Blood Shaper

Somewhere deep inside Kay wanted to be King Arthur form the myths and legends. They had been his sister’s favorite stories and that was why his nickname was Kay. He didn’t spend a lot of time anymore dwelling on the loss of his family like he once had. He knew that was part of grief and healing and that he had simply reached a part in his life where the open wound of that loss wasn’t always stabbing into him. Now and then it twinged and he teared up as he remembered his parents and his sister but it wasn’t the constant digging pain that it once had been. But he still wanted to do right by them and to be a person that they could be proud of. How better to do that then to strive to exemplify the virtues and heroics that his sister had loved so much and his parents had spent so much time trying to instill in them both?

Sometimes when a decision didn’t have a clear cut answer Kay asked himself, what would King Arthur do here? That was addressed to both of them, the legendary King Arthur of Camelot who stood for a romanticized version of chivalry and honor and of the historical figure that lived at some point in the British Isles, a tribal leader or petty king who united disparate people to fight back against foreign enemies. His friend Noah had been studying folklore and mythology back before Kay had been shunted into a new world and he’d gone on and one at one point at the differences there must have been and how it was sad that they’d lost so much of the history and legends that must have popped up about this legendary figure. In Kay’s mind the fanciful King Arthur would call for solutions and answers that were too divorced from reality and focused too much on the intangible, while the historical King Arthur was more ruthless and efficient. Oftentimes, when added to the many other sources advice and deliberation Kay had, he would be able to reach a middle ground in between those two points that was never perfect but was generally good enough.

He didn’t think either version of Arthur would support leaving one’s troops behind on the battlefield to fend for themselves and perhaps die in the process. He watched a soldier in the uniform of Avalon fall beneath a series of relentless strikes of a mostly elven vampyr with arms that were much too large. He only got that one glance of that tiny snippet of the battle as he raced past that fight with Edric’s team around him and Blood Guard trailing just behind, but he knew that there were people dying everywhere in this battle that he was doing his best to leave behind and a portion of his soul screamed at him.

How was he so important that he was the one pushing ahead, surrounded by over a dozen people that were making sure not a single threat made it within a foot of him? He didn’t feel special, he never had, he was just Kay from Arizona and while his means and abilities had changed drastically after ending up in Torotia he didn’t feel like he had truly changed to deserve reverence, or special treatment, or to be obeyed. He was not above these soldiers fighting for every inch of space closer to their destination, so why wasn’t he down there fighting and dying with them?

The answer of course was that he was special. Not in value, he wasn’t better than anyone else intrinsically, but he was special because of what he could do and what that meant to the fight they were all in. No one else was as much of a threat to the vampyr or their leader like he was and they couldn’t afford to send less than their best weapon. He wasn’t ignoring the troops fighting and dying because he was above their fight but because he had his own integral part to play that wasn’t against enemies he could crush with barely a thought, it was against foes that potentially no one else could stand against. Piece by piece he fed those true answers and honest thoughts to the part of him that gnashed it’s teeth and wailed and slowly it calmed down into a silent acceptance that didn’t like what had to be done or what had to be sacrificed but was willing to take on that burden.

Vampyr died as they approached the perimeter surrounding Kay. Hunters and duelists from Edric’s team eliminated individuals in short bursts while mages and bruisers wiped out packs. Together they cut a swathe through the field of enemies that stood between them and the palace in the distance as the group outpaced the army and moved away from the ritual circle. No vampyr truly worth Kay’s time appeared, supporting the idea that all the elites had retreated to defend their leader. More and more evidence was pointing toward that leader being as important as the ritual circles, if not more, and the sense of doom that seemed to hover over everything made Kay push himself faster, forcing the rest of the team to do the same.

Kay reached the end of his patience as they arrived at the open square in front of the palace’s steps, which was filled with both rubble and vampyr. Edric and his team braced themselves for a slog through the monsters gunking up the space they needed to go through, but Kay had no time for that. He lashed out with his halberd, sending a flying slash wide enough to fill half the courtyard to slice through everything. At the same time he shouted, “Blood Guard! Forward!” and then he charged. The hundreds and hundred of vampyr were mere fodder before Kay and with some of the most elite members of his personal troops accompanying him they cut through the obstacle like a burning sword through a pat of butter. The vampyr were eliminated in an instant.

Edric ran up to him as he gathered the blood coating everything and began compressing it into additional layers of armor over him. He stopped at Kay’s side and quietly insisted, “You need to save your strength! This level of fight is nothing to you, obviously, but even the tiniest amount of spent resources might be too much!”

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Edric frowned as he looked at him. “Do any of your other vampires feel whatever you’re feeling?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t stopped to ask.”

“We should. There’s no telling if this is a trap or-“

Kay got right in his face. “We don’t have time! If it’s a trap, we spring it and kill everyone who made it. We don’t have the option to wait and plan. Do you not remember the message I got from the System? We have to go.”

Edric spent half a second looking back at him before he spat to the side. “Dammit, I hate these kinds of missions.” He turned and started barking orders. “Everyone, move! No time for anything we need to hit them now!”

They ignored the massive doors built into the front of the palace and headed straight to a normal sized service door. A single slam with a maul destroyed it and they were inside. Two scouts from Edric’s team took the lead, with ranged attackers following right behind them ready to pick off anything that got in the way.

“How do they know where to go?” Kay shouted his question to Edric.

Edric glanced back as he dodged around a broken column without looking at it. “They don’t! Maps of this place showed us that there’s a central hall that connections to everything else, we’re headed there! After that we’ll probably need you to guide us unless there’s something super obvious pointing us in the right direction!”

The interior of the palace was trashed. The servants hall they passed through looked like it had once been functional and plain, but now it was ruined with most walls missing pieces and random sections of ceiling haven fallen in at some point before their arrival. They burst into a more public hallway, with three vampyr getting beheaded or bisected as the group burst through a door into their midst. The more public areas were just as destroyed as the servants passage but here there was more evidence of an over the top and gaudy decorative style. Tiny bits of gold sat in recessed channels that were almost entirely dug up. Bits of gold painted frames that had been smashed were littered everywhere with the paintings sometimes still attached. Broken furniture that was also painted gold was occasionally accompanied by a piece that was completely intact. A careful eye could notice that a huge amount of the palace had obvious and more discrete amounts of gold added into the structure, making the building a fortress and a weapon for the previous ruler. In Kay’s case blood was both easier to source and less gaudy, which made his defenses more tasteful to look at.

Another door died a tragic but important death as the scouts leapt to the sides and an armored figure rushed forward and slammed into the door with their own body. It broke into splinters that continued forward into the room beyond and covered some of the vampyr waiting there. Kay, Edric and his team, and the Blood Guard all came to a stop in front of the motley crowd of twisted vampyr. The wide open room was the largest Kay had seen inside the palace so far and the dark stone floor would have contrasted nicely with the glod that he knew must have covered this place previously. Off to the right of where they’d entered the largest doorway in the hall was standing open, with one of the doors that had once filled it lying on the floor and the other missing entirely. A shimmering barrier of multiple bright colors that clashed horrendously and gave Kay immediate eye strain covered the opening.

The vampyr facing off against them were of all shapes and sizes, with a handful looking mostly humanoid and the majority having some kind of perverse new form thanks to the eldritch energies running through them. All of them were unsightly things with many of them actively painful to look at. The worst part though, was the spark of intelligence in each of their eyes. Mad they might be, but none of these enemies had been driven so far into madness that they couldn’t plan or properly react to danger.

Near the back of the pack a long, thin from rose form among the other monstrosities. Thin tendrils sprouted from the bottom of a humanoid torso and grew, pushing the torso up further into the air. Each tendril was thin and faintly translucent, filled with a deep blue colored liquid that flowed backward through the extended limbs. Kay didn’t know how he knew that it was flowing backward, just that it was. The torso attached to the tendrils was that of a dwarven woman. The head was sunken and sallow from the bottom of the neck to the top of the bald scalp, making it look like an off-color skull. The torso and arms though were muscular and looked quite healthy compared to the attached head. The vampyr spread it’s arms and opened it’s hands, revealing twin bundles of glowing energy that matched the barrier covering the way forward.

“You will never reach the Great One!” The vampyr gloated. “My barriers are impenetrab-“

Kay launched himself forward his halberd already extended to run the vampyr through. He’d only waiting long enough for one of them to start gloating and give away if he was heading the right direction or not. With that confirmation he didn’t need to listen to any more.

Dozens of the hundred of jellyfish-like tentacles extending from the bottom of the barrier creating vampyr came together in a flash to form a composite limb that that took the brunt of Kay’s attack and redirected his charge off to the side. He slammed into the wall there, breaking the stone into shards, before throwing himself forward again. The vampyr he was after dragged itself toward the ceiling with more tendrils, shrieking angrily as it rose above him. He started climbing through the air with his normal trick of hardening the blood beneath his feet as he took a step upward. Dozens of attacks lashed out from him and his armor as he raced to kill this particular vampyr as fast as possible.

Below them, the tense atmosphere shattered after his attack and the Shatterplate Order’s leader and best hunters fought alongside Kay’s Blood Guard to wipe out the best fighters among the vampyr that had been gathered to protect this “Great One”.