Chapter 128: Wildfire

Chapter 128: Chapter 128: Wildfire

Donald spent his six free points the next morning, at the kitchen table on the forty-fifth floor, while Evelyn ate toast across from him and pretended not to watch.

He had been fighting things bigger and stronger than himself for weeks. The Keeper had nearly taken his head off with a single swing, and if Evelyn’s hand hadn’t been in his, he would never have lifted it. So this time he didn’t put anything into Mana.

[Free Points: 6.]

[Strength: 104 → 107.]

[Stamina: 102 → 105.]

Then he opened Escrow Seal and laid it over the Genesis anchor, so that nobody would ever be able to buy, contest or steal it from under him again. The upkeep rose to forty thousand a day. It was the easiest forty thousand he had ever spent.

"You’re doing that thing again," Evelyn said.

"What thing?"

"Staring at nothing and nodding." She finished her toast. "You do it every time you buy something. It’s very strange to watch."

---

That night the Wildfire Syndicate came for her.

Donald woke because the room was too quiet. The city noise that always came up from forty-five floors below had stopped, as if someone had shut a window he couldn’t see, and there was a thin, sweet smell in the air that he hadn’t smelled since the Iron-Vein Mines.

Blood.

Evelyn was already awake beside him. She lay perfectly still with her eyes open, and her right hand had slid off the bed to where Starfall leaned against the nightstand.

"Three," she breathed. "On the balcony."

Donald let Lesser Mana Perception spread out through the glass doors. Three points of mana stood outside in the dark, cold and slow, not shifting the way the Faceless had, but heavy and red. He had felt something like it once before, in a cave under the Iron-Vein Mines, when a hooded man with blood-stilettos had nearly cut Evelyn to pieces.

The balcony doors opened without a sound.

The three who came through them wore long gray cloaks with deep hoods, and they moved so fast that the curtains were still settling when the first of them reached the bed. Donald saw a pale hand and a long dark-red blade made of hardened blood, and then Evelyn was out of the bed and between them with Starfall in her hand, and steel and blood struck together in a spray of sparks.

[Target: Wildfire Blood-Stalker (x3)]

[Rank: A-Rank. Levels: 58 to 61.]

[Sub-Class: Vampire.]

[Warning: Blood-arts inflict anti-heal. Wounds will not close.]

The second one came for Donald.

He rolled off the far side of the bed and came up with the Pile Bunker already on his left arm, where he had slept with it since the airship. The vampire’s blood-blade came down at his head, and he caught it on the gauntlet. The force of it drove him back into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Before he could fire, a second blade, this one grown from the vampire’s other hand, slid past his guard and opened a long cut across his ribs.

It burned. It didn’t stop burning.

Donald felt Regeneration try to close it, the way it had been quietly mending him all week, and felt it fail. The edges of the cut stayed open and wet, and a thin red mist rose from them where the anti-heal sat in the wound.

The vampire smiled under its hood. "Your little healing skill won’t help you," it said softly. "Nothing heals what we cut."

"I’ve heard that before," Donald said.

He put his right hand flat over the wound and let Purifying Touch run into it.

White light poured into the cut. The red mist screamed away from it, the curse boiled out of his flesh in a thin black smoke, and the moment it was gone, Regeneration took hold. He felt the skin start to pull together under his palm.

The vampire’s smile disappeared.

Donald didn’t let go of the light. He kept it burning in his right hand, stepped in under the vampire’s next swing, and grabbed it by the face.

It shrieked. Purifying Touch burned anything from the Abyss, and vampires had been made by the Abyss as surely as the Faceless had. White fire ran across its pale skin from his fingers, and it tore away from him with its cheek smoking and its hood half burned off.

Then he fired the Pile Bunker into its chest, and it went backward through the glass balcony doors and over the rail into the dark.

---

On the other side of the room, Evelyn was fighting two of them at once, in nothing but a long shirt and bare feet.

They were fast. They were faster than anything she had fought since the Abyss, and they came at her from both sides together, low and high, their blood-blades growing and changing shape as they swung. One became a hooked whip that snapped at her ankles. The other split into three thin stilettos that went for her throat.

Evelyn didn’t try to match their speed. She stood in the middle of the bedroom with her feet planted and Starfall held in both hands, and she let them come to her, and turned every cut aside with the smallest movements she could make. Every time Starfall touched a blood-blade, the starlight in the steel flared and the blood hissed and smoked away from it.

"Nyx," Donald said.

The cat came out of the air over the bed. She landed on the back of the whip-vampire’s neck and sank her claws in, and through the Phantasmal Siphon she drank its speed and passed it down the bond to Donald. The vampire staggered, suddenly a full step slower than its partner.

Evelyn saw the gap and took it. Starfall went through the whip-vampire’s chest in a single straight thrust, and the vampire fell away from the blade in a cloud of red ash.

The last one turned and ran for the broken balcony doors.

Donald was already there. He had moved with Nyx’s stolen speed, and he stood in the doorway with his right hand still glowing white.

The vampire stopped short a meter from him. It looked at the light in his hand, then over its shoulder at Evelyn coming across the room with Starfall raised, and it lowered its blood-blade and let it melt back into its arm.

"Enough," it said. "I’m only the messenger. I was told to deliver a message, and then to die if I had to."

"Then deliver it," Evelyn said. The point of Starfall stopped at the back of its neck.

The vampire pushed back its hood. Its face was young and very pale, with red eyes, and when it spoke, it spoke to Evelyn, not to Donald.

"The one who killed your raid leader in the Obsidian Vault has a name now," it said. "He is called Corvin. He serves the Blood Father, and he has grown since you last saw him." Its red eyes didn’t blink. "He sends his regards to the Vanguard who couldn’t save her friends. He says he remembers how Marcus screamed."

Evelyn’s face didn’t change, but Donald saw her knuckles go white on Starfall’s hilt.

"Where?" she asked.

"Port Saren. The Blood Father’s court sits on the anchor there, as Paimon’s sat on Hanseong." The vampire smiled faintly. "In nine nights, the moon over Saren goes red. On that night, my master will feed on the whole city, and Corvin will be at his side. If you want him, Valkyrie, come and take him."

"And if I don’t?"

"Then he’ll keep feeding without you," the vampire said. "And he’ll come back for the rest of your family later, starting with the little boy downstairs."

Evelyn killed it.

It was one clean cut, and the vampire fell into red ash at her feet before the last word was finished. She stood there in the broken doorway with the night wind coming in off the Glass Field and blowing her long shirt against her legs, and looked down at the ash for a long time.

Donald went to her and put his hand on her shoulder. The Synergy woke at the touch, warm and steady, but she didn’t seem to feel it.

"I’m going to Saren," she said quietly.

"I know."

"I’m not asking you to come."

"I know that too." He turned her gently to face him. "I’m coming anyway."

She looked up at him, and for a moment the hardness went out of her face, and she leaned her forehead against his chest.

"Nine nights," she said.

Behind them, a window opened that only Donald could see.

[New Quest: The Blood Father.]

[Objective: Reach Port Saren before the blood moon. Defeat Corvin.]

[Days remaining: 9.]