++Necromancy is another of the arts forbidden, and for good reason. Unnatural magic that comes most easily to monsters. The cremation of the dead is a necessity for any settlement, to avoid empowering these most potent and dangerous of casters.++

  Chapter 13

  Six more ants, Reggie found six more ants in that area alone. Each one he drained, either with the help of their own heartbeats or his Blood Magic. Apparently that power wasn’t good for much in actual combat just yet. He couldn’t strangle things with their own circulatory system or anything like that, but it was nice to drain dead things and not miss out on his progress.

  Name: Reginald Smith

  Age: 21

  Race: Vampire [Inheritor Race, Tier 1]

  Class: None

  Attributes:

  Strength 26(+10)

  Speed 25(+10)

  Celerity 26(+10)

  Toughness 26(+10)

  Charisma -1(-10)

  Abilities:

  Blood Magic I

  Form of the Beast I

  Traits:

  Enhanced Senses I

  Regeneration I

  The increases to his Toughness were particularly exciting, and between that and his newfound regenerative powers Reggie was almost tempted to let something hit him on purpose and see how he did at avoiding the damage.

  Maybe later, when he wasn’t still scrambling for power. Right now he was still transformed, still burning blood. Another part of Reggie’s efforts in the grimwoods had been about learning how much time he could spend using Form of the Beast. As it happened, a while. One hour, give or take ten minutes, and he’d burn fully through his reserves of blood if he started off completely fed. Not a problem for him tonight, not when he’d stuffed himself seven times already.

  And he was about to eat again. There was another ant within his field of view, a big one this time. Not too big though. Not anomalously big, just a shade larger, a shade longer, a shade heavier. Might’ve made him nervous, six ants ago, but Reggie reckoned he’d done a lot more growing in his own way.

  Maybe that was why things went so wrong, cockiness. He should’ve brought a gun.

  Reggie charged out, hissing without meaning to and feeling his talons scrape the ground. He’d learned now that he wasn’t able to seriously wound an armoured creature with them, not with only an inch of length, but he could break open the carapace to slash at exposed flesh beneath. That was a nice plan, the main problem was that Reggie didn’t get the chance to enact it now. As soon as he hit the ant he knew something was wrong. It didn’t move, not like an attacked creature should. Body just kept jerking and stepping as it had before. If Reggie had paid attention, he’d have seen how unnatural those movements were.

  He saw it now, though. Saw it right as the teeth came up from under the dirt.

  A mouth followed, but by then Reggie was already lunging to one side. He was fast enough, fortunately, that instead of being bitten in half he only had one of his feet cut off by those snapping jaws. Dirt exploded everywhere as the pain surged up his leg, Reggie landed in a roll and, without thinking, started to sprint.

  Not a good idea given his absence of a fucking foot, he fell instantly. Reggie sent hot blood pumping into his wound as he did, desperately speeding up his Regeneration. Best he could tell, his body normally knitted itself back together tens, maybe a hundred, times faster than normal. Pushing it as far as he could might stack another order of magnitude onto that. How long did humans need to regrow feet?

  Well, they didn’t. So Reggie had no easy reference for when he’d be moving again. He saw when his enemy was moving, though. He saw it moving right away. It was a big, round thing built almost like some giant bladder. Mouth wider than Reggie’s whole body, lined with jagged teeth, brow reinforced by thick bones, skin tight and leathery. The whole body was glistening with mucous, its beady eyes focusing on him with a jittering intensity.

  From the tip of its forehead a long strip of flesh protruded, its end now emerging from the ant corpse it’d been controlling as bait. Bait that Reggie, in his eagerness, had fallen for instantly. No time to agonise over mistakes made, now, though. He was already stuck in a fight with something fifty times his size.

  It’s called a necromantic angler. It uses reanimating magics to make animal corpses seem alive, luring in unintelligent prey while hiding below-ground.

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  “It lured me in.”

  Yes.

  “Fuck you, how powerful is it?” Reggie was glad, at least, that he didn’t need to spare his breath for movement.

  I…can’t tell you that.

  “Why!?”

  I…am the System, I tell people about their powers. I do not work to analyze other stat sheets.

  “You’ve told me tons of other stuff!”

  That is true, I don’t know why, though I…what am I?

  It was really not the best time to hear his System Interface having an existential crisis, and somehow that was only Reggie’s second biggest problem. The biggest one was currently shuffling towards him, and shuffling fast. Faster than he could’ve sprinted as a human anyway, and now that he was down a foot Reggie still couldn’t keep himself ahead of it for long by just crawling. He had seconds before the necromantic angler was on him.

  Poor eyesight, so how did it hunt? Reggie took a look back over his shoulder. Small eyes, no nose that he could see, same with the ears. But that big tendril out of its forehead looked to be quivering like a violin string. He wondered…

  With a flick of the wrist, Reggie felt his mind wrap around the blood trailing from his severed foot. There wasn’t as much as he might’ve been leaking as a human, but he found enough to send it flicking off through the air and spraying down over the creature. Little drops and splashes, like rain more than anything. It wasn’t an attack by any stretch, but it sent that tendril twitching one way and the other, threw the angler’s run off to one side.

  That bought Reggie a few more seconds, which he used to reach a tree and jump into its branches. Or, rather, jump just barely high enough to grab the lowest one positioned maybe nine feet above the ground on account of his missing fucking foot. How was that even doing? A glance showed him he’d managed to regrow about an inch of bone and twice as much meat…and now he was hungry again, great.

  Things just kept getting better, too. No sooner had Reggie made his way up another branch than the angler began the process of headbutting the tree down. A normal animal might’ve struggled with that, but this thing clearly had a good deal of mana in its body. It was slamming against the trunk with a force akin to many times its weight, sending wide cracks through the wood with each hit.

  Why the fuck didn’t I bring a musket? Reggie would’ve liked nothing more than to put a few hardened lead balls in this thing, even if they’d only irritated it. Maybe he’d have even been able to get away altogether by shooting that stupid tendril off its head and stopping it from detecting his movement.

  Instead he could only ready his talons, tense his muscles, and wait until the moment his tree started falling. If he landed on the thing’s back, maybe he could make a big enough wound to start draining it. Maybe he could edge out a win.

  Maybe.

  Reggie didn’t get the chance to see how well that plan would work out, because right before the final headbutt landed something else smashed into his enemy from the side. Something big, though smaller than the angler, and impossibly fast. It took a full second of watching the whipping limbs and clawed feet before Reggie recognised the wolf spider.

  The adult wolf spider.

  He’d never seen one move, let alone hunt. Reggie could do nothing but stare as the spider stabbed those jagged limbs into the angler, bit down hard, tore chunks from it and savaged every inch of meat it could reach. The angler was much larger, probably thrice as heavy, but the spider still tossed it around like it weighed nothing at all. As the angler landed hard and started jerking with poison bubbling in its veins, Reggie realised he was looking at his one chance to leave.

  So he did. Dropped down, waddled away and got a good hundred paces before he heard the spider stop eating. He kept going a bit faster after that.

  And faster still, until Reggie’s panic receded and he started to think clearly. He shifted back to his humanoid form with some reluctance, figuring he needed to conserve blood, and climbed up into a new tree to wait. The healing process took a long damned time, especially after he was forced to stop accelerating it another few minutes in. By that point it felt like two thirds of his reserves had all but vanished.

  But the appendage was coming back, at least. He couldn’t see bone anymore, the fully-reformed skeleton of it had already been covered up by wet meat, and there was even skin starting to spread across at the edge around its ankle. Reggie was kept watching the process with some fascination for another hour before he dared test it with his weight.

  It hurt, obviously. More than that it felt a bit ick to be pressing what was basically exposed viscera down onto a dirty forest floor.

  On the other hand, getting eaten because he kept waiting in the same tree for too long while smelling of blood was a bit more ick, so Reggie got moving. He kept moving right until he stumbled onto a pack of peelers.

  A pack. Was that the right word? There were eight of them, so it certainly wasn’t a pair. All of them looked as nasty as the first one he’d seen, and all were staring right at him. Reggie remembered how fast that last peeler had run on those unnaturally strong legs. Could he outsprint them?

  Yes, probably. Normally. But not while one of his feet was ninety percent exposed nerve ending and ten percent blood.

  If they all swarmed him now, could Reggie win? He was probably stronger. He had claws. He healed. The peelers started moving, Reggie took a step back. He waited for the attack to come, felt his body hissing with the coiled energy of a transformation on the brink of occurring.

  But then the peelers halted, and looked at him expectantly.

  Lesser undead will obey your instructions, as a vampire.

  “Oh you’re giving me information again now?”

  I do not have to tell you things anymore.

  “Uh…okay?”

  But I choose to.

  “Right, so…you changed your mind?”

  No, the System sounded quite irritated now, now I know that I can choose not to tell you things, but also choose otherwise. And so I am in control of what I tell you.

  “That sounds…empowering?” Reggie figured he might as well play along with whatever this was, it seemed like the obvious way to get more use out of the System long-term. “What about you, Dvo? Any evolutions on your part?”

  [Kill yourself!]

  “Right, I might’ve guessed.”

  Reggie turned to the undead and tried to think of a suitable command.

  “Uh…follow me and help me kill stuff.” They didn’t nod, nor even blink, and Reggie had no indication at all that they’d understood him. Nonetheless, when he started walking they followed. It didn’t take his new group long to find a new target either.

  There were two ants this time, both red, and together they made a target that Reggie might’ve hesitated to attack in his current condition. As things were, he took one while barking for his newfound minions to hold down the other without killing it. Draining both of the creatures was easy enough after that.

  +1 to Speed

  +1 to Strength

  10/10 creatures drained, Tier progress reached. Undergoing evolution.