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

- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -

Thick, heavy fog fills the air outside of the castle windows. It doesn’t flow; rather, it sits in a dense stagnation that makes the night seem impenetrable. Despite the lingering glow of the fading moon that has yet to reach its vanishing state and the shine of the heavenly stars — now three less than before — one cannot see their reflections just past the tips of their noses. But in the castle of the Vampire Lord, such an act would be ill advised nonetheless, as in the mirrors there is something that lurks. Within the reflection in the glass, there is something that is only there, but not on the same side as the looker. However, should one come too close, peer too carefully, and examine the odd details that don’t quite line up with what they know to be behind them, then they have made a grave mistake.

Inkume shifts his gaze, looking at the mirror.

He had thought he saw something inside of it. But that can’t be. He doesn’t have a reflection.

[The Mirror Hallway]

{???}

Nestled in the castle’s forgotten wing, this abandoned corridor houses an old mirror.

And nothing else.

Room Effects:

• [Hidden]

This room is active and functioning. Monsters seem to avoid this area for some reason.

The Vampire Lord shifts, turning from side to side. He’d love to know what he looks like. But there’s just no way to find out, is there? Mirrors don’t work. There’s no reflection in any body of water.

All he has to go on are Snatch’s descriptions, but they aren’t exactly the most helpful for his attempted objective assessment of what he’s become.

“Perfect. Beautiful. The most amazing master ever,” she wheezes, floating after him. “Your grace and power are all I ever think about.”

“Thank you, Snatch. But I haven’t actually done anything yet,” replies Inkume, looking back at her after staring at the mirror for a moment. He can’t see himself, but he can see the room. It’s an old, sleepy corridor that has a quiet mystique to it. Heavy curtains hang over the windows, and on the end of the hallway sits a grand mirror. It’s ornamental and looks to be priceless beyond imagining in a world like this one. Behind him, lining the corridor, he can see six statues standing watch over the forgotten area.

Snatch is holding onto her head, pressing it up further away from her shoulders, and stretching out her neck to elongate it. “Do I— Do I look better this way?” she asks.

Inkume raises an eyebrow, pointing at her as he walks off back down the corridor. “You look perfect the way you are,” replies the Vampire Lord, not really being sure what else to do with such a question. Feeling him staring, she lets go, and it snaps back down into place.

On his way out, he counts five statues in idle passing.

But when he glances back toward the mirror he had just looked into, there are also five there.

“I could have sworn…” mutters the Vampire Lord, and then shakes his head. It must just be his imagination. "Snatch. Why are there so many mirrors in my evil vampire castle?" asks Inkume, wanting to get to the bottom of the matter.

Snatch floats next to him, panting. She pulls on her legs and clothes, stretching the gooey ectoplasm out in all directions, trying to change her robe into something more ornate by literally shaping it. But it all keeps falling apart into a vague sludgy shape until she gives up and lets it go back to its normal state. "To see your radiant beauty in, Master."

"But I don't have a..." He sighs, stopping himself mid-thought. It's probably not worth worrying about. "Never mind. Thank you, Snatch."

He’s never felt this strong before.

“The humans will come soon, Master. The castle has many monsters, but it will be up to you to decide which ones are worth taking into your service.” She fights for breath, looking at him and then around the area with a certain paranoia to her eyes. “The old Master preferred the cruel and the strong,” she explains. “Anything that would rip and kill and bring terror to the living. Yes…”

Inkume stands there, his hands behind his back. She led him here, down to a crypt below the castle, wanting to show him something. Although calling it a crypt is maybe more generous than what it really is. It’s a pit, a hole, full of nothing but bones. The bones of animals, of people, of things — all of them are littered here in heaps and piles like the hills of a landfill. The room stretches on for quite the distance, weakly burning torches that feed off of the castle’s magic being the only things giving this gray place a little color. The orange light leaks over the ancient, dry bones, giving them the appearance of bleeding a disgustingly off-colored liquid.

“Master has said that I may tell him… tell him… my secrets?” asks the ghost, pointing to herself.

Inkume nods. “You can always tell me everything,” replies the Vampire Lord, and she wheezes, holding the poster of something demure.

“Snatch always thought that they were very expensive monsters… too expensive. Too much blood was needed to keep them alive — the big, angry things that the old master liked,” she explains. After her words echo around the pit for a second, she lets out a sharp scream as they come back to her. In an instant, the ghost fades into the shape of an orb, screaming in terror as she realizes what she just said. The fabric of his cloak billows up. She’s shot down, hiding behind him. Inkume looks downward, and a moment later, a weary tendril of ectoplasm with two googly eyes stares out from inside of his cloak in terror.

“You and your secrets are safe with me, Snatch,” remarks Inkume, feeling the terrified ghost clutching him as she peeks out in trained fear. “What do you suggest instead, then?”

After a time of scanning the area for some rebuke that never comes her way, the ghost starts to leak out again, reforming only half of her body as she snakes around his arm like a laced glove. Her upper half partially regrows, gesturing out timidly to the boneyard.

“S-Skeletons are cheap to maintain. The Master’s castle doesn’t need to make the bones. It just needs to reanimate them,” she explains. “You, the dungeon, the monsters — it all takes magic to keep alive,” lists the ghost. “I think -” She stops abruptly after saying those two words, looking back at him for affirmation, as if this were really okay for her to do. He nods to her. “— that you should make use of cheap monsters for now.”

She flinches, breaking eye contact with him, and immediately shields her face with her arms as if he were about to hit her.

Inkume reaches with a finger through her guard and softly nudges her face back into place with his other hand. “Go on.”

Looking at him, Snatch traps herself in her wheezing laugh for a moment as she drips down lower, her upper body melting around his out held arm as she dribbles down like the wax along the sides of a candle. “It would be unwise to summon a great, powerful beast with no real threat facing you yet. You could instead have a hundred skeletons for less energy to manage the odd few farmers who are nearby who will come to intrude in our… I mean, in your home, Master.”

That’s actually perfectly reasonable advice. It makes total sense.

His powers run off of, in essence, a magical battery that he can recharge by drinking blood. Everything here has a passive drain on that level of energy that he’s keeping stored. He has power to spend now that he’s fed on Azalea, but Snatch is right. He should place himself on a budget. It’s wiser to take care of some low-level fundamentals, before ‘buying’ anything really crazy and then standing there with empty hands should a real emergency arise.

It sounds like the old Vampire Lord was a bit of a magical spendthrift, in essence. Well. Good for the new Vampire Lord, because he wouldn’t be here if his predecessor was wiser.

This new body has always felt ‘good’, if not a little odd to get used to. But since last night, since his drinking of Azalea’s blood, he’s felt invigorated and energized in a way he can’t quite explain. He’s buzzing with energy.

His hand hovers out over the empty space, a darkness swirling beneath his fingers. The cloud shifts and changes, rising with sharp edges like the wings of a thousand bats squeezed within his clenched fist.

[{Room Reactivated} Boneyard]

{Skeleton Spawning Zone}

The endless victims of the castle are laid here, dropped into the abyss where their plucked, gnawed-on bones can dry out and rest until they are needed by the dark lord of the castle. Humans, animals, and monsters alike — all are equal in their service of the Master.

This room is responsible for managing the passive summoning of skeletons, as well as modifying your skeleton-related abilities.

You may further improve it to enhance your focus in these areas.

Room Effects:

• [Skeleton] spawning rate increased by {100}% within the castle grounds!

◦ Skeletons will now rarely spawn within the haunted forest!

◦ There is a {01}% chance for a skeleton champion to spawn with every resurrection!

• Skeletons will spawn of any type according to your collected bone sources!

• All of your personal [Skeleton]* abilities have been increased in power!

◦ [Summon Skeleton Servant] now summons additional helpful skeleton workers.

Current Skeleton Collection: Human. Elf. Dwarf. Orc. Vildt. Rat. Fox. Wolf. Lizard. Rabbit. Mouse. Squirrel.

This room is active! Monster spawning is active here!

Inkume raises an eyebrow. “Snatch,” he starts dryly, looking at the excited, bubbling ghost. “Why do I have a collection of forest critter skeletons in my horrific stockpile of people’s bones?”

Her smile is, quite literally, running over the sides of his wrist. She’s sagging down over his arm toward the ground like a damp washcloth. “I caught them for you, Master!” exclaims Snatch, a little too excitedly.

He opens his mouth and then closes it again, watching as the bones rattle all around him. Hands reach out of the heaps, grabbing skulls and bones as they reassemble themselves.

— A small collection of bones that makes up a palm-sized lizard starts to climb up his leg. Snatch growls at it, swiping it away in jealousy with a tendril of ectoplasm.

“…Thank you, Snatch,” replies Inkume, choosing not to deconstruct the word ‘caught’ too closely here.

The undead lizard runs away. Snatch angrily chases after it, running on all fours and growling like a creature.

Fascinating.

The Vampire Lord stands out in the mist, in the castle gardens he had discovered last night. With folded arms, he puzzles, watching something unexpected.

A skeleton with a wide-brimmed hat and overalls is running around, plucking weeds and pulling out the occasional screaming plant from the ground. They howl, looking like oddly human creatures, with a deadly ear-piercing shriek. The skeleton gardener doesn’t care for them much though and simply tosses them into the pond nearby, where they bubble down to the bottom of the sludge, until their voices drown out.

~ [Mandragora] ~

A mandragora.

This immobile, low-level plant-type monster is highly passive, only ever defending itself if plucked from its resting place. Having no limbs or teeth to defend itself with, the mandragora can only release an ear-piercing scream that will temporarily deafen and disorient anyone who hears it.

In common folklore, hearing a mandragora’s cry is a certain omen of death for the person plucking it. So it is common for adventurers in need to tie strings around the roots in order to let an animal remove it instead, bypassing the curse.

It is said that one mandragora of many thousands will sing when uprooted, instead granting a wish to the one who has plucked it. However, this may just be a rumor started by ambitious dungeon-cores, hoping to trick a few more adventurers into doing themselves in.

Type: Plant Rank: F-

Common Drop: Fibrous Leafs Rare Drop: Screaming Seeds

The skeleton gardener runs around in a frenzy, doing its best to catch up on a thousand years’ worth of missed work days. It looks like it will be busy for a while.

“Keep up the good work,” says Inkume, not really sure if it can hear him. But then the skeleton tips its straw hat and returns to its duties.

The Vampire Lord, unsure, spares a glance down at the brackish water of the pond. There’s a series of claw marks where something drug itself out — he assumes the skeleton maid, Fi-Fi, the other night. His eyes catch something in the mud.

Bending down, he picks up an old bracelet. It’s bronze and caked with mud.

The water next to him stirs as another mandragora is thrown into it. It doesn’t have a chance to sink away before something lashes out of the murk and snatches it, ripping it down into the phantom depths of the knee-deep pond.

~ [Bone-Hooking Fish] ~

A bone-hooking fish.

Growing up to the size of a man’s fist, these dense, heavy fish thrive in dark, fetid waters where living things fall into by mistake. Able to go for several months without food, these extremely calm fish will patiently wait for as long as they must before springing into an immediate feeding frenzy at the first sign of food. Their long, hooked, razor-sharp teeth will easily pierce through flesh and into bone, making sure that they take a good piece out of whatever comes into their domain.

The true danger of the Bone-Hooking fish lies in their density, both in weight and number. A school of Bone-Hooking fish will swarm and simply latch on to their prey, dragging the victim down into the depths and holding on tightly. Given the added weight, the victim will drown. Only afterward will the fish release their clamp and begin devouring the flesh of the deceased.

Type: Beast {Water} Rank: F

Common Drop: Hook Tooth Rare Drop: Glistening Scale

— A second later, there’s a loud splashing. A fish flies out of the water, speared on the end of a long, cylindrical body. A snake the size of his legs thrashes through the pond, its upper half wrapped around a dead tree.

“The circle of life…” mutters the Vampire Lord, rising back up to his feet.

~ [Venomous Viper] ~

This carnivorous snake is extremely aggressive and will attack anything smaller than it unprovoked and anything larger than itself if it feels like it — it often does. Its venom is debilitating and will quickly begin to degrade the muscle tissue of its victim, immobilizing its prey in order for easy consumption.

Type: Beast {Poison} Rank: D-

Common Drop: Venom Sac Rare Drop: Swallowed Trinket

Restoring the skeletons didn’t just give him skeletons for his arsenal. There was an entire chain of hidden effects that play off of each other. The skeleton gardener fed the fish, the fish fed the snake, and the snake will probably feed something even bigger. He’d best keep moving before it gets here. Snatch really knows what she's doing.

Very interesting.

- [Snatch] -

Like this?

The ghost looks down at herself, pulling on her body to get it to change shape.

No. This isn’t right.

She looks up again, studying the sleeping elven priestess. It’s been so long since she’s seen a person. She forgot what they looked like. But clearly this is something the Master likes more.

Stupid people. Stupid Fi-Fi. Just her luck that the Master would summon her of all people. At least the maid is a skeleton now instead of her old human self. Very unappealing. That makes her competition for the Master’s affection easier to win.

Snatch tries again, stretching out her entire torso to become longer, her legs to be more shapely, and her frame to be more supple. The ghost even works to make her clothes more regal by pulling on threads and ectoplasmic fabric. Like a clay doll, she shapes herself into something that she thinks looks like the sleeping priestess — not as a twin, but more of a copy of the general design that’s better in the places that matter from what she recalls.

For a second, the ghost floats there, studying herself as she looks down her now slender and delicate arms that have changed away from their usual shape of a stubby goblin’s claws. With two fingers more than usual, Snatch reaches up, pressing her own face together too. Her sharkish teeth and wide frog’s mouth narrow in into something more human in shape.

— Into something more beautiful.

It feels weird, this form. Her body is flexible and malleable. It can, in theory, take on any shape she needs it to, within the constraints of her ectoplasm. However, the problem is that she’s been, well, herself for so long that it really has become the default state. No matter what shape she takes, there’s always this underlying urge to ‘snap’ back to who she really is.

She hates it.

Snatch didn’t remember why until last night, but now it’s all come back to her. It’s the reason she became a ghost in the first place, all of those many centuries ago, and here she is now, a thousand years later, haunted by the same thing that brought her to death.

— She’s ugly.

But what the hell does Fi-Fi have of all people that she doesn’t? God, she hates Fi-Fi. She hopes that it hurt when the maid died.

Snatch looks down at herself and then pulls on the frills of her reconstructed dress, mimicking the weave of the maid’s uniform only in part — just enough to catch the eye.

There!

Snatch looks at herself, unsure. This is… this is good, right? She’s pretty now, right? The Master is very nice to her, even if she’s wretched. Nobody has ever been nice to her before. She wants him to be nice to her forever. So she needs to make him happy so he won’t leave or make her drip into a flat layer of ooze lying under the entryway doormat for ten years like she had to do before. He’ll be happy if she’s pretty. Yes. Yes… She’s very clever, or lucky, but he likes her ideas. She’s not sure why.

That’s helped her so far. But what if she has an idea that’s bad? It’ll all be over. He’ll lose his patience and send her to be mop water for when Fi-Fi cleans the kennels just like last time. She doesn’t want to have to do that ever again.

The ghost does her best to hold her new shape in place. It’s hard to keep it all together. She just has to keep this up until she sees the Master next time and wows him. Snatch gets excited. She can barely keep her panting constrained.

There’s a noise.

The elf girl she was using as an artistic reference stirs below her. Master’s prisoner and blood thrall — very clever, imprisoning a living person here in the castle like a cow to be milked for all eternity. The old master just ate his victims outright. But this new method is much smarter. Inkume is very clever. Yes. Very cruel and cunning, but kind to her. The perfect master.

She’s only a little jealous of the elf because Master bit her. Snatch wishes she would get bitten too. But she doesn’t have any blood anymore.

- [Azalea] -

Azalea, in a daze, slowly opens her eyes. She lets out a tired groan, looking around herself as she comes to her senses after what felt like a very long and very nice dream. The details are already foggy and gone, but she hasn’t slept so blissfully in a long, long time. Her body, warm and tingling, feels like she ran a race and was still in the process of recovering well from it.

The elf’s hand finds her face, holding it as she slowly sits upright in her bed, trying to remember what in the world she did last night.

…Wait.

The priestess looks down at herself and then at the wide, large bed that is far more expensive and lavish than anything she’s ever laid her eyes on. Her imprint lies beneath herself, sunken into the thick, soft mattress like a shadow that stubbornly refuses to follow the rest of her. She hasn’t stirred an inch all night by the looks of it.

Her hand slaps against the side of her neck, feeling the tender spot there. Azalea’s fingers run over the two imprints small on her skin, where a monster’s fangs had drawn into her body.

The memories of the past night return to her. Her eyes dart around the room for sight of him — the man — but find nothing except lavish furnishings, fit for a king. She never thought about it before, but she supposes that it makes sense for a castle to be decorated this way. The bedding, the wardrobes, and even the large, gilded mirror in the corner of the room are very beautiful. It’s all nothing like the ruin she navigated her way through. Maybe this restored area is where he lives? The rest of the castle is likely just too large for someone here all by themselves.

Her hand drops down, feeling the soft material of the beautifully woven, glossy sheets that she recognizes as being pure silk — only from her memory of once touching a bishop’s robes while washing them as part of her apprenticeship.

This bed alone is worth more than her entire village church is. Let alone the rest of the room.

She feels very out of place here all of a sudden. Azalea grabs the blanket, holding it up over herself as if hiding in embarrassment from the room itself as the contrast of stations comes to her. She’s just a grubby, dirty village priestess covered in more mud and sheep’s urine than an old hatter. She doesn’t belong in a place like this.

Someone has taken her boots off and laid them to the side, but that just almost makes it worse, because her mud-stained, unwashed feet, besmirched from running errands around the village all day, have left dirt marks on the bedding.

She feels like a worm stuck inside of a marble statue. She doesn’t belong here. What did she do?

Azalea, feeling oddly sweaty all of a sudden as the feelings of last night return to her, covers the lower half of her face with a tightly clenched blanket.

That was sinful behavior, those thoughts and feelings.

She did the right thing. But now she has to get out of here before this gets any worse. Her brother is probably worried sick.

The priestess turns her head to the side, getting ready to quickly crawl out of bed when she freezes in place, hearing a sudden heavy breathing next to her ear. The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and she glances slowly from the corners of her eyes before meekly turning her head to follow.

There, floating near the ceiling of the room, is an off-white gestalt — a shape. It’s a melting, dripping thing like wet soot and ash from a chimney formed into a vague blob of something not quite present in the state of person hood. It has the features of a human, but they’re all wrong. Its sharp teeth cascade in many rows within a too-small mouth, and its elongated, knuckle-dragging limbs are far too long and lanky to be anything close to natural. Its sleek, many segmented fingers graze down near its hovering feet. Its frame is a mockery of anything human, misshapen, and wrong, and it stares at her with wide, haunted eyes far too large for its thin head that leaks white from them like rot dripping from a damp wall.

“Am I…” it wheezes, floating toward the priestess with out held arms. “— beautiful?”

Azalea screams in pale horror, falling straight out of bed, the blanket wrapping around her like a constricting grasp as she fights and scrambles for her life. She escapes from the silk trap, mindlessly grabs her boots, and bolts out of the door as fast as she can, all in one instant motion.

- [Snatch] -

Snatch floats there, watching the priestess escape, and then slowly looks down at herself.

A spontaneous, loud, snotty, ugly-crying fills the air.

A small side door into the room opens, a prim skeleton in a maid’s dress peeking inside. “Oh?” asks Fi-Fi, the housekeeper, looking around at the ruckus. “Ohayo~, Ugh-You-Again! It’s been a while!” she says in her high-pitched tone, forming a heart with her fingers by her hollow face and aiming it toward the crying ghost. Snatch is sure that if she had lips, she’d be blowing a kiss through the gap like she used to do. “…Where is the new Master’s keepsake?” asks the undead maid a second later, looking at the other open door to the room with a blanket strewn toward it.

“Shut up, Fi-Fi!” yells Snatch, her face dribbling and melting as she points at the maid and then vanishing into nothingness.

A lamentation travels through the castle’s bones from one end to the next.

- [Fi-Fi] -

The skeleton in a frilly dress holds a hand over her mouth, letting out a shocked gasp before she then prances into the room, picking up the blanket and tsking audibly to herself. “This is no good, no good at all,” she sighs, shaking her head and then the blanket out.

The Master explicitly told her to watch after that person.

Fi-Fi leans out of the doorway, calling down the corridor toward someone who is long gone already. “Excuse me! Excuse me, Onee-san!” calls the maid. “You can’t go there. There are monsters,” she explains to the empty hallway.

No response comes, obviously. The priestess is already somewhere else.

— As for the hallway. The hallway does talk sometimes, to the right people at the right times. But this isn’t one of those moments.

The maid shrugs to herself, shaking her head as she changes the bed sheets and starts to tidy up the bedroom.

Well, that’s about the best she can do. It’s out of her hands now.

- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -

So the humans are coming his way.

What a troublesome existence this new life is shaping up to be. It’s only been a few days, and he’s already made himself not just one, but an entire folk’s worth of mortal enemies. How did it end up like this?

He has to prepare.

Inkume sits on a crumbled old throne in a broken grand hall and reads the book that had come all this way with him to this other life. He hates to say it, but it hasn’t let him down yet. It may well be his strongest weapon against the onslaught to come.

If this really is a world of adventurers and dungeons, then it won’t be long before it isn’t just the local villagers who come after him. Pretty soon, there will be some fresh, bright-eyed adventurers braving his castle on some abstract quest for friendship and purpose. He can see them now in his mind’s eye already, with their spiky pink, blue, and green haircuts and absurdly large swords running around his haunted house by the dozens. There will probably be some kind of adventurers’ guild nearby, and it’ll end up becoming a whole setup where they’ll start farming his precious skeletons and ghosts for, like… experience points and low-level item drops.

Oh God.

The Vampire Lord has a sudden epiphany, his eyes rising away from the book and staring down the length of the destroyed throne room. Deep scars line the marks of an ancient battle. The walls are broken down, and vines grow in from the forest outside. The roof is missing, and the last rays of moonlight shine in over his silhouette before it fades into darkness.

— He’s the villain.

It should be rather obvious, him being the Vampire Lord and all. It isn’t exactly a very promising social title. But he really is the bad guy. There really isn’t any way around it, is there?

“Damn,” mutters Inkume to himself, realizing that, despite his best efforts to not fall into this exact trap, it’s somehow happened to him anyway. It’s almost as if fate itself were conspiring to get him into this role and position, despite his trying to defy it.

Snatch’s mutterings from the other night of that evil prophecy come back to the forefront of his mind.

Inkume’s eyes rise up toward the night sky, toward the last crescent of the moon.

He’s going to be the one to rid this world of its sun and bring about an endless age of darkness, beasts, and gnashing teeth. Even if he tries not to be, one way or another, destiny is going to make it happen. That’s what the prophecy promised, and so far, it’s really turning out that way, isn’t it?

He hasn’t gotten any inklings to perform such a ritual yet, but by restoring the castle to make his own life more comfortable, isn’t he himself inching the world a little closer to eternal darkness, just because he wants his library fixed so that he isn’t bored? If the castle remained dormant and sleeping forever, he could never really perform such a ritual with any chance of succeeding, could he? Sure, he himself would die and vanish if he never fed, but his sacrifice would keep this new world safe for maybe another thousand years until a new Vampire Lord appeared once again.

He himself would die, but he’d die as a silent, unknown hero — the man who did the right thing that nobody would ever know about.

The throne room is silent as he watches the night, and it watches him back.

“Nah, it’s probably fine,” mutters the Vampire Lord to himself alone, glancing back down at Enfangled, now that he’s making a dedicated effort to actually read it from front to back instead of just skimming. He has no intention of dying ever again. Once is enough for a lifetime. “Oh, Matthew-Cray-Anthony, what would you do if you were me?” he asks the book, flipping another page.

‘Enfangled: Chapter 4’

“As if I would just let them have this,” says Matthew-Cray-Anthony. “My family has owned this land for generations,” he explains, his eyes burning defiantly as he stares out of the window with a serious melancholy in his gaze and posture that she is sure that only she can fix if only he would let her in.

“But Matthew,” starts Sarah-Sarahbellum, shaking her head. Her long, glistening mane of hair flows from side to side as she approaches him, her hands on his broad back.

There’s a rival family to Matthew’ arrived in town, and they’re setting up a competing paper manufacturing business to his family’s.

“There’s nothing you can do. They have so much money,” explains Sarah, looking around his free-standing, humble, modern five-bedroom house as he stands before the floor-to-ceiling windows out toward the exotic deer nature reserve. He likes to take care of them in his free time. He had invited her over for tea, but strangely enough, he hadn’t drank any himself.

Matthew turns around, looking at her. Sarah steps back, realizing that she had touched him and maybe overstepped her bounds. They don’t know each other that well.

“There is,” he says with a cold confidence in his hawkish eyes that fills her with electricity. “They want to make paper too?” he asks. “Then I’ll let them.”

“Matthew?” asks Sarah, confused.

He looks back out at the forest. “They’ll just have to buy their wood pulp from somewhere else,” says the young man. “I’m going to pay every logger and every factory within a week’s drive for exclusivity rights to their materials,” he says firmly, his hands choking the air. Sarah wishes her neck was there instead.

“But Matthew, that’s… How?”

He powerfully turns around again, stepping toward her. “I have money,” he explains. “You don’t know this about me,” says the jewel of her eyes, standing before the exotic, imported, handmade Qatari glass windows. “But I’m rich, Sarah,” explains Matthew-Cray-Anthony. Her eyes widen in shock. “My family are ultra-billionaires.”

She covers her mouth, gasping quietly in loud shock.

He turns his head to the side, a hand covering half of his face in shame. “I didn’t want you to think less of me.”

“Oh Matthew…” she says, stepping toward him. “You’re still the same to me as you always were,” she explains.

Of course, that’s not true. She loves him even more than ever before.

— But she isn’t courageous enough to say it.

“Of course!” says Inkume. He’ll have the entire forest chopped down. That way he can see any intruders coming!

No… no, that doesn’t sound right.

The Vampire Lord thinks, combining tonight’s lesson with his current predicament.

The enemy is coming for him, just like they’re coming for Matthew. Matthew, however, preempted his rival’s plans and cut their attack off at the root before it could form. So he has to do the same thing, right?

— He has to kill every expecting mother before they give birth to a new human that wants to destroy him and stop his dark power from growing!

…No… no… Where is he getting these weird ideas from?

Inkume rubs his face. The whole Vampire Lord thing is getting to him more than he thinks; he’s starting to notice. His mind and thoughts are, as if he were wearing a mask, starting to take on the role given to him by the universe.

Adventurers are coming to kill him.

So… he needs to weaken their efforts to stop him at their root, at their base level, at their lowest common fundamental resource. And what do all starry-eyed, plucky adventurers have in common in every fantasy novel and story he’s ever read apart from colorful hair, bonding trauma, found-family tropes, and deeply unrealistic romantic opportunities?

It’s obvious.

The humans will come, and they’ll work to plunder his dungeon like it was a mine full of precious gold, before inevitably slaying him at the end of their pilfering. But on the days and nights within that process, the adventurers-to-come will need a place to retreat to — a place of rest, food, and mirth where they can sell their loot and buy shelter for the night together with their quirky, yet high-spirited bands of cohorts.

— An adventurers’ guild!

The Vampire Lord tucks his book away and rises to his feet.

Well, he’s going to poison the well of their thoughts and create the wasps’ nest himself. Before any industrious person gets the idea to do so. He’s going to cut them off at the start and create the adventurers’ guild himself!

It will take some power to maintain, but he has plenty of energy left. Worst case, he’ll ask Azalea if he can bite her again.

Wait, no… he shouldn’t. How would he even ask her that? It feels like a weird thing to ask. She’ll think he’s weird.

The Vampire Lord stares at the ceiling.

That reminds him. He should check in on her.

- [Azalea] -

Tick. Tick. Tick — A long pause. Another tick.

Azalea clutches herself, not sure where she is anymore. It’s cold. She ran down the hallway, but it never seemed to bring her anywhere except deeper into the castle. She went left and found herself looking out of windows to the outside, despite her having been sure there were internal rooms in that direction a second ago. When she looked back, the doors she came through were suddenly doubled. The old, tattered rugs seem to shift and relocate their imperfections every time she looks away, as if to confuse her. She can’t help but feel like she’s already been eaten by something, and this… maze is nothing more than its way of breaking down and digesting its food.

But now she’s in a different place within the castle. When she looks out of a window, she can see the rest of the castle. It’s wrapping around itself in a way she can’t really explain the architecture of. Towers jut out nonsensically like mushrooms sprouting from the forest floors. Walls and bridges span in all directions. It really isn’t like anything someone built. It’s like an organic, growing thing.

As for this place, it’s different. It’s quiet. The rest of the castle was chaotic with howling, with wind, and with the disturbed spirits that saturate its old bones. But this new section she’s found herself in, it’s just… quiet. The only thing she can hear is mostly constant ticking. It sounds like an old clock. They had one back in the city, where she did her apprenticeship. She and the other girls would take turns winding it up. It sounds silly, but it was an odd treat to be able to work those bronze chains and weights into place. Maybe they, all being simple village girls, were just enamored with the marvels of magical technology in the rest of the world.

But here, the ticking is broken.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Three ticks come in perfect rhythm, but then there is a stopping and nothing but silence, like a failing heartbeat, before the ticking continues again.

What is this place?

Azalea, coming out of some kind of gallery, steps out onto a balcony that looks over a completely sealed-off room inside of the castle itself. It’s full of slowly moving metal.

The walls next to her move. Metal turns in slow, tight pacing. Gears the size of a house sit lined together in a complicated pattern of design, each moving the other as they’re turned by an unseen mechanism somewhere down below her in the darkness.

— A strange striking comes to ear. As if a different hand of the clock had moved than the others before. It has a sharper sound.

The noises cascade away.

[The Hydro-Mechanical Clocktower]

Stretching high above the castle's heart sits this grand tower full of nothing but gigantic mechanical clockwork, responsible for moving a series of machines both within itself and throughout the castle.

The great clock on its dramatically spired peak is currently malfunctioning.

Restoration Requirements:

• Steam Mechanicals (Requires restoration of [Blackflower Gardens] + [Boiler Room])

• Manual re-calibration of clocktower pendulums

Honestly, it almost sounds odd to say considering that she was just running for her life, but there’s something... quietly peaceful about this area. It’s like a graveyard — morbid, yes. But at the same time, there’s a tranquility to it.

Holding her hand against a railing, she makes her way up a staircase that runs around the inside of the large, vertically open room, circling around and then through the clockwork.

Should she be here?

She probably shouldn’t be here. This seems dangerous. But then again, it’s not like she intended to wind up here. It’s not like she just got up and decided to snoop around the vampire’s den. And the castle itself seems to be trying to stop her from going back the way she came. It keeps rearranging the walls. So, up the stairs she goes.

The ticking breaks again and then continues.

Eventually, she rises to the top of the room and finds herself standing before something more amazing than the ascent.

A large, circular, crystal glass window, big enough to be one of God’s eyes, spans the distance ahead of her. Moonlight weakly cascades in through its magnificently stained but tired-looking glass.

Above her swings a pendulum up high in the darkness, out of reach. One. Two. Three. And it stops.

Azalea watches it, essentially sticking in place on one side of its swing, before dislodging again and returning to motion. When it gets stuck, some other mechanism climpers and triggers next to it, several long chains rattling, but then never activating anything further. Her eyes trace it all back down to four hanging, golden weights suspended in the air above the abyss. They’re hanging at different heights.

It really is just like a grandfather clock, only much, much larger.

One of the weights is out of alignment. Such clocks need some manual adjustment every now and then because machines — being made by man — are imperfect compared to Heaven’s creations. They require a person to nurture them, the same as a person requires a higher power to do so too.

The moonlight really does give this place a strange glow, doesn’t it? The way it comes in through the glass of many colors and then bounces around the golden and bronzed metals. It feels dampened and nostalgic. It’s like she’s looking at an old tome, at something from a back shelf that nobody else had picked up in decades.

Ahead of her, toward the big window, is a statue. Fed through the statue’s clenched hands are four separate chains. It’s covered in dust and cobwebs. It’s a statue of a person, maybe? She can’t tell. It’s old and worn out, as if it alone had been suffering more from time and the elements than any of the rest of the clocktower.

Nobody has touched it for a long time either.

The heartbeat stops again — the ticking, she means — and then it continues.

Azalea knows she shouldn’t touch anything here. But that little animal curiosity in her mind kind of wants her to.

The little chains feed up into a larger mechanism, which runs around several gears and then back into the counterweights. She just needs to pull on the one, and it’ll fix the ticking.

The priestess reaches out, grabbing the chain and pulling on it. It slides down through the hand of the statue, a little bit of crumbling grit clogging the opening for a second, until it gives way a moment later. Dust rains down. There is a winding noise as small cogs ratchet into place.

Behind her, the counterweight that she can only imagine weighs as much as a dragon begins to rise up into the air together with the other three.

Azalea doesn’t have time to examine the fruits of her labor, because as she turns around again, the only thing she sees is a melted, ghostly white face staring her down from inches away. A collection of dozens of boneless, grubby, three-fingered arms reach out toward the priestess, grabbing hold of her everywhere all at once. Azalea’s scream is muffled as a ghostly hand covers her mouth, the other hands searching her as if looking for something. There’s a tsk a moment later as they give up, and then the last thing she hears before everything goes dark is a single word.

“SNATCH!”

- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -

“You what?!” yells Inkume, raising his voice without even realizing it's happening. His fist strikes out to the side to brace himself. The doorway breaks in as the brickwork around his hand crumbles.

“Yes!” affirms Fi-Fi, nodding to him but stepping back and lifting her hands in a cowering surrender. “Human-chan left under her own power earlier,” explains the skeleton maid, clenching her feather duster in both hands by her face as she strikes a one-legged pose like a flamingo in cold water. Inkume looks at her and then at the empty bed where Azalea had been resting.

The maid was outside polishing windows. He dragged her in here to explain when he found the room empty.

She tilts her head. “Fi-Fi… I mean… I did not stop her. The Master did not ask me to keep her prisoner, only safe,” explains the maid. Her head tilts. “So I let her go.”

“— Into the castle?!” he argues, pointing down the hallway. “It’s full of monsters!”

The skeleton stares at him, looks down at herself, and then looks back at him. “Hai…?” she replies, puzzled.

He grabs his face in exasperation. This is bad. But he doesn’t smell any blood at least, so that’s a good sign, right? He’d be able to tell if something bad happened. The Vampire Lord turns to go in a hurry, his cloak swishing dramatically behind him in his haste.

Then he stops for a moment, turning back toward the skeleton who covers her face with the feather duster. He grabs her wrist, pulling her hand toward him. The skeleton exaggerates and flings herself against him.

“Oh~!” she cries, lifting up her leg behind herself as she leans against his chest, swooning her head back with her forearm draped over it. “Will Master cruelly punish poor Fi-Fi-chan for failing him?” asks the skeleton. She doesn’t have any eyes, but he can’t help but feel like she’s still watching him as she dramatically turns her head away in some sort of feign. “Will he tie her up and torture her, break her will in this very room, and make innocent Fi-Fi submit to his every deep, dark desire?”

He literally can’t deal with this right now.

Inkume drops the lost bracelet he found by the pond earlier into her hand, returning it to its owner, and then lets go. The skeleton, standing on one leg, flails her arms and falls back onto the bed. “No. I’m sorry for my outburst. I know you did your best,” he says curtly. “I should have been more clear in my instructions,” explains the horrific terror that haunts the screaming night and then simply turns around, walking back out of the door. “But please stop talking in the third person.”

Without another word, he struts out of the door.

He’s just too soft for this line of work.

- [Fi-Fi] -

The skeleton stays behind, very confused. She looks down at the bracelet and gasps, recognizing it immediately. She thought she lost this forever!

Giddy, she puts it on around her wrist. Unfortunately, her wrists have become rather thin these days compared to back then. The open bangle simply slides back off and over her fleshless arm and clatters down to the ground. She looks as it rolls away. “Oh…” mutters the undead maid in a soft, depressed camber.

There’s an audibly frustrated groan from out in the hallway, carrying the voice of someone who doesn’t have time for the situation they’re in.

A second later, the sound of stomping makes its way back to her. The Vampire Lord paces back into the room, picks up the newly dropped bracelet, and then wraps it back over her wrist, squeezing the metal with his strong hands tightly enough to bend its quarter-circle opening closed so that it won’t slide off anymore.

Without a word, he struts back out and hurries to begin his search.

Fi-Fi sits there on the edge of the bed she made in preparation, even more confused than before. She looks down at the golden bracelet, shining on her arm. It stays in place.

She had thought for sure that she could provoke the new Master, beginning the first stages of her scheme into becoming closer to him than anyone else to secure her safety. But somehow, her plan’s initial stage didn’t really work out as she had expected it to.

Her cold fingers touch the bangle as she looks back up toward the door after him.

But he’s already gone.

- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -

It’s always something.

The new Vampire Lord hurries through his castle at a rapid pace that isn’t a run nor a stride; any observing onlooker could perhaps only describe it as a quick-tempoed trot. If he was Azalea and ran into the castle, he’d try to get out of the castle as fast as possible. She’s probably trying to go home. Why didn’t she just wait for him? He would have brought her back himself. This is dangerous. The castle, the forest. She knows there are monsters everywhere; what is the girl thinking? Maybe her blood loss made her delirious? He can’t think of anything better than that.

The entrance hall.

If she’s leaving the castle, that’s the main way out. He might be able to intercept her there if he hurries. Assuming she survives the castle, at least he can offer to help her through the forest. That’s the least a man can do after drinking nearly a half gallon of a girl’s blood inside of a haunted ruin.

The Vampire Lord turns into a cat and then runs as fast as he can, jumping from one banister to the next as he weaves his way down a long series of staircases and broken, crumbling gaps in the castle, following his intuition until it takes him all the way to the main entrance.

[Midnight Monster: Cat]

Active Ability

You have transformed into a cat!

He picks up a familiar smell. It’s her.

— Is that creepy? He isn’t sure. He’s a cat. So it doesn’t count, right? It’s only creepy if a person is out there smelling other people they barely know. Cats are A-okay as far as socially acceptable sniffing goes.

Making remarkable speed, he reaches the entrance hall and sees a human silhouette down in the darkness by the entryway doors.

Oh, thank goodness. He made it just in time.

Inkume leaps down from the darkness, his body changing back into its human shape.

Wait.

That’s not - !

- [Cvet] -

Azalea's younger brother walks in to the castle, drawing his sword out at the ready. There’s a dankness in the air, a foulness locked within the miasma. It all stinks of death and the sweet rot of decay. A few world-weary hunters walk in behind him, their old crossbows and eyes having trained themselves on many unspeakable beasts in their time.

A black-draped shadow drops down before them, its form shifting grotesquely from some speck into that of a man who lands on his knees. A long, black cloak falls down behind him, like a burial shroud too afraid to stay above the face of its keeper. Ruby eyes rise up, the blackness billowing just over him in the same second as a barrage of sharp metallic twangs fills the air. Half a dozen bolts shoot out in a volley but are swallowed by the fabric of the vampire’s cloak as if it were an empty hole. They simply never make it through to the other side.

“The demon!” yells a hunter, the rest of them stepping back a step as the vampire rises up to its feet, towering over them. Cvet holds his sword ready, stepping forward.

“Welcome. I was not expecting you so soon,” greets the creature, holding out a hand to its side, its long, black-nailed fingers bidding them inward. The mens’ eyes wander the bleak halls, staring at the paintings that seem to be looking back at them. “After shooting me once already, I would kindly ask you to refrain,” it says in some sort of sick joke, the moonlight cascade coming in through the open castle doors shimmering in its predator’s gaze. It looks away from the hunters and down toward him. “Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot?” says the vampire, walking toward him and holding its hand over its black, rotten heart. The creature that strides in the skin of a man bows in a half bow, watching him closely. “My name is Inkume. I am the master of this castle.”

“I’ve come for my sister, creature!” shouts Cvet, stepping forward forcefully and swinging out his sword directly toward the lowered head.

But the blade never makes contact with anything more than a strand of midnight hair, swiping only through thin air as the shadow retreats back with unnatural speed.

It just vanishes and then reappears a few steps away.

“Now, now,” says the monster, lifting its hands and looking at him in a way that makes his gut clench and turn. “You’re Azalea’s brother?” it asks, piecing together the information. It smiles. “She and I are actually getting along very well,” mocks the vampire. Cvet yells, lunging forward again. The shadow evades his strike, looking at him from the side. He can feel its breath on his neck. “I hope you and I can learn to do the same too.”

He ducks down, the old iron blade cutting through the air with a frantic, inexperienced slice. But once again, it hits nothing.

The vampire stands somewhere else.

How is it doing that?!

Cvet’s cold blue eyes leer at it in disgusted rage. “I’ll kill you for touching Azalea!”

It shakes its head. “I promise you that she is in good health and care,” says the thing that pretends to be a man. The hunters behind them reload their crossbows, as is evidenced by the groaning of old wood and metal. But they don’t have time to shoot again. “I was intending to help you see her again this very night, actually,” it threatens.

The vampire’s hand is in the air.

A second later, a barrage of screams comes from behind him. Hollow, skinless creatures lurch and shamble out of every shadow and seemingly empty pocket of darkness around them. Skeletons’ wails and shrieks fill the air, charging toward them by the dozens. The hunters’ bolts fire ineffectively, bouncing off of fleshless bodies and at best dislocating the odd collarbone or rib, which is simply realigned by the dark, horrific magic of this cursed place. Ghouls and crawling things come from the mud, and the old metal bars on the windows rattle as things fight to get in from the sealed-away gardens outside.

Dead hands reach for him from all angles, grabbing at his hair, clothes and sword as they try to yank him away. The hunters scream in terror as they’re shoved off of their feet and swarmed, their helpless cries being dragged out through the doors and back into the night, where they fall silent again. Cvet kicks and fights his way free, shattering a skull with the hilt of his sword and breaking a femur through with his boot. A second later, the boy leaps through the encircling crowd toward the thing that stole his sister.

— But it vanishes again.

It’s playing with him like a cat would with a mouse.

His frenzied eyes scan the area as he destroys one skeleton after the other. They’re weak, but they come in large numbers. He’s never fought anyone before except the other village boys, but his blood is strong, and he carries in himself knowledge he didn’t know he had before now. The old sword arcs and turns, shattering through the spine of an undead. It topples down into a lifeless heap.

“Stop!” comes out a forceful cry that reverberates around the castle entryway like a powerful black magic spell.

Everything freezes. The skeletons, the ghouls, and the castle itself seem to stand still as even the wind-blown tapestries hang now motionless.

What manner of foul sorcery is this?

Cvet, panting for breath, points his shaking blade up its way as his eyes find the vampire again. It’s standing above the hall, at the top of a grand staircase, and looking down at him from up there as if he were just some wretch far, far below it.

“I don’t want to fight you. If you would only listen to me. I’m not trying to deceive you,” it explains with a confidence and charm to its tone that almost makes him want to believe it. This is devil’s sorcery. He listened to all of the hunters’ old stories about vampires. He knows their tricks. It’s trying to lull him into a sense of trust and security so that it can strike while his guard is down.

Cvet, gasping for breath, holds the old sword ready. “I want Azalea!”

Maybe Azalea is dead or gone; he’s not sure. But he knows that he has to put an end to this. He has to kill the vampire and rescue her if he can. She was all that he had left, and now he might not even have her anymore.

“Ah, well, you see…” it begins. It’s making up some sort of excuse already. He can tell.

“Now!” demands Cvet, his foot stepping up onto the first step of the grand staircase.

A second later, a distortion appears up in the air next to the vampire. The air shifts and wobbles in a deeply cursed, unnatural manner, and an instant later, something appears. It isn’t anything that he can describe as anything more than a shape.

— And it has Azalea in its grasp.

She’s held up in the air, aloft, by the hands of the dead. “Master! Master!” pants a wheezing, breathless voice that sounds like it had swallowed broken glass with every spoken sound. “I brought you your prisoner!” says a horrific ghost, made up of a melting ooze like a rotting candle. Its twelve arms latched around his sister’s limp body.

“AZALEA!” screams Cvet, seeing her hanging there. Her skin is pale and sickly. Her neck is swollen and red, punctured with two sharp points. “You bastard!”

He’s bitten her. His sister. She’s been infected. She’ll become a vampire now, just like it.

Cvet runs forward in rage, tears in his eyes as he blindly barrels up the stairs.

— His foot makes contact with the middle landing, halfway up.

There’s an audible, dense click that fills the air of the entire room. He looks down just in time to see the floor open beneath himself. Cvet cries, tumbling downward into a deep, black pit that opens up where he was standing as the stairway landing floor drops in — a trap door springing open.

He spirals down into an abyss, his hands and eyes reaching back up for the image of his sister hovering there as he descends into the depths below the evil castle.

- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -

“What was that?!” yells Inkume, clutching his head with both hands as he leans down over the edge of the massive hole. “Snatch!” shouts the Vampire Lord, looking back at the ghost who had arrived at quite literally the worst possible time.

Snatch looks at him and then down at the hole. “…That’s a trap door, Master,” she explains proudly, as if answering a quiz question he had posed for her to test her. “Your castle is full of many traps, yes.” She nods and smiles, as if expecting praise.

“…I thought the castle’s traps were inactive?” he asks, his voice faltering.

Snatch nods. “They were, Master. But…” She narrows her eyes, almost angry about what she has to say next. “This girl just reactivated them in the clocktower and I fear… perhaps worse things too, yes…”

The Vampire Lord stares in disbelief, not questioning the second part of that statement just yet.

How? How can this keep happening to him?

This can’t get any worse at this point. He’s totally the antagonist — the villain. Fate is really making this happen, if he likes it or not. Oh God. He’s going to get killed by some spunky hero after having to hear a speech about the power of believing in yourself.

Inkume’s eyes look back down at the trap door in the middle of the staircase. It swings shut, closing itself again like a parted mouth with a loud slam. “Where does this hole go, Snatch…?” he asks, not sure if he didn’t just kill Azalea’s brother. Thank God she’s unconscious and didn’t have to see this just now.

“Uh…” the ghost thinks for a while. “Ah!” she exclaims, one of her several hands lifting a finger. “Spike pit!” His face goes paler than usual. “Wait. No… no…” mutters the ghost, scratching her head. “Ah! It’s the hole that leads to the den of ten thousand teeth!”

“The what?!”

“Oh, wait… no, no… Sorry,” says Snatch, hitting a fist into an open palm. “It’s been a long time. This one here actually just leads to the old water channels,” she explains, almost bored. “It runs back out into the forest,” she says, looking rather sad about that. “He’ll just flush back out back toward the road.”

Inkume sighs in deep relief, his hand over his heart as he rises back up to his feet.

She tilts what amounts to her head. “Do you… do you want me to fill it with knives and sharp things, Master?”

“That’s okay, Snatch,” says the Vampire Lord, looking at Azalea. “Is she hurt?”

“No,” replies the ghost. “Would you like me to hurt her?” she asks, the many hands tightening themselves already around the limp body. The ghost’s eyes go wide. “I’ll do it for you, Master.” He vigorously shakes his head. She loosens her grip.

“She’s just passed out because of fear,” says the ghost, wheezing in her jackal’s laugh. “She’s not strong, like me, Master. Yes. Snatch is very strong. She ran away, and I caught her for you.”

He rests on a hand on one of the ghost’s twenty-something shoulders. “Thank you, Snatch,” sighs Inkume in relief. “You’re always a big help,” he explains, not sure if this is a lie or not, actually. She has terrible timing. “I’m glad that I can at least count on you,” he praises.

She begins to wheeze and bubble excitedly, twisting around herself as her expression turns into something happier again than it was before.

Somehow, the ghost did help, but she also technically made everything worse, like back with the wolves. But that seems like a mean thing to say, because he knows she isn’t doing it on purpose, so he’ll stick to the positives.

Is there even a word for when someone tries their sincere best to help but somehow always achieves the opposite result in the end?

As for the priestess, it doesn’t look like Azalea is waking up anytime soon. “Take her back to her room and lock the door until she wakes up,” says Inkume, not sure what else to do with her now. The sun is almost up now after all of this drama. So he can’t bring her back to the village anymore tonight. Either she’ll have to go alone come tomorrow morning, or he’ll just have to escort her on the next night then. There’s no way around it.

“Will… will…” asks the wheezing ghost, getting excited again. She looks around the room feverishly before glancing back his way. “Am I… am I your favorite, Master?” she asks.

The Vampire Lord raises an eyebrow.

There isn’t really a pool of choices here. Is she her favorite compared to… who, exactly? The giant spider above his broken dinner table? Snatch is the only ‘person’ he actually knows in any sense in this new life.

“Yes?” replies Inkume plainly, not really having anything else to answer with.

She’s practically heaving now like a dog that ate a tray of brownies as she begins to float in closer and closer toward him, her eyes almost bulging out as they grow in size by the second. “Will Snatch be rewarded for being good?”

He stares at her cautiously, getting very weary these days. “Uh… sure,” replies the Vampire Lord tentatively. “Of course. What would you like?” he asks, not sure if he has anything worth giving to a ghost. What do ghosts even do or want? Gold? A promotion? They can’t really… you know, live it up.

Her wobbly, round eyes go wide. “Can he… maybe… Can the Master bite me too?” she asks, ten different fingers poking themselves together shyly as the ghost makes her ask.

Inkume raises an eyebrow. “…You don’t have any blood, Snatch,” remarks the Vampire Lord plainly before thinking about it any further.

It doesn’t take a second before the volatile spirit clutches her own head, squishing it together with several hands as she lets out a horrified scream and then starts to swirl together into a chaotic dot.

Azalea, released, drops through the air, and he catches her, watching as Snatch vanishes into nothingness a second later, her expression compressed down into a wailing orb that then smushes itself out of existence.

“I was going to say ‘yes’,” he adds, not sure if she can hear him anymore.

Maybe he should lead with that next time. Snatch seems like a very volatile creature. The poor thing has a serious background, apparently.

The Vampire Lord walks away, apparently needing to carry his own guests in his own castle by himself. Being a lord is more work than he thought it would be. But with servants like these, what else can he expect?

Before leaving, he stops and looks back over his shoulder toward the grand entryway down below the stairwell.

A hundred skeletons and monsters are still standing there, frozen stiff from his prior command given to them before. "You, uh, you may resume,” says Inkume.

As if waiting for that alone, they all shriek to life. A thousand silhouettes screaming and running around each other at once, crashing and colliding into chaotic heaps. Bones flies in all directions, spirits and haunts shooting through the air and crying in a torment that apparently can’t be that bad.

This place is a madhouse.

It’s a wonder his dignity is still intact after the boy came at him just now. It’s really only because he discovered that new transformation that he didn’t get skewered by some random village kid. The Vampire Lord would say it was another useless ability, but it really saved him now from being stabbed a good seven or eight times.

He can’t teleport from side to side, no. But, as he already knew, he can change into a variety of animals.

— Animals that he’s noticing all seem to have the same rhyme to their name. They all rhyme with ‘bat’. It turns out that this is an actual rule of his transformation ability. His hopes of changing into something cool like a wolf have been dashed.

Bat. Cat. Rat.

And today’s newest discovery, that helped him dodge the sword of Azalea’s brother?

Gnat.

[Midnight Monster]

Active Ability

• Allows you to transform into any animal that is associated with the night, decay, or death!

— As long as the animal’s name rhymes with ‘Bat’.

The Vampire Lord stares up to the ceiling, walking in forlorn hope through his dark castle.

Who made these abilities, and why do they all seem to have been designed to specifically torment him? Is this hell? It might be hell. Maybe he was never actually reborn, and he’s actually here being punished by the powers that be?

Pondering the vagueries of life, the lost soul strides down into the darkness, carrying the limp priestess in his arms, and vanishes into the night.

- [Cvet] -

Cvet splutters, crawling out of the river and onto the embankment as he pulls himself out of the icy water. The river he had fallen into washed him through a series of underground caverns and cisterns until it eventually opened up out here in the forest, coming through an old cave.

Panting for air, he stabs his sword into the mud and pulls himself out of the water, stumbling down toward the old road that is not far away. He falls down, retching out a mouthful of liquid.

Nearby, the bushes rustle.

He turns his head to look, watching as a group of familiar hunters comes out from the forest. “You’re alive,” remarks the boy, wiping his face on his sleeve as the men approach him.

“Aye. Don’t know what happened, but we managed to slip away,” explains one of the hunters, clapping him on his back and helping him up.

“I could say the same,” replies Cvet, barely being able to stand upright as he leans himself against his sword, using it as a crutch as he begins to hobble back toward the dark castle again.

“No, boy,” says a man, holding his shoulder. “You’re in no state anymore.”

Cvet turns around, trying to strike the large hand off of his shoulder. But he’s too weak compared to the grizzled old hunter. “I won’t leave my sister there! The beast has her!”

“Azalea’s a good soul. We’re with you, Cvet,” replies the hunter, nodding his head to the boy. “But a good hunter knows when he’s the stalker and when he’s the prey.” He nods his head to the others. They grab Cvet and pull him away, despite the boy’s fighting and protest as they head back to the village with one hell of a story.