Equipment Item
Thud—!
With the crack of a gunshot, a spray of red blood painted the sky.
My vision jolted from the impact.
Aurell, who had been walking at my side, stared at me in shock.
"Charlotte-nim...!"
Aurell’s scream came a beat too late.
I steadied my swaying body and glared toward the direction the bullet had come from.
At the center of the city, where darkness lay thick and heavy, something caught the moonlight between the collapsed outer walls of a ruined building.
Once more.
Flash—
Thud—!
The instant the tiny light flickered, the sound reached me a moment later.
It was a snipe, fired with such precision that it had found me even from afar.
I let out a low breath and moved the shadows.
Whoosh—
The shadows surged up and formed a barrier in front of me.
The beam that had been cutting straight toward me was stopped dead, unable to pierce the wall of darkness.
I looked down at my shoulder, where the bullet had gone through.
Red blood kept welling up and spilling out, but the wound had already begun to regenerate.
I didn’t even feel any pain. That meant it wasn’t a wound severe enough to threaten my life.
"Aurell."
"Y-Yes!"
"Hide somewhere decent."
Aurell nodded wordlessly.
She seemed to understand that she wouldn’t be much help in this fight.
An attack strong enough to wound a level 20 vampire. And on top of that, the enemy had used a long-range sniping skill.
That meant a human player of at least level 15.
Level 12 Aurell would be minced meat if she took even a few swings from a human player.
Without another word, I launched myself toward the city.
Wrapping shadows around my body and climbing the outer wall of a building felt as natural as breathing.
As I leaped from building to building, I thought.
There was a high chance the sniper belonged to the same group as the humans I had dealt with yesterday.
When the others who had gone to buy weapons still hadn’t returned, they must have found it suspicious and come out to investigate.
I’d been wondering what I would do if they didn’t show up, and then, just when I needed them, here they were.
What a relief.
They knew about the shop NPC.
Which meant there was a good chance they knew the location of another shop as well.
The reason I hadn’t left the city immediately, instead spending the day farming credits, was to run into these people.
Thud!
I kicked off the side of a building and leapt into the air.
Finding one person using only the faint light of the moon was, by any normal standard, absurdly difficult—but the senses of a vampire far surpassed normal standards.
The faint scent of human blood drifted to me.
He’d tried to bury his own smell beneath the stench of gunpowder and oil, but vampire senses didn’t miss even the faintest trace of blood.
A blurred sound reached my ears.
It was the sound of blood flowing through the vessels just beneath his skin.
Thud—!
The instant I rose into the air, a white flash came flying at me.
The moment I pinpointed the source of the attack, shadows spread and shielded my body.
Whip—!
The more I used my skills, the more I felt myself becoming closer to a vampire in truth.
I had begun, by instinct as much as by habit, to use the power of the vampire Charlotte.
The moment I thought I needed to change direction in midair, the shadows wrapped around my body unfurled behind me and formed a massive pair of wings.
Fwoosh—!
I didn’t waste time wondering about the basic mechanics of how to use the wings that had sprouted from my back.
The instant they appeared, they moved.
To control shadows was, to me, not so different from moving my hands and feet.
Whoosh!
As the wings beat hard and shoved the air backward, my body shot forward.
Having wings didn’t mean I could fly freely through the sky like a bird. It only meant I could ride the wind for a brief moment.
The muzzle flash that had glittered from inside the ruined hospital suddenly changed direction.
It was obvious the sniper inside was trying to run.
I drew a katana from the darkness and swung it hard.
My flight didn’t slow.
As I flew in fast and struck, slashing with all my momentum, I cut into the side of the huge hospital and forced my way inside.
Crash!
The outer wall of the hospital collapsed behind me.
I narrowed my eyes and took in my surroundings. At the end of the corridor, I spotted a human player running away.
I could hear his heart hammering and his ragged breathing.
The human player’s emotional state was pouring off him in real time.
Excitement and fear.
The scent of blood changed.
I tightened my grip on the katana and ran toward the end of the hall.
Slash!
As I swung the katana, I thought, This fight is already over.
But the next instant—
Bang!
With a violent roar, my body rolled across the floor.
Black smoke rose through my blurred vision.
I spat out the dark red blood gathering in my mouth and bit down on my lip.
Gasping, I barely managed to push myself up.
My body was in a terrible state.
Most of my clothes had been torn apart, and my left arm—the one that had been caught in the explosion—had been burned black.
"You still alive?"
A voice tinged with mild surprise came from beyond the smoke.
A cold wind burst through the window and cleared the black haze away.
The figure revealed in the smoke was a tall man.
He was crouched low, aiming a gun straight at me—right at my heart.
His dull gray hair and the sharp scar slashing across one cheek stood out at once.
Inside his black eyes, blue flames flickered slowly.
In an instant, the scent of blood changed.
That meant the emotions he was carrying had shifted.
Rage, calm, excitement, curiosity.
The feeling of fear vanished without even leaving a trace.
The change was unnaturally fast.
I could remember one skill that humans had in Blood Carnival.
Emotion Control.
It could only be used by human players at level 20, and it let them set a character’s emotions however they liked.
Emotions had a huge influence on a character’s stats.
Being able to adjust those emotional buffs at will meant you could cancel out the penalties of the emotion system and draw maximum benefit from it.
The man was a level 20 player, just like me.
I waited for my body to recover as I measured his strength.
He’d used a long-range sniping skill and laid a reactive bomb that would go off if anyone approached.
Both were skills far removed from close combat.
No matter that his level was equal to mine at 20—if we fought up close, I would win without question.
Unless, of course, he had planted more bombs.
I looked down at the left hand that had just been blasted apart.
Enough time had passed that pale flesh had begun to regrow through the charred skin.
I tightened my grip on the katana and glared at him.
Even though his build should have favored keeping his distance, the player stood silent, holding his ground.
Did he have some hidden scheme? Or was it just a bluff?
It was maddening not being able to read his thoughts because he was using Emotion Control.
"What level are you...?"
It was the opponent who broke the uneasy silence with that question.
His expression was much the same as before as he asked me.
Just as I had been gauging his power, he had apparently been calculating his odds of winning against me.
And now he needed one final confirmation.
"20."
My answer made him frown.
He seemed to hesitate for a moment before speaking again.
"I have a proposal..."
"A proposal?"
"What do you say we both pretend we never saw each other and back off?"
I frowned at the unexpected suggestion.
Back off and pretend not to have seen each other?
He meant to stop the fight?
Of course, if that were possible, I’d like that too.
But it was a proposal that could never hold.
He was a sniper.
That meant the farther away we were, the better his chances of winning.
No matter what, I had to kill the man in front of me.
"Does that even make any sense—"
I trailed off and gauged his reaction.
Then I caught something strange in the flow between us.
An instinctive realization.
A certainty that I couldn’t drag this out any longer.
I trusted Charlotte’s instincts and sprang forward.
Tap-tap-tap!
My legs drove hard against the floor as I surged ahead, katana slashing in my hand.
The moment the wide-spreading shadow flew out like a blade, my opponent reacted too.
He rolled swiftly across the floor and fired the gun he had been holding.
Bang! With the shot, the area around us lit up.
Since I had been ready for an attack, blocking it was no problem.
The shadows wrapped around my body and knocked the bullet aside—then, suddenly, an explosion rang out.
Crash!
My body lurched violently.
The shock stole my balance for an instant and sent me floating weightlessly.
I had protected myself with shadows, but I still couldn’t escape completely from the force of a bomb exploding right in my face.
The opponent wasted no time and put distance between us.
Feeling his presence recede, I bit down hard on my lip.
I couldn’t afford to lose him.
I spread my wings behind me and brushed away the black smoke clouding my vision.
Flap!
As the smoke filling the hospital corridor scattered, my sight cleared.
And there he was.
The human player had braced one foot on the stairs at the end of the corridor and was aiming his gun at me.
Thud—!
Another shot cracked through the air.
The bullet raced toward me, but the shadows stopped it and sent it tumbling to the floor. In that same instant, he hurled himself out the window.
I couldn’t lose him.
Beating my wings, I threw myself through the window beside me.
Once outside the hospital, the opponent began fleeing the city at a speed that seemed almost inhuman—squeezing through collapsed gaps in buildings, racing along walls.
It became a desperate chase: him trying to escape with everything he had, and me trying to catch him and kill him.
The pursuit, carried out under the faint light of the moon, lasted until his mana was completely exhausted.
Craaack!
The moment I caught up to him, I flapped my wings and slammed his body down hard.
"Gah—!"
With a short cry, he skidded across the road.
Immediately, shadows moved and pierced through his arms and legs, pinning him to the pavement.
Crack!
There were no more bomb attacks this time.
I licked the blood at the corner of my mouth and drove my katana into his waist.
Splurt—!
Rrrip—!
"Aaaaaagh!"
The hard blade tore through his body and sliced through the bones inside.
He thrashed and screamed in pain, but it was nothing more than pointless struggling.
I swung the katana in my hand in a long arc and cleanly separated his upper body from his lower half.
Snikt!
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