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Chapter 77: The Bloody Massacre I
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The trio left the diner swiftly, a silent agreement passing between them.
The authorities would come, questions would be asked, and none of them had time for bureaucratic folklore.
Adam's truck ate up the darkening Transylvanian roads, its powerful engine sticking out in the vast, oppressive silence of the Carpathian foothills.
Inside the spacious, tech-filled cabin, the atmosphere was tense. Blade broke the quiet, his voice cutting through the silence.
"How did you find him? And why here? Dracula's Castle?" He sounded skeptical. "Dracula's not an idiot. He wouldn't hole up in a tourist postcard. Not with hunters like me in the wild."
Eric Brooks, known as Blade, had earned his suspicion. His story was written in blood and silver.
Born to a woman bitten by a vampire during childbirth, he was a unique hybrid; a Dhampir.
He possessed a vampire's strengths; enhanced speed, senses, and durability; but none of their weaknesses to sunlight, garlic, or holy symbols.
His mother died in childbirth, blamed on him, and he was raised by the vampire hunter Abraham Whistler, who forged his rage and unique biology into the ultimate weapon: the Daywalker.
Blade's war wasn't ideological; it was existential, personal, and brutally simple.
He hunted the things that had cursed him from the womb, and at the top of that list sat the progenitor, the archetype, the king: Dracula.
For Blade, Dracula was the source of the infection, the original sin of vampirism.
Taking him down was the closest thing to a holy grail his grim profession offered.
Adam kept his eyes on the winding road, the headlights cutting a path through the ancient gloom.
"Used a favor. Called in a psychic. The location is solid. I've had eyes on it; drones, satellites, seismic sensors; for a week. He's there. Can't or won't move. Maybe he's… indisposed."
Blade grunted. That sounded reasonable. He'd been suspicious, but the lure of a confirmed Dracula location was a siren song he couldn't ignore.
His research on 'Adam Cypher' had painted a picture of a chaotic, powerful mutant, someone who danced on the edge of the world's darker truths.
The presence of Tony Stark, a man whose reputation for delivering on impossible promises was global, added a layer of credibility.
And the encounter with Mephisto... That had sealed it. Only someone truly, profoundly entangled in the supernatural deep end attracted that kind of attention.
His next question was pragmatic, born of a life spent understanding the motives of monsters.
"You hunting him for power? To become one? Think turning will give you an edge against your hellish pen pal?"
His tone was flat, devoid of judgment, merely assessing a potential future threat.
Adam's eyebrow arched. He didn't deny the aesthetic appeal. "I've always liked the vampire vibe, you know? Broody. Edgy."
"My childish mind used to have this whole scene: me in a castle, wearing a black and red three-piece suit, legs crossed, sitting on a throne of skulls. Looked so fucking cool in my head."
"The edgy child is clearly still in the driver's seat," Tony interjected from the passenger seat, his arms crossed. "And you still want the throne."
Adam laughed, a bright, unguarded sound. "Exactly!" He glanced at Blade in the rearview mirror.
The Daywalker's expression had turned to stone. The casual admission was a trigger.
To Blade, wanting to be a vampire wasn't a dark fantasy; it was a suicidal, sociopathic desire to become the very plague he'd dedicated his life to eradicating.
His hand drifted unconsciously to the stake at his belt.
"You turn," Blade stated, his voice a low, deadly promise that filled the cabin, "And I stake you. No conversation. No consequences. You just end."
[Blade's "no consequences" line is so cold! He doesn't play!]
[Adam just casually admitting to vampire fantasies in front of the vampire boogeyman!]
[The tension in this truck is thicker than the Transylvanian fog.]
[It's worse. The tension in this truck is thicker than my ass.]
[Goddamn, you must be thick.]
[But Adam becoming a vampire, eh? I bet he wants to become like Morbius.]
[True, he wouldn't want all the shitty baggage that comes with being a vampire.]
[I am Morbius!!] [+1] [+1] [+1] [Classic.]
Adam shrugged, utterly unfazed by the death threat. "Don't be so pessimistic."
"I don't want to be some bargain-bin bloodsucker who can't enjoy a fucking burrito without hurling, or who bursts into flames from a sunbeam. Sounds like a shit deal."
He tapped his temple. "So, I've been studying. Biology, mostly. This past week has been… enlightening. I think I can improve and do better. Something like a daywalker sounds more to my muse."
Blade took a deep, controlled breath, the leather of his trench coat creaking.
He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes behind his shades.
"When your little science project fails, and the thirst takes you," He said, his voice final, "I'll be there to stake the evil out of you." He dismissed the conversation, retreating into his own grim focus.
Even Tony looked at Adam sideways. Studied biology for a week? Tony Stark, who had miniaturized an arc reactor in a cave, knew the sheer, mountain-sized complexity of the biological field.
He assumed even for him, it would take a long while to master biology, let alone something like vampire bullshit.
A week, even with Adam's genius, sounded ludicrously optimistic. A month of non-stop work with a full lab might yield a hypothesis.
Adam was talking about performing supernatural gene-editing on the fly.
[Adam thinks he can out-engineer VAMPIRISM in a WEEK? Can he do that?]
[Tony's side-eye says it all. That's "build a time machine in your garage" levels of arrogance.]
[I just noticed that narcissism is having an orgy in that truck.]
[Now that you pointed it out, we do have three of the most aloof, arrogant, and narcissistic individuals in the same truck.]
[What could go wrong.]
Adam just smiled, undeterred. He began to hum, then softly sing a lilting, melancholic Romanian folk song he'd picked up from the diner's jukebox.
He seemed to be having the time of his life, a tourist on a scenic drive towards an apocalypse.
Outside, the sun finally surrendered, plunging the forested mountains into an absolute, consuming darkness.
The truck's headlights were the only defiance against the night, carving a tunnel of light through the ancient, watchful pines. The road grew narrower, more neglected.
Then, the atmosphere changed.
It wasn't a sound. It was still pure silence. It was a chill in the air, a flicker in the woods.
The damp chill of the mountain air deepened into a penetrating cold that seemed to leach the warmth from the truck's cabin.
Blade's eyes snapped open. He didn't need to look. His Dhampir senses, far beyond human, stretched into the night. "Filth," He growled, the word dripping with visceral disgust. "A lot of it. Everywhere."
Adam's singing stopped. His cybernetic eye whirred, its enhanced optics and thermal overlay painting the world outside in data.
The forest, which had been a blanket of cool blues and greens, was now speckled with sudden, clustering points of low, predatory body heat.
As expected, vampires have significantly lower body temperature compared to the average human.
Simple thermal imaging is effective for spotting them among humans, but in the woods, it's a whole different story.
But that doesn't mean thermal imaging is useless. It can still map things out, and with Alice filtering all the information, it's possible to distinguish vampires from inanimate objects.
Dozens of them. Moving with silent, coordinated purpose.
He was about to comment when he saw it; two pinpricks of reflected light by the roadside, up ahead. Not animal eyes. These held a malevolent, intelligent gleam.
The attack was instantaneous. One of the low heat signatures detached from the tree line and moved.
It was a blur of pallid flesh and tattered, anachronistic clothing; a peasant's shirt gone to rot, leather breaches stained black with old blood.
The face was gaunt, lips peeled back from elongated canines that weren't elegant fangs, but dirty, yellowed bone spikes.
Its eyes burned with a feral, hungry red. This was no romantic noble of the night; this was a hungry, ground-level predator, a foot soldier of the undead.
It cleared twenty meters in a blur, leaping for the truck's windshield, claws extended to shred metal and glass.
Adam's hand didn't move to the wheel. He didn't flinch.
From the starless sky above, a comet fell.
It was a sleek, silver-and-gold streak of modern warfare. It struck the leaping vampire in mid-air with the force of a tactical missile.
There was a wet, explosive THWUMP as almost a ton of armored force met undead flesh at terminal velocity.
The vampire was driven into the road like a nail, pulverized into a crater of gore and shattered asphalt.
The suit; the Mark II, polished to a mirror shine; landed in a classic three-point stance amidst the wreckage, repulsors glowing in its palms.
It stood up, turning to face the truck, its faceplate retracting to reveal no one within.
"Called for a little air support," Tony, by their side, would say. "JARVIS had the suit on standby orbital drop. Seemed appropriate."
Adam had already brought the truck to a halt, the tires crunching on gravel.
Blade was out of the truck before it fully stopped, landing in a crouch, his trench coat flaring.
He held a sword in one hand, a stake in the other, his senses scanning the encircling dark.
"Don't celebrate yet, Stark," Blade's voice was taut. "He wasn't alone. That was the greeting party."
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