The bandit fortress no longer resembled a place of habitation or defence—it looked like the ruin of an ancient temple freshly desecrated by divine wrath. A deep crimson hue soaked the battered stones, as if the very walls had been bled dry. One entire side of the Hall had been obliterated, blown outward in jagged chaos. An enormous rupture stretched from the uppermost floor of the fortress down to the shattered throne room—a vertical shaft carved clean through like a lance from the heavens had pierced it.
But the sunlight, so eager to flood destruction with purity, did not land on a throne. There was no throne anymore. Only a gaping hole in the middle of the floor, where the light shone through, casting a radiant circle on the unrecognisable remains of a human body.
BLINK.
A sharp twitch in the void of unconsciousness.
RED.
His first sight through the blur was not light, nor clarity—but colour. Deep red. Not metaphorically—but literally. Blood was everywhere. Slick. Warm. Alive. And dripping.
DROP. DROP. DROP.
The sound was unmistakable—the rhythmic patter of blood falling onto stone echoed like the ticking of a clock counting down the seconds of Ali's existence.
The world around him was smeared in smudges of movement and shadow, but one thing was agonisingly clear—the pain. It hit him with a crushing force.
'I'm missing my right side… All of it…'
The horrifying realisation dawned in the midst of shock. There was no sensation of limb, no weight, no structure to the entire right half of his body. Only pain. A raw, burning agony mixed with the stinging sensation of wind brushing across open, exposed organs. That he was even alive, even aware, was a testament to the monstrous durability of his body—and the regenerative miracle of his healing cells, which fought relentlessly against a wound that would have torn any other man to pieces.
His face—half of it—was gone. The left remained intact, grinding against the cracked stone floor. The other side was little more than bloodied bone and sinew, slathered in dirt and the remnants of what used to be skin. His breath came in staggered pulls, and even his consciousness threatened to flicker again.
ROAAAAAAAAAAAAAR
From high above, a furious roar exploded through the broken halls of the fortress. A thunderous cry of wrath, and primal dread. Abeloth. The fire dragon had felt it—a pulse of danger unlike anything he'd sensed before—and now his massive form burst through the crumbling architecture. Stone collapsed beneath his talons, and shards rained down as his great yellow eyes locked onto the figure of his master, a broken silhouette lying at the bottom of the blood-lit pit.
"Master, can you hear me!?" Abeloth's voice rumbled like magma through the fortress walls, his desperation unmistakable.
Ali, unmoving, didn't answer. He didn't need to.
The dragon's roar sent deep vibrations through the fortress. Blood, which had pooled above, began to seep and splash more aggressively through the cracks and down into the hole, splattering across Ali's already-soaked body.
"Don't block the sun…" came a command—weak, but deliberate—delivered directly through the connection between them. It echoed into Abeloth's mind.
The dragon's head shifted obediently, pulling away from the shaft of light. The sun broke through again, its golden rays pouring directly down into the pit. The sunlight landed squarely on Ali's mutilated frame.
'It's the only good thing right now…' he thought.
With trembling concentration, Ali opened his inventory through sheer willpower. A small glass vial shimmered into existence, glowing faintly red—a healing potion. It hovered in the air, suspended by the Force, and began drifting downward with gentle precision.
"Master, what do you want me to do? I can take you out of there…" Abeloth asked again, his deep voice quieter now, shaded with guilt and panic. His mind raced—if the Dragon Father, the progenitor of flame and the progenitor of his lineage, were to discover that his son had allowed the Herald of Dragons to suffer such a fate… the consequences would be cataclysmic.
'Father would throw me into the Ancient Fire…' Abeloth thought with dread.
'Thankfully, the connection to the Dragon World has weakened. He can't see through my eyes now…' the dragon consoled himself. As if the Dragon lords wouldn't be able to piece everything together once the connection regained it's power or as if they couldn't read Abeloth's memories…
SPLASH.
The potion tilted midair and spilled directly over Ali's broken chest, soaking the wound in glistening red fluid. Instantly, a spark ignited inside his body—his cells responded to the ancient elixir like dry wood to fire.
The regrowth began.
Veins reconnected. Bones knit. Muscles reformed. It was slow—agonisingly so—but undeniable. His body was rebuilding. Not healing from a wound—but reconstructing itself from ruin.
Then—SLIDE.
Ali's eye flickered upward.
He heard something. A deep, slow grind of stone shifting.
What he didn't yet know… was what had been lying just below this fortress for possibly centuries.
Beneath the crumbled debris, buried amidst forgotten relics and the bones of men long dead, two ancient coffins lay undisturbed—until now. One of them, smaller and rough-hewn from aged grey stone, began to shift. Cracks split the surface. Dust spilled from the edges. And slowly… a hand emerged from inside.
It gripped the edge of the coffin with a terrifying sound.
The fingers were long and bone-thin. The skin, if it could still be called that, was stretched parchment-thin over veins and tendon, the colour of decayed ash. Blackened nails protruded like claws from the ends, curved and sharp.
SCREEEEEEECH
The claws scraped down the edge of the coffin as the figure began to rise.
It stood just over five feet tall, its twisted frame a grotesque display of flesh barely clinging to bone. The creature resembled a malformed human skeleton—except for the small, tattered bone-wings protruding from its hunched back, and the monstrous, oversized skull that crowned its deformed body. Its skin was pallid grey, stretched thin over joints that cracked as it moved. And its face—if one could even call it that—was a nightmarish mask of decay: half a nose, shrivelled lips peeled back in a permanent sneer, and glowing red eyes that radiated pure hunger.
Those glowing eyes snapped to Ali the instant he came into focus, the vampire's attention latching onto the lone man lying broken and bloodied in the pool of blood at the base of the crater. The creature took a single, slow inhale—and its withered chest expanded unnaturally.
It could smell the blood.
Rich. Potent. Alive.
A screech tore from its throat, high-pitched and piercing—SCREEEEEEEECH—like iron nails dragged against steel. Its hunger had been dormant for centuries, locked away with it in a cursed slumber, but now… now that primal urge awakened with fury.
Its jaw unhinged grotesquely, stretching open far wider than should have been possible. Rows upon rows of jagged, obsidian teeth gleamed wet in the shadows. Its long tongue writhed between fangs like a worm searching for flesh.
And then, it lunged.
Ali remained still, broken, unmoved. His only functioning eye watched it come, calm and without fear.
The moment the vampire's shrivelled, grey skin brushed the shaft of golden sunlight pouring through the hole above—
SSSSSSSSTT
Smoke rose instantly from its flesh as it hissed and recoiled in agony.
KRAAAAAAAAAGH!
Its scream shook the cracked stone beneath them. The light was scorching it alive, even in such a small dose.
Ali narrowed his eye. 'Sunlight burns them here. Just like the myth…'
His body was healing—slowly but surely. His right side, previously torn to ribbons, was knitting itself together with the help of the high-grade potion. Bones regrew like branches, ligaments stitched themselves back into place, and new muscle swelled across once-empty space. Ali's flesh weaved itself shut over exposed ribs and punctured lung.
The vampire, meanwhile, staggered backward into the edge of the shadows, snarling. Its limited mind began to regain clarity, enough to avoid the deadly sunlight. It lifted its gaze and squinted toward the hole above, looking for a path of escape.
And that's when it saw something worse than sunlight.
ROAAAAAAAAAAR
A guttural thunder rolled down from the sky above as Abeloth's enormous snout appeared in the opening. His yellow eyes glowed like miniature suns, and his deep chest swelled with the promise of annihilation.
One look at the abomination threatening his master, and fire rumbled in his throat.
Ali's voice, though weak, carried weight. "Don't."
Abeloth immediately obeyed, closing his maw and pulling his head back from the light. Still, his presence lingered overhead like a waiting executioner.
Ali, now sitting upright in the blood-filled crater, moved slowly. He didn't flinch as warm blood soaked his body, dripping from his still-mending chest.
His gaze locked on the vampire.
And this time… it was the vampire who recoiled.
The undead monster staggered back—because in Ali's black eyes, it didn't see fear. It didn't see prey.
It saw a predator.
The vampire turned and leapt toward the darkness behind it—but the shadows weren't empty.
A monstrous purple eye opened within them, vertical and cold, gleaming like an ancient gem. It belonged to Shadow, the beast dwelling within Ali's own shadow—his silent, lurking sentinel.
The vampire froze. Trapped.
Caught between a burning sun, a dragon above, a living shadow behind, and a man in front who had just cheated death.
Ali's voice, quiet yet unwavering, cut through the tension.
"Can you speak?"
The vampire's answer was yet another screech—SCREEEEEEEECH—and this time, it tried to summon the blood from beneath Ali to fight.
The liquid trembled.
It began to rise.
Ali's eyes narrowed. 'Not again.'
STAB.
In a flash, a long, white fang burst from the ground—impaling the vampire from below. The sharp tooth skewered it clean through the groin and exited from its skull, lifting the wailing creature off the ground with grotesque precision.
SCREEEEEEEEECH!
The vampire writhed on the fang, trying to dislodge itself, but the tip began to grow—stretching from Shadow's realm and extending upward, inch by inch, until it began pushing the creature toward the shaft of sunlight.
"No escape," Ali muttered as blood slid from his hand like ink in water.
The vampire clawed and howled in agony, but it could do nothing. No magic. No movement.
Its fate was sealed.
The moment its shrivelled arm touched the sunlight—
SZZZZZZZZT—SCORCH.
Flames devoured its entire body in an instant. The ancient undead shrieked one final time as its flesh withered and its bones turned black. The fire consumed it utterly.
By the time it reached the beam's centre, there was nothing left.
Only ash. Fine, black dust.
A real vampire's death.
Final. Absolute.
Ali sat motionless, watching the last particles float away on the warm air.
SIGH
Ali exhaled slowly, a shallow breath filled with tension and calculation. The burning in his wrist intensified once again, searing against his skin like hot iron pressed directly onto flesh. He didn't flinch—not outwardly—but he recognised the sensation intimately.
'It's coming from the gold coffin…' he thought, his sharp black eyes narrowing as they settled on the ornate, half-buried tomb now revealed beneath the collapsed stone. Despite the debris, the gold still shimmered under the distant sunbeam that managed to cut through the ruined ceiling above.
'It must be a stronger vampire… One far more ancient than the creature that crawled from the smaller sarcophagus…'
Ali's entire body remained still, except for his eyes—watchful, alert, and calculating every second. His extraordinary senses picked up the subtlest of sounds—a faint shifting of stone, the tremble of air displaced by something inside that golden casket. Whatever was within was already awake. Awake… and listening.
'I can hear the breath it doesn't take, the heartbeat it doesn't have… and I can smell it. That scent. The scent of death. Not rot. Not decay. Death. The kind that only killers like me understand…'
Ali's eyes locked onto the coffin just as the heavy, gilded stone slab began to levitate unnaturally, slowly rising from its resting place. Not by gears, not by hidden mechanisms—no. This movement was deliberate, supernatural. Magic.
The coffin's cover floated silently several feet into the air before tilting, rotating, and crashing heavily onto the rubble with a thunderous BOOM, sending clouds of dust rolling through the chamber.
Ali didn't flinch.
'It must be starved… likely centuries without blood. And I'm lying here in the sun… If I want to, I can collapse this entire structure and let sunlight flood every inch of this crypt. Burn it alive right where it floats. But…' his fingers twitched slightly. 'I'm not running. I'll see what I'm dealing with first.'
With a single thought, he mentally commanded Shadow to withdraw—his loyal dragon slithering back into the darkness, vanishing like a spectre. The beast's terrifying aura disappeared completely, replaced by silence and waiting.
Abeloth, his fire dragon, remained overhead. The scorching heat from the dragon's breath warmed the crater below like a furnace. He was ready to turn the entire hole into a molten pit at Ali's command.
And then it rose.
From the depths of the golden sarcophagus, a second vampire emerged—floating, regal, and terrifying in its form.
It levitated effortlessly above the coffin, suspended in the air like an ethereal wraith. Roughly the same height as Ali, its form was much more developed than the first vampire. While it shared the same ashen-grey skin, stretched thin over sinew and bone, this one had a disturbingly humanoid shape—more refined. Feminine.
Its bony chest swelled with a semblance of preserved anatomy—its figure unmistakably female, from her long limbs to the slim contours of her waist and hips. She was naked, her corpse-pale body adorned only by a thick golden necklace with a deep crimson gemstone embedded at its centre, resting on her collarbone like a cursed artifact.
Her wings stretched wide—massive, leathery, and ancient. Every beat of them stirred the air, releasing a gust that fluttered the edges of Ali's hair. They were not for flight alone, he knew. These were wings of intimidation—displaying her age, power, and authority.
But it was her eyes that truly unsettled the moment.
Blood-red irises, like polished rubies, stared directly at Ali. Inside them, curved shapes formed—a crescent moon within each pupil, sharp and unnatural. Eyes meant to hypnotise, to paralyse prey with a glance. But when those eyes met Ali's…
She faltered.
Her mouth, half open in the anticipation of domination, slowly closed.
'This human…' she thought. 'He does not possess human eyes.'
Indeed, Ali's void-black irises didn't merely reflect darkness—they were darkness. There was no regular soul behind those eyes, no fear. His gaze swallowed hers whole, pressing down like a predator on a lesser beast. She had only seen eyes like that once before—long ago, when the vampire elders themselves spoke to her.
'Even they… may not match what I see in him…'
She floated downward now, until her bare feet touched the blood-washed stone. Her claws clicked lightly as she walked to the boundary of light and shadow. There she hesitated, standing right at the edge of the sunbeam streaming through the broken ceiling above.
Her hands trembled.
Ali noticed it.
A small twitch in her long, bony fingers.
'She's starving…' he thought. 'The thirst is overwhelming her. And all this blood—' he glanced around at the red pools still trickling from the upper floor and down into the crater. 'It's driving her mad. She can smell it. She can hear it moving.'
The blood fell around him like soft rain, drop by drop, feeding her madness.
But she didn't step into the light.
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