditional spiritual entities.
We do not know how kobolds choose their first homes, but they seem to have a taste for the humble, as these spirits are only ever found in old houses that one would consider ‘quirky’ and comfortable. Royal manors and regal palaces are anathema to the silly kobold.
Cave Kobolds, in comparison to their mischievously fun, good-natured cousins, are sour-tempered, diligent workers who will toil day and night in service of their underground, natural lairs. While they are known to warily ignore any intruders — to an extent — they will become exceptionally violent if even the slightest bit of damage is done to their precious cave by an outsider. Even so much as kicking a stone by mistake will set them off.
Extreme caution is advised during any interactions, as Cave Kobolds are generally found in sizable groups.
One scholar’s odd theory states that house kobolds are just cave kobolds who have managed to leave their life of hard work behind and retire.
Unlike traditional kobolds, cave kobolds are considered to be more like an elemental creature rather than a haunting spirit.
Type: Elemental {Elemental} Rank: C Common Drop: Kobold’s Tooth Rare Drop: Enchanted Pickaxe
Several of them are blown around by the wind, the creatures tumbling around. But the others just continue their work without complaint.
Hmm. Interesting.
He wonders what kinds of things this material is going to be useful for. Probably just some boring stuff like… new iron-clad toilet seats or that the castle’s window frames have been reinforced. Maybe they’ll make decorative chimes and esoteric ornaments out of the crystals?
Either way, it’s good that he has this secret passage secured. The last thing he needs is for somebody to sneak in undetected. That could be fatal. Although he gets the feeling there are many more than just this one.
The kobolds begin construction on a bridge across the underground chasm.
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- [An Adventurer] -
“Look out!” shouts the man, shoving his colleague out of the way through the castle’s front gate house.
A loud bang shakes the world around them. Dust and debris flies through the air.
A massive, black portcullis gate has suddenly slammed shut between the two of them. One man is now outside of the castle; one man is trapped on the inside. “The hell…? Are you okay?!” he asks. The other adventurer dusts himself off, getting up. “This wasn’t here before, right?”
He looks around himself at the castle entryway. The sides of the gatehouse are lined with colorful, healthy flowerbeds.
There’s a small sign.
‘I'm tired of asking. Stay off of the flowers. Or else.
— The gardener.’
“No,” replies the other man to both questions, running his hands over the thick, rough metal gate that seems to have appeared out of nowhere.
The two of them ponder for a time, trying to figure out how to open it again, assuming that there must be some kind of switch or lever somewhere nearby to make it budge. “Uh… hey.”
“Wait,” mutters the man on the inside, fumbling with some mechanism on the wall.
“HEY!” calls the adventurer on the outside.
“What?!” asks the trapped one, before then following his friend’s pointing finger back over his own shoulder and toward the inside of the castle grounds where the usual battles take place. His eyes run up to the sky, where the silhouette of a person is flying through the clouds over the castle on a broomstick. “What is that?” he mutters.
“S-Skeleton,” replies the man on the outside nervously.
“Huh?” The trapped man narrows his eyes, staring at the shape of a person in the sky. “That’s not a skeleton; what are you…” His eyes drop down the thing his friend was actually pointing out, not the other strange thing that he just saw.
Standing inside the castle courtyard is a single skeleton, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and overalls, holding a sharp, black metal scythe that catches a flint of crescent moonlight.
Quietly, the trapped man looks down at his footing, which is currently flattening several once very beautiful flowers. His eyes look up just in time to see a black shape launching his way.
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- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -
The Vampire Lord hums to himself, observing his upgraded castle.
“Oh, fancy,” he says, almost jokingly, as he examines the metal bars that run along the framing of some of the windows.
— They really have been upgraded. He was just joking about that earlier.
He smiles to himself. It’s the little things in life that make one happiest, isn’t it?
[An Adventurer has been Defeated] An adventurer has been slain in your castle. A [{600mL} Bottle of Blood] has been added to the wine cellar. The following items have been added to your treasury:
• [Bronze Longsword]
• 14 [Obol]s