The charcoal pile loomed like a jagged, black mountain, casting a long shadow across the floor. He stood frozen beside it. His gut had screamed that something was wrong the moment he stepped into the chamber, but the sheer, suffocating weight of the air caught him completely off guard. The assistant general pressed a hand to his sternum, his chest locking tight as his lungs refused to expand. "I cannot- what isthat?" The words ripped from his throat, raw and frantic, dissolving into a breathless choke. "I CANNOT BREATHE!"
As the vampire assistant general had tilted his head earlier in desperation, the dim light caught his silhouette. His hand clawed at his chest, twisting his posture until his shadow stretched across the floor like a deformed, horrific beast. He collapsed into himself, silently begging the stale air to fill his lungs.
He had no idea his executioner was watching from the dark.
Cassius Victus had been born a slave in this weird realm, but he possessed the ruthless, calculating mind of an apex predator. He had been fighting this war for a cure entirely alone since the very beginning. Hidden deep in the gloom behind the massive charcoal mound, surrounded by the silently trembling female vampire slaves, Cassius pulled a lighter from his pocket. The wheel clicked; the noise was small but sharp. Still, the vampire who was out searching for him like a hungry predator didn’t notice that, maybe because of his only multitasking flaw. Cassius understood something that he noted in his genius brain for later. A small, fragile flame flickered to life.
Cassius stared at the spark, his mind flashing to the previous assistant general- the one currently rotting in a caged cabin because of him. The yellow flame-fire from his lighter was the absolute best weapon against their kind, but a tiny pocket flame was useless from this distance. The heat couldn’t reach across the massive barrier of black rock.
His eyes shifted to the jagged mountain of fuel beneath him.
The charcoal.
Working quickly, he jammed the flame into the loose debris at the base of the pile. He offered a silent, desperate prayer to the dark. Charcoal caught slowly, but once it took, it became an unstoppable furnace. Within seconds, a thick, greasy black smoke began to crawl upward, pooling against the ceiling before dropping down to fill every square inch of the small chamber.
The air turned to poison. Though Cassius was a vampire himself, the heavy carbon tore at his undead lungs; a human might have endured the smoke longer, but to their species, it was pure agony. Gagging quietly, Cassius ripped open the collar of his heavy overcoat. He stuffed the thick fabric against his mouth and nose to filter the air. With his free hand, he tore at the rest of his inner upper garment, shoving the scraps of the cloth into the hands of the terrified women beside him, gesturing sharply for them to cover their faces.
Through the haze, he watched his trap spring closed. The assistant general stumbled blindly, his boots scuffing the floor as he fled the chamber, desperate to reach the dry, crisp air of the outer vampire city.
The plan had worked perfectly. But victory tasted like ash. As the smoke grew thicker, the female slaves around Cassius lost their grip on the cloth, their bodies limp as they fainted one by one onto the hard ground.
The smoke was a living thing, thick and vast, stinging the back of Cassius’s throat with the bitter taste of burnt ash, like a poison. A cold dread knotted in his stomach. His methods were brutal, perhaps too brutal, and the terrifying realization settled deep into his bones: if he sparked his lighter against the charcoal just one more time, the resulting blaze would devour the very vampires he was trying to tear away from this hell, along with him. It would be a catastrophic, agonizing blunder.
Dropping low into a crouch, he crept from the shadows of his hiding spot. He left the heavy but thin iron anchor where it lay, coiled like a rusted snake around the three female vampires. They were dead to the world, chests barely moving, bound tightly against the metal. Cassius paced the perimeter of the cramped, suffocating chamber, his boots grating against the grit as his eyes swept the floor for the one thing he desperately needed.
Near a heap of jagged, shattered glass, his gaze locked onto the dull gleam of a tin shovel. Even in this twisted, alien subterranean realm, vast logic still applied. To clear the suffocating drifts of the dry charcoal from the vampire city’s grounds, the high-ranking elites undoubtedly relied on slave vampire labor. Yet, even with thousands of disposable hands, clearing this waste raw would take an eternity. There had to be tools.
Navigating the minefield of broken glass, he carefully extricated the shovel, his bare skin narrowly avoiding the razor-sharp edges. The metal felt surprisingly light in his grip- flimsy, cheap tin, but it would have to do.
Time was bleeding away. Before the guards caught the wind of the heat, Cassius dashed back toward the glowing charcoal bed. He plunged his hand into his overcoat pocket, pulled out the heavy, metallic lump of galena ore, and balanced it precariously on the flat of the shovel. Gritting his teeth against the searing waves of heat that were making him sweat cold, his normal human eyes again transformed into the void dark-eyes due to the pain he felt in his vampire body. He thrust the tool directly into the heart of the burning coals.
Minutes stretched into a grueling test of patience and raw muscle. Sweat stung his completely black, smoky vampire eyes, but he didn’t close them until the grey stone finally yielded, collapsing into a shimmering, heavy puddle. He murmured slowly with the might that he was left, "Exactly."
Pure liquid lead.
Moving with deliberate, trembling precision, Cassius tilted the shovel, guiding the molten silver stream directly into the core of the massive lock securing the women’s chain. The metal hissed, filling the lock’s internal mechanisms to the absolute brim. Before the fluid could set, he seized a small iron grip, plunging it into the liquid to serve as a makeshift handle.
With desperate, heavy kicks, he scattered the charcoal while sitting on his haunches, stomping out the remaining embers until the blinding glare died down. Then, breathing heavily in sudden darkness, he sat frozen, his blistered hands clamping the iron grip tight, waiting for the lead to freeze it into place.
The scent of scorching metal hung heavy in the damp air of his makeshift sanctuary.
Cassius sat back against the cold, jagged stone of his hiding spot, tracking the sluggish cooling of the molten lead. Every second bled away like a precious resource he couldn’t afford to waste. If he was ever going to mend this shattered reality and pull the world back to truth, he needed to understand the mechanics of this nightmare.
He stared into the shadows, picking apart his first theory- the Multitask Flaw Hypothesis. He had initially assumed these vaampires operated on some rigid internal clock, a biological rhythm that occasionally failed them. But a new, troubling anomaly shattered that logic. He thought back to Florianthum, the revered soldier. The horde had hung on her every word, obeying blindly even when she omitted the Lord’s holy name.
A chill crawled up Cassius’s spine as the pieces aligned. The shift hadn’t started with a cosmic rhythm; it started with the sting of a syringe that he had gotten from the same needle as her. Ever since that fluid had been forced into his veins, the tunnel-visioned monsters had begun tracking his voice, hanging on his words with the identical submission. He hadn’t invoked the name of Vilucious either, yet they noticed the words coming out of his mouth.
Am I becoming like her? The thought echoed in the silence of his mind. He was terrifyingly certain of the answer: the medication hadn’t just changed him- it had gifted him the exact same hypnotic gravity.
Cassius uncurled his fingers, shifting his gaze to the raw, jagged lacerations cutting across his palm- souvenirs from tearing into the stubborn galena ore. The sight froze the breath in his throat.
Seeping from the torn flesh was a thick, visceral purple fluid.
The world seemed to tilt. His mind raced back to his tense encounter with the assistant general. He had forced open his own wounds before the commander, the blue fire of his flambeau casting dancing, ghostly shadows across the room. He had thought it was a desperate bluff. It wasn’t.
"He was checking the color of my blood," Cassius whispered, his voice a low, raspy fracture in the dark.
The pieces fell into place with a sickening click. The assistant general bled a rich, human crimson- the very reason he had mistaken Cassius for a high-ranking peer rather than a lowly slave. Suddenly, a long-buried fragment of his human memory surfaced, vivid and jarring: the black-eyed guard he had encountered before possessed blood as bright and unnatural as a bruised leaf- green blood!
Cassius looked out across the chaotic encampment, his eyes finding the female vampire slaves. Across their blistered, overworked skin, small weeping cuts oozed a distinct, sluggish green. A profound wave of goosebumps erupted across his arms.
In this wretched, hellish hierarchy, caste wasn’t determined by title, strength, or wealth. It was written in the color of their veins.
Leaving his surprise behind, he noticed the molten lead had completely cooled, so he twisted the iron anchor that he had attached to the top of it as soon as possible.
Clack-
The lock opened!
"DID IT! YAAH WAKE UP WE HAVE TO-" Cassius, screeching his fangs out of happiness, said this aloud while trying to wake the unconscious women vampires while looking towards them.
But something else was written in his fate. A sharp edge of a knife-like thing came into contact with his bare shoulders. The cold edge of that metal felt agonizing, as Cassius knew if he turned to look at it, the sight might be completely horrific.