The echoing roar of the shotgun blast faded into the crisp desert night, leaving only the sound of the wind rustling through the palm fronds. The purebred vampire was dead. The threat to the Petrivna Tribe had been systematically neutralized, and the oasis was finally safe.
I stood over the steaming, headless torso. My primary Death Chant Shotgun… Means of Communication… carried a massive, reinforced frame and a heavy, permanently welded anti-heal bayonet that took up an immense amount of physical and structural space within my spatial array. To optimize my loadout, I chose not to store it digitally. Instead, I slung the five-kilogram firearm over my shoulder, securing it tightly into the leather harness strapped across my back.
I looked down at the severed, blistered head resting in the sand. My internal analysis calculated its mass at exactly 4 kg. With my firearms currently removed from the queue, my inventory ring's capacity was sitting at 20 kg out of 25 kg.
I extended my index finger, channeling a precise pulse of mana toward the severed target. A localized distortion field enveloped the skull, smoothly sucking it into the spatial void. The ledger immediately updated:
[Inventory Load Capacity: 24 kg / 25 kg… Optimization Complete]
[Don't Ask? 6kg]
[Last Words (2x) 10kg]
[Vampire Head 4kg]
[Purse 4kg]
I was completely loaded, my physical signature perfectly optimized for the journey back to Sisiphon City to claim the 18-gold bounty from Chief Roman and the Bureau.
But before the remaining torso could dissolve entirely into ash, my jade-green left eye locked onto the rich, dark crimson fluid pooling from the neck wound onto the white sand. It was the concentrated, high-tier blood of a purebred lineage. Leaving it to evaporate into the desert wastes was a severe waste of biological resources.
Moving with a fluid, predatory grace, I dropped to my knees beside the corpse. I pulled back my blood mask, exposed my elongated, razor-sharp fangs, and bit deeply into the severed vessels, aggressively drinking down the volatile essence.
The moment the fluid hit my throat, my sensory receptors flared with a sharp spark of revulsion. The taste was absolutely awful… bitter, metallic, and heavy with the suffocating spiritual residue of the hundreds of innocent elven scouts and Luminous Knights he had ruthlessly slaughtered to fuel his power. The phantom screams of his victims echoed faintly in my mind as I forced the fluid down, my Phase 5 vampiric core violently processing and absorbing the raw essence to fuel my own cellular vitality.
I didn't stop until I had completely drained the vampire's body dry, leaving nothing but a hollow, crumbling husk of gray ash that scattered harmlessly into the midnight wind.
[Drain Activated Extraction Completed consumed four liters of blood]
I wiped a stray drop of crimson from my lip and snapped my hardened blood mask back into its rigid, flawless position. My wings flared once behind me, shaking off the lingering dust of the engagement, before folding tightly and invisibly against my spine. The hunt was finished. The evidence was secured. It was time to return to the capital and rewrite the narrative.
I snapped my massive crimson blood wings wide, generating a powerful kinetic backdraft that kicked up a wall of fine sand behind me. With a single, explosive upward surge, I launched myself into the midnight sky, leaving the quiet, liberated oasis of the Petrivna Tribe far below. I leveled my 5'5" frame against the rushing wind, setting a maximum-velocity trajectory back toward Caria.
As I cut through the freezing upper atmosphere, my mind drifted toward the logistical safety of the elves. The analytical part of my brain had expected a messy, bureaucratic nightmare when moving an entire displaced demi-human tribe into a human capital. But the memory of Nikolai's immediate compliance… his stubborn, unyielding decision to grant them free, secure lodging at the Sand-Glass Inn… brought a rare, gentle warmth to my chest.
A quiet, deadpan thought crossed my mind.
"I didn't know Elicia's former party members possessed such a strong, protective moral baseline." In a world governed by coin and political leveraging, Nikolai was a rare, reliable variable.
And then there was the Archivist. The High Sage who sat at the apex of the Central Library's intelligence web. He was a complex, multi-layered enigma… capable of displaying calculating kindness when it aligned with the city's structural preservation, yet thoroughly cold-blooded when executing the ruthless political maneuvers necessary to keep Sisiphon from collapsing. He would receive Nikolai's report, and he would handle the data with clinical perfection.
I slowed my aerial pacing slightly, tilting my head back to look at the endless, glittering tapestry of stars stretching across the dark midnight sky.
In the quiet of the high altitude, the dying words of the purebred vampire echoed clearly in my memory.
"You will always be a monster to them... a parasite... a blood-sucking demon to the very humans you serve..."
The monster had truly believed that operating as a rogue entity while defending human borders was a mathematical paradox. He thought the Capital Knights Bureau and the high orders would inevitably turn their vanguards on me the moment my tactical utility expired. He thought I was choosing to be a dog in a cage.
I shook my head, my jade-green left eye flashing with a cold, unyielding certainty behind the narrow slit of my blood mask.
The vampire's metrics were entirely warped. I wasn't serving the capital, and I wasn't pleading for their acceptance. I was rewriting the ledger on my own terms. Branded as a demon or hailed as a savior, it didn't alter my operational philosophy. My weapons… Means of Communication, Don't Ask?, and Last Words… would do the talking, and my family would remain safe. Let the world call me whatever helped them sleep at night.
With a sharp tilt of my wings, I dove back down into the lower cloud banks, accelerating toward the distant, glowing spires of the capital to deliver my four-kilogram prize.
The freezing wind of the high upper atmosphere roared against the narrow slit of my hardened blood mask as I maintained a high-velocity aerial trajectory back toward Caria. My massive crimson blood wings beat in a flawless, mechanical rhythm, cutting through the low-hanging cloud banks.
Then, my passive sensory arrays picked up a slight biological anomaly.
FLAP. FLAP.
Two… no, three distinct silhouettes emerged from the mist, matching my exact flying speed and positioning themselves directly alongside my flanks. I skewed my jade-green left eye to the side, initially registering them as a standard flock of desert crows migrating through the midnight air.
But as they drew closer, my analytical processing instantly rejected that hypothesis.
They flew with an unnatural, mathematically precise stability that no living bird could replicate. Their feathers were an eerie, uniform shade of obsidian black and dark ash gray, entirely unaffected by the brutal wind resistance. And most tellingly, a small, polished crystalline matrix was perfectly affixed to the center of each bird's forehead, humming with a subtle, deeply familiar vibration of compressed dark magic.
They weren't living creatures. They were advanced, mana-constructed reconnaissance drones.
A sharp spark of memory rippled through my mind, tracing back to the chaotic battlefields of Beelzebub. I had seen these exact constructs before, deployed to map out terrain and systematically dismantle enemy ambushes.
Elias.
My older brother… the Shadow Walker, the elite operative who mastered the three distinct applications of human dark magic. If his signature Shadow Crows were currently tracking my flight path, it meant his real-time surveillance link was active. Through the crystals on their foreheads, his calculating eyes were looking directly at my 5'5" frame, my exposed tactical bandolier of mustard gas, and the massive, unmistakable crimson blood wings extending from my spine. He was actively logging my biological data into his intelligence ledger.
Before I could even formulate a tactical response to his surveillance, a deafening, high-caliber crack shattered the midnight air from a distant, elevated ridge line below.
BANG!
A hyper-dense, dark magic bullet… infused with the exact spatial-piercing properties of a high-tier Death Chant firearm.. ripped through the sky with absolute velocity, bypassing my passive wind barriers entirely.
SPLAT!
The heavy ordnance pierced straight through the upper membrane of my left blood wing. A sharp, localized burst of pain flared along my spine as the projectile tore a clean hole through the crimson tissue, scattering droplets of my volatile fluid into the wind. The sudden structural damage completely disrupted my aerodynamic stability, causing my aerial trajectory to violently buckle as I began to plummet out of the clouds.