I stared for a bit. No, I was not open to criticism for my actions. This was the kind of magic someone at Gold—someone nearing Opal—was capable of. Of course, I stared.

Still, my real priorities asserted their position before long. We had six Thralls immobilized at the moment. But that wasn’t all of them. Several more were waiting behind the first wave to engage us. Now that they had seen their comrades were down, they all charged in.

“How many of them can you hold at once like that?” I asked, readying myself.

“Since they’re Silver at best, if that, about a dozen, give or take,” Revayne said. She didn’t turn towards the approaching the Thralls, choosing instead to stab her sword—her pen had transformed back into the sabre—through the nearest Thrall’s heart. “Can you hold them off for a bit? I’ll just take care of these ones first.”

Easier said than done. I didn’t have the core of a Brillwyrm turning me partially into a monster, and I didn’t envision ripping out a Thrall’s heart to turn into one of them either. No. I had grown stronger myself. I was Silver-ranked now, in nearly all my areas. If I had beaten one Thrall on my own before, then I would beat a half-dozen now.

The second wave of Thralls rushed in, screaming and cursing at us. Most of them did, at least. I thought I saw one of them falling behind the others, his face not showing the same kind of drooling, bloodthirsty ferocity that I was expecting from a Scarthrall.

There was no time to take note of something like that. The closest Scarthrall was almost on me.

I hadn’t charged in because I was preparing and sending out threads of mana all around me. Without a shield, taking on multiple Thralls at the same exact instant would be difficult, even if I had grown stronger. So instead, I used Gravity to carve out an opening.

Field Manipulation created a circle of heavy gravity with Infusion. One the vampires stepped in and stumbled.

Now I had my opening.

I rushed at the disbalanced vampire while the rest of the Thralls were aiming for my original location. My Agility was high enough that I got to my target before the rest of my adversaries could even begin to turn around.

A powerful swing of my mace had me crushing the bent-over Thrall’s neck and clavicle. At least I didn’t have to hear the vampire screaming, though the frothing sound coming out of its pulped throat was certainly effective at making my skin crawl.

I whirled around, just in time to see that one of the first Thralls that had reached my original location was now rushing at me again. This time, she leaped straight for me.

My hand shot out instinctively, palm straight and facing my opponent. Field Manipulation and Siphon created a circle of repulsion on my gloved hand. It was like controlling the Force, but obviously a lot more scuffed.

The rays of gravitational forces struck the woman’s shirt, affecting it and only it. But it was still enough.

Her body twisted in midair even as her momentum jerked her forward. But she no longer posed a threat to me and found no way of hitting me back when my mace crashed into her side. Another one down.

I didn’t see the next one coming. A growling grunt warned me for just a second before the next Scarseeker jumped onto me from behind. Strong arms and legs clasped around me, locking the vampire’s body to my back, filthy nails cutting into my skin. An instinctive use of Infusion was all that kept me from falling backwards and getting overwhelmed by the vampires.

Teeth snarled next to my neck, but I had shot an arm up to prevent the fangs from breaching into my flesh. Just the saliva alone made me feel like my skin was sizzling.

My worried head glanced at Revayne for a brief second, who had only downed a couple of the vampires so far. I wasn’t sure if they were dead or not. They just weren’t moving where they had fallen on the ground, which they hadn’t been doing to start with anyway.

Got it. I was still on my own.

The other vampires were rushing me down, but I didn’t give them the chance to add their weight on top of the one already on me.

So, I jumped.

As soon as the vampire had clasped his limbs around my body, I knew I had no time to rip them off. I had started Sacrificing my threads, boosting the power of my next cast. Once, twice, three times, before using Field Manipulation with Siphon as well. It didn’t reduce the weight of the Thrall on me as much as the combination of Affixes did for me.

I went straight up, almost fifteen feet high with one leap.

The rest of the vampires staggered their charges at my move, hurtling backwards to not get caught by the field of reversed force.

I was still using one hand to prevent the Thrall from clamping his fangs down on my neck. But my bloodthirsty backpack’s weight made us twirl in the air until I was facing the sky, the vampire on my back pointed to the ground.

Then it was Infusion’s turn again. My weight went up. I pushed as many threads into myself as I could, turning myself several times heavier than I was. The sensation of mass flowing through me, of my density growing and growing, almost made me feel sick.

But I was also raising Field Manipulation’s repulsive power with Siphon, trying to maintain my hovering stance.

I flicked it around with Infusion a couple seconds later. We fell. Hard.

The vampire was pulverized between me and the solid ground. His body was squashed, bones shattering and flesh tearing, blood and fluids bursting all around us in a gory halo.

Needless to say, his grip went slack.

The impact worked the way I had hoped for. It had also had the unintended effect of hurting my hip badly. Really badly. As I forced myself up, ripping pain tore down my left leg, evidence that the landing had injured me too.

But I would survive. Honestly, the bigger pain was the gore clinging to my back.

I fine-tuned the threads of my Gravity Aspect and sent them to my back, where they reached the nastier bits. Now no longer a part of a living Scarthrall, I had no trouble manipulating their weight so that they sloughed off my body.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The more important effect was that my display had intimidated the remaining Scarthralls. With the ones I had brought down still not back up yet—and the pulped one obviously nowhere close to getting back on his feet—the last of the Scarthralls decided they had more important matters to attend to. Namely, ditching me to deal with Revayne.

“Keep him busy,” yelled the one on the right to his companion before shooting off towards the guard captain.

He was probably going to just get himself killed faster against Revayne, who was in no danger. But I had promised her that I would take care of these ones, so I ran after him.

Pain screamed down my leg with every motion, and I had to bite down against it. That was so annoying. I supposed I had been a bit reckless with that manoeuvre, but still.

Maybe it was that slowing me down, or maybe the Thralls were just pretty fast on their own, because another vampire caught up to me quickly. She slashed at me with her clawed hand, but I batted her arm away hard. Then she stumbled and fell.

“Don’t wear long sleeves to fights,” I yelled back at her as I ran on, holding back my wince from the leg pain.

My Power had once again inserted threads using Mana Injection, which I had promptly used to tie her down. But my real quarry was getting away from me. No choice now.

I threw my mace. It wasn’t weighted down yet, but I had inserted a ton of threads into it. Better yet, my Power was strong enough that the mace flew straight, a little lessening of the weight at the head allowing it to fly farther and straighter. Just before it conked into the back of the back of the Scarthrall’s head, I weighed it down once again, turning it several times as heavy.

The vampire went down with a cry, spine broken and body trapped by an immensely weighty weapon.

“Nice one,” Revayne said, still stabbing through another vampire several places.

I hauled my agonised ass over the downed vampire. This pain… Hmm, could I deal with it with my Vitality Augmentation, somehow? I hadn’t yet gotten one, but Vitality was a health-related Attribute. Couldn’t I train up an Augmentation that could take care of things like wounds? A healing Augmentation, of sorts?

As I moved towards my target, I tried to focus on my mana. All the aggressive motions had built up a lot of threads around me through my other Augmentation. Threads I didn’t want to let go to waste.

It didn’t quite work. That was alright. I had reached my target and had more pressing things to worry about. The back of the Thrall’s head was crushed from the mace throw, but I quickly picked up my weapon and hammered down on the nape of his neck just to be certain.

“Don’t nice one me,” I said. “You’re taking too long.”

Revayne looked a little affronted. “I’ve never actually killed them before. It’s significantly more difficult than I assumed.”

I cursed the fact that I didn’t have another Blessed knife. “We’ll need to hurry—”

“No, actually. I already sent one of my birds to the Guardhouse. The Thralls who ran off should be captured or killed by now.” Her face went back into her book, though she continued stabbing different spots of her vampire subject. Poor idiot couldn’t even scream. That petrification effect was powerful. Could she asphyxiate people just by stopping their muscles? “Actually…”

“Actually, what?”

“It depends on how many of the Thralls are still in the dungeon, and how many are running around loose in Zairgon.”

I growled, then turned back to the task at hand.

Most of my vampires were down, save for the one who had seemed hesitant. He cowered as I drew closer, covering his head with his hands and nearly prostrating himself before me.

“Please, please!” he shouted. “Don’t kill me. Please. I wasn’t—”

I wasn’t in a particularly merciful mood. “Should have thought about not dying before you decided to invade the city.”

“I didn’t want to be a Thrall! They forced me!”

I had raised my mace, but my arm froze. “They forced you? I’m supposed to just believe that?”

“Please, I’m telling the truth! Ka—one of my friends. He—he got mixed up with them. Turned into a Thrall and threatened me to keep it a secret.” The vampire before me, a boy who was younger than Aurier, trembled. “I didn’t want to be involved. I didn’t want any part of this. But then he said the best way to make sure I don’t blab was to turn me into one too.”

I repositioned myself around the Thrall so that the rest of his cohort was in my line of sight. “If this is a ploy to distract me, it’s a stupid one.”

He just shook harder. “I’m not lying!” he cried.

“It’s potentially true.” Revayne had switched from simple stabbing to straight up crucifying the Thralls to the ground with long spikes of ink. “We may have been dealing with Thralls who willingly joined in on the massacre, but there is no doubt there are many in Ring Four and everywhere else who wish to have no part in it. That wasn’t going to stop the Scarseeker, however.”

“You Pits-cursed stupid mutt.” One of the Thralls I had put down was rising. That was the fellow with the shirt stuck to the street. Well, not stuck any longer. He wasn’t glaring at me, though. His murderous red eyes were fixed on the Thrall at my feet. “You just had to go and blab like you always do.”

The boy whimpered.

Something snapped in my head. “You.” I nudged the trembling young Thrall with my foot. “Get up. Now.”

He stopped shaking after a couple more nudges, looking at me in confusion. The other Thrall who had risen was also trying to understand what was going on, not rushing in blindly after how I had taken him down the first time.

“What—”

“You were turned into a Thrall against your will,” I said. “So what? Are you just going to lie there and be a fucking Thrall for the rest of your miserable life?”

Something seemed to snap in his eyes too. They hardened as they stared back at me. “I—I didn’t want anything to do with this! I—”

“But you are a Thrall now, aren’t you? You didn’t want it, but that’s what you got. That’s the card you were dealt.”

The boy stared at me, eyes riveted to my own. “I… I’m not like you, Cultist Ross.”

Wait, this kid knew me? I swallowed. From where, I didn’t even have a clue. I certainly didn’t recall seeing him before. But my racing mind put two and two together to determine that he must have been turned very recently, that he had to have gone through the traumatic, violating experience of being forced into his life as a Scarthrall maybe even days ago at most.

Then I scoffed. Actually, I laughed. Now even Revayne was staring at me.

“Don’t you see? You’re just like me. I was pulled into a situation—into an entire fucking world—I didn’t care about. And now I’m here—” I turned, facing the Thrall. No, Thralls. More of them were rising, wounds healed, unimpeded by fading purple threads. “Fighting these assholes.”

All the Thralls were on their feet. Including the boy who had been trembling less than a minute ago. He was facing the vampires though, not me.

“You see how it’s the same, don’t you?” I said.

Slowly, the boy nodded. “I’m just… a human. Or… I was.”

“Exactly.” A different kind of feeling was coursing through me now. Not just the adrenaline of fighting. It was a burning rightness that I couldn’t even being to explain. “Born a human. Born in Ring Four. You got dealt the worst lot you can in this city. And now you’re a Scarthrall. Because unlike you, these jerks got lured in by stupid promises of power.”

The vampires hissed at me, baring their fangs.

“Shut your maggot mouth, you summoned scum,” one of them shouted. “You don’t know the first thing about what it’s like to grow up in Ring Four.”

“You don’t know anything!” another yelled.

A third stepped forward, a manic bloody grin stretched across her face. “We are blessed. Not by the likes of you and your ineffectual posturing.” She waved her arms rousingly to draw in her companions. “We’re blessed by the Woven Way! And tonight, we’re going to make sure that all of Ring Four is blessed just like us! We’ll show all of Zairgon—”

An enormous whip-sword of black ink slashed through the vampires in a single, rippling slice. Blood exploded everywhere. Where there had been five vampires standing ready to fight was nothing more than six pairs of legs and waists, more blood fountaining into the air.

The screams of the dislocated vampires rippled into the air to accompany the shock, though the screaming seemed to fade somehow as Revayne spoke.

“We’ve got no time to waste, it would seem.” She turned to me, one of the inky birds disappearing back into her book. “There are more of the Thralls than I accounted for, and they’ve spread out farther than is ideal, across Ring Three and potentially elsewhere.” Her eyes steeled. “Our priorities are likely different, but that is good. Do what you must, Ross. So will I.”