- [The Grand Cathedral — Schwarzmond City] -
“We would love to help your village, but I am afraid that all of our resources are currently tied up in the north-east,” explains the old priest, sitting at the table.
The old merchant, having traveled here from his village, grips his hat, held before his gut, as he looks at them with a pleading expression on his face.
A younger priest lifts his hands, seeing his distress. “There’s a crisis we’re currently managing there,” he explains. “Another dungeon-core. It’s of utmost priority, I assure you, my good man.”
“Please,” begs the merchant. “You don’t understand. The Vampire Lord has returned!” he explains, his voice rising in fervor. “The old vampire dungeon is coming to life again! We’ll all be killed!” he argues, stepping closer toward the table. A metal arm reaches out, holding him back. The guarding knight in ornate plate armor standing by the door blocks him from getting closer. Their face and features are obscured by a steel helmet.
“I assure you, we are listening to your news with earnest sincerity,” explains the older priest. “But there is, respectfully, no important threat that we can identify from this as of the moment.” He shakes his head. “A Vampire Lord hasn’t been seen in a thousand years.” He lifts his hands, making a pained face. “The chances of one having come now, given the crisis already underway elsewhere, is very unlikely.” He shakes his hand. “The system has never given us more than one global crisis anywhere in recorded history. As such, I can only piece together that while this vampire may be a threat to people, it is not a threat to the world. It is just a simple vampire like any of the others we kill every day.”
“Your Grace. It’s not some primitive beast like some dungeon vampire. This one walks in the shape of a man!” argues the merchant. “It’s advanced.”
The old priest rises up, the younger priest helping him stand. “We will send someone to handle the matter in good time once we have the capacity to spare.”
The young priest looks at the merchant as he escorts the older man out. “I’m sorry. Resources really are tight. We’re short on priests from every corner of the world right now because of the other dungeon core we’re dealing with,” he explains, his expression carrying a consolement with its helplessness. “For now, I suggest that you tell your people to come here to the city instead. I will find them housing and work myself, I promise.” He looks at the knight blocking him. “Agnis. Please provide our guest with everything else he needs at our expense.”
“But— I…” The old merchant reaches up after them as they go, his fingers squeezing his hat. The two priests leave the room.
A lot of the people of his village are too old for such a journey on foot. They’d never make it this far. Hell, in his age, he only made it here because he has his old anqa to ferry him back and forth.
His shoulders slump, the guarding knight lowering their arm. “Do you need provisions or water?” asks a muffled woman’s voice through the metal visor, looking down at him. The old merchant sighs, rubbing his world weary face. Everyone was counting on him to do something to help them. His wife. He had promised them he would bring help.
There’s nothing else to do.
“I need a sword,” replies the merchant, lifting his eyes toward her. He hasn’t swung one in a good odd forty years, but perhaps that season of life has come to him again now. “Silvered. One that can kill a vampire.”
The knight looks at him, sizing him up and down. Perhaps he might have once been a strong, sharp man. But age and the comfort of married life in a sleepy village have softened at least the hone of his exterior, even if his eyes are still keen. “Respectfully. I don’t think you would manage to kill a vampire, especially an elder.”
“So you believe me?” he asks.
The knight doesn’t reply for a moment and then nods. “I do not see why else you would have come all this way,” she replies. “Nor do I believe that the fathers do not believe you either. Please understand that the crisis in the north-east really is of utmost importance to the church,” she explains. “The dungeon core there threatens to destroy more than just a backwater village. We have an oath to prioritize saving the many over the few.”
He points at the knight two heads taller than him, his old wrinkled finger pressing against the regal, ornate cuirass, leaving a smudge there on its polished, unblemished metal as his other hand grabs the top edge of it, pulling the helmet down lower toward his face. “My wife lives in that backwater village,” notes the merchant with strong coldness in his eyes. “I have an oath to save her,” affirms the old merchant without a hint of fear in his voice at picking a fight with the knight. “Give me a sword.”
She grabs his wrist, easily pulling it off of her armor, and stands back up straight. The knight and the merchant stare at each other.
Then, after a moment of that, she lets go of his wrist and turns away to open the door. “I cannot, in good conscience, accept your request,” explains the knight, lifting a hand to stop him as he starts to protest. “The father said to give you whatever you need. So I will go with you and kill this vampire myself,” she affirms, nodding to him, her fist striking over her armored heart. She waves for him to follow her. “We’ll post a call to action at the adventurers’ guild to attract some extra bodies and then be on our way back to your village immediately.”
The old merchant watches her, confused.
She’s going to help him? Why?
“I thought there wasn’t anyone available?” he asks.
The slitted visor looks back over a steel spaulder. “There aren’t any priests available,” she corrects, before walking back forward. “I am not a priest,” explains the knight in her heavy armor, striding back out down through the corridor with a strong gait.
Perplexed, but deeply relieved at this great news, the merchant looks around himself and then runs after her.
“But why?” he asks, catching up to the tall woman whose normal pacing causes him to have to half jog to keep up with her.
The knight, one hand resting idly on the sheath of her sword, doesn’t look at him as the two of them walk out of the city cathedral’s grand doors, out toward the bustling market place. “I have a soft heart for stupid romantics,” explains the voice from inside the metal wrapping. “It will be the death of me one day.”
“…That’s… very inspiring…” he mutters to himself, walking after her as they go out into the city to make a notice for help needed to destroy a newly reborn dungeon in the outlands away from the city.
Promises of renown by participation in a quest given by a church-ordained knight, rare loot, and less competition than the local dungeon in this city go a long way quickly, and before the sun has set and they leave the city, several hundred eager adventurers with weapons and magic at the ready have already begun making their way to the old village, chasing after the stars in their eyes.
The old merchant, sitting on his ragged, dusty anqa looks around himself as they ride out of the city. His animal looks very haggard and sleepy compared to the sleek, noble church anqa Agnis is riding on.
He can’t believe his eyes as they ride down the old roads. They were empty when he came this way. But all of a sudden, like veins refilling after the first strike of a resurrected heart, they are starting to swell up again. Young adventurers are making their way out of the city in droves down the old, overgrown roads.
He’s so relieved. He didn’t get any priests, but he did get help. The old merchant just hopes that it isn’t too late to save his dear home.
Who knows what devilry the foul beast has been up to in the days he took to get here? He can only pray that his wife is still safe kept.
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- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -
The Vampire Lord stands there outside, surprised at what he sees. A skeleton in a gardener’s overalls with a wide-brimmed straw hat stands next to him with its hands on its hips as the two of them admire the work that has been done.
While Inkume was resting in his coffin, the skeleton had gone on a rampage. The old gardens he had found destroyed and overgrown are now beautifully restored. He’s not sure how the lone worker did it, but he sure managed somehow. The decayed plants, withered and dry, are now blooming in shades of green so dark that they might well be black. Flowers sit along the edges of the paths, blossoming delightfully — but only as a trap to lure any unsuspecting legs into the waiting vines and roots that stretch out, waiting to grab ankles and legs. They release mind-altering perfumes into the air. Monsters sit there, mimicking trees and such things. The ponds are cleared from sludge and now look like wells of black ink, reflecting the starlight back up to the sky so clearly that one might think they were simply an extension of the heavens above themselves. These bleed out into a series of ornate, brick channels of water that run in several directions through metal grates — some of them into the castle, where they feed into other systems and rooms that have now been restored because of the fresh water.
The garden whispers and rustles as the cold wind of the night moves through it. Voices, mischievous and giggling, come from behind the dark fountains and trees where cruel fae have resettled back into their nooks and crannies.
[{Area Reactivated} The Blackflower Gardens]
{Plant and Water Type Spawning Zone}
Outside within the castle grounds sits this beautiful, darkly mysterious garden. It is full of rare flowers and exotic plants collected from all around the world at the behest of the Vampire Lord by his dutiful servants.
This room is responsible for managing the passive summoning of plant and beast-type monsters, as well as modifying your beast-related abilities to now also affect plants.
You may further improve it to enhance your focus in these areas.
Room Effects:
• [Beast] and [Plant] spawning rate increased by 100% within the castle grounds!
◦ [Beast] and [Plant] monsters will now rarely spawn within [The Haunted Forest]!
◦ Rare alchemical ingredients will grow abundantly in this garden.
• Your personal [Beast]-related abilities will now also work on [Plant]-type monsters.
The area is active! Monsters are spawning here!
“You did amazing work,” says Inkume, patting the undead gardener on the back. “Thank you.”
The skeleton, a straw of wheat hanging from its teeth, simply nods to him with a thumbs-up before going to tend to some extremely zealous creeping vines that are trying to attack a statue of some random woman he doesn’t know. Presumably they think it’s a real person.
— The crumbling statue has also been fixed.
He’s never been much of an outdoor person. But even he can admire the beauty of these gardens. It’s honestly almost otherwordly. Inkume strolls down a path, looking at a canal running toward the castle. Something long swims beneath the surface, looking up at him for a moment with bright blue slit eyes, before quickly vanishing downstream.
His eyes are sharp in the darkness. Tonight is a fully moonless night, and so he feels like he can see everything more crisply and clearly than ever before. As a vampire, he really does thrive in total darkness.
Kneeling down, the castle behind him with its many jutting towers thrusting into the night in all directions, he gently cups a flower growing out of the side of a massive stem and smells it.
— A yelp. A sharp crack. His face stings.
Surprised, Inkume looks up and sees the face of some off-human shape. The rose wasn’t just a rose. It was a part of an entire creature.
~ [Albrūn] ~
An Albrūn
Coming in many hues — all of them green, yellow, and pink — albrūn (Alb-roo-n) are rare, elf-mimicking plant monsters with intelligent but deeply selfish personalities. Taking on in part the shape of an elven woman, their large lower halves contrastingly consist of a single, many-petaled, immobile flower. Surrounded by a slight pooling of sticky nectar, their humanoid upper torsos stick out of its open center like the flower's pistil. Albrūn are extremely shy and will close themselves up and hide inside of their their petals if approached.
However, they are so shy that they will kill any man who does see them in an unguarded state because of their embarrassment. They have no quarrel with women, unless attacked. Because of this, some adventurous field botanists have managed to form friendships with these monsters, allowing deep insight into their complex nature.
While being themselves extremely physically weak and frail, Albrūn are capable of controlling the plant life around them via a complicated intermeshing of their personal root networks with those of the deep forests they live in, allowing them to manipulate their environment. One can see where an Albrūn is growing because of its propensity to greedily steal exorbitant amounts of nutrients from its own cluster of soil via its manipulation of the greenery around it, resulting in patches of flowers that grow at its extremely fertile base. This will come at the expense of the rest of its starved forest, which can often seem hungry and dry in contrast.
Type: Plant Rank: D+ Common Drop: Pink Petal Rare Drop: Strange Nectar
Instinctively, Inkume jumps back, his hands raised, his mind telling him to bolt before someone pulls out a phone and records him. His eyes immediately scan for a crowd leering his way for being a creep. Oh God. It’s over.
He only sees the skeleton gardener, looking his way. “I didn’t do anything weird! I swear!” explains the Vampire Lord, the writhing, screaming plant woman stuck there next to him. She’s clutching herself and flailing around like an overcooked noodle, her petals closing and rising up around her to shield her body. The skeleton gardener looks at him and then just quietly turns its head back to its work.
Wait.
“I’m the Vampire Lord…” mutters Inkume to himself, his logical mind coming back to push away his base gut knowledge of this being a bad look. He looks back at the monster that should be under his control. “Enough!” he commands. “No more screaming.”
The plant monster stops screaming, falls into a heap, and clutches herself. The petals wrap closed around her as she peers with terrified eyes through the gaps his way.
Good.
An instant later, the ground bursts apart, razor sharp roots from the plants and trees all around them shooting up into the air and writhing like maddened tendrils.
Not good.
He doesn’t have a second’s time to get a single word out. A barrage of whipping vines smash down all around him, Inkume just barely dodging them all by transforming into a variety of different animals second after second, jumping out of the way as a cat before sliding through a choking wrap that grabs him as a rat, until he then just seems to vanish entirely.
The roots stop, the dust and the flung mud of the scarred garden settling down.
The plant-girl mutters a wordless perplexion out to herself as her big eyes move from side to side through the small gap in the wide, thick, pink flower petals she’s hid behind. But she can’t seem to find him.
He’s just vanished.
“…Huuuh~?” mutters a rather simple voice from inside the flower.
Everything is quiet.
— Only a slight buzzing can be heard as a little fly drifts past her ears.
“GOT YOU!” shouts his voice right behind her all of a sudden, his large hands grabbing her hunched over body.
The albrūn cries bloody murder, jumping up and shrieking in pure terror — all of which are not screams. Her petals burst open as the Vampire Lord’s full body remanifests into the shape of a human inside of her cluster, down on his knees. He’s kneeling behind her human back with his arms around her front as she flails, swinging herself out to try and shake him off, her limbs and fists hammering in terror. The roots and vines all around the area go crazy, cutting into trees and through fountains. “Enough! Stop!” commands the Vampire Lord, clinging on.
And then, as commanded — having no choice to do otherwise — the monster stops crying and fighting him too.
Thank God.
Instead, there’s a short sniffling and then the sound of loud, snotty sniffling as the shaking monster has nothing left to defend itself with.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
A second voice comes from the side — one he doesn’t know. “Is this really what you do all night?” it asks.
Still holding the plant monster from behind, the Vampire Lord looks over to a bench by the nearby fountain where a stranger is sitting and watching him.
He stares. Then looks back at the panic-attack-having monster in his unfortunately placed grasp, and then back toward the other person. Snatch is floating next to the stranger. “It iiis~!” cries the ghost and then immediately vanishes with a long, loud lamentation.
“…It’s not what it looks like,” notes Inkume, releasing his grasp on the plant monster as he tries to get back out from the inside of the flower’s recessed bowl. A sticky, thick honey-colored nectar covers his legs and front, having been smeared all over him from the wrestling. He dusts himself off, and before his hands finish swiping his clothes, his ability to always stay clean and pristine makes everything disappear.
Inkume looks back at the plant monster. “Sorry,” says the Vampire Lord to the albrūn, which quickly vanishes into its flower again.
The gardener nearby stares at him. A cut-through tree falls down in the background. The skeleton gestures to vaguely everything. Half of this part of the courtyard is completely destroyed. “Sorry!” he says again, gesturing to the gardener as he walks to the stranger.
The Vampire Lord stands there, looking at them.
It’s some woman. She’s mature and extremely athletic in frame and has full dark, wild, past-shoulder-length hair that carries hints of once being a vivid, fiery red, but it has become matted with the colors of life over the years. Her posture is casual, and she’s sitting leaned back on the bench with her arms spread out over the rest, one leg crossed over the other as she stares him down with a coldness to her eyes. The well-tanned skin of her body and face are covered in large patches of contrastingly pale vitiligo, along with a wash of scattered sun spots from head to toe. Her clothes are little more than rags, held together with primitive strings and what look like the old lost buckles of forgotten shoes. Given her rudimentary outfit, her stomach and honestly, just about the rest of her — is exposed, and she has clear, outlined musculature that he does his best not to stare at, since that would be very weird to do.
— Eye contact only. He isn’t a creep.
“I came to follow up after our little talk, Inkume,” she says, almost spitting the last word as she glares at him with narrowed eyes. “But you seemed more dignified then,” she remarks, almost skeptical.
Inkume stands there, his hands behind his back.
A splotch of something sticky and wet strikes the back of his head. His ruby eyes shoot behind himself, quickly glaring at the plant monster that lets out a sharp cry at being seen again and then hides back down again into its flower.
By the time he looks back at the stranger on the bench, the flowery goop on the back of his head has vanished again.
“Ah, yes. You,” says the Vampire Lord, keeping his voice dry and emotionless.
He has no idea who she is.
But she clearly knows who he is, and he isn’t going to ask her name because that would be awkward. Clearly he’s supposed to know. But he doesn’t. So, as one does, he’s just going to wing it until some circumstance reminds him of her name.
But, no, really. Who is this? He has no idea. Is she important? What’s happening here? Why is she in his home? Snatch was here, so she knows this woman, right? But Snatch is gone now, for whatever reason.
He’d better play this off coolly. She seems like a serious person. There’s an intensity in her eyes. She’s staring him down like he’s a rabbit in a cougar’s cave.
It’s Matthew-Cray-Anthony time.
The Vampire Lord leans over forward, his hands still folded behind his back as he stares into her eyes. “I find that… different people require different approaches,” he explains with cold confidence, playing off whatever embarrassing nonsense she just saw happen here as if it were nothing at all. He holds out one hand toward her, staring deeply into her keen, strong eyes. “…Some of them are more…” He makes a strategic pause, leaning in only ever so slightly closer toward her, as if her unsure gaze were pulling him in — not close enough to be weird-weird, but close enough to be strategically weird. This is what Matthew does. He talks half-way through his thoughts, then stares broodingly for a moment, does stuff with his face, and then keeps talking. Apparently, according the book, it works. “- intense than others,” he explains, stealing a new line from the book one-for-one.
Something breaks in her gaze, a wall rattling on its foundations.
Immediately, she tsks, flashing a glare at him before she gets up and off of the bench by herself. The woman cracks her neck, rolling a shoulder, her knuckles letting out the same rasp as she gets ready for something. “You talk too much, pretty boy,” says the stranger. “I didn’t come here to talk.”
He raises an eyebrow. “What else, then?” asks Inkume. She bats away away his hand.
“You expect to show up in my forest, make a ruckus, and expect me to bend the knee just because you got some flowery words?” asks the stranger. She shoves him back. “We’re fightin',” she explains. “And if you don’t like it, I’m gonna be doing the punching myself,” she says, snarling, a long canine tooth visible.
“WOLF!” he yells, suddenly realizing what — who — she is.
Her hair-protruding fluffy ears and long, shaggy tail that sticks out from under the back of her rags should have been an obvious hint. But somehow, he didn’t notice them in his nervousness until just now. Honestly, he was working too hard on keeping only eye-contact and not looking like a lecher.
It’s the wolf matriarch. The one Snatch captured many nights ago, during the attack on the village.
His instincts kick in, one of his semi-useful abilities activating.
[I Was Here Before All Things With Teeth] Passive Ability • Allows you innate knowledge in regards to all monsters and creatures of the night, giving you insight into their nature and design.
There’s no moon tonight. It’s a fully moonless night, so the wolf matriarch has lost her gigantic four-legged form and reverted back into a human shape that she once held those thousand some years ago, back when she was still a revered deity and spirit.
She raises an eyebrow.
Shit. He just let that one out without thinking. He’d better tack something on. She wants to fight him? That’s even worse than him looking like a stooge. He literally cannot fight some ancient elder wolf god. His abilities suck, and he’s never fought anyone before in his old life either. The best thing he has going for him is his immaculate sense of fashion.
“— Why would I fight you?” he asks in a much cooler demeanor, his rejected hand swatting back through his own hair. The Vampire Lord shrugs with a cold, smug, almost laughing smile as if this were a legitimate question and almost a waste of his time. It’s like he’s just humoring her at best. “I told you then. I won’t.”
She steps toward him, clenching a fist. “In that case. You’re gonna be having a hard time drinking blood with no teeth.” She gets ready in some very firm, strong stance that suggests she actually knows what she’s doing. The scars and rough skin on her knuckles and all along her arms to the rest of her body seem to agree with the observation.
He doesn’t have a clue how to fight. What the fuck?
The Vampire Lord just kind of stands there, shifting to the side just a little and lifting a single, listless hand her way. He’s copying a pose he saw drawn in a comic once about some edgy wizard.
He has to weasel his way out of this.
“You’re weak,” says the Vampire Lord. “Come back to me on a full moon, when you’re stronger, and maybe it'll be worth it for me to entertain the idea.”
She steps toward him. He holds his ground. Stepping back would make him look uncool. He has to look unphased. If a dog is coming after you, turning tail is the surest way to make it give chase. Never turn your back on a predator. The wolf snarls. “I figured you were a flake, just like the last one,” explains the wolf, not giving in to his provocation. The wolf spits on the ground and then angles her head to the side. “I came in this shape to prove my point,” explains the wolf matriarch. “Beat me in a fight, and I’ll let you have a drink,” she explains, tapping the side of her neck. He looks. She smiles. “Can’t resist that, can you?”
She’s serious. Shit.
He can't use Matthew-mode this time. She's not biting. He needs to try something else since there doesn’t look to be any way to talk himself out of it. But how the hell is he going to take on such an experienced combatant? He has nothing. He doesn’t have a plan; he doesn’t have any bullshit left, and he certainly doesn’t have any ability to actually pull it off if he tried. It won’t take a minute before he’s lying on the ground in a headlock, crying like an ugly baby with a mother that doesn’t love it. It’ll look really, really bad. His new immaculate brand image will never recover. All the skeletons will laugh at him for the rest of eternity.
She sidesteps, starting to circle him and he follows her motions, the two of them moving in a pattern as they look to be sizing each other up. She might be doing that, but he certainly isn’t. He’s just stalling.
Maybe he can make this idea of a fight unattractive for her? If she isn't falling for the softboy-core, maybe he'll try evil Vampire Lord out.
“Your blood isn’t good enough for me to waste my time,” he remarks. The wolf narrows her eyes. The Vampire Lord clenches his fingers closed, overturning his hand and then reopening his palm — a black aura emanating from his grasp.
— The aura isn’t really anything. It’s just some magical fluff he’s releasing to make it look like he’s doing something.
“What’d you say, punk?” she snarls, her canine teeth showing.
“When I win, you will submit to me,” tacks on the Vampire Lord as a condition that he is sure is too much for the proud person to risk taking on. “For now until eternity, you’ll lie your head at my feet like a good dog and wag your tail whenever I tell you to.”
That should do it. There’s no way that a former deity would ever agree to such a scandalous risk to their image and ego.
“Deal,” she replies, gritting her teeth, her eyes full of indignant anger and confidence. His fantastic plan backfired. He just pissed her off even more. “Let’s do this.”
Fuck.
It’s over. He’s done for. He may as well get his coffin ready now, because they’ll need something to bury him in.
A rumbling comes to the ground they’re standing on, presumably from some inner power. The two of them freeze as a static fills the air in that microsecond where both of them know the fight is about to start. Her stance shifts, a twitch in her calf hinting at her jumping straight toward him with a fist ready, the ground beneath her boot caving in from the power of her forward leap’s first motion straight toward his vaguely wiggling outstretched hand that he is just literally doing random crap with. The Vampire Lord realizes he’s just copying old gun reloading animations from some video games he played in his past life.
Why is he like this?
— She hurtles toward him.
In that same time-frozen instant, a flash of stone gray rips through the castle gardens with terrifying speed. Trees break and fly in all directions; holes rip through a ten-fold row of hedges. A few terrified night birds scatter up into the air as they’re catapulted toward the stars, almost the same as the wolf is.
His summoned sarcophagus rips out of the castle with blinding speed, skittering his way on eight legs like a solid stone spider, and crashes directly into the wolf in the same second she was starting her attack. She never sees it coming, and the only thing she realizes in her confused daze as she hurtles through the air is that somehow the world isn’t looking as she expected it to.
Her scream trails off toward the clouds.
Inkume stands there with his mouth hanging partially open, an odd croaking noise coming from the back of his throat as he watches her silhouette vanish toward the clouds with a long, trailing, confused scream. Quietly after a moment, he slowly lowers his gaze, looking at the animated coffin that sets itself down in front of him like an excited house pet. It pulls its sharp, eight legs back into the slotted holes on its exterior.
[Summon Sarcophagus] Active Ability You have summoned your sarcophagus!
“…Thanks,” says the Vampire Lord, very much not able to keep up with his new life.
The sarcophagus rattles.
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- [The Ancient Wolf] -
She screams, hurtling through the air, sure that any lesser creature than herself would have had broken bones from an attack so quick and powerful. The powerful wolf demi-god flails helplessly in all directions, not being an animal designed to be up so high.
She didn’t even see it coming. Did he even move? She didn’t even see him move. What happened?!
She’s never seen something so strong. Even the old Vampire Lord she was able to keep up with to an extent, but this…
— This is impossible. What kind of monster is he?!
Her mind can’t keep pace with her chaotic thoughts as she spirals toward the night sky, terrified, and then comes to a slow.
Her momentum stops, and she plummets back down to the ground. It’s over. She’s going to die! Her scream and howl carry through the night as she drops from the darkness down back toward the world below.
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- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -
Inkume stands there, staring up toward the sky.
…Does he… does he do something? Did he win? This means the fight’s over, right? The Vampire Lord stands there, perplexed.
For a minute, he thinks that the wolf matriarch is gone for good, having been thrown off somewhere toward the ends of the world, or at least into the forest.
Is she dead? A fall like that is definitely going to kill someone, right?
Did he just kill her?
“What have I done?!” yells the Vampire Lord, falling to his knees in despair and holding out his arms open toward God.
But his concerns are alleviated in part for a second as he sees a speck crashing back down out of the sky, flailing wildly in all directions like a spider flung from the moon.
“…Huh…?”
He doesn’t have time to gather his thoughts before she — as fate would have it — lands exactly within his open arms that don’t even budge more than an inch from the terminal velocity impact. She continues to scream and howl, flailing around for a moment as she seems to be stuck in whatever state she’s in. The Vampire Lord stares at her in disbelief, his eye twitching as he looks at the impossible thing he’s done once again by sheer happenstance.
A window appears next to him and then vanishes again a moment later.
[Forget Your Father] Active Ability • Allows you to perfectly catch any falling maiden as they drop, likely falling from the high windows of their guarded family home’s into your waiting arms.
He can’t even get angry anymore about this nonsense. He’s just empty at this point.
Her seemingly breathless howling begins to trail off, the proof of the proud wolf’s loss dripping down his arm into a puddle of urine that he simply isn’t going to acknowledge because of how weird it would be. This whole thing is weird. Why is everything always so weird?
He’d better end this before she recollects her resolve and breaks his nose, or worse, tries to have a conversation with him.
“You lost,” declares the Vampire Lord, looking at her dazed expression that is still recollecting its surroundings.
Those two words immediately rekindle the raging fire in her eyes, as if they were spoken with burning magic. Her body tenses up, and she instinctively arcs her arm back, the other one grabbing his collar as she gets ready to fulfill his minute-ago nose-related prophecy. Honestly, he’s almost astonished at how fast that scratch to her pride awoke her from a state very much the exact opposite of that.
The Vampire Lord strikes, his face lashing unexpectedly toward her in with the pull on his collar as he drops down past her pale, confused face. The Vampire Lord sinks his teeth deeply into her neck. The load held in his arms lets out a sharp, short, breathless cry that is little more than a surprised gasp — all of its extensions spasming, coiling, and writhing together at once as if she were suddenly electrified.
Her legs kick, her fingers around his shirt’s collar open wide, and then close again tightly in a consistently rebreaking clamp. Her nails run a groove down along his collarbone, her other arm moving in to hit him finally, but only landing with a soft thud against his shoulder as its violent force seems almost sapped from it. Her voice, both undulates as he drinks from her nape. Until then, at the end, both of her hands are wrapped around him, her clawed fingers of one hand digging into the back of his head and shoving him in closer, the other wrapped around his back and drawing blood.
Her body shakes, and she lets out one final release that is more guttural than any other before, before her eyes fall shut and the shivering thing in his arms stops, turning into a dead weight.
[Experience Points Gained] You have drank a large amount of the blood of an ancient wolf! It’s magical properties are potentially vastly potent. However, it has been dormant for a long time, and the strength of the blood is not what it once was in an age since passed.
*★✧+- [LEVEL UP!] -+✧★* You are now level 104! You are now level 105! You are now level 106!
NEW ABILITY [Sensual Toxin] Passive Ability • Via an excretion of pheromones through your skin, you always smell extremely pleasing to anyone around you.
NEW ABILITY [The Dripping Man] Active Ability • Instantly change your current outfit any time you want by throwing your cloak over yourself. Note: All outfits must always have a cloak.
NEW ABILITY [Castle Hassle] Toggle Ability • Your castle loves you. All haunted paintings and other furnishings will vigorously clap and cheer whenever you are within eyesight.
With a droplet of blood trailing down out of the side of his mouth, Inkume looks at the unconscious woman in his arms. Somehow, this is the second time he’s ended up this way. It’s probably not a great look. It’s a good thing social media doesn’t exist here, or he’d be done for.
What does he do with this one? He already has Azalea, whom he has to get back to the village, and now this. Somehow, he’s collecting people. That’s usually a bad thing.
Oh God. Inkume realizes what he just thought.
He’s collecting people.
He’s actually the villain. Life really is setting him up to be the bad guy in this scenario, as it keeps doing.
“How does this keep happening?!” yells Inkume at the night.
— The night, being a little off kilter at the moment, does not respond.
There is a sound from his side. The Vampire Lord looks at the skeleton gardener, who is still just standing there and watching him amidst the destruction.
“…I’ll help you clean up in a minute,” promises Inkume.
He ducks, his senses firing off.
A glob of yellow plant nectar flies over his head and splats against the face of a statue. Inkume’s glare catches the plant monster from before, who quickly hides back in her petals, only popping her face out for a second to stick out her tongue at him.
Inkume bets the old Vampire Lord didn’t have to put up with all of this.
Turning away, he struts back toward the castle that is starting to grow new towers from the wellspring of his freshly drunk power. His foot squelches from the dampness of the wolf urine having leaked into his socks for a minute, until his abilities dry it out and hopefully remove the smell.
Somehow, nobody ever mentions this part of the job.