++One must always be cautious when approaching a vampire’s lair. Many a hunter has perished in their eagerness to attack after locating one, apparently not knowing of the bottomless traps and pitfalls these fearsome creatures are able to prepare. The wise Witchfinder bides his time and assembles his strength before attempting anything of lasting consequence.++
Book 2: Chapter 14
It took a lot of killing before the fight was finally over and done with, enough that Reggie actually thought he was tired by the end. Impossible, of course. More likely he’d fucked up his joints. His body was still that of a human’s, albeit a dead human. Whatever magic animated it would simulate the strength and movements of a living person, but a living person was only built to move at full speed for so long. Short bursts, usually. The stamina to sprint forever didn’t mean his ankles could take the sprain of it for hours, even if they healed in mere minutes.
He was still in better condition than the ants.
Most of the dead were in more than two pieces. The praetorians had fared better, but not by much. In the chaos of everything there’d only been a few of the enemy left wounded, and of those only two had shared a Tier with Reggie. He’d drained them both, of course.
+1 Speed
+1 Toughness
Progress to next Tier;
3/250 creatures drained
0/10 years passed
Name: Reginald Smith
Age: 21
Race: Vital Arcanist [Inheritor Race, Tier 3]
Class: None
Attributes:
(S)Strength 50(+12)/56
(P)Speed 50(+12)/62
(P)Celerity 49(+12)/62
(S)Toughness 49(+12)/56
(P)Charisma 26(-12)/62
Abilities:
Blood Magic II
Form of the Beast II
Royal Presence I
Necromancy I
Traits:
Enhanced Senses I
Regeneration II
Addictive Ichor
Enhanced Magick I
It didn’t really compare to the recent explosions of growth Reggie had enjoyed in the nest, not at all. What was worse, that time requirement for his next Evolution was still dangling there like an icon of mockery. Ten years.
Well, he wasn’t going to stand around and complain about more power, at least. He turned to Ludvich.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
Ludvich said nothing, still busy emptying a drone’s twitching body into himself. More of them had died than the other castes of ant, probably because so many had been left in numerous pieces. Nonetheless, enough had been left dying instead of dead to make a good and productive meal out of them.
Once the ex-Witchfinder had finished draining the remnants of his latest kill, he looked up to Reggie and grinned with bloody teeth.
“Ten Attribute increases so far, including that one.”
Reggie did a quick tally of the remaining ants, counting a good half-dozen drones and as many soldiers.
“Drain the big ones first,” he advised. “If they die of their wounds you’ll be missing out on more.” Ludvich got to it fast. He hadn’t taken long to adjust to his new condition, in the end. Certainly not as long as Reggie would’ve expected from someone who’d made a life out of hunting what was now his own kind.
Not that Reggie was complaining. Ludvich being his robust and practical self, combined with the gift of vampirism, made him about the best ally he could’ve hoped for.
Gift of vampirism?
Interesting, when had he started thinking like that?
Reggie supposed it was good timing, he needed to start thinking about all the gifts he had right now because that gunshot had been very loud and would have been audible for a great distance.
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“I can Evolve,” Ludvich told him abruptly.
“Don’t,” Reggie advised. “Once you hit Tier 2 you can only grow stronger by eating other Tier 2s. Those are a lot rarer than—”
—”don’t tell me how rare Tiers are in the grimwoods,” the man snapped, “I was a Witchfinder. So I still get Attribute improvements once at my evolution threshold? Okay, good.” He kept on slurping down ants.
The gunshot still troubled Reggie so much that he’d barely registered Ludvich’s words. They were high up on this castle, and he remembered reading about how certain objects could either dampen or strengthen a sound as it rang out around them. Trees were good at muffling stuff, loud stuff at least, over long distances.
On the other hand, it was hard to get much better at conveying sound than a giant plane of flat granite. Much like the one his new castle was built atop.
Ludvich was finished eating soon enough, and Reggie caught a whiff of change about him. A new strength of blood, not a physical sensation as much as a magical one. Was that sensory power a new feature of hitting Tier 3, or had he just been inattentive before?
No time to investigate now, Reggie bottled the detail up for later.
“We need to go,” he said at once. Of course Ludvich didn’t answer, the old man had probably come to his own conclusion about that sooner than Reggie had.
“We do,” he agreed, looking around him, scowling. “These corpses will give away a lot about our strength.”
Reggie had a thought about that, spent a moment concentrating and sent his will and magic out in vast Necromantic waves. Compared to the mana he’d been juggling in his last Tier, this was…well, there was no comparing. A candle to a bonfire maybe. Enhanced Magick? Nice.
That magical bonfire rolled over the dead ants and seeped its power into them. A few twitching antennas came first, then the limbs. Then Reggie watched as, all at once, a good hundred drones and maybe a dozen soldiers hoisted themselves up to stand as one.
He spent a good five seconds just staring at them standing there as if on parade, all awaiting his instructions. Then he sent his will out again, this time targeting the corpses beyond the wall, littering the stone around his castle. More ants rose, then more still. By the end of it Reggie estimated he’d reanimated a good three hundred. Anything that wasn’t now moving to his will was either a praetorian, too strong to control, or simply in too many pieces for his magic to affect. Reggie got to enjoy his newfound power for all of a second before it abruptly cut off and he fell from the wall.
Apparently, vampires could lose consciousness even without being shot in the head. Mana exhaustion, more supernatural than physical. Worth remembering. When Reggie came to his head was resting in a nasty dent left in the granite floor of his castle’s perch. He felt fine, his skull not especially damaged. Maybe it’d cracked open on impact, but if it had, the damage had healed itself before he even woke up.
By the time Reggie got to his knees, Ludvich was just about running down to greet him. The old man was clearly concerned, but he’d still taken the stairs. Reggie glanced up at the sixty-foot wall to confirm its height.
“You probably could’ve dropped down, you know,” he noted. “Might’ve broken a leg but those heal fast. Faster than it took you to reach me.”
Just then, Reggie was hit by a new feeling. He pounced on the nearest ant corpse and drained it dry in two seconds flat. A soldier, ichor already thinned and weakened by the half-hour or so it’d been lying there as a corpse. It barely reduced Reggie’s hunger, and he went around draining more and more until he’d finally filled himself up.
“What happened there?” Ludvich asked as he did. Reggie shrugged as best as he could while man-handling an armoured insect the size of a small pony.
“Your guess is as good as mine, my Necromancy just shit itself and died, then I was starving. Sycily?”
Necromancy drains its user of blood over time, in proportion to the number and Tier of undead reanimated at once.
Ah. “So not only does it take ichor to actually resurrect something, I also need to keep burning it to keep the thing in question undead?”
Yes.
Reggie’s blood capacity had gotten seriously expanded by his Tier improvement. Before, draining a praetorian would’ve filled him almost to the brim. After the fight, though, Reggie had needed to empty three of them just to almost replenish his reserves.
It was a bit frightening to know that he could empty even this new tank of power so fast if he wasn’t careful.
“Can you tell me how fast sustaining one reanimate will drain me, relative to my current power?”
…I can’t, sorry.
Ludvich snorted, looked like he was about to say something, then seemed to decide better than doing so.
Reggie tried another reanimation, though found it harder this time.
Necromancy becomes more difficult to work on creatures that have been dead for longer, Sycily explained to him. That answered a few of his budding questions right away, like “why does every necromancer not just empty entire cemeteries and instantly get an army”.
“Will he ever be able to raise the long-dead?” Ludvich asked, thoughtfully.
Eventually, yes.
The ex-Witchfinder didn’t seem surprised. “Thought so, I’ve seen a few do that before.”
“Vampires?” Reggie asked.
“No, just necromancers. Humans can pick that Class up. It’s one of the forbidden ones, drives them mad and…” he paused, blinked, then sighed. “According to the elves that is. I’m realizing now of course that there’s every chance it has no strings attached, beyond the obvious of being weird and using people’s dead bodies.”
By then, Reggie had managed to drag several of the ants back into some shambling semblance of life. He wasn’t certain what his absolute limit of reanimation was, but for now he didn’t want to push things. They were already leaving his new safehouse in the grimwoods. If he was to do that, he wanted some kind of bodyguard force to protect him.
A score of soldier ants wasn’t much at all, but it would do for the time being. Even with that many Reggie could feel the tug of ichor being drawn from him. It wasn’t crushing, but it felt comparable to sustaining his Form of The Beast. Which meant that, while actually sustaining it, he’d be burning through ichor faster still, and if he ever had to do a lot of healing…
“I’m just now starting to realise why so many vampires are so eager to have big feeding stockpiles,” he grumbled.
“I always liked that,” Ludvich added. “Made it really easy to track them down and kill them. Now, of course, I’m thinking a bit differently about it.”
They were delaying, dawdling on heading out and doing what they needed to do. With a sigh and one last look at the castle, Reggie began walking away from it. One foot in front of the—
[MONSTER, KILL THE MONSTER!] Reggie yelped and transformed, talons whirling out in all directions as Dvo laughed.
“What the fuck was that?” Ludvich stared at him.
“Do you…hear that one?”
“That one?” Ludvich growled, “another voice?”
“Yeah. Okay, so you don’t then?”
[You were so frightened Reggie! I knew that not saying anything for a while would lower your guard. Gosh, this was such a funny idea. And to think you’ll live forever, I have eternity to set up practical jokes just like that one!]
Reggie was legitimately fucked up by the joke. If his heart still beat, it would be doing it very fast now. He tried to bury the frustration that inspired as Dvo’s words sunk in, failed, and let out a good stream of satisfying swears instead. “Let’s keep going,” he growled.
They did so. Into the fog, the shadows and the grimwoods. Back into the fire from the frying pan. Except with the soldier ants and Ludvich’s growing power, Reggie didn’t feel like he was prey anymore. Didn’t take every step fried by the fear of a wolf spider lunging for him.
Now he felt like a predator.
