++Vampire Knights are easily the most fearsome of them. Tier 4 monsters, their abilities are of a starkly martial kind and they have been observed to match favourably against greater numbers of Circumscribers in combat.++

  Chapter 48

  Aldyral took his sweet time in actually answering, letting them all stew. A whole room full of people staring at him, trying desperately to guess what was going on in his fickle brain, hoping against hope that the die would fall in their favour. That was what it was to be a human in the elves’ world.

  Used to be our world. Could be again.

  “I will be seen as crossing my people if I do what you’re asking,” Aldyral said at last, “you realise that.”

  “We do,” Strygai conceded, “and yet that would be their shortcoming. You are, after all, the one bearing the brunt of this conflict on their behalf. If they don’t see that then it is a failure on their part.”

  “And a failure that I will suffer for all the same,” Aldyral snapped. Strygai, cleverly, opted to stop talking at that. What followed was another period of sulking, or, as Aldyral probably liked to imagine it, weighty deliberation. It ended with another growling remark, but one that sounded somewhat promising. “I will need more benefits than this, to make it worth my time. If I am to be seen as betraying my peers because of their own stupidity, then I will go the full mile and gain from it. What deal can you offer me?”

  They talked amongst themselves , or rather pretended to. Norman had seen something like this coming a mile off of course and everyone had already gotten a good understanding of what could and could not be offered. Feigning otherwise, though, let the elf think he’d surprised them, and that made him more likely to accept whatever was offered.

  “Your guards have been talking about forming up with us, haven’t they?” Strygai asked the elf. “Not at length, not often, but the discussion about their joining our union and pushing you as we push your peers are getting louder. We can cut them out, assure you that they won’t get our support. Maybe they can form some union of their own, but it’ll never corroborate with our organisation of them.”

  Reggie didn’t like that, and he did. He had no particular love of Lorwick’s guards, as far as he was concerned it served them just right to get cut out of benefitting from the organisation they’d worked so hard to stamp out. Even so, that the unions could unilaterally do this was unnerving.

  Aldyral didn’t seem to agree though. Reggie saw his eyes light up, and got the feeling that it was only with great restraint the elf managed to keep from agreeing out of hand within an instant.

  “And what else?” he asked, getting greedy, trying to squeeze more. Strygai responded well enough.

  “We have little else to give. We’ve already made a big concession here, your guards would have been a huge benefit to us and driving this wedge between us and them will ensure you enjoy the advantage of combat power in this city forever.” He didn’t go so far as to accuse Aldyral of being unreasonable, which was probably why the man accepted what he’d been told.

  “Fine then,” the overseer snapped, “fine. You have my support. For all it will do, I can’t imagine this little experiment of yours lasting a year even if the Patricians accept it.”

  Strygai and the rest of them kept silent at that, just nodding and taking his snide shots. They had what they’d come for, let the elf have the last word.

  Once outside, they finally let their grins break out. Reggie found his own matching them, despite the exhausting tension he’d just been smothered with and the nagging feeling in his gut.

  “That went well,” he croaked at last.

  “Well?” Norman grinned, “it went perfect. One more meeting like that and we’ll have everything.”

  Reggie felt another shiver. Things were going to go wrong, he knew it. A wolf spider would ambush him, or the planet would blow up. Something would happen. It had to. A good thing couldn’t be allowed, not by this world. He just had to keep his eyes out and spot the disaster before it came.

  “You feeling alright, John?” Norman asked him.

  “Yes.” Reggie said. “Fine. Yes. Why?”

  “No reason,” the man said evenly, “just wondering why you were walking alone and mumbling to yourself about spiders.”

  Ah. Reggie really had to focus more on keeping his inside thoughts where they belonged. Lots of people would kill him for being that weird.

  “I’m nervous,” Reggie admitted. “It’s uh. I don’t know. Things are going well, at the moment. That doesn’t happen. I’m trying to think of what’s going to go wrong. It’s how the world works, things are good sometimes, to lower your guard, and then it all turns terrible, everything becomes horrible again and makes you miserable. You know?”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Norman just stared at him. “I…don’t know, no, sorry lad. I don’t have the expertise needed to deal with…whatever this is. But I can tell you that I think we have a real chance at making things better.”

  “Of course you think that,” Reggie snapped, “you’re…You don’t see the cracks in things.”

  He’d never said it to someone out loud before, but that didn’t make it less true. People—other people, those who weren’t Reggie—just didn’t understand the world. Couldn’t understand. They were blind, missed the obvious. They deluded themselves into happiness and lowered guards.

  Not him. Tempting as it was, never him.

  “What?” he snapped, cutting Norman off as he realised only then the man had been talking. “Sorry,” Reggie added, “I’m getting distracted.”

  Norman seemed cautious, but kept meeting his eye at least. “That’s alright, I was just saying that…you’ll see whether I’m right soon, won’t you? And if everything does go wrong, I’ll rest easy knowing you’re ready for it.”

  Reggie didn’t feel the slightest bit comforted, like usual the dumb optimism was just bouncing off him.

  But there was no use in letting Norman know. No point in dragging other people down to be miserable alongside him. “Yeah. I guess we’ll see,” he said, and forced the most convincing smile he could until the man turned and rejoined the larger group.

  They split up soon, with their only passing words being a reminder to keep an ear out and be ready to reconvene. Staying together was still a risk, but it wouldn’t be long, Norman assured them, until the time to make their final push came. After that, everything could change. Reggie was almost tempted once more to be hopeful.

  [There’s nothing wrong with optimism, Reggie!]

  Great. Now even the demonic voice that lived in his head was telling him to relax. Did that make listening to Norman’s advice a better idea, or a worse one? Reggie’s head was starting to hurt. Annoying. What was the point of being a walking corpse if that still happened?

  He retired to his room, and with nothing more pressing just enjoyed the isolation and lack of any immediate fires in need of extinguishing. Reggie didn’t feel fatigue the way humans did, but his mind could still get tired. His mind could get more tired than ever, these days. It was nice to give it however brief a respite this was.

  The closer things got to what Norman claimed was going to be the final push, the more wrong they felt. Was that Reggie having good instincts, or bad?

  A sad fact was that he couldn’t really tell. Pessimism had been so often correct in his life, but then his life had been uniquely shit and the subject of a unique amount of effort to keep it so. Was he being paranoid by applying that attitude here? It wasn’t like some cosmic force existed solely to keep him unhappy, right?

  No. So why wasn’t his gut listening to that?

  Are you okay?

  Great, even Sycily sounded concerned. It probably didn’t bode well for him that Reggie was managing to freak out the nigh-omniscient System interface.

  “I’m fine,” he lied.

  You’re lying, she truthed.

  “Sorry about that.” Sycily didn’t say anything, perhaps waiting for more and then falling into a true silence upon realising it wasn’t coming. Reggie let the day slip him by, and was pleasantly surprised not to be thrown back into imminent danger just yet.

  That came at nightfall.

  Walyn knocked on his door and walked into the room without asking permission, though stopped when he saw Reggie had reflexively leveled the heavy musket at his head.

  “Uh, sorry?” he asked.

  “No, my bad,” Reggie hastened to put it away, partly to stop threatening his immediate superior and partly so there’d be something obscuring the wooden stake stashed under his bed, “I’m jumpy.”

  “Yeah I noticed.” Walyn seemed to be in a good mood, all things considered, which Reggie took note of and…felt somewhat nervous at. Maybe it was that damned paranoia again, but something told him that Walyn’s good mood would inherently come at his own expense, or that of other people at least. What, had he drained one of the people at the asylum?

  Perhaps he already knew what had happened to the door there, and was just pleased to nail Reggie for it.

  “What is this about?” Reggie asked, not confrontational but needing the answer.

  “Good news. Good news for both of us actually, the Lady wants to talk to you again. She has her Knight with her.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh right, I forgot you’re new. A Knight is the enforcer of a Lord or Lady’s word among our kind. Combat-oriented vampires of significant age and power.”

  “Like, uh, like a Witchfinder?”

  “Oh they kill Witchfinders. Whole squads of them, when they need to. At once.”

  Lovely. Reggie would’ve preferred not to meet what was essentially an executioner’s axe in human—rather, dead human—form, but then he didn’t get a choice in much of anything he did these days. He accompanied Walyn out.

  The Lady’s building felt different, though that was perhaps just a feature of Reggie’s overactive imagination. Inside it he saw nothing changed from his last visit, save the presence of exactly one new person. A man, tall and paler even than most vampires. He was built like someone who used his limbs to kill people, and his back had a sword the size of a large child strapped to it. Red eyes affixed themselves to Reggie and followed him in as he entered.

  “Good evening gentlemen,” the Lady said from behind her desk. Walyn didn’t reply, so Reggie didn’t either. She continued. “I have been looking into your progress from the outside, both of you, but of course my information will be incomplete without your own impression of what has happened. Fill me in.”

  Reggie saw what she was doing, subtly letting him know that she was already caught up from sources he couldn’t account for. Warning him that he couldn’t know which of the lies he might choose to tell were already proven false to her. He would’ve been honest anyway, not knowing what sort of lie-detection magic she may possess. If anything it was nice to see a trick like this used, it made it all the more likely that she didn’t have a power like that.

  He spoke, and he did it at length. Reggie had gotten good at compressing information over these reports and he was done with the day’s events, details and all, in only a few minutes. The Lady’s face was impassive, like always. Maybe after enough years spent dead your expressions just stopped pretending to be alive.

  “You’re close to dealing then,” she murmured, “and the union are confident?”

  Reggie hesitated. He didn’t want to say yes, if she heard ‘yes’ she’d do something to make them less so. Interfere, create a reason for them to accept her help.

  “Yes,” he said. Sorry Norman, but this wouldn’t do too much harm in the long-term he thought, right? Practicality above all. You had to work with these systems to have a hope at changing them.

  The Lady still seemed pleased and soaked the information up quickly, then turned to Walyn.

  “Then it is time for you to approach them about the asylums.”