++It is unknown what determines the sizes of undead social groups, though it has been observed that longer-animated undead tend to be able to maintain larger hordes. Absent of a necromancer, they have been known to exceed one hundred heads. With a caster controlling them, this number can grow by orders of magnitude. ++

  Chapter 16

  Ludvich left Reggie and the Witchfinders alone soon, and they wasted precisely no time in getting to business. That didn’t come as a surprise to him of course, Reggie had known Ludvich enough that he saw many of the old fuck’s mannerisms in this new group. Were they just Witchfinder traits? It seemed likely. Witchfinders often trained at one of a relatively few special institutions designed to instill in them the skills and knowledge required to die usefully, maybe he picked up a few idiosyncrasies common from whichever one he went to. Unless Ludvich was another apprentice-case who’d trained under an existing Witchfinder. Reggie realised then that he didn’t know much about the old man.

  Didn’t matter much now, though, what was really important was what these new Witchfinders were saying.

  “We’re not going to take you in easy,” the oldest one, Vagryn his name was, growled, “Witchfinders don’t do easy. This is hard work for hard men, if you can’t stick it out we’ll just cut you loose. If you look like you’re going to get us killed, we’ll cut you loose without even heading back to town first. Understood?”

  Reggie didn’t like this man, he quickly decided. It seemed like he was trying far too hard to be as gruff and down-to-business as Ludvich. Except you didn’t try to do that, it just happened when you focused on your work above all else. That he could be so concerned with aesthetics was actually quite relaxing.

  “Understood,” Reggie nodded, as if he was thoroughly impressed anyway. No use in pissing the man off for no reason.

  Of course this was the sort of man to look for a reason, and he spent so long staring beams of scrutiny at Reggie’s face that it took the second oldest Witchfinder, a stout fellow named Ledwig Vor, to get the conversation back on track.

  “Do well, though, and you’ll be fast-tracking your way to becoming a Witchfinder yourself. Do you know how much we get paid?”

  Reggie shook his head.

  “Three shillings for a peeler, fifty ryven for an adult wolf-spider. That’s the range of pay for these woods. Most tend on the lower end, but if you’re good at the job you’ll still be bringing home half a ryven each day.”

  That was between two and three times what most labourers earned, the kind of pay that normally took years of specialised training and an expensive workstation to match by producing luxury goods.

  Not very much. Not for this job, not to risk your skin and life every night and know you had ten-in-one odds of ever reaching retirement. But Reggie had seen the value once, as a demon-boy the whole town hated. He could pretend to be a disfigured wanderer seeing that same value now.

  So his eyes lit up like he was seeing a silver ryven dangled before them on string.

  “That’s true then? Ludvich wasn’t bullshitting?”

  Ledwig grinned. “I don’t think Ludvich has a bullshitting bone in his body.”

  Which wasn’t exactly true, or else Reggie would’ve been killed all over again, but they didn’t need to know that.

  “Can we move this along?” the youngest Witchfinder, Barry-no-last-name, mewled, “I want to hurry up and start collecting those shillings.”

  The other two glanced at him with a dash of irritation that Reggie caught and pocketed away for later study, but his words weren’t ignored.

  “Yes, let’s move out,” Vagryn nodded, “oh yes, new lad, what’s your name?”

  “John Smith.”

  He stared at Reggie.

  “Seriously?”

  “Having an identity got my face melted off, do you really care that much?” This was a bit of a risk, but Reggie figured it was easier to be open about hiding some real past from the start. It’d make the Witchfinders, skilled investigators all of them, less likely to dig deeper and uncover something he actually wanted hidden. If that happened, well. Pitchforks, torches, etc.

  Apparently he’d chosen wisely this time, because the three men just looked at each other and shrugged. Only Barry seemed reluctant to accept things.

  Fortunately, Barry didn’t seem to get much say in anything. They were all setting off without much further ado. Each of them was armed differently, but all heavily.

  Barry was the most silly of them in Reggie’s opinion. He had a big, stupid fucking thing strewn over his shoulder that looked like someone had taken seven pistols, elongated the barrels and then strapped them all to a single handle and trigger. He called it a ‘Nock gun’ after catching Reggie looking at it for more than a second, then launched into an unprompted explanation of the thing.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Old, the gun was. But then most technology was old. It was designed for ship-to-ship combat, meant to give sailors an edge by letting them unload a whole spray of shots with one trigger pull before everyone closed into melee. That was the origin of its colloquial name—the volley gun.

  Except it was a little bit too powerful. Fired by men without an appreciable amount of Attribute points, it had a tendency to break collars, ribs or even arms, and it was eventually disused by the ancient navy that created it for its inconvenient tendency to set the bloody rigging on fire.

  Reggie did not share Barry’s enthusiasm for his fucking weirdo gun, but was polite and nodded while informed about it. Who knew? Maybe it’d come in handy. Maybe they’d get attacked by a tree at some point with no lumber axe available.

  Everyone else, Reggie included, was more sensibly armed. Long guns loaded with the same hardened lead that Ludvich used, except with weird bayonets brought along too. Elongated by an extra few inches and with odd cross sections added with protruding barbs along the steel. Most everyone had one or more side-arms, and all of them were moving well enough.

  Not as well as Ludvich, but Reggie was still struggling slightly to keep pace without breaking into an outright jog. Speed had been one of the lesser improvements he’d made since becoming a vampire.

  But infinite stamina made up the difference.

  Ordinarily, Reggie would have been concerned moving alongside a group of people who had trained for most of their lives to identify him as a vampire. But he’d discovered something very interesting about his evolution while Ludvich was setting the meeting up.

  Royal Presence I. Your blood is of an older and more refined variety than the common vampire, and can shape your aura as you please. By focusing on an impression you may convey emotional effects onto surrounding humanoids with line of sight to you. Use of this power may also disguise your vampiric nature, feigning bodily functions such as breath and blood flow at the cost of slowing Regeneration.

  In this case, it was perfect. Not only did Reggie not have to worry about being identified at a glance, but slowing his body’s healing meant that he wasn’t going to give away his vampiric nature by undoing the burns if he was out with the Witchfinders for more than a few hours.

  It did also mean that injuries he took would hurt for a while, but then he’d be avoiding crippling or killing wounds anyway since not bleeding to death when his heart was removed would’ve already been a dead giveaway. All things considered, he was feeling vindicated in his choice of evolution.

  That lasted about as long as it took for them to hear the first weird noise. Reggie immediately thought to the necromantic angler, to his brush with that adult wolfspider, to any number of other nasties that lurked in the grimwood and might enjoy a bite of marbled Reggie. He caught himself looking around, staring at every bush for some sign that a horrible creature was about to burst out of it.

  The Witchfinders weren’t exactly less paranoid, but they had a stronger focus to their fear. All of them covered a particular angle, guns ready and eyes narrow. There was no nervous twitching in them, no more than in a well-oiled set of gears.

  Reggie was more like a rusted crank, turning often and making more noise than he’d have liked. At the very least he seemed to have a fair bit more coordination than as a human, probably the few extra points of Celerity, and he wasn’t doing anything to give away their position. At least not for creatures that weren’t already within visual range.

  Still, he waited. Silent as he could be, counting the seconds by as nothing happened. Then kept happening. Just when he’d started to relax, movement exploded free of a nearby bush and something came lunging for the group.

  Peelers. Lots of peelers. Lots and lots of peelers. They were attracted to life, right? Still, the things didn’t normally travel in big groups. Bad luck it seemed, lots of bad luck. There were at least ten of them to Reggie and the three Witchfinders, worse than two-to-one odds. Equal numbers would’ve still been too long for his taste, though seeing the things charge now he found himself relaxing slightly. Not as fast as when he’d first encountered one as a human. Even without transforming, Reggie had a good amount of physical power that he’d not enjoyed before.

  But not much, less than most Witchfinders. Best not to get cocky. He raised his musket, waited for a good shot, then took it.

  Hardened lead, great for killing things that were much tougher than humans. Not so good against reanimated corpses. The metal didn’t expand like softer material would have, and the wound it left was not the fist-sized cavity Reggie would’ve hoped for. All the same it was a nice chunk of matter removed from the peeler, which Reggie was happy for. The others’ shots were similarly effective, gouging out pieces of meat where they hit and leaving significant fractions of their targets’ limbs strewn about behind them. Only Barry held off on firing.

  Until the peelers were right in front of them, that was. Then he squeezed off a shot from his ridiculous gun and turned two of the undead into clouds of flying meat ribbons. Reggie had to admit, he was coming round to the volley gun.

  But he didn’t get time to stew in how wrong he’d been before another peeler closed with him. He swung his emptied musket like a club, timing the attack just right so that its brass-plated butt caught the creature’s temple. Thinnest part of the skull, its temple, and Reggie was close to twice as strong now as he’d been in life. The impact neatly cracked a section of bone and caved it inwards, sent the peeler sprawling and kept it still on the ground long enough for Reggie to finish it with a few more bashes.

  He looked up and saw his comrades were managing to tie up their own fights. None were bothering to reload their long arms, but a few had fired secondary weapons. Pistols churning up peeler insides with fat, lazy bullets. Only one of the things was left, and Reggie came up behind it to smash his musket right down into its neck. The spine broke with a meaty crunch, it fell convulsing at his feet, and he stomped its head into jelly.

  Apparently, while his Royal Presence was activated the undead didn’t differentiate between Reggie and anyone else. That was good to know.

  “You alright kid?” Vagryn asked, not looking right at Reggie as he did. He was too busy stomping his own peeler for that.

  “Fine,” Reggie replied. Huh. He hadn’t been hurt. Felt almost weird not to get torn up in a fight, vampirism might have made him careless. Well he’d need to kick that habit now. “There were tons of them,” Reggie added, thinking aloud more than anything else, “is that a normal amount?”

  “No,” Ledwig murmured, “it definitely isn’t. Everyone hurry and reload, I say we take the heads as proof and then move on fast.”

  He found no arguments with that.