To his credit, Gordon reacted instantly to the sound of the new threat. Ingrained habits had him reaching for his gun with lightning quick reflexes, and by the time he’d spun around mere moments after, he was already barking orders like a seasoned professional.
“Vamp! Bring it down quick!”
The Harpy needed little encouragement beyond that. As the sound of bones shifting beneath skin just barely began to settle, it was already dashing in as fast as its wing turbines could propel it.
Raking its fingers through the air like claws, brief flashes of cyan, almost white light brought forth spiraling blades of air that twisted their way towards the prone form of the vampire. It aggressively seized the initiative of the fight while it still could, using the short window where the vampire was still shedding its disguised form to close into melee range. One wind blade scored a glancing blow from the snap-fired movements, while the other missed entirely and cut cleanly into one of the adjacent corpses. But that was just the opener.
It tensed its back leg and splayed its wings wide, shifting the entirety of its body weight up high and balancing on as small of a point as possible without lifting off. The sleek, metallic limb that was its robot leg raised high, knee practically level with the Harpy’s head as the turbines whined in preparation to stomp the monsters head in with everything it had.
Unfortunately, as fast as it had managed to react to the situation, the vampire was still able to gain just that small hair of time it needed to react. The steel mannequin-like foot hurtled down at breakneck speeds, but all it impacted with was the stone tiles underneath. A crater at least 6 centimeters deep blossomed from the impact site, chips of stone spalling away into the air as the sheer force of the Harpy’s attack powderized the spot where the vampire’s head had been mere moments ago.
The long, sticklike limbs of the vampire contorted a little fluidly to be human, taking little time to recover back into a hunched position on all fours. Despite the Harpy maintaining the aggressive tempo by returning to its ranged Air Domain assault, the tide of the battle had taken a noticeable shift now that the other contender could actually counter the moves it anticipated.
Twisting, almost writhing in fashions that didn’t even remotely border on being humanly possible, the unnaturally thin creature dodged almost every blast of magic with contemptuous ease. Even as Gordon stepped forth and added his own weight of fire to the mix, the best the two of them were able to manage was keeping it on the defensive.
Step by careful step, the two members of the Gentleman’s Club pressed forward, unloading salvo after salvo of both bullets and spellshot alike in the hopes of keeping the vampire suppressed. Due to the sheer volume of fire, several hits were able to land cleanly, kicking up spatters of the monster’s blackened blood but otherwise seemingly doing little to actually deter it.
That was raising alarm bells for Henry. This vampire was powerful. Probably powerful enough that had this been a one-on-one fight, any one of them would be hard pressed to come out of it totally unscathed. And that included heavy hitters like the Harpy and Layla in the mix.
And yet, it seemed perfectly content to cede the offensive to its two opponents. Rather than face the two of them head-on, it broke into a sort of fighting retreat that put distance between it and the source of the whirlwind of attacks.
Henry could practically see the muscles in the creature’s legs coil as it bent low to leap backwards. Tendons rippled beneath the surface of pale, stretched-taut skin, and with a bounding stride, it began backing off as the distance grew from a few paces to over a dozen meters in a manner of seconds.
Naturally, as the ranges increased, the accuracy of the combined assault began to suffer. But as the saying goes, quantity has a quality all of its own. As the extended magazine in Gordon’s submachine gun ran dry, he let the weapon drop to hang from its sling while he whipped out Henry’s revolver and let loose a quick shot downrange.
While not a cramped space, the hall was still enclosed and buried under several meters of solid rock. As such, it made Henry’s ears ring more than just a bit when the shot was loosed, tearing a deep gouge straight through the vampire’s shoulder as it retreated.
To his shock, the vampire barely even flinched at the wound.
Henry realized.
Several pieces clicked into place at once.
How did he not realize it sooner? If there was already a vampire infiltrating down here in the first place, then logically the next step that it would take would be to take advantage of the…
Gordon and the Harpy redoubled their efforts to cripple the fleeing vamp, stepping out in front of the pile of mage corpses. Henry ducked out of the alcove that had been his hiding position, beelining straight for the lifeless body of the head priest while Layla gave him a confused look from the sideline. As he knelt down and fiddled with the clasp on the formerly raving lunatic’s heavy fur cloak, she fell in behind him, concerned for his safety as well as his state of mind.
“What in God’s name are you doing?!”, she hissed between the deafening reports of the overclocked snubnose. “Now’s not the time to be looting the dead, Henry!”
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Being zip-tied at the wrists was making this more difficult than he would have liked. It was almost worse than doing it with one hand, because the other most often found itself in the way as he tried to fumble with the simple knot around the brooch. Huffing frustratedly at the inconvenience, he pressed on, the loud hiss of Air Domain spells causing him to wince in pain from the sharp noise against his already hurting ears.
“Are you even listening to me? Or are you-”
“Shh!” He held up a finger to his lips, pointing at the base of the priest’s neck where he had removed the cloak from.
As the priest’s head lay slack to one side on the floor, from around the side of the paper face covering, were two faded puncture marks roughly in line with where his jugular was.
He’d been bitten. More disturbingly, however, was the fact that he clearly hadn’t been drained completely, which only happened in one specific circumstance.
“Help me check the rest of them,” Henry urged. “Quickly!”
The sounds of gunfire slowly petered out as the vamp finally exited the two fighter’s effective range. Henry barely paid it any mind, flitting from body to body and checking major arteries as fast as he could physically manage.
Bite. Bite. …No bite. Bite. It wasn’t perfectly consistent, but the trend that was developing was worrisome, to say the least.
As in, , say the least. This was actually beyond horrifying, in his book.
A vampire was typically only as strong as the amount of blood they could hold onto from recent victims. When they’d first showed up, this hadn’t been a problem for the beasts; nobody knew about them as a threat, so they’d free range to pick their targets and call it a day. But once those random morsels had gotten wise, they’d been forced to…
Nowadays, there were generally two brands of vamp. Lone, weak, half-starved ones that were probably worse off than the humans were, and the ones who’d either formed a thrall-camp or pledged fealty to one.
This one had, by sheer luck, stumbled into an overabundant supply of untapped blood. It was a miracle that they’d even been able to scratch it-
“Bugger, that was a tanky one,” Gordon lamented, holstering the pistol cleanly. “Why even bother running when he had us dead to rights?”
“Gordon,” Henry addressed to him dead seriously. “We need to go. ”
“Yeah, that was the plan. Harpy, go pick that 8-Ball back up and-”
“No, seriously, Almost every last one of these guys were enthralled, and as much as vampires enjoy their blood bags, that beast alone would have put us all in the dirt if he was the only one responsible for getting this place nine tenths of the way to becoming a thrall-camp.”
“Then why did he-”
A bone-chilling screech resounded from the end of the hall. Then another, and a third.
Not another word needed to be spoken.
Every last one of them broke into a dead sprint as they scrambled for the exit. They didn’t even slow down for the artifact, Gordon just bent low and scooped it up mid-stride.
The adrenaline kicked in, and Henry’s thoughts began racing as fast as his heart was. The Subway Wizards he knew were fanatic, certainly, but they weren’t Realistically, a vampire shouldn’t have been able to get within a hundred meters of even the Liverpool Street underground. And yet, here they were, right off the heels of the Morlocks’ decision to brave the surface with the help of their newfound artifact.
An artifact which, apparently, had given them the option of open , of all things.
At a wild guess, he imagined their interview process involved forcing random survivors to join their cult by brute forcing Ghost of Tolkien onto them. Carrot and stick, and all that. Probably didn’t have to threaten too many lives, either, in the end. Had they gotten to him before he got his 0013 digits, he probably would have went along with it if it meant he could use a Domain for himself, regardless of how dogmatic they always were.
He would have faked it until he knew every word by heart. He’d been for a time.
So, apply that logic of saying to everyone you meet, and imagine this time you accidentally stumbled across a small coven of disguised vampires and gave them that ultimatum. What, realistically, would be their response?
Realistically? probably. A golden opportunity like that was hard to come by when most everyone else was either rampantly paranoid, superstitious, or both.
All in all, it seemed like a logical progression to him. At least three secret vampires pass their little initiation, play along for a bit while picking targets off here and there, and before long you have one of the most secure thrall-camps known to Hallow London at your disposal. If it weren’t for the heat the Subway Wizards had brought down on them in the process of killing anyone who refused their generous ‘offer’, in all likelihood this place would end up a serious threat a month or two down the road. Now the real question was-
From in front of him, Layla glanced over her shoulder and gasped.
“GET DOWN!!!”
They all hit the dirt immediately. Straining his eyes up as far as he could while keeping his cheek firmly pressed against the tile floor, he saw a fireball sail overhead and impact with a hand-carved mosaic at the T-junction ahead of them, kicking up a cloud of dust as it shattered to pieces in the resulting explosion.
None of them bothered to wait for the dust to settle before getting back to their feet to continue their mad dash. Coughing up bits of dust as they passed through the cloud and rounded the next corner, Gordon asked Layla the question that came to mind after what they’d just witnessed.
“The hell was that?!”, he exclaimed. “They decide to pack a few mage thralls with them before coming after us?!”
“No, that wasn’t it! It was just the three vampires behind us, and the blast ahead of them!”
“Well where’d it bloody come from, then?! It’s not like monsters can access the Fire Domain, you know! If any of them had access to magic, we’d all have been dead long ago!”
Henry interrupted between panting breaths.
“Gordon… I think you might be about to eat those words…”
“Oh, really? And just what do you mean by that, dickhead?!”
“I mean, I’m only seeing one way the Subway Wizards would willingly let vampires into their super-secret artifact bunker. And when… *hah*… when things that are considered impossible become possible, typically an artifact’s to blame.”
He waved haphazardly at the 8-Ball, clutched tight to Gordon’s chest like a rugby ball as they ran.
“Wh- you don’t mean-?!”
“Afraid so,” Henry lamented. “Intentional or not, I have no idea. But if there’s some twat out there responsible for making the world's first vampire mages… I feel obligated to find him and kick his teeth in sometime.”
Gordon made a noise of frustration, as the sound of sharpened nails clattering and scraping against stone finally rounded the corner behind them.
“Yeah,” he grunted. “I think we can agree on that.”
Another fireball passed overhead, and once more they all ducked for cover. The pattern would repeat for several more minutes as they retraced their steps, and in a few more they would eventually reach the hidden bulkhead that held the entrance to the station above.
In that time, Henry needed to think of a way to get the pit back open. Because they hadn’t found a similar control panel on this floor to lift it back up again.
