It is taking us too long to reach our targets. Every minute that we are wasting here is another minute that we are giving to the Navok's to regroup.

  Once the Navok's regroup and attack us, things are going to really bad for us very quickly. We are literally in their homebase. It won't be easy for us to escape them here. We should have already found the vampires and gotten rid of them by now. Then we would have been able to escape pretty quickly.

  Well, I guess that I should clarify this point before continuing. I did not manage to record much about the Navok family's strength before this. The Navok family maintain the strongest army in this town. None of the other powers in this place are even able to compete with them.

  The moment that any of the other powers in the town begin to get powerful, the Navok family crushes them. The only powers that have managed to acquire any power are the factions that hide themselves.

  Even though they are not really that powerful in the grand scheme of things, they can still act as bait. According to the searchers, Anthony had to negotiate with seven such factions to even convince them to attack the place. Even this alliance of powers might not be enough to defeat the enemy. It will just be enough to keep them busy for a while.

  I don't care about them if I am being honest. They can kill each other till all of them are in one of the hells. Right now, the problem is that they are all getting in our way. The entire casino has become a battlefield, and we are facing the consequences of that.

  Right now we are looking for the vampires. The sentinels are making use of the blood echolocators to do so. I guess we could have made use of blood echolocation, but I am saving my mana for the eventual fight I am going to face. There is no way that I am going to let the snake escape again.

  It is not really helpful in telling us the route through this place. The only positive thing in all of this mess is that we are getting closer to one of the vampires. The only question is that I don't know which one we are getting closer to. The blood echolocators are not very precise at identifying individual vampires.

  The thing is that we are relying on John to tell us our route through the casino. The man has only been here a few times and even during that time he had restricted himself to the few rooms in the place. That means we often end up stumbling into the fights between the rebels and navok's.

  Stumbling onto their fights mean that we are fighting both the rebels and the Navok's. Well, we don't really want to fight with either faction. It is just that we keep stumbling into their fights. When we pop up in their location, both factions shift their attention to us. Then they keep assaulting us until we fight back. Then we have to keep fighting until the enemy are dead.

  We have already stumbled on three such encounters and had to fight them three times. The fights themselves are not too hard. The people involved in this fight are the ordinary soldiers. They are mages, but they are not particularly hard enemies to fight.

  The more that we fight the Navoks the worse our position will be when they begin to chase after us.

  They also force us to waste time. Time that we do not have. Right now, the snake must be trying to meet up with the void. We have to find the void (or the snake) before the two of them meet up. Fighting them together is going to be much harder then fighting them separately.

  (After about five minutes)

  We have finally found the vampire that we were tracking. The first thought that I have while seeing the snake is that it is not in a very good situation.

  The creature is pretty banged up at the moment. The first indicator of this is the man's leg. Right now, the man is limping from his fight with Lauren. I juries like that are something a vampire can fix on the fly.

  There are cuts on the man as well from the fight that is happening right now. The creature is not healing from these injuries.

  The most serious injury that he has right now is from a sword stuck in his stomach. Well, I can see the person that has caused this particular injury. He is a Navok family guard whose throat is being held by the snake.

  Right now, the snake is strangling the man. (It is nice to see we are not the only people struggling against the vampire. Also, that means that there is no alliance between the two factions.) I guess that we could try to save the man, but rushing into a battle with a vampire is stupid.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  John doesn't cause me any problems as the man quietly retreats from the room. Even as they leave the room (as they agreed to.), the snake raises his head as he looks at me from his present victim. His eyes dart from me at the retreating figure of the people leaving this room.

  He doesn't say anything though as we stare at each other. Even as I stare at the man, it is clear that he is not at his peak. I have already described his injuries but the sign of the man's weakness is his body. I had made fun of him as the skeleton of a werewolf. Right now that is what the man is looking like though.

  The man is still strangling the guard as he stares at me.

  "Well, I must say that you have seen better days." I speak.

  "You are certainly a confident man. To think that you would let your people leave when you are in such a bad position yourself." The creature replies.

  "You shouldn't speak about being in a bad position, vampire. Look at yourself." I reply.

  "Well, I have to admit that this body of mine is not in a good position. It is still good enough to take care of a half-transformed mutt like you." The man growls. His face is an expression of rage. It is all a sham though. I can see the steely calm of his eyes. The man is looking for an opportunity to strike.

  I have noticed that the man in his hands are already dead.

  "You can't have more than a couple of strikes in you, do you?" I ask, more to myself than the man opposite me.

  It looks like I have caught the man as an expression of flits across his face.

  "A single strike will be enough to take you down, human." The vampires replies.

  I don't reply to this, though, as I focus on my own defense. I can feel my blood mana circulating in my body as my senses sharpen.

  The vampire opposite me is low on blood mana. The creature had to get involved in multiple fights without getting to feed on blood mana. Incidentally, that's why its body looks like a skeleton. Lets just say that costs of being low on blood mana tends to be more drastic than being low on vital mana.

  Now the question that I have is just how low it actually is on mana?

  Right now, we are just staring at each other. I am trying to see from where the enemy will strike. The only problem is that the other party is a poison mage. They have so many ways of casting their spells that I don't actually know how he might attack.

  His claws are naturall a threat. I will assume that his bite must similarly be threat. That means getting close to him is going to be a threat. All of that would still be fine if I could just be sure that keeping away from him would be safe. Poison spells tend to be their deadliest at a distance. (After all, half the poisons of a poison mage tend to be deadly to the caster as well.)

  "Well, how long are we going to stare at each other like this human." The vampire speaks suddenly.

  "We will stare at each other until you attack, vampire." I reply, not taking my eyes off him. "After all, my work is just to buy time until my people get rid of the void."

  "What is your plan?" The vampire asks, the curiosity clear in its tone. "How exactly do you plan to find information about the necromancer. You are killing all the people who know the location of the place they are hiding in."

  "Would you believe me if I were to say that we plan to torture it out of you guys." I reply.

  "Well, if that is your plan, you are really doing a very bad job of it. The void is going to be harder to torture than all the people you are killing." The vampire laughs, creeping me to my bones. "You know that, so you might as well tell me your actual plan."

  He is clearly not interested in actually listening to a reply because the man charges at me. Well charge at me is the wrong word. He swells up like a balloon even as he jumps at me. As I jump to the side I can feel the mist cling to me.

  I have completely stopped breathing as I begin to craft barriers around every hole in my body. (Its not my first time against a mister.) The mist will not be entering my body from anywhere. These barriers can still be breached, so I jump back, making sure that it doesn't get the opportunity to do so. Almost as soon as I do it, I see that the cloud of mist has begun to follow after me. That is good, as I keep out of the creatures way.

  Turning into mist is a pretty dangerous spell among the vampires. If they stay in this state for too long, likely, the snake will likely not be able to return to its normal state. (Half of the misters tend to die because they cannot reform their body.)

  The trick to fight with a mister is to keep away from it. Being stuck in the mist is going to be instant death. (Especially for one that is a poison mage.)

  This cat-and-mouse chase of ours continues for a while, as the mist finally condenses back into the form of the snake. The vampire has a look of rage on his face. I think he had not expected that I would be able to defend against the mist.

  "You damn vampire hunters." The man snarls at me.

  "You should have expected something like that.", I reply, as my heart pounds like a drum. Dodging a cloud of mist is about as hard as it sounds.

  The only consolation that I have is that the man opposite me looks worse than me at least. His shoulders are dropping as he maintains a defensive stance. The most clear indicator of his weakness is his transformation, though.

  Right now, the man looks like he is returning to his normal figure. It is pretty disgusting to look at this, actually, as his flesh is warping and changing shape at random. It looks like he has worms crawling under his skin.

  There is an edge of desperation to the man's movement now. (that causes a shiver to rise in my spine.) Whatever he is about to do is going to screw things up for me. I channel my mana to such a degree that it actually feels painful. (Like somebody is stabbing me with needles.). I just counter this one move of his.

  I don't need to wait for the long as the man charges at me. Even as he moves towards me my sword slashes in his direction. There is no thought put into the man's movement as he moves towards me on pure instinct. That I can why it takes me a moment to figure out what he wants to do. My sword's finds the man's neck as it beheads the creature in this while.

  Even as my sword hits the man, his claws end up in my stomach. Even as I pull out the claw from my stomach, I can feel the world black out around me.