EP.23 One Night -2
EP.23 One Night -2
Vampires in media had surprisingly many weaknesses.
Sunlight, crosses, garlic, silver, stakes—each work gave them different vulnerabilities, and what worked in one story might not work in another.
Because of that, the smartest approach was to figure out a vampire's specific weakness and deal with it step by step.
But that only applied when the ones involved were human.
"Kieeeeek! Kiek! Kieeeeek!!"
A vampire burning in spectacular fashion.
"Ki...?!"
A vampire whose body was reduced to cube steak by a blade-wind.
"Kiek!"
"Kiik!"
"Kkuek!"
Even vampires who were killing each other despite being on the same side, fighting until they dropped dead.
None of them were being taken down by attacks exploiting their weaknesses—they were all being slaughtered by overwhelming power alone.
"The poor things..."
I'd come expecting a horror story, but it turned out to be a superhero flick.
The role of these villainous underlings was simply to be brutalized by the heroes.
"You dare shove your filthy faces into a space where I was enjoying time alone with my husband? Are you insane? Are you insane? Are you insane?"
"Did you eat your situational awareness through your assholes, or did you replace your brains with udon noodles? Why the hell did you show up at that exact moment...!!"
"Oooh...!! My sikhye...!"
Miho, savagely stomping the head of a vampire sprawled on the ground over and over with her foot.
Kor, in a towering rage, running a fiery skewer from a vampire's rear all the way up through its head and incinerating it.
Tia, shredding vampires with wind while venting her fury over having her beloved sikhye dream stolen from her.
Every last one of them had abilities worthy of a hero, but...
'Honestly, I'm not sure who the villains are here.'
At any rate, making the companion Divine Beasts angry was their own fault.
It might come across as merciless and utterly heartless, but what could I do?
These were women even I couldn't stop... the vampires had no choice but to accept the consequences gracefully.
"President, are you okay?"
"Yeah. As you can see, there's no chance I'd end up in danger, is there?"
"That definitely seems to be the case..."
"Speaking of which, Alice, what were you doing?"
"Smashing bloodsucker skulls."
"R-Right..."
Alice pulled out the crowbar made from Fenrir's fang.
The claw end of the crowbar was already soaked and dripping with a red liquid.
Counting Alice, a total of four Divine Beasts were utterly wrecking the vampires—they were starting to look genuinely pitiful.
"More importantly, President."
"Yeah?"
"I spotted what looked like the bloodsuckers' leader."
"Really?"
"Yes. I saw it clearly, floating in the air. A bat Divine Beast."
"Hmm... So that Divine Beast is the one behind this?"
"Do you know what the Divine Beast is?"
"I'm not certain, but there's one that fits the guess."
Ever since I accepted Yata as my Companion Animal, I'd been studying Divine Beasts in my spare time using the Divine Beast Bestiary.
Even if I had Yata's information, there was no telling when, where, or which Divine Beast might come after me.
I figured I needed to build up my knowledge in advance, and that decision was finally paying off today.
"The bat is most likely a Vrykolakas."
Vrykolakas.
It takes the form of a bat by default, and among bats it's classified as a Vampire Bat Divine Beast.
Its diet primarily consists of animal blood, and its feeding method is unusual.
First, it injects its own blood into other animals to turn them into servants, then it orders those servants to drink blood.
Any creature injected with Vrykolakas's blood unconditionally becomes a slave who obeys its master's commands, and they also develop a ferocious temperament...
The problem was not just their vicious aggression, but also the fact that their physical abilities grew stronger.
There had reportedly been an eyewitness account of a puppy infected by Vrykolakas single-handedly snapping a thick tree in half.
Ordinary animals could never stand a chance against servants that powerful.
The feeding ended when Vrykolakas summoned the servants who had drunk their own species' blood and drained every last drop from them.
A feeding method that could only be described as utterly grotesque.
If you're going to suck blood, just suck the damn blood—what was the point of creating monsters by turning them into servants with your own blood?
I could never understand it, but the experts' opinion was that it was an efficient method that allowed it to consume a larger quantity of blood.
Even so, I'd say it was the absolute worst feeding method, with zero consideration whatsoever for the ones being eaten.
"So that Broccoli..."
"It also goes by the alias Ruthven. If you're really struggling with the name, use that one."
"Okay. So all of these vampires are that Ruthven's servants?"
"I can't say with total certainty since this is my first time seeing them, but their characteristics match the descriptions of Ruthven's servants in the book, so that's likely the case."
Those turned into Ruthven's servants were said to all develop pale skin, along with sharp fangs and claws that could pierce through skin to absorb blood.
Looking at those traits, they perfectly matched the vampires in front of us, and if the bat Alice claimed to have seen was involved, it lined up almost exactly.
The one thing that nagged at me, though, was that Ruthven was a bat native to the Southwestern Great Wilds.
Yet we were currently in the northwestern snowfields, human territory.
The fact that a Divine Beast that shouldn't be here was present struck me as suspicious.
'No choice but the option where we catch it ourselves and ask, I suppose...'
In the end, we were facing down a Divine Beast again.
It hadn't been long since we'd encountered Divine Beasts I'd never seen before, and now here came yet another one...
I was starting to wonder if my body was giving off some kind of Divine Beast-summoning pheromone.
"Husband. I've roughly finished off every last one of the beastly little brats I could see."
"Good work. But I think I'm going to need you to put in a bit more effort—is that okay?"
"Of course. Did you think we'd just let the little shit who ruined a perfectly nice atmosphere get away with it?"
"Even if it means snapping its limbs apart, we have to bring it to its k-nees...!!"
"The enemy of my sikhye...!!"
My Companion Animals were burning with fiercer bloodlust and fighting spirit than ever before.
There didn't seem to be any need to worry at all.
"Alright! Then I'll explain the plan I just came up with!"
The bat hunt was on.
***
"Kieeeeek!!"
"Seon-ju! Be careful...!!"
"This much is fine!"
Vampires kept swarming toward us relentlessly.
I kicked one that lunged from the right-hand alleyway square in the face, then kept running without pause.
"Do you think they've arrived by now?"
"If it's Tia and Miho, they've definitely arrived by now...!"
"Then I'll just have to hold out a little longer."
The clock tower stood at the center of Suobi Village.
It was the tallest structure in the village, the only place where you could take in the entire village's layout at a glance.
Considering the position of a ruler issuing orders to their servants, the top of the clock tower was the optimal spot, and the odds that Ruthven was there were high.
So we sent Miho and Tia that way, while Kor and I drew the vampires' attention.
The combination of Kor—highly conspicuous with her blazing flames—and me, who looked the most fragile, made the perfect bait.
In other words, our only job was to keep the vampires from leaking out elsewhere and corral them while Miho and Tia captured Ruthven.
"President."
"Ah, Alice! What's the situation at the clock tower?"
Alice shook her head side to side at my question.
Apparently my hypothesis was wrong.
"A bust. Ruthven wasn't at the top of the clock tower."
"Damn...!! Could it be flying around somewhere?"
"No. I circled the village looking up at the sky, but I couldn't find it anywhere."
"Then where the hell is it?"
On this end, I was playing a first-person FPS, while on that end, they were playing an RTS.
Our victory condition was to find and eliminate the vampires' source, but the source was nowhere to be seen.
I had Alice, the fastest mover of all of us, handling the search, but even she was struggling.
I had no idea how long this stubborn chase was going to drag on before it ended.
"President, more importantly, another problem came up."
"A problem? What is it?"
"Ruthven wasn't at the clock tower where the fox and baby dragon went, but another Divine Beast was."
"Wh-What...? Another Divine Beast?! Wh-What did it look like?"
"It looked like a wolf, sort of... But it had no fur, and it had an orca's tail and fins."
"Seriously, why the hell is that thing here? This is driving me insane...!!"
Akult.
As Alice had described, it was a Divine Beast that mixed wolf and orca traits, known to live in an ice lake in the Northeastern Great Wilds.
There was little known information about it because it rarely ever came out of its lake, but the bestiary listed its temperament as extremely ferocious.
If a Divine Beast that was practically a shut-in showed up at this timing, and here of all places, it meant one thing.
The vampire bat and the orca-wolf. These bastards were unquestionably targeting us.
Otherwise, this situation couldn't be explained.
"Alice, can you go back up Miho and Tia?"
"It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it."
"Why?"
"The fox told me not to help. She said she and the baby dragon would handle it themselves, and asked me to help you, President."
"I see..."
If we wanted the safest, surest approach, the right move would be to send Alice over there too, but Miho's pride wouldn't allow that.
It would basically mean I didn't trust my own Companion Animals' strength.
Even if I was worried, betraying that trust was the one thing I couldn't do.
"In that case, Alice, I'll leave the search for Ruthven to you, just like now."
"Got it."
With that reply, Alice vanished from sight.
In a situation where I couldn't count on help from Miho and Tia, the only hope left to me was Alice finding Ruthven's location.
"Kiiik!!"
"Argh, seriously! There's a creepily huge number of them!!"
I grabbed the heads of two vampires lunging at me from both sides at once and smashed them into each other, neutralizing them.
After that, I deflected a vampire leaping down from a rooftop with wind, and when another burst out of a nearby building's window, I flowed with the motion, grabbed it by the collar, and slammed it into the ground.
But the moment I dodged one wave of attacks, vampires appeared from yet another direction.
There was no sign of this ever ending.
"Seon-ju, wouldn't it really be better if I just burned them all to ash...?"
"No, let's hold out a little longer. The book said there's no way to cure those who've become Ruthven's servants, but we don't know what might happen if we deal with Ruthven itself, right?"
"Yes, understood..."
After taking down the vampires that had invaded, a thought suddenly surfaced in my mind.
Namely, the idea: 'Couldn't they have been saved too?'
The sole reason they had changed like this was Ruthven's blood and ability, so a hypothesis arose: if we killed him, wouldn't they return to their original state?
The vampires who attacked the lodge had already been killed, unfortunately, but I decided to at least try to save the other vampires within the village.
The process was extremely tricky and grueling, as it was right now, but it was worth trying.
Still, we couldn't just keep deflecting their attacks forever.
So I had placed all my hopes on Alice.
"Hoo...!!"
A village in the snowfields, fully blanketed by darkness.
The always lively and beautiful Suobi Village had now transformed into a nightmare town swarming with Divine Beasts and vampires.
What exactly was going to unfold here...? It was a night I couldn't get a grasp on at all.