Vampire Core: Reborn as the Hot Evil Vampire Lord, But I’m Socially Awkward

- [Within a Dark Castle] -

He’s been reincarnated.

Holding his head in thought with one hand, the reborn man walks through the dark, shadowy, long corridors of what appears to be some sort of forgotten castle. Old, tattered scraps of rugs adorn the failing walls, hanging in part from broken, rusted frames. They look like fabric draping over the shattered arms of battered skeletons. Cold, pale blue moonlight streaks in through the large, dusty windows that he walks past — hundreds of them — as he goes around from corridor to corridor, just trying to find his way out of the dark room he had woken up in. A haunting shimmer reflects off of shards of broken reflective glass as he walks past a fractured metal frame hung against a stone wall. A broken mirror. It looks like somebody smashed it a long time ago. He’s seen a few of them now. They seem to be scattered around the old castle, but all of them are destroyed and covered in thick layers of grime. Outside, a storm rages, battering against the dilapidated castle.

[{Destroyed} Dungeon Core, Vampire Lord’s Castle]

A once terrifying fortress that loomed high over the night in the forgotten back lands of the world, this formerly incredible castle has long since fallen into a dilapidated ruin. The towers have crumbled, the walls are failing and resemble the loose mountain sediment around them more than they do structures, and the majority of its substantial magical powers have long since faded away.

Only a small passive glow of its former power remains, sustaining a few leftover inhabitants and objects that stem from long-forgotten nightmares. This unusual dungeon core preferred to spread itself outward as a castle on the surface world rather than burrowing deep down below the rocks and soil.

Once in a long since passed time, it was full of monsters, ghouls, and beasts and tread only by the bravest of adventurers. However, now only some ghosts, remnants, and the wind remain.

— And you.

Monster Spawning: Inactive Dungeon Core: Defeated

Treasure: None

His head is in a daze of sorts, since his soul is still merging with this vessel it has been put into. It feels odd and uncomfortable, this new body. It feels like instead of him being naked, he’s rather opted to put on a wet set of clothes. Everything feels off and sticky in the strangest ways. The little details don’t add up — his gait, his posture, the color of his skin, and the shape of his hands — his very, very big hands.

“…Why are my hands so big?” mutters the so-called Vampire Lord, looking down at his unnaturally long paper white hands that could each ring themselves individually around someone’s neck. He narrows his eyes, staring at something even worse. “…Why are my nails black?” he asks, lifting his fingers to his eyes.

His fingernails are black.

“Is this nail paint?!” shouts the reincarnated vampire to himself in disbelief, letting out an annoyed tsk as he keeps walking. One of his long, sharp fingernails pokes into the side of his mouth as he tries to scrape the black paint off with his teeth.

[The Beast Within]

Passive Ability

You have physical strength far beyond the norm. Appropriately, your bones, nails, and teeth have hardened to those of a dangerous predator, making them nearly unbreakable and the latter two unbelievably sharp.

Whether through fabric robes or metal breastplates, you’ll be able to get in where you need to be.

His mind can grasp reincarnation without much of a problem, honestly. He’s read plenty of stories like that in his old life. Hell, his favorite swordsman book that got him into this mess was about exactly that topic too — a man who reincarnated into another world as a powerful swordsman. But what he won’t stand for is reincarnating as a man who paints his nails; that’s just not what he envisioned for himself at all. Sure, he listened to heavy metal sometimes in his past life, but he was never that into it. After twenty, you just can’t go full goth as a man anymore. It’s just not socially acceptable. People get judgmental when you go to buy toast and yogurt while wearing spiked synthetic leather combat boots and a sidecut. Given his discomfort with other people, he just didn’t need that kind of heat.

As for his old life, well… dying sucks. But he wasn’t really doing anything with that life anyway, and it’s not like anyone will miss him.

— Except bookstore girl.

He lets out an immediate, fresh scream, grabbing his hair in frustration and shaking his head to try and force that fresh painfully awkward memory away for now so that it can come back to haunt him when he lies down to sleep instead — as any mentally healthy individual does.

Stopping, he turns to look at a dusty, placid window. The glass is thin and single-framed, and the longer he stares at it, through it toward the misty, forest landscape below, the more something clicks.

He can’t see his own reflection in the glass. It’s like there’s nobody there at all.

Right. A vampire. He’s a vampire — the vampire, apparently.

[An Empty Man]

Passive Ability

• After countless years of cruelty, your soul has withered away, leaving only a body and its physical desires behind. You do not have a reflection anymore because of this. Lacking a soul is a weakness in your ability to hide amongst the living and causes you to take enhanced damage from HOLY spells; however, it greatly strengthens your ability to resist manipulation and illusion spells.

— That’s kind of cool, right? Maybe this won’t be so bad? Vampires can be pretty awesome. A lot of the coolest villains in the things he used to watch were vampires.

He looks around himself at the dusty ruin, built in a forgotten age a long, long time ago and long-since abandoned.

Sure. He doesn’t like the kind of vampires that had become popular in the modern media of his past life. But… that doesn’t mean he has to be that kind of sparkly, handsome, heartthrob of a vampire, right? He can be the powerful, terrifying kind instead that haunted the old world’s dark history! He’ll be all creepy and powerful, sitting in his castle as a recluse until the movie starts and a wayward hero finds his way here and kills him by the end of it.

Standing there, his perfect hand rubbing his god-sculpted, baby soft chin, the vampire shakes his head.

“…That’s a terrible idea…” he mutters, continuing his walk. He’d better not think about it too hard, lest the universe think its funny, and make it happen after all.

Where the hell is the door to this place?

Maybe he’ll become a cool vampire, a friend to humanity, who sacrifices it all to prove to them with his final hour that he really wasn’t a bad guy after all. He’ll team up with the heroes to defeat some greater evil and die in the process, proving that every dark soul has redemption within it somewhere.

“…Wait…”

His eyes wander to the dusty, cobwebbed chandeliers that line the ceiling.

He’s starting to think his experience with the vampire genre is somewhat limited. They always seem to lose in everything he’s ever read about them, don’t they? Either they’re the bad guys in some trashy horror movie and get staked in the end, they melt in the sunlight by a hero dramatically ripping open an old curtain, or they’re the campy sidekick in someone else’s adventure who sacrifices themselves in the name of friendship or something like that.

— Well he doesn’t have any friends, and he doesn’t plan on being stabbed, so not much has changed from his old life, actually.

He swipes a black strand of beautifully colored, straight, strong, thick hair out of his sparkling ruby eyes. The partially purple-shaded hair glistens, flying in the moonlight with bedazzling flow that makes every spider and rat around him stop and look in awe.

[Sparklefang]

Passive Ability

• Even wretched beasts cannot resist your insanely compelling beauty.

Does the vampire ever win? It doesn’t seem to be the case, does it? He’s never seen a single thing where the vampire doesn’t…

He stops that thought midway.

Reaching into his coat, he pulls out the book stashed inside of it and stares at the beautiful man on the cover. A man who, in his story, is winning.

“I guess you figured it out, huh?” he mumbles, shaking his head and tucking Enfangled back away before the smugly drawn man on the book’s cover can look any deeper into his soul.

[Within the Shadows]

Passive Ability

• You may quickly store and access items within your castle’s treasury through the darkness beneath your cloak as needed.

He navigates his way through the castle. Doors line the corridor, hundreds of them, and there are hundreds of rooms, filled with all manner of furnishings — some for purposes he can’t even begin to identify.

“Is this a torture room?” he asks, looking at a table with straps on it, shaking his head and closing the door, before moving on to the next one.

One of these has to lead out of here.

Further down the hallway, an unlatched window down the hallway slams open, the broken frame striking against the stone wall as a gust of the stormy weather blows in through the castle. His hair and cloak billow as he turns his head in the direction of the flow and then follows it as something clicks in the back of his head.

[Domain Dominance]

Passive Ability

• You know your own domain in and out. Every way within your territory is clear to you. Every door will open. No matter what shape or form your ever-changing castle takes, you always know where everything is, and it will always respond to your desires.

He looks back at the door he just came from.

— That was a torture room. Oof.

[{Destroyed} Torture Room]

{Succubus Spawning Zone}

This room houses all of the odds and ends needed in order to partake in deeply mutual conversations between two parties regarding the nature of their differences. Straps, belts, chains, needles, and everything else required for healthy, constructive dialogue had once been here.

— But now it’s not.

Room Effects if Reactivated: Allows you to invite guests over for friendly chit-chats.

The room is inactive; the castle is destroyed. No monsters are currently spawning here.

Pulling nervously on his collar to loosen it a little, he continues down the castle with unimaginably perfect strides, the movement of his strangely long legs causing his black cape to flow behind him as if held aloft by an unseen magical force that, at all times, is intent on making him look incredibly fabulous.

— Rats run after him from the nearby distance, their eyes bedazzled with love as they watch him from afar.

He leaves down the corridor.

Behind him, pale, gray fingers wrap themselves around a crumbling corner of an old, broken wall. Something with sharp, yellow eyes watches him from the darkness as he goes, the pupil’s haunting shine mulling through the dust covering the ruin.

The storm howls.

[{Destroyed} Grand Entrance Hall]

The castle’s once regal and breathtaking grand hall, making up the entrance to the dungeon. Once, bodies both living and alive moved through here by the hundreds, but now there is nobody left but you.

Room Effects if Reactivated: Passively assesses the [LEVEL] of any intruder and adjusts the castle’s layout accordingly.

The room is inactive; the castle is destroyed. No monsters are currently spawning here.

He’s finally made it here, after what felt like an hour of walking. The castle is gigantic, and he almost had the feeling that it seemed to change and shift its corridors as he navigated them, as if it were trying to keep him here longer than he ought to have been. Walls appeared where before there were none, and sometimes he’d swear that suits of armor moved from one place to another as he looked away, intent on confusing his sense of orientation. Tapestries would change color, and some doors almost felt like living things, determined to stay locked despite him pulling on the handles and them then giving way to him.

It’s hard to explain, but he can’t help but feel like… something else is here.

Great, gigantic paintings hang on all sides of the grand entryway — a massive hall with ceilings higher than heaven above and formidable columns of solid brickwork, adorned with the carvings and statues of generations worth of master masons. The house-sized artworks are faded and worn through by time and the elements; the faces of the people who are portrayed there in those portraits faded blank, leaving only featureless, milky blobs that still always feel like they’re watching him from all around the gloom.

The exit. He’s found it.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing here just yet in this new life; he needs to clear his head and just think for a while. So he’d really love to get outside and get some fresh air at this point. There’s a… dankness to this old castle, an atmosphere that is somber and heavy. It’s like the air itself takes in all the dampness from the rain and the deep forest outside but never lets in any of the freshness of life too. There’s a stagnation here, and he feels like he’s stuck in it; it’s like treading water.

— It’s suffocating.

His hands grab the metal rings of the massive doors. Each iron circle is spun within the mouth of a metal demon, bolted deeply into the old wood. His boot steps forward, pressing the weight of his body against the doors.

Then there is a soft crunch.

He looks.

There is an old piece of broken glass that had gotten stuck to the bottom of his boot. It must have been from one of the many shattered mirrors. He saw a few of those along the way.

And then comes the sound.

— The whistling.

It’s close. It’s just behind him, that whistling. It sounds like someone breathing out their stuffed nose, straight onto the back of his neck. It sounds like the wind sneaking and forcing its way through a hundred broken windows on its way to his nape, to the inch-wide open gap in the two entry way doors of the castle as suddenly, from their stirring, the entire structure breathes at once. An unblocked flow is established through the castle for the first time in centuries as the front doors open and air can rush in.

His hair blasting past his face from the vigorous wind, the Vampire Lord turns his head slowly and looks.

He looks at the pair of hauntingly cold, glowing yellow eyes staring straight back at him from just above head height, from an unnervingly close distance.

“Leaving so soon?” asks an ominously curious growl of a voice through sharp, jagged teeth that remind him of a shark’s mouth.

In an instant, it all changes. Everything roars to life in the background behind him in the grand entryway, the castle starting to shift. The lanterns and the chandeliers rattle, the crystal ornaments flickering as crackling sparks of magical fairylights wind around them, a dull hue of many purples and reds starting to try and breathe through the caking of time over their reflective surfaces as they fight to relight themselves after a millennium of slumber.

Broken metal suits of armor that stand in proud, crippled legions against the walls begin to rattle, taking incomplete steps off of their pedestals, their pikes and swords shaking in their hollow hands as they try to regain their strength after an aeon of slumber. It looks like a quake is tumbling them all over, but they catch themselves on old, bent gauntlets and begin to crawl and lurch like zombies.

The massive paintings on the walls shift and move now in full force, the faceless giants on the large entryway portraits grasping at their own missing features, as if suddenly horrified and screaming for their lack of eyes and mouths; but with no faces, no sounds come out.

Yet other faces are abound aplenty — shapeless, vague, blobby faces made out of pale white, translucent goo begin to drift and seep up through every crack in the brickwork, like toxic gas rising from the underworld — ghosts. Formlessly, they howl and moan in senseless cacophony.

The singular floating thing with shark’s teeth behind The vampire leans in closer. “But… but you just got here,” wheezes the yellow-eyed spirit.

Metal gates rattle around the sides of the room as bony, fleshless arms press through from the midnight-soaked courtyards outside. Reanimated skeletons moan and shriek and reach in toward him from every barred opening.

A different shape screams, screeching through the room as a ragged bed sheet covering a manic soul flutters off of one of the windows — he had thought it was a curtain, but it was a banshee that now howls around the room’s ceiling as the violent storm breaks open the partially cracked grand doors behind him in full force all at once with a gale, causing the Vampire Lord to stumble forward.

His head looks back behind himself at the graveyard just outside, the ancient stones sinking deeper into the disturbed mud as the storm rages outside. Lightning flashes illuminate the rotting, soggy hands that now claw their way up out of their flooded graves and back up toward the world of the living. Zombies rise from their plots, their hollow faces broken and rotting apart as they begin to look his way with cracking, damp movements.

— And as for the yellow-eyed spirit hovering just behind him, she’s an odd thing. She looks like some devolved person who had taken on the features of a monster. Her completely blank, unnaturally rubbery smooth skin is a fallow gray that leans toward a suffocated purple. Her deeply inset, unblinking eyes are sharp as knives, but wide and flat and take up an unnatural majority of her face, and around them is a spasming layer of dark skin that almost looks like it's painted on — a stain. A large tuft of extremely long and fluffy feathered white hair covers her head, hanging past her face like a dead bride’s veil. Her thin nose is smushed down flat like it was broken ten times over and lacks much of a point to its tip, and her cheek-to-cheek-wide, sharply-toothed mouth is open broadly like a devourer’s maw as it bears down on its hunted prey — him. Her keen, jaggedly crooked teeth look like broken glass in her mouth. “— Master?” asks the spirit with yellow eyes, floating there like a specter in the rays of moonlight that cascade in through the open doors behind him, together with a torrent of rain and the shines of lightning. Her tattered dark robe dangles down over her frame that he can only best describe as goblinoid.

Water pours in, running down the back of the vampire’s cloak as he looks around himself at the many ghastly things lumbering his way and then back at it — her — at her three-fingered hands reaching down for him in the same instant as ten thousand dead things encircle him at once, all of them reaching, grabbing, groaning, and wanting.

The reincarnated man lets out a terrified sound and an endless wash of closing fingers grab nothing at all — including her snatching grasp that misses him — as he slips away up into the air, not sure what’s happening as he follows his gut instincts. His human-shaped body changes, his form compressing and altering in a surprisingly ungrotesque manner as he shoots up toward the dark night above, slipping through a stream of wailing monsters.

[Midnight Monster: Bat]

Active Ability

You have transformed into a bat!

Squeaking desperately, the very large bat flies away, tumbling awkwardly from side to side in the powerful storm as it learns to fly on the go, following some ingrained instinct that it doesn’t quite understand.

The Vampire Lord escapes what is said to be his own castle.

— Even destroyed and inactive, it’s still very scary.

- [Outside in the Forest — Azalea, Low-Level Elf Priestess] -

Azalea runs, branches clawing at her face and skin as she scrambles through the forest in a wild sprint for her life. Her chest heaves, desperate breath rushing out from her much the same as the sweat pouring down her rain-stricken face as she scrambles up a rooted incline. Her fingers claw into the soaked forest dirt in panic. A piece of her dress snags on a crooked, sharp branch, and she screams, pulling away and climbing over the incline, thinking that they caught her. A cut runs along her body, a piece of the robe ripping as the priestess gets up from all fours and continues sprinting through the woods, looking back behind herself for just a second. She sees the branches give way behind her where she just was, where something is coming.

It howls — they do.

The blood curdles in her heart, and she shouts again, running through the underbrush, batting branches and dead wood out of her way as she tries to escape. But it feels like no matter where she turns, the forest keeps going and going, and the trees — the odd trees — almost feel like they’re trying to slow her down, to stop her. Branches cling to her like the fingers of the dead, reaching out from the shadows all around her as light footsteps come to ear, louder and louder and louder as her pursuers come closer — unhindered by the forest, to which they belong.

Her foot snags on something, and her scream falls with her, tumbling gracelessly down an incline until she comes to a hard stop at the bottom of the hill, planting with her core down into the wet dirt of a river’s embankment.

Azalea looks around herself, disoriented. She crawls forward toward the river, trying to get back up, but she’s too scared. Her legs aren’t working like she wants them to. She knows she has to get up. They’re going to catch her. They’re right behind her. But her legs won’t work.

She reaches the water, gasping desperately, and looks at the river.

It’s so wide and fast. The current will take her if she tries to go in there. But…

— Azalea turns her head back around, flipping her body over onto her bottom and crawling back as far as she can across the mud, the water soaking into the fabric of her robe. Her shaking eyes stare up toward the top of the incline that she had just fallen down.

The bushes up there start to rustle.

And then, glowing, hungry eyes come out to look at her, having hounded her down to the end of the way. First one pair emerges, then two, and then many more come from all around her.

No. They didn’t hunt her down; they led her here. It was a trap.

Wolves are smart. They’re cunning beyond belief, far more than other animals. But the wolves in this forest especially blur the line between animal and monster. There’s something different about them, something wrong.

Even more eyes leer out from the darkness from the left and the right.

She’s surrounded by the pack that has finally caught her. Snarling, stained teeth flare in the crescent moonlight shining above her, and Azalea screams her final scream. She instinctively covers her face as she’s about to be torn apart.

But then nothing happens to her.

A series of sharp, high-pitched yelps of terror suddenly fill the midnight air, together with the renewed rustling of underbrush.

And then it’s quiet, apart from the river. It seems to have a lot to say with its babbling, but it’s not anything she can understand.

Panting for breath, confused, the priestess lowers her arms enough to look through the gaps between them, wondering why she isn’t dead.

She sees… something.

Azalea didn’t even hear him coming. But a voice comes from next to her. “Are you okay?” it asks, and she gasps, scrambling back through the mud in surprise away from the source.

A strange man stands there in the night, his unusual silhouette set against the moon that rests behind him, hovering behind the old hill and castle off toward the dark horizon.

Azalea holds her hand over her thundering chest, feeling like she’s going to vomit because of the hammering of her adrenaline-filled heart. She doesn’t manage to reply as she gasps for breath. The priestess tries to stutter out some semblance of anything that makes sense as she looks at him and then back toward the bushes where the wolves just were and then back at him. “What…?” she starts, trying to form a question.

He’s a person, right?

Her eyes, wide, observe him. He’s…

The man in the clothes of a foreign merchant looks down at her, his long, black hair swept in a side part over half of his face in a style she’s never seen worn here before. It catches the unusual colors of the moonlight, soaking into the strands with an oddly blue-purple that seems almost impossible to her eyes. Behind him is draped a regal cloak, below which rests one arm and the other is held out her way as he leans closer. A look of worry and confusion is on his face. His skin, his features — he’s impossible. It’s like looking at a statue come to life.

While all of these things whisper and say many nice things in her reptile mind, one thing cries aloud in the other direction.

— His bright, ruby-red eyes. They are the eyes of a beast.

Azalea screams, covering her face again.

- [The Vampire Lord] -

[The Haunted Forest]

{Low-Level Spawning Zone}

An ancient, foggy forest that lies down below the castle in all directions. Its dense trees and thick brambles almost seem to conspire to lure in any wayward straying people toward the maws of hungry things. While sounding ridiculous, the people of the region fear the forest, as they can’t help but feel that it itself is alive as a whole and watching them the same as would any other beast or monster hiding inside of it.

— Because if a person is killed inside the forest, the trees eat whatever is left over.

- Area Effect -

• A consistent, thick fog fills the forest day and night. Orientation is extremely difficult.

• Wild monsters naturally spawn in this region.

◦ Spawning rates are doubled during the full moon.

[Beastfather]

Passive Ability

• All animals of the dark night fear your very presence and will obey your will if commanded.

The fledgling Vampire Lord backs off, lifting his hands into the air as the girl screams bloody murder into the night. Terrified, he looks around himself for the police on their way to electroshock him with a stun baton or something.

— But they never come.

Is he giving stalker-serial-killer-forest-axe-murderer vibes? The man looks down at the river, wanting to check his reflection instinctively, but then remembers he doesn’t have one as he stares at the water.

He may be giving off stalker-serial-killer-forest-axe-murderer vibes.

What the hell is going on here? First the castle full of monsters, now this random screaming girl in the woods. What is wrong with this world?

The supposed Vampire Lord looks around himself, trying to figure out what’s happening.

He died. Then he was reborn in a haunted castle. Then he turned into a bat and managed to turn back into a man after a horrifying sequence of events that he hopes to never repeat, and after a single minute of absolutely blissful silence in the darkness of a rather peaceful forest, this random girl runs barreling through the woods like a truck loaded with whistles flying off a highway ramp.

What a messy reincarnation this is all turning into.

He wouldn’t even have stopped here by the water, if not for the fact that, for some reason, he found it impossible to fly over as a bat.

[The Killer’s Game]

Passive Ability

• You may not enter homes uninvited.

• You may not cross flowing bodies of water.

• You may not come into contact with silver or garlic.

• A wooden stake to your black heart will end your unlife immediately, bypassing all protections, spells, and wards.

He stands there where he is and watches her gracelessly scramble away through the mud. She falls down again and vomits before trying to crawl away from him on all fours a second time.

Idly, the vampire just stands there and scratches his cheek. This isn’t the worst reaction he’s ever gotten from a girl, but it might well be the one that hurts the most.

What’s he supposed to do here? Is she hurt? She looks hurt. Does he… does he just let her go back into the forest by herself? There are still wolves there. Then again, he’s a vampire, right? So maybe it’s fair to try to get away from him too. She looks like… wait.

— His ruby eyes scan the back of her head. There are long, floppy ears.

“ELF!” shouts the vampire in a sudden realization, pointing at her.

Elves are real! He’s in a world where elves exist. Jackpot!

She screams, trying to crawl away even faster.

Shit.

He has to contain himself. That didn’t help.

— But note: magical world. Vampires, check. Ghosts, check. Elves? Check-check and check. Maybe this is going somewhere good after all?

Just as he thinks it, his eyes drift to her side flank, to the torn fabric along her stomach. Red blood runs down and stains the muddied robe.

Who the hell wears robes?

This new information might check off another box in his mental list, but he doesn’t have time to figure out which one, because apart from that idle thought, his eyes won’t turn away anymore. They’ve seen something. He watches her — more specifically, the red spot on her side and something… stirs in his gut. It’s not a hunger or an interest; it’s an urge. It’s a dying man’s thirst.

Something beats inside of him for the first time since his rebirth.

At first, he himself is surprised to feel a heartbeat, but there it is. It’s struck just once, just only once, in response to the sound of a single droplet of blood that falls from her flank down to the muddy ground. He shouldn’t be able to hear it over the sound of the roaring river next to them or the storm, over the sound of her continued panic as she tries to get away but keeps slipping around and messing up — she looks like a fish out of water, trying to flop back into the river — but he can hear it.

[Predator Prime]

Passive Ability

• You are able to detect and perfectly pinpoint even a single droplet of lost blood within a range of (LEVEL/2)km.

He can hear the sound of a single drop of blood leaking from her. And then the next one. And then the next one.

And with every hammering of it, a strike of the same strength fills his heart and lurches his body involuntarily a step closer forward after her.

It’s so loud.

His thoughts go blank.

His eyes dilate in pulse together with every last bit of ruby liquid that makes contact with the drowned soil. His body twitches, his arms lifting up an inch higher and an inch higher as the elf’s dripping blood beats within his senses like an intoxicating war drum. It’s everything he can think about.

[Hunger]

As a vampire, you are unable to regenerate your magical life essences like the living can via sleep, food, and joy. You must instead parasitically feed off of a victim, using their lifeblood as your own.

The more pure or strong a soul, the more potent the blood is.

The longer you go without doing so, the more desperate and feral you become. Eventually, if not fed, you will go rabid.

Note: It is recommended to instill terror into your victims before feeding, as adrenaline will imbue their blood with an unsustainable surge of magical power for a brief window, making it the perfect opportunity to feed.

His having died and being reincarnated and everything that implies about life and the universe, the whole Vampire Lord and the entire matter of the castle — it all fades away into the background of his thoughts as an odd primality takes over him.

He approaches her as she keeps failing to get away and looms over the scrambling creature. Razor sharp fangs protrude from his opening, readying mouth as he reaches for her shoulders and grabs her from behind.

— A crack.

She spins around, her face covered in snot and grime. That loud crack fills the night, stemming from the slap of her hand across his face as she screams. The few nightbirds that had remained to watch the horrifying scene unfold fly now instead into the air to escape as the whip of her open hand turns his face to the side.

He returns to his senses.

What is he doing? Immediately, he stands back upright.

This is bad. This is really, really bad.

Oh God. He’s a creep. He’s doing creepy things. He actually really went full stalker-serial-killer-forest-axe-murderer there for a second on some random girl in the forest. He’s the kind of guy they make true-crime videos and podcasts about.

What does he do? Does he run into the woods? That would be weird, right? She’ll think he’s weird, but that ship has left the harbor anyway, most likely. He could turn into a bat and fly away, but isn’t that weird? Won’t that traumatize her more or something? But he obviously can’t offer to help her anymore now, can he? She’s made herself pretty clear that he should get lost. But then he’s going to let some random person get eaten by wolves — he’s a vampire, not a monster.

— These thoughts all happened in the flash of a second post-slap. He’s well trained in such paranoia after a lifetime of avoiding social landmines.

The man spins around together with the moment of the slap — on purpose — clutching his hair in frustration as he thinks and racks his brain on how to handle a situation he’s not equipped to handle.

What does he do?!

And then the obvious solution comes to him.

The corner of a book peaks out of the side of his open cloak, and his panicking eyes look down at its cover, at the man on it in a t-shirt that gets tighter every time he sees him. The Vampire Lord would swear that the man on the cover nods up to him as he pulls the book out in a sweaty delirium and quickly flips through the rain-battered pages full of melodramatic, vaguely-not-teenagers’ school life stories for what he would do.

‘Enfangled: Chapter 2’

“Thank you for saving me!” she exclaims.

Matthew-Cray-Anthony stares at her with his brilliantly sparkling eyes, holding a rough, firm hand against the side of her dirtied face, his garden sheers dangling from the side of his imported, European designer brand low-rise jeans. Sarah-Sarahbellum holds her frail hands together over her heart, feeling it flutter together with the butterflies in her chest as he looks through her soul, holding her in his arms as he lifts her off of the ground, now that he had saved her from that errant wheelbarrow full of explosive fertilizer. Her long, plain-Jane brown hair dangles below her over his surprisingly strong arm, and she freezes as the boy she’s only ever seen from a distance but never spoken to — because she’s just a simple small town girl with no friends in a new city, and he’s the popular, mysteriously handsome, and cute hearthrob of everyone at this new school.

“It’s my job to protect beautiful things,” he shamelessly replies with a smooth voice immediately as he gets up from next to the flowers he tends to every day, smiling at her. “I’ll take you to get help.” He carries her from the school gardens through every busy corridor and hallway, past the popular girls who give her a mean look as she rests in his arms. He pulls her in, as if shielding her from those looks, and takes her all the way to the infirmary before he finally sets her down there. He doesn’t leave until the nurse arrives.

— She had expected to feel the warmth of his body through his black V-neck shirt, but instead she only felt her own.

But she doesn’t really notice that in more than subconscious thought. Sarah-Sarahbellum only wishes that he had walked just a little slower to get her here.

“…Is this really not weird to do?” mutters the Vampire Lord quietly to himself in confusion, needing more information. Are you allowed to just… take people? He flips the page, reading on as fast as he can. He only has a minute before his standing here becomes even weirder than it is already. He has to hurry and learn more.

- [Azalea] -

Her ankle is hurt. She can’t get up. It might be broken. She’s gonna die. Oh, God, she’s going to die!

She looks at the beast of a man, still standing there with his back toward her, having stepped away after she struck him. She’s surprised about that, honestly. He’s much larger than she is, given her small village-girl frame. His hand is clutching his face as he faces away from her and stares toward the moonlit castle in the distance. The rain and the storm howl around the two of them as they remain there by the river.

She can’t get up. But he doesn’t leave either.

Instead, the wind blows through his hair, tussling it to the side. Glistening sparkles of dew wick off in the breeze toward the river, catching starlight.

Slowly, Azalea regains her breath and then, as she does so — watching him just stand there and face away from her — she realizes something.

She’s still alive.

The wolves, he scared them away, right? He must be very strong. So if he wanted to hurt her, then why hasn’t he? He’s just… standing there… mysteriously…

Obviously she was wrong about his intentions in her fear.

The priestess tilts her head, looking at him as rays of moonlight cast past his broad-shouldered silhouette toward her. His frame is limber but strong, his eyes carrying within them a glance of fresh pain and terror she hadn’t expected to see from someone who looks so powerful as he glances back over his shoulder for a moment toward her. He then looks away a second later, as if her eye contact had rattled something in him.

— Of course, she can’t believe that.

She doesn’t know what else to do, so she just says something. “I’m sorry, Azalea,” says the nervous, soaked girl and then shakes her head. “— I mean, I’m sorry! I’m Azalea!” she corrects, looking at him as he stands there… brooding. She can’t see his other hand, but she’s sure it’s held over his heart. Something in her imagination just says so. “Thank you for saving me,” says the elf. “I was so scared. I… I’m sorry. Thank you.”

She sighs, looking down at the water, and then rubs her face clean with her sleeve. It isn’t in much better condition, but it’s enough to get the grime off of her cheeks.

And then, before she can do anything, she finds herself being grabbed and lifted up into the air. Azalea lets out a sharp gasp, clenching her fists together to fend for herself once more, but then stops before she reaches his stoic face, instead keeping them clasped over her chest. “It’s my job to protect beautiful things,” replies the man who has lifted her out of the mud, holding her up into the air with ease in both of his arms. His eyes are red, yes, but they stare at her with a solid, soft confidence so firm and hard that it might well be the blade of a hero’s soft, warm sword, thrust straight through her core.

— That makes sense. Don’t overthink it.

The sudden, brash words from so close cause the air to freeze in her throat, her eyes going wide in surprise. “I… wha… huh…?” Azalea only proceeds to make frog noises, which does well to confuse the actual frogs on the riverbank, watching the two of them.

“I’ll take you to get help,” he explains calmly, looking back up toward the dark forest as he starts walking, rain pouring down his drenched clothes. He strides off into the woods with a certainty that suggests he knows exactly where to go. But she’s never seen this man before. He’s not from the village. He’s not from these parts. So how…?

His fingers pull in against the soft skin of her arm and thigh as he holds her firmly against his broad chest, almost shielding her from the rain. She expects to feel warmth from him, but it never comes. All she can feel is the heat of her own body pulling away from herself.

- [The Vampire Lord] -

Oh-God-Oh-fuck-Oh-Hell!

What has he done?! WHAT HAS HE DONE?!

The man screams within his soul as he, as a nun would say, pimp-walks through the forest, following some sense of direction that he doesn’t understand while he holds a complete stranger in his arms. He’s not doing it on purpose. It’s just his natural gait. Every time he tries to walk like a normal person, his legs sort of just eventually revert to doing this instead.

He’s done it. There’s no coming back from here. He’s gone full creep after all.

She’s looking at him. WHY IS SHE LOOKING AT HIM?!

It’s all he can do to keep his rigid, robotic composure together as he moves through the trees, the rain pattering around them. It’s a good thing it’s pouring; otherwise, she could see the gallons of sweat running down his face right now.

…Does he even sweat?

He’s not sure. That’s a thought to follow later. For now, he’s busy trying to keep this charade going.

Damn you, Mathew-Cray-Anthony, you handsome bastard!

“Who are you?” she asks, finally stringing together some words after a moment of blissful not asking him questions that he has to answer or he’ll look like a freak.

“I…” he starts, racking his brain.

Does he use his old name? From before he died? That would be… uh… would that be weird? Plus, it was always kind of lame, honestly. It was a solid C-, as far as names go. Good enough, but…

Does he steal the name of the vampire from the book?

No… no. That would be too weird. He doesn’t want to be a man with more than two first names. Nobody likes a man with two first names.

His eyes scan everything around him, desperately searching for an answer.

They land on his long, sharp fingernails that rest over her contrasting white robe, drenched in rainwater and clinging to her skin. They’re black as ink.

“Ink…” he starts, looking at her expectant face. “You.”

— FUCK. He didn’t want to say that second one, but he was stuck in the moment. The man looks up to the sky, pulling out the next best thing he has. “— me?” he adds. “Inkume,” he reaffirms.

Nailed it.

- [Azalea] -

One Minute Earlier

“What’s your name?” she had asked, looking up at him.

And for the first time, she sees something shift in his reaffirmed rigidity. “I…” starts the man, as if pained by something deep and old as he hears the simple question. He quickly looks away from her, as if the visions of a desperately cruel past were flashing behind his eyes like lightning. He gazes off into the night around them, lost in a spell of his certainly deep and tragic memories. It’s like he doesn’t want her to see the ghosts inside of his pupils. He chases his demons, his eyes finding a way back down toward her again. “Ink…” starts the man, as if he were muttering a painful incantation he had sworn to never speak again a long, long time ago.

He seems so… distraught and lost about the mundane question. She didn’t mean anything bad with it. But behind his expression, she can see something dancing around, as if trying to avoid the rising flames of hellfire that had come bursting forward from the depths of his soul.

“— youme,” he finishes with a relieved exhalation, lifting his gaze up toward the weeping heavens above them, as if to let the rain hide his pain from her, which that single word must have brought him to say out loud.

It was cruel of her to have asked that innocent thing of him; she can see that now.

“Inkume,” he repeats quietly, affirming the statement to both of them, as if it were something he hadn’t heard in a long time. He almost sounds like he wasn’t sure it was true himself — his own name — like he was lost in the fathoms of something she — a simple village girl — could never understand.

So complex.

- [The Vampire Lord Inkume] -

He did not nail it.

A full minute of reflection has let him realize what a fool he is.

‘Inkume’? What the hell is that supposed to be? He blew it. He totally blew it! That’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard.

First the bookshop girl, now this. What is wrong with him?!

- [Azalea] -

The elven priestess opens her mouth, wanting to thank him again, this time with the imprint of his name after the thanks, so he can be sure that she really is grateful for him saving her life. She ought to be dead now, but she’s not.

She never gets a chance.

“This should be enough,” says the stranger and lowers himself down toward the ground. He looks up past her, toward the houses nearby that are within sight, just beyond the tree line. “You’ll be okay now, Sarah — I mean… Azalea,” he explains with certainty, after shaking that first name she doesn’t know out of his mouth and replacing it with hers.

But before she can say a single word of the many she had been collecting, there comes a noise from nearby — shouting. Voices come from close, voices that she knows. The edges of the forest start to glow as rain-suppressed torches come closer and closer, the hissing of the flames calling out into the night together with the men of the village — calling her name. “Azalea!” shouts one young man particularly desperately.

It’s the voice of her younger brother.

She was separated from him by the storm while trying to herd the flock back into their pens. She called for him to hide while she ran away into the forest, making a ruckus, to lure the wolves away from him and after her. He must have gone to get help.

“Over here!” she calls out into the storm instinctively, raising her voice. “I’m here!” shouts the girl — perhaps not thinking about the optics too closely in her elation that he’s safe too. God’s mercy is great tonight, and she’ll pray all the way through in thanks until morning comes.

“Azalea!” shouts the boy’s voice, and the lights diverge toward them, the bushes and underbrush rustling as the villagers move through the storm, having come to search for her. A young man runs in, the frantically worried but hopeful look on his faltering face immediately as he stumbles into the clearing, holding his torch up against the wind. He looks at her before his eyes go wide and glare at the stranger who has knelt down over her tattered and dirtied frame, her frail body held tightly in his claws.

“Let go of my sister!” screams the boy immediately, looking at her bruised and battered appearance, her torn robe and bloodied, stained face, and then looking at Inkume’s sharp, black fingers and blood-red eyes. The vampire’s black clothes are wet and damp, but the droplets of her blood that had fallen down from her side run over the exterior of the fabric, glistening obviously in the firelight. “Monster!” he calls out. “She’s here! Help!” screams the boy. Then her little brother, impatient as he is, runs forward, swinging the torch out as if trying to scare away a feral animal with the flames. Inkume dives back out of the way. Villagers coming in from all sides, holding pitchforks and old wood-felling axes.

“Wait! No!” she cries out, trying to get them to stop, but Azalea’s cry is drowned out under the angry voices of the villagers who are encroaching around them. They’ve misunderstood! “Stop! Everyone! He saved me!” she protests loudly.

“MONSTER!” calls a voice from the side.

“A BEAST!” screams another in a growl. “His eyes! Look at his eyes! His eyes!” howls the old, world-traveled man — a wandering merchant who had given up adventuring to find a new, quieter life here a long, long time ago. “A vampire! He’s a vampire!”

“He’s come to take the priestess!” shouts the miller.

Her brother lunges forward the last of the way, his torch striking out toward the stranger again, the flames licking toward his pale face. In an instant, Azalea feels herself being let go, falling the last few inches to the ground as the stranger slips away and vanishes.

The swung torch strikes nothing, the flames licking over the top of her head.

Azalea and the villagers look around, and then up toward the sky, as a single, black, giant bat begins to glide away toward the moon.

Her brother drops down and holds her. “Azalea. I was so scared,” he sighs, clutching her against himself. “What is that thing?” he asks. “Did it hurt you?!” he asks, grabbing her shoulders and looking her over.

“…He saved me,” repeats the priestess quietly, looking back up toward the night sky, trying to process what had just happened to her.

He’s a monster, right? This proves it. No human can transform like that; no human has those eyes.

He’s a monster and a monster who saved her. She tries to understand why. Her eyes remain trained toward the sky, while her younger brother holds her in relief.

Yet all there is to see up there is a flash of lightning that illuminates a single bat’s silhouette, and then there is only darkness as the storm begins to die away.

- [The Vampire Lord Inkume] -

The castle door slams shut behind him, his arms spread out wide as he holds it shut, rain dripping down his soaked clothes.

His base instincts told him to return to the castle, so he did, despite it being the place he ran from to begin with. There’s so much happening to him at once that he can’t explain. He desperately wishes for just ten minutes of nothing. Just nothing. He just wants to sit here for a little while and not have anything happen at all.

— That was so bad.

Nobody’s ever swung a torch at him before. It’s a lot scarier than one would think. He’s so terrible at talking to people. Why didn’t he just hover there in the air as a bat and wait for her to tell the villagers what really happened?

…No, that might have been worse, actually.

But he saved someone’s life tonight. If nothing else, despite all of the catastrophic failures, this one seems like a big win. He’ll take it. He’s never saved a life before. It feels good. Despite his terror and confusion, he feels good.

— And hungry.

His eyes stare down at the ground, water running off of him, and then, as he calms himself, he sees a loose piece of white fabric stuck to him — stained red. It’s a small piece of the priestess’ robe, saturated with her blood down to the depths of the coarsely woven fibers. It must have ripped off of her when he dodged that torch.

And there it is again, the heartbeat. It hammers inside of his chest.

His fingers lift the piece of red cloth toward his mouth, a thick, crimson droplet falling out of it and splashing down on the stonework castle floor, sticking to a thick mat of dust between his very expensive-looking shoes. He holds the scrap of her robe over his tongue. It all happens without thinking, without knowing. He needs it.

The Vampire Lord’s teeth clamp down, squishing just the little of the blood that’s there out into his mouth.

It’s still warm.

[Experience Points Gained]

You have drank a minuscule amount of the blood of a pure, young priestess!

It’s magical properties are significant but untapped as of the moment. However, you are able to extract the full potential from the essence, as fear has filled it with power.

*★✧+- [LEVEL UP!] -+✧★*

You are now level 101!

NEW ABILITY

[We Are Connected]

Passive Ability

• Drinking someone’s blood allows you to always make perfect mental images of them in your mind’s eye!

“I knew you’d come back to us,” says a growling voice from above his head.

Inkume lifts his gaze, looking at the wide, shark-toothed grin of the pale ghost he had seen before fleeing here the first time. Her yellow eyes gaze down at him with an almost manic expression, the purple insetting around them smudged. “If you were hungry,” she wheezes, gasping for air as if this one sentence was enough to wind her. “You… You should have just asked. I would have got you something myself,” she explains coyly, her wicked grin widening as she hovers down over the top of his head. “— Master.”

Immediately, the vampire spits out the damp, torn fabric from his mouth.

He wouldn’t want to seem weird, after all.