As the day continued, scouting units entered the catacombs. Skeletons beat every wall and surface with wooden staves before any human was allowed forward. Most of the traps had their mechanisms broken or molten by the heat. The first treasures found were jewelry taken from thralls and vampires, only slightly warped and twisted by the heat. Fittingly, Adarin watched as a pallet of vampire skulls rose from the hole. Soldiers and settlers alike joked about putting them up over their hearths. He kept exchanging nervous reports with all his subordinates, expecting the return of the Patriarch.

  Commodore Ashfield had expressed it well. “Technically we won his bet—but do you really think he’s going to be a good sport about how he lost?”

  Several starry-eyed mages were inspecting the inscriptions on the walls, murmuring about a major historical discovery. Then it turned out that an entire wing of storerooms had been nearly untouched by the fire, containing among other horrors a library of tomes written in a strange script on what was definitely human skin. Some of the books had gnarly teeth; others had arms that grabbed at anyone who got close. Another set of rooms was clearly a blood-wine cellar. Gavin insisted on taking samples of the blood, murmuring something about specialized enzymes before Adarin had the entire thing smashed. And then a treasury was unearthed containing a dozen small chests full of silver, gems, and gold.

  The public announcement that followed—that a third of the treasure would be paid out in equal parts to every settler and every soldier involved in the affair—turned the mood as bright as it had been since the beginning of the expedition. Settlers cheerfully chattered about what they were going to buy with their part of the treasure. Soldiers were singing songs in the streets, and mages debated which obscure arcane tool or book they would acquire. Town life normalized surprisingly quickly. The coal milers continued, as did the housing construction, the skeletons of the first houses already beginning to stand by the side of the town square.

  Adarin had heard about the levels the others had received. Liora had only gotten a single one, but Krislov had made a killing.

  He consulted his own winnings from the two battles:

  You have led an army in defeating a host of Nosferati!

  Normalized strength difference 148%

  Number of Levels gained: 3

  You have led an operation that annihilated a nest of Nosferati!

  Normalized strength difference 307%

  Number of Levels gained: 6

  Adarin grimly accepted his advancement and dismissed the system tattoo. This isn’t over.

  Day passed into night and night passed into morning, and still nothing happened. Adarin was pacing the town the next morning when Duchess Viola found him. She grabbed him and dragged him into the cover of some underbrush that was already recovering from the druidic spells.

  “Sir Adarin, this cannot continue. The way you stalk the streets is making people nervous.”

  Adarin looked at the duchess. “Everyone should be nervous. Yes, we exterminated their nest, but we didn’t get the main threat. Just the—”

  Viola shook her head. “I’m aware, but people need a break. People need to rest after what happened.”

  “And so they can be happy when they get slaughtered by the monster when it comes back?” he ground out.

  The duchess jabbed her finger at one of the trees. “We have the warding schema. We have the catacombs secured. We have a detection network with the trees. We’ll know when that thing comes.”

  “And then do what? If that monster had attacked our defensive position, I don’t think we would even have inconvenienced it.”

  Duchess Viola looked from side to side and exhaled long. “Please, Sir Adarin—do what’s best for the colony. For the mission.”

  Adarin grumbled but retreated underground into the catacombs, overseeing how the mages were loading the vicious books into metal-reinforced caskets to be examined by the Order’s librarians and the archmagister himself. He approached the naval mage in charge of the underground exploration.

  “Sir, I have a preliminary report for you.”

  Adarin gestured for the man to move ahead. Maybe someone here shares my uneasiness and isn’t happily looting while the monster is out of the house.

  “I believe they moved in here a few weeks ago, shortly after we departed Portguard. From what I know about vampire nests,” he swallowed, leaned in and lowered his voice. “They are very reluctant to move. I think this place held a basic garrison before the vampires swarmed in. Unless I’m mistaken, the big bat moved their entire brood here for whatever they intended to do with you.”

  Adarin bit his avatar’s lips, murmured a thank you, and returned to pacing—this time the underground corridors—guns, dagger, and grenades always at the ready. He kept wondering, his mind circling around the same question. Why? Why had the vampire been playing this game? Why had its master targeted him? Why am I awake and alive in this time and place?

  Each time he heard footsteps, he expected the creature to appear, expected the shadows to start mocking him, expected a gruesome display of the corpses of settlers and soldiers. But for another day, nothing happened.

  It was late morning on the third day when the monster took Liora.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Adarin had just finished talking to Devin and Gavin—Devin had taken over guard of the warding schema—when a scream, a chorus of nails on chalkboard, sang out from the market square. Adarin ran through the temple complex, and soon reports reached him: a blurring shadow of black and red had slaughtered workers in the underground, screaming in anguish and desperation all the while.

  He reached the exit of the temple, and there on the other side of the plaza—amidst half a dozen slaughtered workers and soldiers who apparently had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time—the creature stood. His black silks were torn and stained with ash, his face a mask of rage, his flesh boiling and bleeding off into gobbets that turned into bats, which in turn rejoined the body. In one of its claws it held Liora up in the air by her throat, claws clearly digging into her neck. Adarin's heart began to beat harder.

  The moment it saw Adarin, the world began screeching. From every shadow, from every nook and cranny, the monster’s voice emerged. “You killed my family. You. You monster.”

  Adarin swallowed several responses, judging that they would not be conducive to Liora surviving this encounter. Why am I feeling so chipper, so… casual? The girl was hanging there with serene calm until the vampire shook her.

  “See this,” the master said. “It is important to you. It is the most precious thing in the world for you right now. I hope. You have taken my family. This will never be equivalent.” He tightened his claw and blood ran down Liora’s neck. “But I hope it will make me feel something. You killed them all. Burned them alive,” it hissed, and the shadows elongated, seemed to claw at people desperately taking cover with an almost physical force.

  Adarin advanced slowly over the square, feeling calm, ready, validated in all his fears. So now… now it will finally be over.

  The vampire continued his maddened rant. “I was merely following orders. You made this personal. I’ll kill her, then tear apart every one of your minions before I end you.”

  Something compelled Adarin to keep walking, to ignore the rantings of the mad creature. Something—not really a plan, but an instinct—told him to move forward and to speak up.

  “Oh my. Finally lost your cool?”

  The vampire lost it. He screeched, threw Liora high into the air, and she sailed in an arc nearly ten meters, crashing down into one of the construction sites. Adarin’s heart froze. Is she alive? He sent one of his snake-bots after her, to investigate. Why did I just say that? Why did I provoke it?

  But then it was too late for questions. The creature was on him. Adarin brought up the diamondoid dagger, but it was as if he were moving in molasses against this unnaturally swift foe. The manipulator was cleaved by the long, diamond-sharp claws. In the next instant, Adarin felt claws sinking into him at dozens of places, felt them rip and tear at his core. Splinters of agony erupted in his mind. He tried to get an angle with the guns, tried to ready the grenades, but somehow his body felt limp and impotent. His control over his muscles broke, and then the creature held his core in its hand.

  The world went white around Adarin as all the connections were torn apart. He dismissed the nanomic interface, ordering the surface nanites into photonic transmission mode. He picked up the vibrations of the sphere first, as his sensorium restored itself.

  “I hope you can hear me. Make sure you can hear me and see me. I think I’ve changed my mind,” the vampire murmured with an absent rage. “I’ll carry you around as a trinket and slaughter everyone you have interacted with in this world. Yes. Yes, that is an appropriate punishment.”

  Adarin saw the mad, twisted face glinting with a mania only born of grief and loss from close up. “But first let’s see how much you can suffer.” The vampire extended the hand holding Adarin’s sphere up like a mirror and brought the pointy finger of his other hand to the surface. Then he began carving, and Adarin hissed and writhed as the shrieking vibrations of shredded contacts burned dissonant signals into his mindspace. The vampire increased the pressure on the sphere and brought all his claws to a single point. He began pressing. Adarin felt the diamondoid material slowly give way under the cutting power of the blades. He screamed as the thorn of pain burned into his skull. His memories and protocols were cut off from his mind, but his focus was elsewhere. The world narrowed on his goal.

  The snake-bot had found Liora. Her back was broken, but she was already flush with healing energy. The snake-bot slithered back to him at speed, coming up behind the vampire.

  Another wave of pain made Adarin lose consciousness, but the timer reassured him. It had only been milliseconds. Must have hit some vital routine. He focused briefly on establishing redundancies. As the claw penetrated his computronium core deeper, and the vampire described the cruelties he would inflict upon everyone here—how their children and children’s children would be enthralled to his new vampire nest.

  The snake was halfway across the marketplace when the vampire paused. “No. It’s somehow not satisfying hearing the screams of your enemy as you torture them.” He knocked a knuckle against the sphere containing Adarin. “I don’t even know if you’re actually suffering. I think I’m going to start killing off the people.” He looked around and a smile flickered over his face. “Where did I throw that girl?”

  He took a step toward the house, and Adarin exhorted the snake-bot to move faster, to reach his body in time—when suddenly a refractory wave detonated around the vampire. Pure meaning rippled and seemed to engrave itself into every surface—the soil, the very air itself. Adarin saw, felt, sensed, knew the command.

  “NO.”

  The vampire froze and fell to his knees.

  “Patriarch,” he whispered. Another wave of raw meaning crashed through the world.

  “FOLLOW.”

  A pause seemed to drag, and Adarin dimly noticed how everyone who had been outside had collapsed, screaming, pressing their hands to their temples. The snake-bot was so close to his body—so close to delivering the control shard into his mainframe. Fucking oversight. I should have retained one as a backup.

  The second word splintered the world again as if it had been cast into amber that suddenly liquefied and evaporated.

  “ORDERS.”

  Blood ran from the vampire’s mouth, nose, and ears. The vampire began screaming in bone-jarring agony as black smoke boiled off his skin. Droplets of his very flesh flowed upward like oil falling against gravity. Adarin dimly noticed that he had been dropped, but there was only one thing on his mind: the mathematics of vectors and angles.

  Slowly he shifted his wooden body as the vampire howled in agony. With painful inevitability the creature’s body re-solidified. Adarin’s control returned in fits, encountering difficulties with commanding his body's cut-apart muscles, with moving the guns to the right angles. But just as the vampire took on his normal form again, the first gun aligned.

  Adarin didn’t wait. He pulled the trigger for the slug round just as the vampire was turning back to him with a groan, turning his head toward Adarin’s body and core.