++There have been known occurrences of the fearsome vampires using their foul blood to influence animals, even magical beasts, however from what I have gathered this is, for reasons somewhat beyond me, considered to be…risky.++
Book 2: Chapter 5
Reggie was regretting the gun, now. It was just weight on his back. He left it by one of the holes, and felt a snag in his mind as he suddenly turned to the thought that he’d regret that, too. God. How many times had he staved off near-death this week alone, and he was still indecisive?
Such was life.
It’d be death too, if Reggie didn’t keep his head on straight. He’d gotten a scare jumping that praetorian, but he’d also shown himself that he could beat them.
And that it was better not to try, unless he had to. He ventured deeper, kept an ear out, and promptly ran into several more. Fortunately, he figured out he was running into them before they did the same, and was able to avoid actually being found.
Reggie got away smoothly enough, and he got away from the next one he found. And the one after that.
He didn’t get away from the following ant, but only because the poor thing was a mere soldier. Reggie took the chance to use his newly heightened Attributes to their full extent, and enjoyed a fight that was that much easier than the ones he’d been tied up in until now.
+1 to Strength.
Name: Reginald Smith
Age: 21
Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]
Class: None
Attributes:
(S)Strength 41(+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
More Strength. Reggie was appreciating Strength, right now. Strength meant his talons went deeper, right? More strength, more force, more penetration and more wounds.
Toughness increases the resilience of your talons.
That was news to Reggie, and he took only a moment to draw the obvious conclusion from it.
“So they’ll cut better?”
Circumstantially. They will fare better against tough targets that would otherwise erode their cutting edge, but won’t be innately sharper.
That brought Reggie to the thought of deliberately sharpening his talons, though that was a concern for later. Even if possible, he didn’t have anything hard enough to try it on hand now.
Luck wasn’t on his side at first. Reggie saw nothing but praetorians, then fortune smiled on him as he turned a corner and found a whole den of soldier ants.
Reggie stared at them, grinning. They stared back. Then they started moving.
All ten or so, which quickly reminded Reggie that he wasn’t that much more powerful than them yet.
He was faster than when he’d first come into the tunnels, though. Good thing too. He wouldn’t have gotten away in his panicked sprint if he hadn’t been.
Reggie led the soldiers on a merry chase until all but two of them ended up losing him. The rest were close by, he could tell that much, but for the moment he had some leeway. He used it.
As far as plans went, screaming like a lunatic and sprinting right at the enemy was not his most sophisticated. He didn’t have much choice though. Reggie sent a mass of blood to cling across the face of one soldier, then pounced on the other and bit down hard at the meeting point of its torso and head. He’d been hoping to tear its throat out, though the ant squirmed and lashed at him until Reggie stumbled away. He only, with all his new bolstering to every Attribute, managed to take a fist-sized chunk of meat out instead.
Things got wet and sticky fast.
By then the other soldier ant had recovered enough to start lunging for Reggie too. He backed away, doing a far better job of maintaining the space between them with his added Speed and punishing its every attack with a slash of his talons. They still weren’t able to just carve through the carapace, but Reggie noticed a great many more flakes of the stuff falling away with every hit. Once he began striking places he’d already clawed at, blood began to show.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
And his Blood Magic did its usual work of drawing out yet more from the wounds.
Reggie enjoyed the forefoot in his fight for all of five seconds. Not a long time by most reckonings, but at the speed his body and mind were moving now it felt like a good while indeed. Then the soldier ants galvanized and managed to close on him together.
That was when the pain started, but Reggie just kept pumping blood down into whatever important parts of him were damaged. He could deal with pain, his whole life had been pain. So long as it didn’t slow him down physically, it didn’t matter how bad the hurt got. One of the ants seemed to accept his unvoiced challenge and took a few fingers off, talons and all. In exchange, Reggie took a mandible off with a lucky stroke and watched the soldier ant fall back as blood fountained from its face. He fell on it, ignoring the attacks of its companion and biting more chunks out until the thing stopped moving.
After that, his fight became a one-on-one.
Reggie was slowing down, now. He’d had muscles shredded in enough parts of him at once that he couldn’t regenerate them all fast enough, couldn’t patch up the damage as it was done. But his enemy was slowing too. A few more scratches and a well-timed punch with his stumpy fist and Reggie put the ant down, then stomped its head into the ground before it could get back up. He threw in a few more stomps for good measure.
Then it was feeding time. His favourite time.
+1 Strength
+1 Toughness
Name: Reginald Smith
Age: 21
Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]
Class: None
Attributes:
(S)Strength 42(+12)/49
(P)Speed 41(+12)/52
(P)Celerity 41(+12)/52
(S)Toughness 42(+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 paused as he saw the stats.
“Sycily, did you…deliberately give me Strength and Toughness, knowing I wanted them most?”
No, this is just a coincidence.
Huh. Nice coincidence, then.
This coincidence had left Reggie with Attributes that most Circumscribers, he was fairly sure, would be jealous of. At least that Eryqai would be, though looking back on it he had seemed like a bit of an idiot compared to his peers. Either way, they were another step forwards.
Reggie didn’t have long to dwell on them before more shuffling and scraping drew his attention to the remaining eight soldier ants. Apparently they’d found him.
He ran of course, or shuffled rather. Much of his healing had focused on the upper body, mid-combat, and he was feeling that focus now as he hastened blood below the belt to stitch together all the things needed to keep his skin as far from the enemy’s pointy bits as he could manage.
Suddenly, getting both his Attribute increases in helpings of extra force and resistance to force, rather than speed, felt like a bad joke. But Reggie had enough of a head start that he was long healed by the time any ants were even close to him, and his undead stamina soon took him farther on still. Like before, they started losing him.
Unlike before, he was able to isolate a single one this time.
+1 Speed
Name: Reginald Smith
Age: 21
Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]
Class: None
Attributes:
(S)Strength 42(+12)/49
(P)Speed 42(+12)/52
(P)Celerity 41(+12)/52
(S)Toughness 42(+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
That was seven left, by Reggie’s count. Seven soldiers, at least, until he couldn’t be certain of encountering any more. He got to hunting, already starting to feel the fear of more praetorians recede and the hunger for more strength grow. Dangerous, he told himself. Both feelings were quickly checked.
Another praetorian encounter gave Reggie a nasty surprise, and this time he was down a foot by the time he managed to escape through one of the holes. The same fucking foot he’d lost against the cockoach and necromantic angler, he realised. What, was it cursed or something? That was just what he needed, a cursed foot.
[Your whole body is cursed, Reggie, you’re a vampire; a demonically possessed corpse doomed to prey upon what used to be your own kind, a walking mockery of human life beset by an endless hunger and a bottomless evil.]
“Shut up.”
Regrowing the foot—the same fucking foot!—again took a lot of Reggie’s ichor reserves out of him. Between that and his paranoid insistence on remaining transformed while he did so, he had only half left by the time he was ready to go hunting back into the deeper tunnels.
Not a dangerous level, but low enough that he’d not get another chance if he cocked this one up too.
He almost did, too. Another praetorian was his next encounter, and the one after that. When Reggie managed to circle around back to where he’d found the ten soldiers, he found none. At one point he stumbled onto a few drones, which were nice to replenish his ichor but, again, did nothing to progress his gaining Attributes.
Why couldn’t I have just eaten more of these little fuckers before my first Evolution?
Reggie’s growth was unique, apparently. Most vampires certainly didn’t start with a Tier as high as his—or rather, no vampire started with a Tier as high as his maximum was, and even most normal ones didn’t begin with the ability to hit Tier 3 right off the bat.
That wasn’t feeling like such an advantage now though. Reggie kept up his search, keenly aware of his power trickling away and his luck running dry. Two praetorians at once and he’d be dead without even putting up a fight, four soldiers and he reckoned there’d be a similar result.
But eventually, Reggie found two soldiers with no more to help them. He wasted no time in pouncing.
Again, Reggie ambushed them. He wasn’t too proud to jump an ant if it meant raising his own odds of survival, and the newly-toughened talons of his Form of The Beast actually went right through carapace to cut into the flesh below with their first swing this time. Progress. While one ant was still reeling from that, and feeling its vital fluids drawn out with Blood Magic, the other took a kick directly to its chest from Reggie’s foot. He didn’t have talons on his feet, unfortunately.
But it was still a kick from someone strong enough to juggle grown men.
The ant was a bit bigger than a grown man, so it didn’t go so far as to ricochet off any walls as it went flying. It was taken out of the fight for a few moments though. Just in time for its ally to recover. Two swipes of natural weaponry came Reggie’s way, and he sidestepped both before returning in kind.
His claws were sharper, and they moved faster. The ant was scored by both attacks and left to weep more yellowish blood from jagged wounds. It let out a hiss and started backing away, which served only to let Reggie focus fully on attack. This time he aimed for spots he’d already hit. Not easy, on a moving target, but the one or two times he got lucky enough to strike carapace mangled beforehand saw his talons cutting deep enough to kill a human near-instantly.
By the time the ant he’d kicked was up, the first was already down. Reggie pounced on the second soldier ant, foregoing the dance of talons and limbs entirely to just sink his teeth into its neck joints and drink. Once his meal was resting warmly in his gut, he did the same to the barely-living first creature.
