++Circumscribers working together with Witchfinders must make a note of their terrible fragility. They are weak things, and break so very easily.++

  Book 2: Chapter 7

  Ludvich’s question brought Reggie a great deal of other questions all for himself. Until now he’d had vague notions and plans and ideas, and a few half-formed convictions about lines he’d cross now that he wouldn’t before. He’d massacred a bunch of Witchfinders, that was new. He hadn’t felt bad about it, that was newer.

  But he hadn’t given anyone else his ichor yet, he hadn’t gone about making servants of people like all the evil Counts of legend.

  Not yet.

  “Norvhan is where I grew up,” Reggie told him,” and it was around here that I was turned. Put in the Crimson Cradle, as vampires say.”

  Ludvich nodded, understanding instantly.

  “You’re bound to this land. The soil and spirit of it is significant to whatever magic animates you. It will get more significant as you become more powerful. You’re…planning on becoming more powerful?”

  He hardly needed to ask of course, he’d seen the wall.

  “I need to, right?”

  Ludvich looked less than pleased at that.

  “You need to more than before,” he noted idly. “Your efforts to become more powerful have made things a lot more dangerous for you. Did you know several Witchfinders have been dispatched to—”

  —”yeah,” Reggie cut in. “Ate them already.”

  It was a rare treat to see Ludvich left speechless.

  “I…I see. I came too late then?”

  Reggie shrugged.

  “You might not have. I killed them last night, if I hadn’t gone out looking for them you could’ve reached me before they did. Assuming you made a beeline right for this castle. They don’t know where it is, or else it’d already be swarmed by a lot more than Witchfinders.”

  Ludvich grunted at that. “You’d have made a good Witchfinder, you know.” He noted, “you already know how to think like us.”

  “I’m pretty sure that just comes with the territory of everybody trying to kill you.”

  Ludvich grunted again, not exactly in disagreement.

  “So you’re staying in Norvhan.”

  “I’m going to rule Norvhan,” Reggie corrected without thinking about it. “You’ve heard of the Vampire Baronies right?”

  Ludvich couldn’t have gone paler if Reggie had decided he needed more progress to his next Tier.

  “That’s a dangerous fucking goal to start with when you’re locked in Tier 2 and with a single old madman as your only ally,” he hissed.

  Reggie thought of Ajoke, at that.

  “Gone,” Ludvich told him, when asked. “She seemed less affected by your…blood. She’d already left when I felt its effects wear off me.”

  It was clear he didn’t want to talk about how those effects had felt, so Reggie didn’t.

  “A shame about Ajoke,” he said instead. “I could’ve used her help.”

  “You could use fifty of her help,” Ludvich told him. “Do you even know what it is you’re suggesting, turning this place into a Vampire Barony?”

  Reggie thought he had, but it was pretty easy to think you know anything. The actual knowing of it was where most people ended up tripping.

  “No,” he said at last. Ludvich sighed, and he told him.

  It was not a pleasant piece of information to receive, but it was nonetheless useful. All information was when you were weak, friendless and hated by the world. Vampire Baronies were by far the most impermanent of vampiric settlements, simply because they had such high mortality rates.

  Vampire Baronies were a stunning example of ‘natural selection’, a concept that could also be seen in the grimwoods. The strong lived and made more of themselves, gained influence and spread. The weak died, and nobody had cause to bear them in mind ever again. This simple fact was the reason vampires were so overwhelmingly feared.

  Because above all else, they culled each other to keep it so.

  “Baron,” Reggie played with the word, rolled it around on his tongue. “Sycily, what’s a Vampire Baron in system terms?”

  Ludvich frowned at him. “Did you just call the System—”

  A Vampire Baron is a blanket term not officially recognised by the System, however all Tier 3 Evolutions available to a vampire of any Subspecies are generally considered Barons by the vampires of this world.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Why?” Reggie asked.

  I don’t know.

  Not too surprising, but Reggie had more than enough information already. He turned his focus back to the increasingly baffled Ludvich and decided to fill him in.

  “Turns out I’m about one Evolution away from becoming a Baron myself.”

  Ludvich wasn’t as thrilled as Reggie would’ve expected. The reason as to why became pretty clear pretty fast.

  “Are you hearing voices again?” he asked him, quietly, carefully. “I need to know if you are.”

  Reggie blinked at him, genuinely surprised. Apparently Ludvich had been under the impression that Reggie had ever stopped hearing voices.

  Well, in a way he had. Reggie didn’t hear voices that weren’t there anymore, except maybe Dvo. Sycily seemed to think he was real and he was certainly a lot more conscious than any phantom imagining Reggie had been plagued with before.

  But those nuances didn’t seem like they’d alleviate Ludvich’s fears.

  “I always heard voices,” Reggie said instead. “These ones are just more useful. Something to do with the System.”

  Ludvich looked exactly like a man trying to figure out how crazy the monster with limb-removing strength standing two paces from him was. Apparently he came to a conclusion that satisfied him, and just nodded sourly.

  “So you can be a Baron soon, then, that doesn’t mean you’ll last as one. Most don’t.”

  He had Reggie there.

  “And what would you suggest as an alternative?” Reggie challenged, “do you have any ideas that’ll give me better odds long-term?”

  Ludvich paused a moment.

  “You could run. Disappear properly, forget Norvhan. Take a few fistfuls of earth—hell, take a few dozen—and live your life safely. Go and be the lackey to some Vampire Lord or Lady, make yourself useful and indispensable. You’re a clever boy, Reggie. A really clever boy. You have options.”

  “No,” he snarled. Reggie hadn’t expected his own voice to be that harsh, but he fed on the heat and let it work him up into a passion. He’d seen what came of compromise and moral strategy, let yourself bend and other people, bad people, would twist you miles away from anything good.

  “No, what?” Ludvich growled. “No, you won’t try and stay alive?”

  “No I won’t play other people’s games,” Reggie continued. What had his Sire made him for? Why was there a new Lineage of undead that started with him?

  Stupid questions, they didn’t mean anything. What mattered was right and wrong and having the power to fix things. Reggie had that power now, he had it in spades.

  “This isn’t about losing or winning, it’s about living or dying.” Ludvich sounded desperate, furious and barely controlling himself.

  “Then help me win, so I live,” Reggie shrugged.

  “Fuck you,” Ludvich spat, then turned and stormed off. Reggie let him go. He knew better than to fear the old Witchfinder would actually be gone for good, and in the meantime he really wanted to spend a bit of time not almost dying.

  As it turned out, by the time his rest was done it was night again. That was about as long as it took Ludvich to be ready for more conversation, too, and he approached Reggie once more, fortunately looking far less grumpy than before.

  “You know I’ll help you already,” he sighed.

  “Yeah,” Reggie admitted.

  And so they got to planning.

  ###

  Their major obstacle for the time being was that they didn’t know much about Norvhan’s current state. Ludvich had more information than Reggie in that regard, having picked up whispers and accounts from various Witchfinders who hadn’t realised he was the now-extremely-wanted traitor to their order. It was all vague, though. Reinforcements heading over, extra scrutiny and harsh crackdowns from the elves. All good to know, but none of it helpful for forming a particular strategy.

  In the end, it all directed Reggie to a very particular course of action. He was somewhat surprised by Ludvich being willing to go along with it.

  And so, with help this time, he headed back to the ant’s nest. Reggie took the chance to examine Ludvich and his equipment as they started to head out. Different from before, of course. This time the old man was bringing some big pike, its shaft easily three or four inches across and its tip a giant, jagged knife of jutting steel.

  “You said they were big and aggressive,” he explained, “so with luck this’ll drive itself deep using their own momentum.” That was when Reggie saw the crossguard and metal bands. Made to hold the enemy in place, and reinforce the shaft against snapping under their Strength.

  It was a good weapon and a wise choice, but didn’t alleviate his fear.

  “You know I’m literally ten times stronger than you are now, right?”

  “Protect me then,” the Witchfinder grunted.

  Reggie couldn’t argue with that. Or at least, not after they delved into the nest and had their first encounter.

  It was a praetorian, by the size of it. Reggie almost started for it then and there before Ludvich raised a hand, silently gesturing him to wait. He did, and a minute later they saw the mandibles of more emerge.

  “An ambush,” the Witchfinder muttered. “Ants aren’t smart, but they’re controlled by something that is. Now you’ve given them time to realise what was happening before, they’ve adjusted. They’re ready for you.”

  That was not particularly heartening.

  What was was that Ludvich had a plan, and equipment ready to put it into motion. Reggie watched as the old man slowly pulled out what looked like a few bear traps, except they were bigger and, when he was setting them up, needed some weird hand-crank to be cocked back. The Witchfinder was wheezing with effort fast, so Reggie took over.

  He felt a bit of resistance as he did it, but even in human form he was probably close to double the Strength Ludvich had enjoyed in his prime. And the old man was getting farther from that prime by the day. When Reggie was finally finished, they’d set a good few of the devices down.

  “What are these?” Reggie asked. “Wolf spider traps?” He said it with a smile, to be funny. Ludvich kept his face straight. “...Holy shit.”

  “Don’t set one off yourself,” the Witchfinder warned. “It’ll chop your leg off.”

  “Yeah, right, it…it would.” Reggie kept one eye on the evil devil traps, and the other on the creatures at the end of the tunnel. “So how do we start this?” he asked.

  Ludvich drew out his second weapon at that, something that looked like either a musket with gigantism or a cannon with dwarfism.

  “I’m going to lure them over here, you’re going to ambush them when they’re out.”

  It was certainly a plan, but one that needed no great amount of preparation. Reggie ended up transforming just for the Strength needed to claw into one of the walls and hide himself within the excavated section.

  Then Ludvich fired.

  Reggie had no doubt that the ridiculously sized weapon he had would’ve blown out the man’s eardrums, were it not for all the mana reinforcing them. The tunnel took all the sound and amplified it, throwing it right ahead to race the lead ball on its path for ant flesh. The sound ended up losing.

  But that wasn’t the shocking part, Reggie had known already how fast a musket ball could move. What stunned him now was how fast it didn’t travel, or, rather, how slow it appeared to his new reflexes. Celerity 45. It wasn’t enough to make the bullet slow or easily seen, but between its large size and Reggie’s quick eyes it appeared in his vision as a barely-perceptible streak of grey in the tunnel.

  Then it impacted, and everything kicked off.