“Oh Gods…please…don’t kill me.” The adventurer begged, a simple mage who was practically bathed in the blood of his teammates. Bodies who were swelling with life, just as normal creatures would, now slowly becoming cold.
Each of them adventurers moving to the place they were told about. “Just an unofficial dungeon.” They said, “An easy means to become rich.” They were told. Now only to be massacred by this…monster in human form. Looking at it now, they should have been more careful, not that it meant much now on, dancing in the thread between life and agonising, brutal death. This was all meant to be a simple trip, from point A to point B, simple as that, yet somehow that was interrupted miserably.
“Do you whimper this much when facing death? Aren’t you supposed to be an adventurer, a person who faces death so often?” The voice asks, a feminine one he immediately recognised. She just seemed to be a fellow adventurer who had, a bit off probably but this was something that no adventurer would do to another creature.
The adventurer kept moving back, practically crawling while only now noticing how terrified he really was. Whimpering, panting, sweating, terrified further than what he could actually explain in words. After all, this one person was able to wipe them all out in a matter of minutes with power they only heard about in old stories. Then, the footsteps began again, approaching slowly, slow enough to be considered intentional.
“Look at me mage…look at me.” The voice said, a gauntleted hand grabbed his shoulder and threw him against a tree with strength she didn’t seem to possess naturally. The force in which he hit it caused the tree itself to shake too. He looked up slowly soon after, making direct eye contact with his aggressor; a woman in full black armour and red trim. Her eyes crimson red and hair like shining coal that flowed down her body like a river. Her skin was a light warm brown and expression cold as she was beautiful.
“You’re…a vampire.” The mage muttered, it was all he could get out through whines of panic and his thoughts racing about his life, or more specifically, how close it was to ending in just a moment, like how he was like an ant in the face of a much greater monster whose life was in their hands.
“Wow, look at you, Mr. Scholar…unfortunately, knowing what I am isn’t exactly going to help your situation.” She said stated too casually, one would think it was a comment about the weather or how her day was going so far. “So, could you care to explain why you were talking about ‘getting rich quickly’ before we met? I mean, I doubt you’re all above gold, so I doubt there’s any quests one would be willing to pay you enough that you could, as you said, ‘get rich fast’.”
She said with an eerie calmness. It was true. His group, including himself, were talking about how they were going to get extremely rich very quickly and what they were going to do with all that wealth. If they weren’t in a forest, a lot more people definitely would’ve raised eyebrows or turned over to see as to what they were talking about, at worse, even attack them when they least expected.
“It…it’s just some stupid castle.” He began, trying to force the words out, which was difficult to do when one’s heart was beating so quickly and breathing like they had just ran a marathon. “It was some unofficial dungeon, a castle somewhere west from here that we were told about. We weren’t going to attack you, we didn’t even know you would be here.” He pleaded, attempting to appeal to her better, empathetic nature.
Although desperate as it was logical, there was one simple issue with that.
Vampires don’t have empathy for humans, at least, this one most certainly didn’t.
“How flattering…” She responded with that same cold expression on her face, as sarcastic as it had seemed from any point of view. “…Where, in specific, is this castle? Do you know what it looks like?”
“I don’t know, we were just told it was by some demi-humanoid tribes in the west, and that it likely dates back to the First Era, Dark Age Wars, likely even further than that, but that’s all I know. I swear.” He continued pleading, his voice slowly raising, as if that would make him more believable, or that he was asking her to believe him.
“First Era, huh?” She asked, turning and taking a few steps forward, back turned to him. “Yet you do not know what this place is called?” The woman questioned.
Finally calming down, his thoughts mixed with a desperate need to survive and an arrogance that he thought there was a chance he could still survive, slowly raised his hand, holding his palm towards her, energy building up and manifesting into fire. A basic fire ball.
“She’s a vampire right? Undead are weak to fire, just have to make this quick, while she’s distracted.” He thought to himself, tensions for him higher than they’ve ever been before. “Fire Ba-“
Whoooosh!!
Shluck!!
Then, silence. The energy built up in the mages hand, in that moment seemed to have disappeared that very instant. It was like something had cut it off abruptly somehow, looking up, he realised the woman wasn’t standing where she was just a few moments ago. Thoughts crossed his mind about where she could have gone in the blink of an eye, it was an eerie feeling that wasn’t helped by the silence that came with his confusion.
It was at that moment that he realised the intense pain in his hand; it was a sharp that seemed to keep pushing without any signs of going away at all. Slowly looking over to it, there was just…nothing.
Not the nothing as in there was nothing on his hand to explain why it was hurting.
The nothing as in there was no hand there anymore to look at, it was now actually sitting on the floor next to him, staring up just as confused as he was.
“AAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!” He screamed immediately after making this revelation, looking at his hand now sitting on the floor, so cleanly severed, it looked as though it had just fallen off on it’s own at a specific point.
“Stop screaming.” The voice said again, right behind him, behind the tree. The cold, stern hand of her gauntlets grabbed his cheeks, his jaw with a grip not even the most physically capable demi-humanoids ever should have.
“Oh Gods…” He muttered; his voice filled with terrified acceptance.
SNAP!!
The sound echoed through the forest, one that seemed like a final nail in a metaphorical coffin that finally silenced both the forest and everything else around it. Right after she let go, his limp body slumped down to the floor again, void of any movement like from before, another corpse of these dead adventurers.
Once walking back around from the tree, the woman looked out into the distance, looking at the direction the newly massacred adventurers were heading, but now with a small, knowing grin on her face. Like someone…excited. She knew the legends, stories and hidden evidence she had received over the years from all kinds of different sources, it was natural working in her specific profession, and because of that, she knew exactly what this place was. More importantly, who lived within it.
“I’m coming…Zerinia Von Istvan.”