Lucious had a deep frown on his pale face as the boy suddenly approached him from nowhere, sliding directly into his path to block the exit.
The sudden, erratic movement caused Dori, who was standing quietly behind him, to peep cautiously from the safety of his broad back.
At first, she had a somewhat soft smile on her face.
To her feral eyes, the boy looked rather nice and harmless compared to the other loud, heavily armored humans shouting all around her in the crowded guild hall.
But the very second she noticed the dark, unwelcoming look on her master’s face, her smile vanished instantly. She had no choice but to act exactly like he does, her loyalty to the vampire who saved her demanding absolute conformity.
Her glowing red eyes narrowed into a cold, predatory glare as she pressed her body closer to Lucious’s spine.
"What is this?" Lucious spoke back at the boy with a deeply unfriendly tone.
There was absolutely no other way to interpret the heavy venom in his voice.
Just the mere tone Lucious used to respond to him made the young boy a bit wary, forcing his false confidence to shatter as he hesitated and took a slow, cautious step back.
"I do not mean to disturb you, but i wanted to know if you were willing to join our party. We are newbies as well, and we need numbers to survive," the boy explained quickly, his hands up in a placating gesture.
Lucious frowned even more, his expression turning into a mask of pure annoyance.
"And what exactly makes you think i am one?"
The boy swallowed hard, gesturing vaguely at Lucious’s attire. "You do not seem to have any expensive gears like most experienced adventurers do. You are still wearing ruined, dirty clothes. And besides, you were just reading through the F-rank quest section."
Lucious knew both statements were absolute facts.
His clothes were still the same ruined, mud-stained rags from his violent fall down the castle hill. But he also clearly remembered the strict rule the shopkeeper Ely had given him earlier about never joining a party without knowing exactly what they do.
He would be damned not to go through with her free advice..
"I walk alone," he replied coldly.
Without waiting for a response, he immediately began walking right past the boy and his ragged group, his long strides eating up the distance to the heavy guild doors.
The young man frowned deeply, feeling heavily disrespected by the dismissive action.
He wanted to say something so badly, his face flushing red as he wondered why someone who was literally dressed in swamp rags would dare to reject him like that.
It was not often newbies get the chance to join an established party of four on their first day.
"Damn you," the man cursed out loud, closing his fist in sheer rage as he watched the pale stranger leave the building.
Finally outside the noisy adventurers guild, Lucious was walking at the front with the dense crowds of Uranik city flowing all around him. Dori followed obediently at the back, staying incredibly close to his shadow to avoid the bustling merchants and loud carriages.
As they walked the paved stone streets, she asked a quiet question, making absolutely sure she was paying close attention to his every movement so as to not get lost in the overwhelming sea of humans.
"Master, why did you reject those people back there? They seemed like really good comrades to fight alongside," she asked, tilting her head like a curious puppy.
Lucious did not break his stride.
"We do not need a team, Dori. The more people you have around you, the more problems they inevitably bring. I am far better off on my own, relying only on those I can absolutely control."
Dori took his words to heart rather quickly.
More than anything in this world, she did not want to disobey him in any way, entirely bound by her fanatical loyalty and her new vampire blood. If her master said humans were a liability, then they were a liability.
To show her submission, she reached out and gently held onto the edge of his ruined shirt as they walked.
They navigated the sprawling city for a long time, checking the rough parchment map Lucious had obtained to find exactly where they needed to go in order to complete their goblin extermination quest.
Normally, other adventurers with coin in their pockets would have just taken a horse-drawn transport carriage to make the journey faster and significantly less stressful.
Not even enough to afford weapons.
But because of the limited funds they had just acquired from selling the dead water dwellers to Ely, his best and most logical bet was to simply walk all the way until they got there.
And which they actually did.
The Rando village.
Standing at the dirt entrance of the remote village, Lucious could already sense the thick, suffocating panic hanging in the air without even needing to walk all the way inside.
The unpaved streets were incredibly scarce, with barely anyone outside their wooden homes. Even the few people that managed to come out into the open were exclusively grown men, who all had various crude weapons strapped to their bodies like they were part of a desperate military militia.
"This place looks exactly like my place back up in the woods," Dori pointed out, her voice barely a whisper as she scanned the perimeter.
And she was not wrong. Looking all the way from the wooden arches of the village entrance, one could clearly see the massive, dark forest trees creeping dangerously close to the houses, nearly threatening to swallow the whole place whole. The shadows of the branches seemed to reach for the rooftops.
Slowly, the duo entered the village.
They walked around the tense settlement for a while until they got close to an older man who was hurriedly carrying a woven basket of fresh fruit, absolute distress written plainly in his wide eyes.
"Excuse me, i would like to-"
Before Lucious could even finish his polite words, the panicked man shoved him hard to the side, looking at him with what seemed to be pure rage and terror.
"Are you crazy? The goblins are coming, its almost dark! Go inside your house!" the man yelled at the top of his lungs before running away down the dirt road, dropping a few apples in his absolute haste.
Lucious was confused for a brief while, standing silently in the empty street, not until his enhanced hearing began to pick up the noises. He began to hear multiple, high-pitched, cheeky laughs echoing from a distance, deep within the encroaching forest.
The sound was frightening enough that even Dori herself, a feral survivor of the wild, could not help but take a low, defensive stance upon hearing it. Her crimson eyes flashed as she bared her fangs slightly at the tree line, ready to protect her master.
’The goblins...’ Lucious thought in his mind, his gaze locking onto the dark woods.
For starters, he had never actually seen a real monster in this world. Though he had read about goblins a lot in cheap fantasy novels back in his former human world on Earth, there was no saying how he could handle seeing the actual, grotesque of one in person.
Still...
’Why do i then feel so excited to fight one?’ he questioned his own racing heart. ’No, even more so, the real excitement is to watch her fight one.’
His glowing eyes lingered on Dori’s tense, beautiful form for a while, admiring the raw, predatory power radiating from his first willing blood kin. Her pale skin and crimson eyes looked absolutely lethal in the fading light.’
"Lets go," Lucious ordered, breaking the silence as he began to walk forward into the danger.
Dori, without wasting a single second, dropped her defensive posture and followed suit, running softly to catch up to his side.
Since they had wasted most of their afternoon walking through the massive capital city to find this remote village, it was already almost night time.
For most normal human adventurers, they would actually need to find lit torches or some sort of magical light in order to survive navigating the dense woods.
But for True Vampires such as these two, once the darkness fully comes, they would see just fine. Their crimson eyes pierced right through the shadows as if the space was illuminated by bright daylight.
Once they fully entered the thick forest, the temperature dropped significantly. Lucious moved silently, relying on his high agility, eventually hiding at the back of a massive, mossy tree with Dori crouching right beside his leg.
His eyes locked firmly on their targets.
Not too far away from where he was hiding, in a small clearing, he could see the group of goblins sitting around a roaring campfire right in front of a filthy, makeshift tent.
From the looks of things, they were aggressively sharpening their rusted weapons and laughing sadistically with one another, as though actively preparing to enter a battle of some sort against the terrified villagers.
Each one of them looked incredibly short, barely reaching a grown man’s waist. But yet, their dark green skin was packed with so much bulging muscles that it did not take much to tell they could easily rip a normal human’s arm right out of its socket.
’These are what they look like? They are actually far uglier than i ever expected,’ Lucious uttered in his mind, his nose crinkling at the foul stench of unwashed bodies and roasting meat.
He began trying to figure out the absolute best tactical way he could handle the situation.
Judging by their total numbers of ten, if he went in recklessly swinging his fists, he would probably not be able to handle them all, not if they all came at him at once with their crude blades.
They looked individually weak, so taking them out one by one from the shadows would suffice.
He looked down at Dori, giving her a silent sign with his pale fingers for her to move stealthily to the other tree across the clearing and stay there completely hidden until he gave the verbal command.
She nodded, her red eyes glowing with lethal intent, and melted seamlessly into the bushes.
But just then, before Lucious could even formulate his first strike from behind the tree, a raspy, unfamiliar voice echoed loudly from the dark branches directly above him.
"Now who could that be...standing there?"