++The saying, as I have heard it, goes something like this; ”one ant is an annoyance, ten a fright, one hundred a disaster and one thousand a very good reason to abandon your whole town.”

  An amusing one, but it hardly seems relevant. If any act could possibly provoke a whole nest of ants to send one thousand of their drones out in an offensive, I cannot for the life of me imagine a person stupid enough to commit it.++

  Book 2: Chapter 12

  Reggie got back to his castle fast, though not as fast as he’d have liked. His body was slowed by twitches of hot pain when he moved too much, and flat-out sprinting involved a lot of those movements. It wasn’t a mechanical limit, if he really needed to he knew he could make himself power past it, but without any imminent pursuit he found it easier and more pleasant to take his time and accept an extra minute or two of travel.

  It wasn’t like the castle was going anywhere. When he arrived, Reggie was less than five seconds in before Ludvich materialised, apparently out of thin air, to approach him.

  “You’re alive,” the old man’s face was lit up with all the relief in the world. Concern tainted it somewhat, though. “Shit, you’re burned badly.”

  Was he? Reggie didn’t have a mirror, which was kind of funny considering he did still have a reflection. He could smell himself though. Smell himself cooking.

  “I’ll heal eventually,” he assured the old man. “Lesson number, uh, like five or something? Anyway, we take longer to regenerate from injuries caused by the sun than we do from others. There’ll be a material we’re weak to that slows our healing similarly as well but I don’t know what it is yet.”

  Ludvich frowned. “You don’t know your own weakness?”

  “Yeah well nobody’s tried to stab me with it, yet, so I haven’t found it.”

  Ludvich grumbled in a most Ludvichy way, at that.

  “Sloppy, that. I’ll need to try and track down a few exotic materials to do some tests.”

  Reggie stared at him. “What?”

  Ludvich stared back, looking almost affronted. “Do you want it to come as a surprise the first time you get stuck with your weakness?”

  Reggie thought back to how he’d been fighting lately, the lack of effort put into dodging, and then farther back to the sight of Walyn’s body just forgetting it was solid after the stake.

  “...Point taken,” he said at last. “But we’ll need to put that on the back-burner for now. There’s other stuff to do.”

  “Like what?” Ludvich scowled.

  Reggie just sort of gestured as best he could to the whole castle around them.

  “We need this fixed up if we’re gonna found a Vampire Barony.”

  Ludvich looked less annoyed at that idea, now. Less certain than more accepting of it. Reggie realised only then how instantaneously he’d inverted the balance of expertise between them. Ludvich wasn’t a veteran any longer, he wasn’t an old expert. He was newer to vampirism than Reggie.

  His progeny.

  Hard to really let himself accept that, with the obvious difference in their ages, but now that it was sinking in Reggie felt himself overcome by a sudden sense of responsibility.

  “You can’t fix a castle up,” Ludvich said confidently. “Neither can I. You wouldn’t know where to start. I definitely don’t. So what’s the actual next step?”

  Reggie did appreciate having someone else to bounce his thoughts off, at least. It made things go faster and easier, made his mind work quicker. He started pacing to add a bit more lubricant to his mental processes.

  “Norvhan,” he said at last, “it all comes back to Norvhan. There’s six thousand people there. Labourers, builders, even a few educated men with knowledge of engineering and stuff. We can use their expertise.”

  “We can,” Ludvich said slowly, “that just brings us to the little issue of it being swarming with Circumscribers. Warden Erindor has smelled blood in the water and he knows his enemies smell it too. He’s panicking, throwing his weight around to keep control of the region. Norvhan isn’t a big town, but he’s not a big Warden. He’ll fight for it hard.”

  Reggie didn’t like it when Ludvich made sense. When he made sense, things got all hopeless and miserable.

  “So we kill him,” Reggie said confidently.

  Ludvich scoffed. “We couldn’t even kill a nest of ants.”

  “We got jumped by the ants,” Reggie replied. “And I plan to be the ones jumping Erindor. We have options that you don’t know about.” He told him about his new Ability, Necromancy. Reggie wasn’t entirely surprised by the look of disgust that plastered itself across Ludvich’s face.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “You want to use people’s bodies to serve you?”

  Reggie hesitated. There was a wrong answer here.

  “Uh…yes?”

  “That’s disgusting,” Ludvich snarled. “You can’t just do that, they have rights.”

  Reggie blinked at that, trying to follow the conversation. “They do?”

  Nobody ever told him that.

  Ludvich breathed hard, seeming to forget his dead lungs in the moment and revert to old reflexes.

  “How would you feel if someone puppeted your dead body for their own ends?” he asked, evenly.

  Reggie thought about that. “I wouldn’t care.” He pointed out, “I’d be dead, right?”

  Ludvich seemed to be getting very annoyed.

  “Well other people don’t want their bodies used like that. Neither do their still-living families.”

  Reggie hesitated, then sighed.

  “Okay, fine, we’ll stick to the natural peelers in the grimwoods, nobody gives a fuck about them.”

  Ludvich clearly wasn’t so happy with that, either.

  “I’ve already had enough of the ones around here,” he growled. “Keep them away from me.”

  Reggie supposed he’d have been hoping for too much if he expected an ex-Witchfinder to do well around the undead. Finding out about the fixes to his memory had apparently done a lot to mollify Ludvich regarding his own vampirism, but he still had a lifetime spent mostly on shooting the things Reggie was planning on working with. Shooting them in the head.

  But he’d agreed not to do that to Reggie’s minions, which was progress.

  “There’s another reason we have hope against Erindor,” Reggie told the old man. “I have you, now. Our power is essentially doubled.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “You drained a few of those ants, right?” Reggie asked him. “How many?”

  “Six,” Ludvich said after a moment. Reggie grinned.

  “Right, six, so that’s already an extra six Attribute improvements for you to—”

  —”I only got three.”

  Reggie paused. “What?”

  “I got three Attribute improvements,” Ludvich scowled, “not six. I get one for every two creatures of my Tier that I drain, that’s what the System said.”

  My name is Sycily.

  “No,” said Ludvich.

  Reggie had to confess he’d gotten the wind knocked out of his sails from that, but only for a moment.

  “Okay. Well, I mean, yeah, that’s a problem then, but it could definitely be worse. It’s not like halving your ridiculous growth rate has screwed us, right? You’re still going to gain power tens, maybe hundreds of times faster than any human.”

  Ludvich was as unhappy as ever.

  “Why do you even grow more powerful faster than I do?” he asked.

  “Good question,” Reggie frowned, “Sycily, do you know?”

  Apologies, as a System Interface I am only able to give information pertaining to your own current Attributes.

  “What? You’ve told me tons of stuff before.”

  Apologies, as a System Interface I am only able to give information pertaining to your own current Attributes.

  Reggie realised what was happening fast.

  “Ludvich, apologise for being mean to Sycily.”

  “Are you serious?” the old man growled.

  “Just do it, please,” Reggie sighed. “We’re helpless without her.”

  Ludvich grumbled more than ever, but muttered out something close enough to an apology for Sycily to be somewhat mollified.

  As an Inheritor Tier Race holder, Reggie gains power more quickly than those whose permanent Tier is lower than his own. Most vampires require far more draining than even you do, Ludvich.

  Reggie could see Ludvich considering that, working things out, drawing his conclusions. “So…how hard is it for normal vampires then?”

  What is a normal vampire?

  “You know, average.”

  Mean, modal or median?

  Ludvich looked so lost that Reggie actually pitied him for a second. “Sycily, he apologised, come on…” He almost heard her sighing in his head.

  The most common Tier for a vampire able to act independently is Tier 3, Adept. At this level they require 8 feedings for each Attribute increase.

  Reggie did some maths fast. “So you need an extra feeding for each Tier under 10 you are, per point?”

  Yes.

  He looked at Ludvich. “I think you should feel grateful, now, at the high quality of vampiric ichor flowing through your veins thanks to me.”

  Ludvich just scowled and turned away. They had little else to discuss, at least not compared to the vast amount they had to do.

  The night passed quicker than Reggie would have liked. He and Ludvich went out together and got some hunting done, and if being exposed in the grimwoods was objectively still very dangerous, Reggie felt a great deal more confident in it than he had before thanks to recent events. That horde of ants had put the fear of god into him more than any lone wolf spider.

  They didn’t come across any more ants, either. Not out in the woods. Worse, it was hard to come across much of anything. Reggie had noticed his own hunting was getting harder in the past, but it was Ludvich who explained it to him now.

  .”Over-eating,” he mumbled. “It’s a common mistake of new vampires. They feed so much to grow stronger that entire regions of a grimwood can be depopulated. Most of the time we track down and kill a vampire, it’s by following the signs of overfeeding.”

  Reggie thought about that. “So…we should probably stop eating in this region, then.”

  Ludvich actually looked pained, despite his explanation, but nodded with only a bare reluctance.

  The question after that was where they could go next. Most of the grimwoods were, fortunately, still not exhausted of potential blood sources, but neither of them were privy to the activities of the Witchfinders searching for Reggie this time around. They had to be careful not to get themselves ambushed in all the ways Ludvich had been trained to do to others.

  In this regard, Ludvich was more confident than Reggie, and Reggie soon saw why. They hunted through the next few hours and encountered no danger, and it was only when they returned to the castle that Reggie was given an explanation.

  “Witchfinders aren’t going to chase down a vampire alone, not one that’s killed a Circumscriber, and Norvhan isn’t big enough for many to be here. We’ll be looking at maybe one or two patrols at most. It’s a big forest.”

  It was the best news Reggie had gotten all week. Apart from Ludvich’s siring being a success. Or Ludvich finding him, of course. Or gaining his Necromancy and finding out it worked as it did. Or…Huh, why was Reggie always complaining? He was a bit of a miserable bastard, come to think of it.

  Reggie resolved, then, to be more optimistic. He had a whole life ahead of him. An infinite number of lives, in theory. He had power and the ability to actually change things for the better, and that was a treasure that almost nobody in all the world laid claim to. What did he have to be so grim about?

  He glanced outside just as he entered the castle, and saw the giant fucking army of ants rushing towards him.