Chapter 3-80: A Graves Matter

The vylstrigoi was cutting across open fields, and we had to detour around the streets to follow, where Sleipner could have just Ward-rode to follow, if need be. It was fine, we weren’t in a hurry. Easy enough to pick it up on the far side.

“There’s a high school and elementary school close by,” he noticed, eyes agleam with a predator’s instincts.

“You getting any intrusion vibes?” I asked in return. If he sped up, I’d lose the track and have to reacquire.

He coasted Bone Marrow to a halt, and closed his eyes for a moment. I could feel a bloody, hungry presence swell around me, like a lord looking for challengers to his domain.

His eyes were half-red when he opened them. “The elementary school,” he growled, and stomped on the gas.

---

We weren’t far away as the crow flies, but the roads didn’t have a direct connection, and we had to go out and swing back in, coming in on the far side of the school and cruising down the road as we circled it, looking for the disease trail.

“Hup!” My fist closed, and he braked abruptly. I looked across the street, and up to the fence around the schoolyard.

“He’s on the roof or in the bushes,” The Mick said, parking his car. I handed him his Sword, and he took it without looking back, as we both got out of Bone Marrow.

“Give me a boost over the fence, and go hunting. I’ll easily half-kill him if I get a shot at him.” I looked around. “Or drive him towards one of the sewer entrances.”

“Already marked them. You want me to follow him if he goes under?”

“That would be best.” In response, he tossed me to the keys to his car. I put them away, and tossed him a closed glass vial in return. “That’s been Energized by Master Fred’s Wrath. Holy water. I imagine you will get his attention if you hit him with it.”

His smile was ferocious as we sprinted towards the fence. I could tell he was surprised at my speed, while his own pace was light and effortless. He just held out a hand, I put a foot in it, and he heaved me over the fence as if I weighed nothing. I grabbed the top, swung over, and hit the ground on the far side at literally the same time he did.

Without slowing down, he drew his Katana.

I was not expecting to see a Katana as white as milk, with the cutting edge the same hue as fresh, wet blood. I had already Identified it when it was in its scabbard; it was a Ki-bound Blood-Enmity Blooding Weapon, which meant an absolute terror to vampires and anything related to them... or bloodsuckers in general. Blooding meant wounds it inflicted could not be healed by magical means until Renewal, a frightening thought to a vampire. Add in Vivic, and any vampire he killed would simply die on the spot.

It was a Drei-Slot Weapon, which in this place was pretty damn good.

It was also Ki-bound, which definitely raised a flag as I watched him go right up the brick side of the school, and get on the roof, leisurely ignoring physics and gravity with a combination of vampiric wall-crawling and lightfoot.

Ki-Bound could not be found on literally any smith’s website anywhere. Nobody outside the game knew that Enhancement, as it would have been adapted from Soul-Bound, and Soul Magic wasn’t used here...

My Detect range was only sixty feet, so I could only parallel the track of the vylstrigoi, and not very quickly at that. That said, if it was trying to hide from me, there were going to be problems for it. I hadn’t been maxing out Perception because I was dumb, after all.

It had gone up on the roof, and I ran along the side of the school, Clavus whispering out, totally ignoring the heads inside turning my way as I circled around it, The Mick moving much faster and soundlessly up above...

“HAH!”

There was a shriek and a distant crinkle of glass, I saw foul steam arising on the roof halfway along the building, and something leapt fast and furiously off the roof, hit the ground, and bounded away, screeching.

I didn’t have to track the disease now, and just sprinted ahead. It was faster than I was, which was totally annoying, but it stayed in the open for a distance of fifty yards, which gave me time to shoot.

It wasn’t the full Monte, because it didn’t need to be, as the thing was going to heal the damage away, anyway. That said, 5d8+27 +5d6 slammed into it, burning hard and blasting its white shirt and dark slacks to flaming ash as the impact sent it sprawling and tumbling towards the sewer access it was heading for. It fairly leapt forty feet to the rusting steel cover, tore it off with patently inhuman strength, and dove down into the hole, mindless of the drop, before I could take another shot.

The Mick leapt gracefully off the roof behind it, landing weightlessly, and was on its tail, not moving too fast to catch it, and certainly drawing its attention with his bloody sword. He spared only a glance for me when he arrived at the sewer hole, cars in each direction braking abruptly as he ran into the road.

With a ripple and a flutter, he blew apart into a whole flock of white-furred bats, and poured down the sewer hole after the vylstrigoi.

I turned around to the window of the classroom behind me, where a young teacher and a room full of young kids were staring at me, the former in shock, the latter in awe.

I put my pinkie to my lips and thumb to my ear, and Messaged her, That was the undead creature infecting the city with plague. It has seeded the grounds of the school. Lock down the school, let nobody out, and call the closest Aruan Temple to clear the grounds so you can exit and they can purify the place. Do you understand this?

If she was a little shocked that I was speaking to her, she still nodded. I repeated the question, and she finally /replied, Yes, I understand!

I turned and sprinted off towards the sewer entrance, and the backed-up couple of cars there, people getting out of them and wondering what they should be doing.

“You and you! Help me seal up the sewer hole!” I demanded of the first two drivers, while I went through the gestures of purification, and dumping a couple gallons of Cantrip’d water on the cover. “NOW?!” I repeated loudly, and the two men flinched and hurriedly came forwards to help.

They kind of stared at the claw marks gouged into the top of it, but grabbed the sides and hauled it thirty feet back to where it belonged, putting it back into place.

“I need a driver,” I said to them, and they looked at one another in dismay at their work day and errands being interrupted. “That first thing that entered here is a plague undead which just tried to infect that whole school of children. The second was a Blooded enforcer chasing it. Do either of you have anything more important to do than put it into the ground? Because I can’t drive.”

They looked at one another again, and the chubby man’s face hardened. “I’ll drive for you. Where are we going?”

I held up the keys The Mick had thrown me, and the swinging fob blinked as I turned in a direction. “That way. After I clean the road.”

----

A minute later, Richie Pullman and I were in slow pursuit, at least by car speeds, of vampire and Blooded. I assured I didn’t want him for combat, I just needed to stay even with The Mick, and maybe drive him back to the car we’d left behind. He was relieved and just nodded as he clutched the wheel with white fingers.

“He’s heading to the cemetery. I’ll have to take the way around,” he observed apologetically.

“Understood. That’s fine, we’re trying to drive the thing out of the city.” He nodded and zoomed east to Bethesda. He turned left, progressing through multiple four-ways and closing in on our goal.

We were driving down Stewart along the cemetery, while I was vectoring the progress of The Mick and his prey.

“Okay, looks like things are pausing here...” A hundred yards away, I saw a swarm of white come up out of the ground, and a sewer grate come blowing up after it, along with a swarm of clawed and rotted things that made Mr. Pullman meep in fear.

“Get me within fifty yards!” He didn’t say a thing, but he didn’t brake, speeding up and coasting forwards to get me close in time as I wormed my way out the window, and the full Shard array wound up around my hand. I let go at the swarm of revealed undead daring to come up under the Haze.

I was perhaps unsurprised that most of them didn’t die, but it was only for the moment. As the incoming Shards were flashing in and detonating in tri-colored explosions, The Mick coalesced out of the flock of bats, Sword upraised, and fell right into their midst, lashing out in all directions in a beautiful flowing spiral of crimson-trailing death.

The undead creatures were all chopped apart in the middle of burning alive, and stinking burning pieces scattered all over the place.

Without instruction, Richie pulled to a stop near The Mick, idling the engine, while I sat on the window. I waved at him, he waved back jauntily, and carefully chopped off all the heads he hadn’t gotten on his initial descent before trotting in our direction with flowing speed.

He glanced at the rather awed and silent Richie, and said, “Thought you’d be in me Marrow, m’lady!”

“I can’t drive.” He blinked, guffawed as he caught his tossed keys, and without being invited, opened the rear door and got inside. I slid back down inside, too. “Mr. Pullman, if you can take us back to the school and the car parked there, we’d be obliged.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He looked ahead and back, made a U-turn, and headed back the way he’d come.

“Mr. Pullman, is it?” The Mick drew a card out of his coat, and extended it out over the man’s shoulder. “A favor you’ve done us, Master Pullman, and a favor you’ll get in return. We pay our debts.”

“Th-thank you, sir,” he managed to reply, noting the red in The Mick’s eyes. He took the card and stowed it away very carefully.

A favor from the Blooded Clans was not something to ignore. I said nothing; it wasn’t the best way to motivate help, but it wasn’t the worst, either.

------

We didn’t chat on the way back to Bone Marrow. We got out next to it, thanked Mr. Pullman again, and sent him off with a story to tell his family and a favor card from a vampire enforcer to back it up. They’d laugh in disbelief, and then he’d pull out the card, and they’d stop laughing.

I, however, had different concerns. “Those were not ghouls, or even ghasts, or they’d be dead.” A single Shard was 7d6+15, at least. I’d been watching, and I’d only killed one. He’d finished the rest off.

“They had mushrooms growing on them,” he grunted. “I’ve never seen the like before. Something felt off about them.”

“And where did he get the corpses?” Cemeteries were basically non-existent now. The gravestones remained behind as a tribute to the fallen, but nobody dead was put into them. They were natural focuses of negative energy, and even the long-buried corpses tended to Animate at irregular and unwelcome times, then wander off and try to kill people... and that was only if something didn’t try to pull them out of the ground first, which is what usually happened.

Necromancers must have undead minions to work on, after all...

“The bodies were mostly intact, they weren’t ghoul-chewed or anything. They had necroic decay as a result of their condition, and fungus growing all over them, but basically they were intact and unharmed.” He worked with undead all the time, and so he noticed those things.

That was totally at odds with proper body disposal. Everyone knew you had to at the very least cut off the head before midnight, and completely disposing of the body was an imperative. Some lit pyres, but even that often left bone behind. The bones had to be cracked, crunched, and disposed of completely, too.

Even that wouldn’t stop a necromancer, who could use ashes to chain the spirit of the dead, or even bone remnants. You either had the remains purified with magic, dissolved them completely in acid, or had a ghoul eat them, cracking every bone for the marrow. All three methods made sure no other undead would rise from them. Necromancers trying to do stuff with ghoul-chewed bone basically got nowhere, as the ghouls ate up all the vital essence they wanted to work with.

They couldn’t even reassemble the bones and Animate a skeleton. There was a reason ghouls were tolerated in their tasks for now...