"Do you know who I am, Ali bin Mihail? Of course, you know my name, my title, my race, my sire, but do you know who I am, truly?"
"I like to think I do, my Count, but perhaps you could inform me better."
"My earliest true memory is that of my awakening as a vampire in the service of my master, Vlad Dracula Tepes. I was fully grown, but from his perspective and mine, I was merely a child. An immortal babe. The sun had not risen before I had ridden to the battlefield and taken men's lives. I first did battle with your oft-spoken-of Corps a matter of weeks after first I awoke."
"Do you mean to intimidate me?"
"Indeed not. I mean to, as you said, inform you. I have fought in hundreds of battles, taken thousands of lives. Devoured many, and allowed many others to bleed into the dust. I, too, have bled. Time and time again, I have battled Hunters, sent by Hellsing and Harker, as well as those less-prepared for doing battle with such as myself. I have had four stakes driven through my heart, been pierced by eleven crosses, two of them made of silver. I have been wounded by forty-one silver bullets, two of them in my brain, two of them in my heart, and, if my count is correct, six of them blessed just as yours are. I know pain. But through all of this, I have learned one thing."
"And that is, my Count?"
"To state it in the words of the horribly cliched roaming heroes so popular in American television, Ali bin Mihail- I don't scare."
You offer the Janissary no further warning, no more do you monologue of your own merits. Instead, you simply leap. You hear the click of his musket's hammer against its percussion cap distinctly before you see the bullet emerge from the barrel. You twist your body out of the musket ball's path as you fly through the air at your target, but are unable to completely avoid it. A horrible, wracking pain immediately shoots through your nerves like lightning. The ball entered just under its intended target and to its left, slamming into your stomach and bursting out through your back. With the close range and the projectile's makeup, it cuts through your entire body, which is more of a pleasant surprise than any other sort. After all, the last thing you need right now is a holy silver ball inside your body.
A split-second after his ball strikes you, you strike him. But he's fast. Much faster than you recall his kin in the Janissaries to be, putting his musket in between you and him. You strike it in the front of the barrel, and he lets this carry him backward. In effect, rather than punching or outright eviscerating him, you've only managed to give him a good shove. Still, you're obviously faster and stronger than he is-
Despite the fact that you've got a pretty gunshot in your chest that's doing a number on your concentration. You grip the entry wound for a split-second, before glancing down at your hand. Already, it's covered in your thick, black, tarlike blood, coagulating between your fingers- and ruining your favorite fucking shirt. You throw your coat off to keep it from being ruined too before you return your attention to the Janissary. It's when you see how far he's gotten through the process of reloading that you realize that you're not taking this seriously enough. This guy is fast, strong, and obviously smart.
More importantly, he's got his hands on a weapon that could very likely kill you. Not in one shot, mind you, but a good shot from a bullet like that to the heart would no doubt immediately incapacitate you. You've never actually been shot in the heart by such a dangerous weapon, and you've watched another of your brothers be killed by such a similar wound. You have to be careful.
You have to let go of your century of complacency. You have to return to the mindset you were in before 1918. You have to become a killer again, if only for a moment.
Before he has time to finish reloading his weapon, you're already on top of him. You grab his face, lifting it before slamming it into the tile floor of the grocery store that's become your battlefield, shattering it like glass. You see his blood, a dark black just barely tinged with red, stained against the ground below him. You'd wondered if his blood would be edible, what with him saying he was undead. Evidently, it's not.
You shouldn't have let that distract you. He slams the butt of his musket into your throat, sending you reeling off of him in pain. You no longer need to breathe, but your human reflex to protect your jugular still exists. Before you even have time to recover, he's retrieved a knife from Devil-knows-where and hurled it at you, the spinning object embedding itself perfectly into your eye- and several inches into your cerebral cortex. You hear a horrible ringing, and your depth perception is immediately gone. Cleverly, he leaps into your blind spot, and between your pain, rage, and cranial impediment, you have trouble tracking him with your good eye. Still, you distracted him enough that he hasn't been able to reload yet.
You see that he's put an entire row of foodstuffs between you and him- a mistake. You grab it in one hand, feeling your grip compress its steel construction as you do, before slamming it toward him, using the entire massive shelf to pin him against the store's far wall. You hear his bones crack.
You make the mistake of thinking he's dealt with for a moment and attempt to pull the knife from your eye. You only manage to get it about halfway out, freeing your brain to begin to regenerate, before he kicks the shelf back away from him-
Utterly ridiculous. That shelf, fully-loaded, would have had to weigh well over a ton. For him to move something like that- he'd have to be much stronger than any Janissary you ever encountered. That train of thought is immediately interrupted by him finally reloading his musket and firing it at you. This time, he's the one that made a mistake. With a good seven or ten meters between the two of you, dodging the ball is a breeze.
Or, at least, it would be, if you didn't entirely lack depth perception. You miscalculate your evasion and feel the blessed silver tear a swath of flesh through your cheek before it passes, otherwise harmlessly, behind you. You charge him, but he's able to leap behind a counter and out of your sight before you can reach him. You try to use your bloodsense to locate him- and fail utterly. As an undead, his heart no longer beats. Your bloodsense is useless. However, you can still smell him, and that way are at least able to vaguely divine his location, slamming directly through a shelf of goods to reach him. He's in the process of reloading his weapon once again, but this time he doesn't seem eager to run away. He slips underneath your uncalculated charge and slams the muzzle of his gun against your gut. It doesn't actually pierce your skin, but it feels like he damn near impaled you, and you're certain he's done damage to your intestines that might be fatal to a mortal.
You grab his wrist, your vicelike grip so tight that you feel his bones begin to fracture in it. You're almost satisfied with yourself until he headbutts the handle of the knife currently embedded in your eye, driving it down to the hilt.
You roar in pain, but instead of pulling away as he so clearly hoped that you would, your fury leads you to only come closer, utterly shattering his wrist in your grip before you slam your fist into his side with inhuman might. You turn his ribs into veritable bonemeal, before hurling him so hard into the store's back wall that he's thrown right through it into what appears to be some sort of storage area. In a rage, you follow, hoping to do more damage before he can recover. Unfortunately, it seems you've underestimated the speed with which a supernaturally-fast soldier can reload a gun he's drilled with for countless hours. By the time you reach him, he's able to slam the gun into your gut a second time- and this time, he pulls the trigger.
You feel the ball just narrowly miss your spine, instead tearing through your small intestine and once again exiting out your back.
You have had enough of that damn gun. You grab it by the barrel, crushing it in your fist. He does not appear to appreciate this and stands, throwing a punch somewhere in your blind spot. You don't realize what he's done for a fraction of a second. It's when the horrible spiking pain runs through you once again that it occurs to you. He just physically slapped one of his musket balls into your head- directly into the nerve bundle at your temple. It's agony, and all of this damage to your brain is making it very difficult to think.
For a moment, you stagger backward. He smiles. He seems almost happy for a moment, smug even. He thinks he's done the job.
Unfortunately for him, there's only two thoughts left in your mind. The first is getting that fucking knife out of your brain, and the second is killing him. You grab the knife's handle, suddenly ripping it from your skull, bringing most of your left eye, its socket, and quite a bit of brain matter with it. A moment later, you've stepped forward and slammed the knife back into flesh- this time, it's his. You drive it deep into his throat, before grabbing his hair as a handhold and using it to tear straight down his chest. You've gut him like a fish, from his throat to his crotch. Still, he grips you with his unbroken hand, fighting like the Devil.
You won't accept that. You step forward, driving a knee into his good arm, snapping it nearly off of his body, before you reach inside his mouth and get a grip on his upper jaw, your free hand grabbing him by the back of his neck. Using this convenient grip, you begin to pull. It only takes a few moments before the sinew goes, and it's followed by the muscle, then the bone, and then the skin. You tear his upper jaw and skull entirely free of his neck and brain stem, before furiously hurling the recently-removed half of his head into the street. At the time, you don't realize it, but the distinct crack that the throw causes is actually his skull breaking the speed of sound as you send it hurtling down the street.
"Smug fucker."
That, you say in Slavonic.
[] Time to pick up the food you collected and head home.
- [] Take his gun and remaining ammunition?
- [] Spit on the corpse first?
- [] Sit down a while and let your eye and brain heal. No use going into the streets looking like another of the zombies. However, your bullet wounds won't properly heal until you've had some blood.
[] Before you bring home the food, get blood. Sniff out some other poor survivor and suck. Them. Dry. You've held back far too long, and you need a proper meal.
[] Forget about the group at home, forget about blood, and go play kickball with the fucker's skull instead. Have yourself a right good go at it. Make a whole night's entertainment.
[] Write in...
it was a good post!
