++Small differences can add up in combat. A single Attribute point in Strength makes its possessor only around 15% stronger than before. Nothing to scoff at. Well-made chainmail, from the time before the System, could withstand an estimated 140 joules of stabbing energy from a spear, with most thrusts falling between 60 and 130. 15%, there, is the difference between failing to penetrate every time and failing to penetrate most of the time.++

  Book 2: Chapter 4

  Reggie’s situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed. The ant’s wound was pretty wide now, and he might even have nicked whatever these creatures had in place of arteries. There was space between them, and he’d already closed the minor wounds his tumble had given him.

  That still left things pretty bad though.

  The ant leapt forwards with an indescribable eagerness to make it all worse, pressing Reggie hard and instantaneously. He was ready for the spray of acid, already throwing out a sheet of blood to catch it in the air. To his surprise, the attack actually disappeared both liquids right in the air.

  The praetorian’s acid is strong enough to destroy your manipulated blood, even on an atomic level.

  Before Reggie could ask what an ‘atomic’ was, he was already grappling with the creature.

  Or, rather, being grappled. Reggie wasn’t a small guy, on the scrawny side but pretty tall too, and yet the praetorian handled his weight like his whole body was made of mist and smoke. It swung him right around in those giant, pincered arms, man-handling him with the top pair while the bottom two got to shredding his midriff.

  Reggie wasn’t dying yet, but he was definitely concerned by the amount of matter getting removed from his body. He kicked out, mostly missing or glancing the ant but scoring a perfectly sound connection against its head with a particularly lucky blow. Nothing. He stunned it for a moment, made its grip slacken, but did none of the damage he’d have enjoyed seeing on an enemy he had physical parity too.

  The Blood Magic kept drawing its vitae out, and Reggie thought fast of a use for it. He wrapped the levitating fluid around both the ant’s lower limbs, blunting its jagged weaponry and leaving himself protected from it. It took the praetorian a few more moments to notice that its barbed limbs had suddenly started doing nothing more than smearing their target with fluid.

  Just as it did, Reggie sent more blood smashing right into its eyes.

  Beads of the stuff hit directly and sent it reeling, getting the reaction Reggie had been hoping his ineffectual kicks would before. He landed, backed away instead of pressing the assault and forcing his body’s own ichor reserves down to heal his stomach. It was the sort of wound that would never quite close in a human, and even after long seconds, enough time for the praetorian to recover, Reggie had barely made a dent in it.

  He turned to run again, and the ant gave chase just as its allies had. Except this time Reggie had a new advantage; his pursuer was bleeding, and bleeding bad.

  The praetorian closed in fast. Reggie was focusing on three fronts; moving his legs as fast as they would let him, pushing more blood down into his opened-up belly to close the ravages of their fight, and drawing more blood out of his target using his Blood Magic. He was managing to balance them, just about, but had the ghost of a headache starting at the back of his mind. Another mystery, there, what reason did a dead head have to be aching anyway?

  It’d be aching a lot more soon, regardless, because the praetorian was gaining. Reggie risked a glance over his shoulder and saw two distributions of blood. About half was littering the ground behind them, already congealing into splashes and splotches on the odd tunnel floor. The other half was hovering behind the ant.

  And the ant did not seem to have noticed.

  Reggie was coming up to a wall, and he did some thinking. Turned as he reached it, then willed the floating blood to wrap around its previous owner’s face. He heard the ant scream, heard legs scrabbling, then saw it impact the hard wall as a blur of motion. He could’ve thrown it off the Lady of Lorwick’s balcony and not achieved so fast a collision by the time it hit pavement, and had the praetorian been smacking into hard stone instead of this softer, crumbly shit he’d have even held out hope of it being cripplingly injured.

  As things were, it emerged after only a few seconds more. Reggie had already tripled his head-start in that time, though, and he got to work on quadrupling it.

  More time. More strides. Did he manage to keep away for as long as half a minute? Maybe a full minute, it was hard to tell in such frantic circumstances. He knew his guts were finally making progress putting themselves back where they belonged, and with the trickles of ensorcelled blood he sent drifting into his own mouth Reggie wasn’t even being emptied much in the effort.

  He also knew the praetorian was just about on him. Getting slower, assuming it wasn’t just wishful thinking, but still faster than him. Getting weaker but still so very much stronger. Getting less dangerous, but still, ultimately, an eight-foot monster covered in armour plating and claws.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  [You have claws too, Reggie.]

  It was a fair point, he’d just have to work on the armour plating.

  Reggie reached another wall and did his blinding trick again, except this time, when the praetorian inevitably started trying to slow down rather than give itself another concussion, he jumped into the air, braced his feet on the wall and kicked right off it. Reggie smashed into the praetorian like someone had flung him from a trebuchet, and they went down in a mess of wildly flailing talons and gnashing teeth.

  Reggie, the less surprised of them, was up first, latching on around the praetorian’s back and biting down hard. His teeth fared much better than his talons at defeating the carapace, but lacked the length to wound anything below. Reggie, problem-solver that he was, resolved this by stabbing those talons into the now-mangled section, and was rewarded by a satisfying spurt of blood.

  Then it all went bad as the praetorian ended up on top, its mandibles closing around Reggie’s arm. The bone shivered, put up a leave of absence notice, and decided to spontaneously turn into two smaller bones that promptly thrust themselves out through his skin. Reggie felt the pain like he’d just been stabbed, which he sort of had, and retaliated by raking the ant’s face with his free arm’s claws.

  Nothing, save a few surface-level defacements of its armour. The ant reared up and its arms came down for him, just barely halted in time as Reggie got his legs outstretched between them and took all its weight against his.

  The ant had an advantage of strength, while Reggie had better leverage by far. They were about even in their contest, locked there and staring at each other. The praetorain tried to settle things by dragging those barbed limbs along his calves and knees, tearing deep down into the muscle, weakening him.

  Reggie didn’t need to weaken his opponent, though. It was a living thing with living stamina, stamina that was fast abandoning it. And all the while they struggled, he kept on siphoning off blood. By now he reckoned he’d drunk enough to drain a soldier ant completely.

  And the praetorian was definitely slowing down, no doubt about it. As his legs started trembling where ruined muscle met loads that would’ve tested it in top condition, Reggie whipped both the limbs in and went for a tackle.

  Not his finest, he had to admit, but it worked now, which made it perfect.

  Reggie could smell the blood filling the air, practically hear it trickling down his enemy. He just needed to wait. Keep using his Blood Magic—more to keep the wounds from clotting than anything else—and keep his enemy stuck exerting itself to worsen the loss. His back was to its limbs, which was just fine by him. Better that than his face when the tearing started. Reggie bit down more on instinct than anything and surprised himself by tasting yet more blood in his mouth.

  The praetorian screamed, but it didn’t run. Reggie didn’t run either. They smashed into walls and went down all over, rolling around and hissing, snarling, screeching, making animal sounds and fighting in animal ways. One of Reggie’s fangs snapped off on the creature’s armour, flooding him with pain he’d never felt since the sun touched him too long.

  Apparently, those were a sensitive spot in his body. Good to know. Better to know the ant was weakening still, but so was he. After a few more moments Reggie’s body had suffered such a wealth of shredded muscles, torn ligaments and broken bones that he couldn’t even raise a limb. The praetorian stood over him, readying for the killing blow.

  And then it collapsed. Reggie was conscious, his enemy wasn’t. Victory to him.

  It was just hard to feel very smug about it when every scrap of meat in his body felt like it’d come disconnected from all the rest.

  Reggie started with the bones. He wouldn’t be moving much without those. There were so many of them broken that it was hard to even count; ribs, both the legs, one of his collars, a few others that he didn’t even know the names for. Feeling them slide back into place was long and painful. Reggie tried just having all of them fix themselves at once, first, but soon realised that was a poor strategy. The lacerations they made in shifting back into place, and the progress that was undone with every moment the bleeding kept going, made it easier by far to focus on a single one at a time.

  He had a fully intact skeleton within a few minutes. Within a single minute more, most of his softer tissues were all functional too. By then Reggie had already crawled over to the praetorian and started feeding.

  Compared to the blood of the cockroach or wolf spider, it wasn’t so strong a concoction. All the same, Reggie was treated to the rare feeling of knowing that something more magical than his own body was being absorbed into it. He trembled as he filled himself with power and let it diffuse all throughout his insides.

  Liquid strength, the best part of vampirism.

  Tier 3 creature devoured, bonus Attributes gained.

  +1 Strength

  +1 Toughness

  +1 Speed

  +1 Celerity

  +1 Charisma

  Name: Reginald Smith

  Age: 21

  Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]

  Class: None

  Attributes:

  (S)Strength 40(+12)/49

  (P)Speed 41(+12)/52

  (P)Celerity 41(+12)/52

  (S)Toughness 41(+12)/49

  (P)Charisma 17(-12)/52

  Abilities:

  Blood Magic II

  Form of the Beast II

  Royal Presence I

  Traits:

  Enhanced Senses I

  Regeneration II

  Addictive Ichor

  Reggie wasn’t so exhausted anymore, the few seconds he’d taken to empty out his enemy’s corpse had let him do even more healing and reverse many of the minor wounds still plaguing him. Even if he had been near-death still, though, the sight of his sheet would have filled him with a vigour to counter it.

  He got up to his feet, still far from peak strength, still healing back to his body’s best condition. And yet he didn’t feel any weaker than he was before anymore. His mind and limbs were just as fast, muscles just as strong. Another half-minute passed and he felt stronger. Across the board, all at once.

  “I gained a +2 for everything when I ate the wolf spider and cockroach, I gained a +1 now. Is the across-the-board Attribute improvement just equal to the difference between my Tier and my enemy’s?”

  Yes.

  Reggie smiled. Yet another reason not to hurry up on that Evolution, at least not yet. He braced himself for a few more hard fights, then went deeper into the tunnels.