++Ludvich, no last name known, is a cautionary tale. Even the most seasoned and hardened of Witchfinders may fall. For Witchfinders are men, and men are…weak.++

  Book 2: Chapter 16

  Henry had always been an arsehole, so Ludvich was more than happy to see it was him leading the charge of pikes and axes his way. Reggie’s ants had gotten stuck in instantly and each one of them seemed a match for three or even four of the Workers, though he doubted they’d last long against the elves with those magic blades.

  But there weren’t any magic blades beyond those, everyone else had nothing to work with except mundane steel. That was just fine as far as Ludvich was concerned. He hefted his own weapons, all ten of them protruding sharp and hungry from the tips of his fingers.

  He got to work.

  Ludvich had a disadvantage in reach, worse than even Reggie did. He cunningly got around this deficit by allowing cunt Henry to stab him, then punching the shaft of his spear and snapping the thing. He was in close before the man could react and slashing out, taking his throat right apart. The man fell gurgling and thrashing, died fast.

  But he wasn’t alone, and already more of the townsfolk were closing in on Ludvich.

  Come on then, you bastards. Ludvich realised only then that he’d been wanting to do this for years. For decades.

  Most of these people were too young to have been the ones to kill Helen and Jake, to have made Reggie an orphan, to have stained Ludvich’s hands with blood. That was fine, Ludvich was old and nasty enough that killing the kids of those he hated was satisfaction enough for now. He hissed and snarled, lashing his hands out and raking great swathes of flesh out of people as blood flew high and far and wounds wept like a child left alone in a world that hated him.

  Righteous fury went a long way in some fights, but Ludvich’s undead body was past its benefits. The tolerance for pain and endurance of rage didn’t matter when his nerves were already dead and muscles already tireless, and despite him killing as fast as he could there were just so many enemies that sheer numbers threatened to overwhelm him.

  Name: Ludvich

  Age: 56

  Race: Vampire [Deity Race, Tier 1]

  Class: None

  Attributes:

  Strength 27(+10)

  Speed 27(+10)

  Celerity 29(+10)

  Toughness 27(+10)

  Charisma -1(-10)

  Abilities:

  Blood Magic I

  Form of the Beast I

  Traits:

  Enhanced Senses I

  Regeneration I

  Ludvich had become stronger. Not just stronger than he’d been before turning into a vampire, at the tail-end of a long and hard life. He was stronger now than he’d ever managed to become. None of his Attributes had ever exceeded 26, even at the height of his youth. Now all but one did.

  He’d let Reggie’s parents die because he was too scared to fight a lynch mob of one hundred, and here he was taking one what had to be more than double that number with proper soldiers to aid them. Funny how things worked out.

  But then he had a lot of help now. Reggie’s reanimated ants were dropping fast, but they were tying up the enemy so well that Ludvich could hardly believe the rest were even still willing to fight him. That only made him hate them more.

  They were a brave people, weren’t they, when it came to murder and burnings? When it came to killing a little boy who spoke to people that weren’t there. They were cowards against all things elven, who’d sooner break their own necks by bowing too low than disobey an unjust order, but they had the will of heroes on matters of murder.

  Kill them all, Ludvich. He started at the System’s voice as it rang through his mind. Make it painful, butcher them like animals.

  Maybe he should’ve been concerned to hear such a command in his own head, voices telling you to kill people were typically not a good thing. But Ludvich was of a mind with this one. He’d been feeling his disgust with Norvhan mount and grow by the year, and now it was time to put it to some good use.

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  He raked a man’s face and saw white bone peeking out with grey brain matter, then blood welled up to cover the wound entirely. Someone thrust a spear into his side hard enough to snap it off in him, and he tore the trip free before thrusting it right into the belly of another. All around him people closed and fought, while Ludvich worked his limbs long beyond the point where mortal meat would grow slack with exhaustion.

  It wasn’t enough, there were just too many. And so eventually he caved.

  “Reggie!” Ludvich roared, in his gutteral, gnarled tone borne from vocal chords twisted beyond anything a human’s throat would house. “Reggie! We need more undead!”

  The boy was quick as ever and understood him instantly, sparing Ludvich one glance up from where he fought the elves’ damned leader. His beady eyes narrowed, and he lashed the woman with sprays of blood torn up from where it littered the ground around them. She was stunned, backing away and swinging, too dangerous to approach for an attack. Reggie didn’t attack her. He just closed the distance between him and Ludvich and sent magic pulsing into the corpses.

  Necromancy. Ludvich had been taught to hate it since he was just a lad, had that instinctive revulsion drilled into him by countless lessons as he trained with the other budding Witchfinders. As much as his body had been hardened and strengthened, his mind had been turned against the dark arts of necromancy. But now it seemed to him the most wonderful thing in creation. Within one moment, two score Workers were standing up, groaning and wielding the same weapons they had in life.

  Oftentimes, the reanimation of one’s own allies comes as a terrible shock. Today was no exception. The living townsfolk were too slow to react as the newly-made peelers thrust spears and swung axes at them, biting deep and spraying the ground with blood. In a single instant the balance began to tip.

  Ludvich kept fighting just as hard, not trusting a bunch of zombies to turn things around entirely. As he wounded and killed, his eyes kept flickering to the fight between Reggie and the elves’ leader.

  It was then that he saw the new arrival, and felt flooded with dread.

  “Wizard!” he cried out in warning. “Reggie, they have a wizard!”

  ***

  Reggie didn’t have much information on what a Wizard was, knowledge about the elven Classes was rare—probably deliberately so—and he’d never been able to find much on it. He’d heard rumours and stories, though, and those rumours and stories had filled him now with a very particular response to the notion of being attacked by one.

  So when Ludvich called out his warning, Reggie didn’t hesitate at all before throwing himself to one side. It was a clumsy pounce, but nonetheless carried him a good ten yards before he landed. Any less and he’d have been at risk of getting caught by the fireball that reared up from right beside where he’d been standing, an expansive, unfurling cloud of flames that boiled the water out of wet mud and left the ground dry and cracked beneath it.

  He rolled to his feet, turned to shoot a stare at where the blast had come from and saw a new elf stepping out into the streets. He wore bright purple robes that covered him from top to bottom, moved more sluggishly than the other Circumscribers but with a quickness of eye that saw him easily tracking Reggie. Already, more magic was building at the tip of a long, silvery staff clutched tight in his hands. Wizards. Rarer than Circumscribers, and far more feared. Was he Tier 3, Tier 4?

  Tier 4.

  That decided Reggie in an instant.

  “Retreat!” he snarled to Ludvich, turning to twist aside from another fireball and instead finding his body racked with pain. Lightning had leapt from the staff, not flames, and it had closed the space between them more or less instantly. Reggie’s slitted nostrils filled with the reek of his own flesh cooking, like bacon burned black on a fire, and he learned something new about his anatomy.

  Apparently, vampiric bodies still suffered from muscular spasms when lightning or similar attacks ran through them. He’d heard Witchfinders did, and now he knew that weakness was one he shared. Reggie didn’t have the luxury of pondering why just now, his convulsing form took all of two steps before the legs fell out from under it and dumped him hard into the ground.

  There was more fighting and dying all around him. Reggie sent out a mental command one moment and was surrounded by his newly-made peelers the next, wincing as a blast of flames hit them just a fraction of a second after they finished moving. All of them just disappeared, more or less, with the ones farthest from the fire seared into useless lumps of meat, and the one that took the hit directly appearing to actually skeletonize as all but its bones was blistered away into ash on the winds.

  In an instant, things had started going bad. They hadn’t planned on the Wizard showing up and as Reggie scrambled back he saw just how big a disaster that fact was. With a single other spell the elf sent a rolling wave of flames lashing out to engulf a score of undead and reduce all of them to burning piles in the mud.

  Not many of Reggie’s familiars were still left, and more were dying all the time as townsfolk galvanized. He decided to make a judgement call. Drawing on the last dregs of his ichor, he sent another thirty or so stumbling jerkily to their feet and marching on the Wizard. Tier 1 Workers were incredibly easy to reanimate compared to soldier ants, though their use as anything but a distraction was limited.

  Fortunately, a distraction was all Reggie needed now. While the Wizard focused on burning the peelers, he leapt through the air and landed hard on one of the Circumscribers who was just now finishing off the last praetorian. Reggie slammed their head down hard into the ground and bit down onto their neck before they could react. Blood flooded his mouth, a torrent of it. Sickly sweet and indescribably satisfying, he drank as fast as he could to refill his ichor.

  But Circumscribers were Tier 2, which meant Reggie didn’t have anything to gain from them in terms of power. Not as food. The sword he stole from this one, though, changed things fast. He came up swinging it and sliced the guts right out of the first Circumscriber to reach him, giving the second pause. While the disembowelled elf was stumbling away and trying to cram his entrails back in, Reggie leapt forwards and swung again.

  His head came off in that single blow, sent flying almost across the street and trailing blood. Reggie snatched that blood out of the air with magic and thrust it into the remaining Circumscriber’s face, then stabbed him right through the chest while he was distracted. He snatched that one’s sword too, snatched the third while he was at it, and started running.

  Fortunately, he didn’t need to tell Ludvich about his plan for a strategic withdrawal, the former Witchfinder was already fleeing and almost at the wall before Reggie even started to run.

  Unfortunately, the Wizard had just about finished taking out his peelers and was working up what looked to be a particularly nasty final spell. Reggie’s soldier ants were mostly killed, the second praetorian was down, and now it was just open ground between himself and a wall of fire.

  Magical fire. Would that kill a vampire for good?