(I) Biomancy

-Prismatic Order Intelligence Report, the Yellowstone Republic8 (I)

Biomancy

Shiv’s impromptu torch bounced off somewhere unseen after a lesser vampire ran into it. All he could hear were the elves shouting and the monsters hissing and shrieking. The fact that he could still hear helped a lot, however, as it allowed him to tell if he was about to drain a vampire or one of the Umbrals.

And as far as he could tell, the Umbrals were going to need a lot of help to survive this.

“I gave you a choice, Nomos. I showed you such mercy. But I suppose I should have expected a lack of gratitude from an . Your kind has always overvalued their worth—existing only because the Composer took pity on you.” The higher vampire tutted as a frozen spear flashed in the dark. Nomos let out a cry of pure rage, and rows of jagged ice exploded up from the ground, spearing through a few lesser vampires as they rushed toward the high vampire. But the Bloodspawn just laughed, and the last thing Shiv saw before the glow of magic faded was the red-eyed man backhanding the ice-shards apart with contemptuous ease.

Shiv could only imagine fighting him. But first, he went after the high vampire and started draining them.

The high vampire cried out in alarm. “Agh! What—what are you attacking me with, Umbral? Sapping my vitality? Have you been speaking to the dagger? Is that it? Has it been whispering its secrets to you?!”

Shiv drew in the vampire’s vitality, and there was a to it, like the flame burned differently somehow. But there was still a flame there. It just wasn’t very human. There was something else on top of the warmth. The Deathless put the thought out of his mind briefly as he remembered he still had his knife equipped.

As he drained, he stabbed, and, to his pleasure, felt a jolt of resistance as the blade struck bone. Once more, the kitchen knife was damaged, but Shiv pulled it down along the high vampire’s flesh with reckless delight. A bestial roar sounded from the high vampire in response.

“Enough!” The cavern came aglow in hues of dark red as the vampire’s eyes went ablaze with mana. A spell pattern formed from what looked like the vampire’s own blood. As Shiv carved upward with his kitchen knife, he felt the blade halt and almost break as the vampire’s skin turned impossibly hard. Bathed by the high vampire’s unholy mana, Shiv saw the Umbrals struggling against the lesser vampires—but more than holding their own. The elves were stronger than the monsters. Their weapons reaped death with almost every stroke, enchantments and skills working in tandem to hold the tide against superior numbers. Yet, Shiv was right about his theory earlier. Small cuts bled on their faces, and they winced as they were hit, their armor serving as their main line of defense against harm.

Shiv judged most of the Umbral elves to mostly be about Initiate-Tier based on their capabilities. Low Initiate for Toughness—maybe not even that. The only one who truly stood out was Nomos. She moved almost too fast for Shiv to track, and she created constructs of ice with every thrust of her spear. She wasn’t nearly as impressive as Adam Arrow, so that made her very Low Adept, perhaps. Or High Initiate. Shiv leaned toward the latter.

This didn’t bode well, as the high vampire they were fighting sneered and unleashed his spell. A wave of crimson washed over the Umbrals. Everyone other than Nomos twitched like they were having a seizure. Blood poured out from their orifices as they cried out and struggled to remain standing. The lesser vampires swarmed them, tackling several off their feet.

“No!” Nomos screamed. In the fading glow of the vampire’s magic, Shiv saw that she was bleeding too. Then, the Deathless resurrected, and he was back in the fight. And his hand came to rest right on the high vampire’s back.

“Hey, Bloodspawn. I’m back again,” Shiv whispered.

The high vampire froze. “Wh—”

Once more, the fact that most Pathbearers didn’t get any heavier worked in Shiv’s favor. He wasn’t nearly as strong as the high vampire, but he could still casually pick the monster off the ground and drop him on his head in a brutal suplex. The explosiveness of the throw caught the high vampire off guard. The bloodsucking fiend let out an uncharacteristic scream of alarm as Shiv bounced their head off the ground.

The Deathless heard stones break—but guessed that he probably did no damage to the high vampire. So he kept going—grabbed the high vampire by his legs and threw him as hard as he could in a random direction. Another loud cry sounded from the vampire as they went flying. Shiv doubted that was going to keep the Bloodspawn stunned for long, though.

“Nomos! I need light!” Shiv called.

The elf responded by creating a massive ice crystal above her. Hanging overhead like some kind of ornate chandelier, the crystal lit the cavern with its magic. A second later, it began pelting the space around Nomos in a hail of sharp icicles. The lesser vampires—too focused on tearing into the other elves—were shredded. Interestingly, the other elves were never struck—the ice magic melting before it hit them. Very fine control on the part of Nomos. Shiv strode into the hail with reckless abandon, hissing in discomfort as the ice magic left shallow cuts on his skin but failed to go any deeper.

He got behind a lesser vampire that was trying to bite through the shortbow elf’s left arm—Utti, he remembered she was called. As she screamed in pain instead of stabbing the vampire with her daggers like a normal Pathbearer, Shiv drove his fist through the lesser vampire’s chest from behind. The monster went from gnashing on the elf’s arm to choking on its own blood in an instant. Utti’s eyes went wide. At the end of Shiv’s fist was a still-pulsing lesser vampire heart. It pumped once more before he took a step back—ensuring the elf wouldn't be infected—and clenched his fist, turning the organ to bloody pulp.

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The lesser vampire sagged down on Shiv’s arm. But he wasn’t done. He drove his other fist into the same wound and pulled in two directions. It took a substantial amount of his strength, but—with a guttural cry—he ripped the vampire in half, sending both halves bouncing in opposite directions.

There he stood, his breaths coming fast, billowing steam in the rapidly cooling cavern. His body was covered in the black blood of the beast he had just slain, and Utti looked up at him, her face a mask of disbelief, her eyes wide. “C-Composer.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Shiv huffed. Just then, another lesser vampire slammed down on him from behind and clamped its fangs around most of his head. Shiv cursed—mostly from surprise. And then the vampire cried out as its teeth broke apart against his skull. “Felling—ruined my moment!” He reached up, seized it by the back of the neck, and slammed it down on the ground next to Utti. The Umbral’s jaw dropped wider as Shiv drove his right heel through the monster’s back, crushing its heart underfoot in an instant.

“Come on,” he said, extending his hand. Utti hesitated for a moment, then reached out to accept his help.

Then, without any warning at all, she exploded into a puff of blood, coating the black ichor covering his body already with a layer of red. Shiv blinked. Nomos cried out Utti’s name with a despairing howl. Shiv instinctively turned, and at the very edge of his sight, bathed in a crimson glow, was the high vampire.

The red-eyed bloodsucker approached him with a look that was somewhere between disbelief and absolute hatred. “You… Iyou.” Shiv watched as patterns of red wove across the vampire’s arm, covering it in a magical glow. Slowly, his shape began to change. The limb mutated, extending into the clawed digits Shiv saw in the bestiary. Ah. Finally. The high vampire was assuming his “combat form.”

Shiv strode forward, determined to find out just how vicious a high vampire was. “No, you didn’t.”

“I did!” the vampire almost screamed.

The Deathless did his best to hide the grin on his face. Broken Moon, he was going to screw with this thing’s mind as much as he could. He didn’t know if he was ever going to get that chance again. “If you did, how would I still be here?”

“I you!”

“You missed,” Shiv retorted, hiding his laughter with a cough.

The high vampire looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. “You !”

“You parasite,” Shiv spat back, his own dark anger rising to meet the high vampire. “You murdered someone I just tried to help. I’m going to pull your heart out for that. I’m going to make you watch me drive my kitchen knife through the pumping organ. It’ll be the last thing you see.”

The vampire charged Shiv with a deafening roar. The bloodsucker didn’t use magic on Shiv this time—which was a disappointment. Shiv wanted to die a few more times to the magic to see if he could get some kind of skill to resist it. The high vampire exploded off the ground. The air detonated in a shockwave at the vampire’s back. A few hours ago, this might have left Shiv deafened and broken. Now, it was merely like a particularly heavy gust of wind.

The Deathless dove forward just as he lost track of the vampire’s movements. It was an act done on pure instinct. And it might have saved his life. A claw whistled through the place where Shiv once stood. The Deathless turned to tackle the vampire—perhaps hold them in place for Nomos or someone to take the Bloodspawn’s head—but he underestimated the vampire’s Reflexes.

The high vampire hit him like a tidal wave. Shiv grunted as he was launched across the cave and spiked into a wall. Stone burst behind him. One of his ribs didn’t feel like it was in the right place anymore. Then the high vampire was on him again. The Bloodsucker drove its clawed hand into Shiv’s chest, and the bladed digits punched deep.

But not deep enough.

They sank through the initial layer of flesh but found themselves stuck against bone and muscle. Then Shiv caught the high vampire’s arm and tried to push back.

“What even are you?” the high vampire complained. “You’re barely faster than a Pathless slave! Why is your Toughness so high?”

Shiv growled as he tried to push the high vampire’s hand away. To no avail. The monster was stronger than him by far. He really needed more Physicality. The Deathless threw a heavy kick between the high vampire’s legs, and he felt his foot crack against something almost as hard as metal. “I can ask you the same question,” Shiv croaked.

A look of absolute indignation came over the vampire, and he drove his clawed hand as hard as he could into Shiv with a roar. The Deathless coughed blood as he finally felt his sternum break apart, but he twisted to his side and let the clawed hand tear out from him. He then jammed his kitchen knife under the vampire's armpit and cut all the way up. The knife sawed through several dense bands of tissue before reaching the severely damaged condition again. The high vampire’s arm promptly dropped limp as if he were a deboned chicken.

Shiv spat blood in the vampire’s face and laughed. “Look at that: You’re pretty fragile, after all.”

The high vampire blinked in disbelief before he snarled and flicked at Shiv with his still-working hand. A crimson spell flashed into shape, and once again, the Deathless felt the insides of his body swell and burst. There was nothing he could do to stop this death. It was like his biology was compelled to revolt against him. A spray of red covered the high vampire, and he tasted Shiv’s misted blood on his tongue. The monster licked his lips and shook his head. “I don’t understand. He's just human…” Whatever else he was trying to say died off in a hiss of deeper pain as Shiv started draining the vampire again. “What… How… Where?”

Toughness > 40

Physicality > 35

Reflexes > 28

Grappling Proficiency > 19

Parry > 3

Before he could notice the forming shadow sapping his vitality, a massive spearhead of ice burst through his chest, and the high vampire barely twisted left at the last moment and spared his heart from getting skewered. A pale, blue hue of mana clashed against the vampire’s red. Nomos stood behind her spear, tears running clear trails through the blood streaks she had wept earlier. The other elves lay convulsing amongst a mess of lesser vampire bodies. “You will pay for the murder of my—”

“Oh, be quiet, blood bag,” the high vampire growled. He conjured a spell pattern with his still-functional hand, and Nomos cried out in agony. Blood gushed out from her eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. Her bones crackled. Her flesh began to warp. Shiv looked on in fascination and horror as he continued draining the high vampire. Nomos was handling the vampire’s magic far better than he was. Was it because she had some kind of resistance skill? Or maybe it was her Physicality. The high vampire’s magic completely bypassed Shiv’s Toughness.

But… that made sense on a certain level. The vampire’s magic was kind of like Biomancy—it twisted the flesh and blood inside someone and used it against them. How could Shiv his own body? It didn’t make sense. No. He needed something to contend with the magic. And he was willing to die as many times as he could to get that skill.

As Nomos fell to a single knee, the high vampire contemptuously gripped her spear by the blade with two fingers. While this was happening, he channeled blood magic through himself, healing the wounds that had been dealt to his body. Yet, his regeneration was slow and incomplete. The high vampire shook his head as blood spilled out from his mouth. “How are you doing this? How are you affecting my vitality? Answer me!”

Nomos’s eyes were rolling up into her skull as she hemorrhaged. But still, she clung to life and consciousness, if only barely, refusing to let go of her spear and just drop. Instead of answering, she spat at the high vampire, and he let out a snarl and prepared to obliterate her.

Then, Shiv resurrected beside him—his shadowy cocoon hidden by the surrounding darkness. The high vampire’s eyes widened in surprise as the Deathless grabbed him by the back of the neck, tripped his leg, and drove him headfirst onto Nomos’s spear. “Missed me again, parasite.”

The high vampire let out a shout of pain as the spear passed deep into his left eye.