Chapter 54

Chapter 54

Riven began to push himself off the wall when he felt the bones in his arms snap back into place. The pain was immense, and he could barely breathe as he began violently coughing up fluid that his lungs had accumulated—but he managed to get to his knees.

He needed to speed up his recovery.

That’s when he saw the second vial of Sinner’s Blood he’d accidentally dropped on the floor. He reached for it, fumbling with the cork.

The second vial was drained in an instant, and just as the monster bellowed to charge Ben up against the wall with its horned head down, Riven knew that Ben was about to die. There was no way the slender man could take the many-ton monster crushing him against a stone backdrop...and in that instant, Riven’s heart twisted with hate. Visions of the school bus, of the dead children, of his sister’s wish that they find the courage to make a better life for themselves that last night they’d spent together scrounging for scraps of food... They all flashed through his mind.

He had failed to save the others, but he wasn’t going to let the satyr get its way.

Riven’s vision began to turn red, his muscles began to pulse, and a hunger for the satyr’s blood boiled over to envelop his very soul. Everything he’d been imbued with, from the way his magic worked at a base level, to the hate boiling up in his gut, to how the power felt when summoned and unleashed, was brought to bear. The way his muscles tensed and his mind warped with each casting came to light, and he applied all of it here and now.

Then something finally clicked, something primal that had been there ever since he’d been born but had never surfaced until now, and his entire life abruptly changed in that instant.

[Sinner’s Blood has caused the remnant biological locks on your body to finally degrade. You have regained your dormant heritage:

[Pureblooded Vampire, Malignancy Heritage (Blood/Shadow/Death)—Your heritage as a pureblooded vampire has finally come to fruition and is no longer repressed. As a person holding one of the original vampiric lineages and as a greater undead, you are a favored descendant of the Blood god. Your heritage empowers you with many bonuses, but it also comes at a steep price. Please review the following changes.

Negatives:

Positives:

Riven’s hands, turned into clawed crimson gauntlets of ice with protruding blades coming out of his arms on either side, tore into the creature like a Gatling gun. His now-enhanced limbs shot forward like lightning strikes and deflected the desperate attempts of the monster to get back up, and before he knew it he was standing over the remnants of what had once been a powerful demon.

His heart pounded, his chest heaved, and his ears rang from the noise of the battle as he started to cough. Dust filled the room from where the warlord had been launched through bent and torn metal bars after Riven had collided with it in a rage. The satyr, or what remained of it, had been reduced to a shredded mess of bones and viscera within a crater in the stone ahead of him. Blood was splattered on the walls alongside scorch marks, and the remaining corpse was plastered into the indentation like glue on paper.

[Instead of the normal prize for beating a dungeon miniboss, you have received half the betting pool, two hundred thousand Elysium coins, as the key player in Chalgathi’s won bet.]

[You have gained two levels. Congratulations!]

[Your minions, though temporarily dead and banished to the nether realms, have received their XP and level ups as well. Congratulations!]

[You are now able to exit your tutorial dungeon and proceed to the starter area, where you will pick your starting destination and be provided details of what Elysium has in store for you. In order to do so, please focus on the command Exit Dungeon to summon a stair portal to your location.]

Riven remained there: panting, hunched over, and in a good amount of pain as two enormous wooden chests of platinum, gold, silver, and bronze coins bloomed into being in front of him—setting themselves down one after the other as the lids flipped up to reveal their contents. His body was covered in viscera, body parts, and blood, and gingerly he picked his mask up off the floor; it had fallen off at an undisclosed time in the conflict. His insides burned and recoiled with every movement he made, but the hunger...the hunger still persisted.

It was an extreme, compulsive feeling. Something that he couldn’t shake no matter how hard he tried. It clawed painfully at his gut and his mind, forcing his will to submit to it as it became an all-encompassing need.

He wanted to feed.

He needed to feed.

He needed blood.

Desperately, he got down on his knees and began licking up the satyr’s blood, but he quickly spat it out and let a primal hiss of disgust escape his lips. It made him want to gag, and the compulsion became even greater as he let out a scream of rage that it wasn’t what his body needed to satiate the painful, ruthless craving he was experiencing.

“Riven?”

Ben’s hesitant voice called out to him from behind, and Riven stiffened.

Fangs extended, Riven whirled with a manic look in his eyes—hungrily staring Ben down.

The other man shrieked in terror upon seeing the obvious change, and he didn’t take more than another second to start running, but he was far too slow. The last thing that Ben ever saw was Riven’s bloody, clawed hand reaching out for him—and then everything went black.