The Vampire's Support
The information I got from the vampire turned out more useful than I'd expected.
No—far more important than I could have imagined.
The quality of the intel itself wasn't much better than what I'd already extracted from the five higher vampires I'd killed earlier. But that last piece of information was enough to completely reframe the way I'd been thinking about this place.
"Reinforcements, huh..."
Right. I'd been operating under the assumption that those mosquito bastards would always try to run. But if you thought about it carefully, these were the kind of arrogant pricks who wouldn't even bother lifting their heavy asses until five of their own were already dead.
Would creatures like that really choose to flee? Or would they dig in, pool their strength, hold the line, and stall for outside support?
Considering the whole aristocratic, feudal-era nonsense they kept spouting, the latter seemed far more likely.
I can use this.
The moment I heard it, I knew it was something I could exploit.
If they could escape outward, then the reverse was also true—outsiders could come in. It was an obvious thought, yet I'd been looking at this world through a game-like lens and had simply decided the flow was one-way only.
This vampire had just proven that wasn't necessarily the case. A new pattern had appeared in the enemy's behavior tree: not just the "flee" button, but "call for backup."
Yeah. This was what an A-rank dungeon was supposed to feel like.
The real essence of the place was the unfairness of it—the player stuck in a limited area while the enemies could freely come and go. A classic time-attack setup. If you didn't wipe out every last vampire and clear the dungeon fast enough, reinforcements would keep pouring in. And the longer you took, the more numerous and stronger those reinforcements would become.
I did think there were too few of them.
The number of vampires stationed here had always felt sparse. Even setting aside the fact that I still hadn't seen anything boss-like, their numbers were pitifully small compared to the humans below. But if that scarcity existed precisely because of a reinforcement gimmick, everything suddenly made sense.
Perfect.
A complete shift in perspective. A change in approach.
Looked at the other way, it meant I was sitting in front of a vending machine that could spit out infinite A-rank-dungeon-appropriate monsters—walking experience packs—for as long as I wanted. Anyone else hearing that thought would have called me insane. To me, it was pure opportunity.
I had multiple summons that needed leveling, and I simply didn't have the luxury of raising them one by one at a leisurely pace. I could feel something big approaching—something that could explode at any moment. The way Lee Se-rin kept casually showing up inside the Academy was proof enough of that.
Which meant I needed to raise as many of them as possible in the limited time I had left.
I set the board.
Assuming the vampire's information was true, the range of dirty tricks I could pull had just expanded dramatically. With Echidna and Kallion on my side, a whole new set of tactics became viable. I even came up with a way to flip the entire situation in an instant. A deep smile spread across my face.
What would it look like if the vampires who belonged in the Demon King's castle ended up arriving at the Demon King's castle instead?
Imagining that, I started walking slowly toward the place the young man had come from.
I left the half-broken youth where he was. While torturing him I'd carefully steered his thoughts toward calling in as many allies as possible. Once he recovered enough of his mind, he'd contact them on his own. For that to work, the fewer people who knew the truth, the better—so I needed to clean out the vampires still waiting in the place he'd emerged from first. You couldn't create proper chaos if the one who called for help was still around.
A house, huh. The idea of mosquito bastards playing at nobility was so ridiculous it almost made me laugh.
Blag or Plag or whatever—how good could a mosquito possibly be with a sword? Most of them would be worse than Ban Taewung. And even if they weren't, one blast of Kallion's holy power would cut them all down.
Actually, it never even got that far. Keres and Shiz handled everything before Kallion needed to step in.
By classification, vampires were undead. To a Soul Eater like Keres and a spirit guide like Shiz, they were basically a delicious free meal. Every vampire I'd met so far had been possessed by Shiz and had their soul sucked dry before they could put up a real fight, or else burned by Keres until not even a single bone fragment remained.
The higher ones were a little different, of course. Some shaped blood into attacks; others pulled beasts out of the shadows to buy time. When it started looking like Keres and Shiz alone might not be enough, I brought Growl into the fight. The whole point of this dungeon was to level the entire group, after all.
The compatibility between blood-using vampires and Growl—who grew stronger by drinking blood—was almost unfair. The tide of battle flipped in an instant. By the end, more than a few of them decided to run. Those ones I personally pinned down with shadows and "kindly" attacked until they lost the mental strength to maintain their abilities and started thrashing and screaming like insects.
Extracting information after that was easy. No matter how much they struggled, they couldn't shake the feeling that they were dancing in the palm of my hand. I didn't even have to ask—they started begging me to just kill them already.
The heavier their asses, the higher their pride. And those same prideful bastards were begging for death. Body and mind both broken, they were no longer noble vampire aristocrats—just blood-sucking mosquito spawn.
So I crushed them.
It's a personal philosophy of mine: mosquitoes deserve to die, no matter what world you're in. In my previous life the Gray Ash had eventually wiped them out completely, but until then they'd been vicious little bastards that stubbornly spread every disease and radioactive contaminant they could find. There was even a rule that you weren't allowed to take off your protective suit for a full week after it rained. Later, mutant strains appeared that ignored mosquito repellent and punched straight through hazmat gear.
I bet more people died to those mosquito bastards than to the Gray Ash itself. Just remembering it still made my teeth grind. I'd gone through every kind of hell back then.
These ones were the same. Different shape, same essence. The old mosquitoes at least had the excuse of fighting for species survival. These ones didn't even have that. They could live on any blood, yet they specifically hunted human blood.
Why? The fundamental reason was simple: because it was better that way.
Drinking the mana-rich blood of a human made a vampire stronger. As undead, they absorbed a person's life force and vital energy and turned it into their own nourishment. If getting stronger was the goal, they should just hunt stronger people. The winner of a fight had the right to claim the prize.
But these bastards didn't. They raised humans who were far beneath them like livestock. They planted fake emotions of joy and happiness until the victims' brains turned to mush, then farmed them and ate them. Not for survival—purely for preference.
I wasn't some child who was going to moralize about it. Even I knew I was nowhere near a righteous hero or champion of justice. I just didn't like it. So I killed them. Nothing more, nothing less.
I had no particular desire to help the humans, either. The only reason I was restoring them to normal was to guard against any other gimmicks I might have missed.
This place was a vampire slaughterhouse.
Vampires strengthened themselves through blood. Drinking it massively boosted their recovery and physical abilities. That was a racial trait of the vampire species, higher or lower rank didn't matter. Think of it as a racial version of Growl's skill Blood Feast, only stronger.
And that was where the problem started.
They treated humans as livestock that could be discarded at any time. So what happened in an emergency? To mosquito bastards who saw humans as nothing more than living blood bags full of fresh blood, those people were disposable weapons and portable recovery kits all in one.
That was the other gimmick I was worried about. Every human in this city could, at any moment, become a mechanic for the vampire monsters. So I needed to clear out as many as possible while I still could—either erase them so thoroughly that not a single drop of blood remained, or remove them from the dungeon entirely.
The first option was easy. Have Keres burn them or Kallion erase them. But that would waste both mana and time. So I went looking for Echidna, aiming for the cleaner second result that only needed a single push.
Finding her wasn't hard. At the far end of the city gate where people were flooding out, a blue flame was clearly visible.
Connected through the Link, she already understood my intent and was carrying it out.
"Everyone, hurry! You must leave this city at once!! While the mercy of Rest still reaches us, flee this place! Only then can we deal with those monsters!"
"Uwooooooh!!!"
A long procession of people clutching every kind of weapon—and some farm tools that barely counted as weapons—streamed out through the gate.
If they simply disappeared like this, I could neutralize the gimmick without spending time or power. But if it turned out to be useless...
Then I'll have to deal with them myself.
Clean the board before they became an annoying "factor" that got in my way.
I slowly closed my eyes. Only after the murmuring completely died away and two sets of footsteps approached did I open them again.
"O God of Rest. Your command has been fulfilled."
"Just as Master predicted, the moment they crossed the boundary they were annihilated along with the nanomachines planted in their bodies."
"Good work."
Echidna's speech could use some correction, but I doubted she'd listen even if I told her. That way of speaking was her entire being. Denying it now would be the same as denying her existence. So I simply praised them both.
The festival city that had been so noisy moments ago was now deathly quiet. A few beings that could still loosely be called human remained, but they were the ones who had rejected Echidna's "conversion"—people who found holy power, which was harmless and even beneficial to ordinary humans, repulsive and had driven it away.
In other words, they still wore human skins, but they were ready to turn into monsters at any moment. The second the human tide left the city, they began to slump as if they no longer needed to pretend—looking for all the world like corpses.
They had probably been left as decoys for the livestock. Their fate would be the same as those bitten by the mosquito bastards still hiding in the city's shadows, desperately trying to grasp the situation.
"Let's go."
In the silence so thick a fight could break out at any second, I took the two of them and opened the door of the house.
They had noticed us, yet they didn't move an inch. Either they were that confident, or they had something to rely on. Either way, it saved me some trouble.
KWAANG!!
I kicked the door—ostentatiously gilded like it belonged to some noble—with a mana-reinforced foot and sent it flying. At the same time I slowly expanded my shadows, sealing every exit.
"...So it was you. The one who murdered our kin."
Even in the room growing darker as the shadows swallowed the light, a middle-aged man with vivid crimson eyes that glittered clearly straightened a few stray hairs and looked at me.
"Murdered by a mosquito? Isn't that a bit too generous a description?"
"How insolent. You humans have always been the same. Give livestock an inch and they forget their place and start climbing above themselves."
What a filthy species. The middle-aged man glared at me with pure disgust and revulsion. I snorted.
"A parasite that lives off humans and sucks their blood has a lot to say. If you don't like 'mosquito,' how about 'leech'? Or 'flea'?"
"..."
His fist clenched tight. Apparently vampires found "leech" or "flea" more infuriating than "mosquito." To me they were all the same, but subjectively those words must have felt more degrading. Maybe because mosquitoes could adapt anywhere while leeches and fleas were pickier about environment?
Note to self: use that next time I need to provoke one.
"My name is Frederick Blag. Vassal of the renowned Noira Ducal House, eldest son and heir of the Blag Viscount House that holds dominion over the Chirek Mountain Range."
Shaaaak!!
From empty air he drew a crimson blade. Around him, bright red droplets began to bubble and rise.
"I swear upon the name of Blag. You will not die cleanly, livestock."
"Ah, you just pulled that out because you got so mad you cut yourself, right? Can't even control your own emotions and you're still trying to look cool? Hilarious."
I pulled a shadow free, wiped the smirk off my face in an instant, poured killing intent into Charisma, and crushed the ambient mana around us.
"Hm?"
It wasn't a question that expected an answer. Just a little performance to express my irritation and scrape at his pride.
"...?!"
The blood droplets that had been floating against gravity suddenly lost form and splattered onto the floor. The man's carefully prepared stance crumpled; his neatly arranged hair fell into disarray.
Crack, thud!
"Ghk—aaaaaargh!!!"
The way he strained so hard his clothes nearly tore just to keep from collapsing was genuinely disgusting. Making that much noise over something this light, and he still wanted to talk about oaths?
I'd waited, thinking he might have something interesting. All he managed was pulling a weapon out of his own blood. Fighting him would be no different from the ones I'd already killed. The previous vampire who controlled shadows like living monsters had been stronger and more educational. At least that one hadn't let his guard down. He'd still burned in Keres's flames, but he'd been more useful than this guy.
The shadows currently swallowing the entire room were an improved version of that earlier vampire's technique, refined in my own way.
I'd lost interest. I didn't feel like dragging this out any longer.
"Don't mimic people when you're nothing but a pest."
It was unpleasant.
I deliberately threw the exact same nuance of words back at him, then drew a finger through the air—aiming precisely at the spot where his neck was.
Shaaaak!!
That was all it took. The head of the man still trying to hold a proper stance was severed by the shadow and flew through the air.
Thud. Roll...
The head bounced and rolled to the far side of the room. The body that had been posing collapsed limply to the floor. The crimson blade in its hand lost cohesion and returned to blood.
The occasional twitch told me it was still alive.
"This... can't... be..."
The head lying alone on the other side actually moved its mouth and spoke. Vampires really were tenacious.
I placed my foot on top of the skull and pressed down hard.
"Ghk—uh, ah, aaaaah...!"
The real-time pain of having its head crushed must have been worse than I imagined. Even with only a head left, it somehow found the strength to thrash wildly. I carefully, thoroughly, stepped on it with more force.
Realizing escape was impossible, blood began to writhe out of the severed cross-section like tentacles. The same thing happened on the body's side. The moment I saw them trying to reconnect, I moved the shadows.
Before the two crimson tendrils could join, a shadow spike swallowed the body, tore through it, and the instant the tip reached the heart, all movement stopped.
"Ah... ahhh..."
That was his final death rattle.
The heart was the root of a vampire. This one wasn't even top-tier—just barely hanging on at the higher rank. The moment the heart was wrapped in shadow and isolated from the outside world, its life ended.
"Caw!"
Without a word I tapped my foot twice. Crows naturally emerged from the floor's shadows and dragged the vampire's corpse down into the darkness until it vanished.
"Boring."
It hadn't even been worth killing time. Still, it was something that had to be done. At least I'd recovered a completely intact higher vampire corpse. That would have to be enough.
The important part started now.
I shaped a chair out of shadow, sat down, and opened Shiz's status window.