When they left the church and Adam expanded his perception to the entire city, he could imdiately tell that there were less lodies overall. He still wasn’t able to finely sort through them when he had his blood sense spread this broadly, but he was steadily gaining more and more clarity when he wasn’t limiting his range.
For now, he pulled it back to only encompass the Pious district. Along with so new strong bloodfiend lodies dotted around, he also noticed an altogether different type of lody. It was one that didn’t emanate any emotions, and it seed to fall between human and animal in terms of the one-track tone that flowed through it.
Maybe those are ghouls, he considered.
There were at least a dozen in just the Pious district alone, which did not bode well for the rest of Moonport. Ghouls were basically zombies, and while they shared all the weaknesses of bloodfiends, they only gained a moderate boost in physical power and were completely enslaved to whichever vampire had made them.
The ones that were close enough to pinpoint seed to be hidden inside buildings and basents, but they would beco shock troopers at night, so trimming their numbers was important. Especially since they could no longer hide in the church, because Father Mathias and his holy relic were both gone.
The others followed Adam as he went over to harvest the bloodfiend that he’d killed during the night using his sculpted eye. Adam’s new shirt imdiately sucked up all of the blood from the dead vampire, and he was glad to discover that it worked exactly like he’d hoped, allowing him to pull the blood out and manipulate it. The mont he spilled any blood on the ground or walls, his shirt hoovered it up, which was extrely useful.
After gathering the vampire’s materials, he’d collected another pair of fangs, putting him at 4 mature, and 24 lesser ones, which was already a good amount of Points, but would also allow him to complete Migraine’s quest without trouble.
But I should probably split these with everyone else at the end. They’re easy enough to collect, so we should have quite a lot by the ti we’re done with Moonport.
Adam’s crimson shirt already had about five litres of blood inside, which put his Defence back to where it’d been with the Cloud Skimr Jacket, on top of giving him 50% more Speed, which was imdiately noticeable.
“Is there a limit to how much blood this shirt can hold?” he asked his cube as they went towards a nearby cluster of ghoul lodies.
[Yes.]
“And what is it?”
[I cannot say.]
“What about the damage and exponential factor? Can you tell
the numbers for those?”
[I cannot say.]
Oh well, at least I can use my status to track how much of a boost I’m getting, so I can just work backwards to find out what the litre capacity on this thing is.
“I’m glad it’s not just
it’s doing that to,” Sofia remarked. “I tried to find out exactly how much Blood Saint boosts my attack speed and impact, but it wouldn’t say. It wouldn’t even clarify how ‘spilled blood’ is counted.”
“I did a lot of training in the Player House to discover how my skills and Relics work,” Kate??ina said. “It is the only way that is reliable.”
Adam nodded. “I did the sa.”
“I guess I should use the dummy more. All I did was try and figure out the best way to spill blood from certain enemy types,” Sofia admitted. “Last Stage was a pain in the ass though, since so many enemies don’t even have blood. I hope Stage Nine isn’t another one full of elentals.”
It isn’t, Adam wanted to say, but he had no plausible way to explain how he knew, unless he wanted to pull the ‘my friend is a ti-looper’ card, and that would just make them second-guess the explanation of how he knew about Moonport.
Maybe I’ll tell them in the Tavern after the Stage though, he considered. I could use the Orb of Insight as an explanation again, by saying that soone else who used it found out.
They reached a residential block after a bit of light jogging, and once Adam had scanned for lodies, they were able to find an unoccupied apartnt they could go through to reach the hallway leading to the apartnt with their targets, which faced into an inner courtyard ford by the buildings. The apartnt had five separate lodies within, and all of them gave off the weird not-quite-human one-track tones.
Kate??ina looked at her clawed hands as her and Sofia prepared to breach the door. Although Kate??ina’s skin had turned bone-pale up to the middle of her forearms, she didn’t have any aversion to sunlight, and she hadn’t even seed to notice the lingering holy magic inside the church, making it clear that she hadn’t gained any weaknesses from equipping them. That might change co nightfall, but for now it seed like a pretty good choice of weapon.
Once Adam and Luo were ready, Sofia kicked the door down and Kate??ina charged in. The apartnt was completely dark, owing to its courtyard-facing windows all being blocked by cloth and paper.
It would’ve been smarter to breach the windows and flood the apartnt with light, Adam realised belatedly.
The occupants of the main room of the apartnt were languid humans with dark-grey skin and proptosis eyes with the sclera turned a faintly-glowing red. Their mouths hung open and showed malford teeth that had only partially transford into those of a bloodfiend. Although they were clearly in so kind of torpor, they stood upright and shifted slightly to keep their balance.
They didn’t react to their intrusion until Kate??ina tore her claws through the head of the nearest one, destroying its skull and brain in one swipe. Then their lodies changed in an instant. Tones of undiluted anger and hunger flowed through them, and the remaining four lunged forward with loud inhuman shouts and groans.
Sofia rushed in to protect Kate??ina, killing one and pushing another back. At the sa ti, Luo took out a third with a bolt right through its do.
Then Adam used a floating limb of flesh to destroy the window fras and fill the apartnt with sunlight.
The two surviving ghouls started screaming, but were abruptly cut off by Kate??ina and Sofia decapitating and pulverising their heads.
“We should’ve done that from the start,” Kate??ina remarked as she looked down at the ghouls rapidly turning to ash at her feet.
“That’s my bad,” Adam apologised. “I wasn’t using my head.”
Once the ghouls had been disintegrated by the sunlight, only their red eyes remained.
Adam stooped to pick one up.
< < Collectible Relic > >
< Ghoul Eye (Common) — The malford eye of a ghoul >
“There are a lot of things to collect in this Stage,” Luo comnted as he helped pick up the eyes.
“It’s worth doing,” Adam replied. “Once we’re done with Moonport, we’ll distribute everything we’ve collected.”
“I should get a backpack as well,” Sofia said, looking at the one Adam was holding with a tinge of envy in her lody.
“You can buy one from the market,” Kate??ina told her. “There were a few leather vendors, and I think they sold bags.”
“It won’t be a Relic though,” Sofia replied.
“Mine isn’t a Relic either,” Adam said.
“Really?” she asked.
“If it were, then I wouldn’t be able to wear the cape over top of it, I’m pretty sure,” he replied.
After collecting ten eyes from the ghouls, they continued southeast towards the Pleasure district, taking out thirteen more ghouls and three lesser bloodfiends on the way, allowing him to fill up his crimson shirt to its maximum capacity, which seed to be 20 litres.
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I really hope they don’t count for the Flayed Lady’s quest, Adam thought.
“I’ve been thinking,” Luo started as they crossed a bridge to the Cloth district from Pious. “If new bloodfiends and ghouls are made every night, aren’t we better off focusing on just the third-generation bloodfiends and up?”
“In theory, you’re right,” Adam said. “But at night we may have to fight all the ones we didn’t kill during the day, so it benefits us to take out as many as we can.”
They continued on into the Pleasure district by crossing another bridge. Although it was faster to move across the rooftops, they moved to the streets once inside the seedy entertainnt district, since they were trying to be inconspicuous.
The first thing they’d decided to do was return to the Sober Eel. Although it was early morning, it was already full of lodies draped in desire and ecstasy.
The people of this world are really going at it like there’s no tomorrow.
Sofia took the lead in asking the proprietor about Gilded Gillian, who they’d gotten a quest from to find his eye. While Adam listened to her talk to the voluptuous woman that owned the tavern, he narrowed his blood perception to only include the building and scanned through its occupants.
“I’ll be right back,” he told the others after a mont, and then he went up the stairs to the third floor. Once there, he found the door to the room that’d caught his attention. There had been two lodies within, but now there was only one. Monts before the other had vanished, it’d been engulfed in pleasure and desire, but it had seed unnatural in how single-minded and obsessed it’d been. Then he’d noticed the other lody, it had a sadistic tone to it, and though Adam initially assud it could’ve been so kind of weird pain fetish thing going on, it was the hunger in that second lody that had tipped him off.
The door had a simple lock, and Adam was able to open it by shaping his finger in a way that it grabbed the key placed into it from the other side, allowing him to twist it around to open the lock.
As he carefully pushed open the door, the others ca up the stairs behind him, and he stopped to gesture for them to stay put and be quiet.
The blinds inside the room were shut, and only a few candles on the floor illuminated the interior. Slobbering and wet chewing echoed out into the hall. After his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Adam saw a hunched-over and naked female figure on the floor, her pale back turned to him as she leaned over the corpse of a man who’d been unsleeved from neck to abdon, his raw flesh and organs fully exposed, while his skin covered his privates like a towel wrapped around his waist.
Adam activated the spell he’d gotten as his boon from worshipping the Flayed Lady. It was called Blood Dagger and used 40 Health to cast, and would recoup 100 when it killed a humanoid. It only had a 5-minute cooldown, but like the na suggested, it required him to get right up close, so it didn’t suit his fighting style at all, and he couldn’t use harvested blood to cast it, which made it more of a liability than an asset. The way it healed him after a kill was also incredibly uncomfortable. As a result, it was the first ti he’d used it outside of Interim Island.
But it is a spell made for backstabbing and betrayal, so it makes sense, I suppose.
As the blood in his veins was pulled out into his right palm, a dagger of blood glass manifested in his hand in the shape of a stiletto with thorns on the handle. Unlike all other spells he’d used with the Mandate of Blood, this one didn’t imbue him with any knowledge of how to cast it, no doubt because the Flayed Lady didn’t want him to learn how it worked.
Even though his blood normally might’ve caught a bloodfiend’s attention, there was so much in the room already that it seed his target didn’t notice. She was gleefully slurping up her prey’s insides and even humming to herself a little.
It was sickening.
Adam carefully moved closer. Since he was standing and not crouched, he saw the face of the dead man when he was only two tres from the vampire eating his remains. He gritted his teeth in disgust at the grin spread across the guy’s face. The corners of his mouth were pulled up as far as they would go, and though there were dried tears running from his wide-open eyes and down his cheeks, it was clear that he’d been unable to break free of whatever hypnotic spell had been cast on him.
Before the bloodfiend could devour any more, Adam lunged forward, placing his hands over her eyes as he jamd the blade into her neck from the side and pushed it out through her oesophagus, disabling her ability to scream and severing both carotid arteries. If not for the fact that Adam had already filled up his crimson shirt with 20 litres of vampire blood, he knew it would’ve happily gulped down the red spray that shot out of her.
While continuing to hold her eyes, Adam jabbed the blood dagger into her chest repeatedly, aiming for the heart. He finished her off by driving it up through the roof of her mouth and into her brain.
[Second Generation Bloodfiend defeated.]
As the bloodfiend fell forward onto her victim, Adam’s dagger turned into a rose-covered and thorny vine that pulled itself out of her mouth and snaked back to him, climbing up his leg. When it reached his torso, it burrowed into his flesh, the entire vine vanishing from sight as it swam through his ribcage to coil around his heart and restore 100 points of Health.
That was incredibly effective, he thought to himself as the others piled into the room. But why is the healing part so over the top…?
“Holy shit, Adam,” Sofia remarked.
“My patron likes when I put on a show,” he said with a shrug.
“What was that vine thing at the end?” Luo asked. “It looked like it went inside you.”
“That’s how it heals …” Adam replied with a frown.
“The All-Mother warned
of the Flayed Lady before the tower Stage,” Kate??ina said.
“You should hear what she did to test
in the Floating Sea,” Adam remarked humourlessly.
He went on to tell them about Julie and how she’d betrayed him and his team alongside Ellen. As he spoke, he harvested the bloodfiend and her victim, adding her fangs to their growing collection of trophies.
Everyone seed shocked by the ti Adam was done with the quick recap and they were leaving the tavern.
“I forgot the point I was trying to make,” Adam trailed off.
“It is understandable that you needed to vent your frustrations,” Kate??ina comnted. “I am glad that my patron hasn’t put
through anything like that.”
“Neither has mine,” Luo added.
“Nor mine,” Sofia said.
“Anyway,” Adam said, getting away from the topic. “What did the proprietor tell you about Gilded Gillian?”
She had been reluctant to give them a straight answer while Adam had been listening, and he hadn’t caught the end of their chat because he’d left to find the bloodfiend.
“Apparently, we’re the third group in the last week to ask her about his missing eye,” Sofia explained. “The proprietor seed to think there was sothing strange going on with him, but after so prodding, she told us that Gillian is known to frequent a place called the Blue Pavilion.”
“We are likely dealing with an ambush or a trap,” Kate??ina remarked.
“I think Kat is right,” Sofia said.
“Kat?” she asked, giving her a confused look.
“It’s easier than saying your whole na.”
“You can just call
Závi then,” she told her.
“I refuse to call you that,” Sofia replied, clearly offended at the notion of using Aeran’s awful nickna for her.
“Should I call you Sof, then?” Kat asked.
“If you want,” Sofia said.
“I prefer Sofia, it is a beautiful na.”
Sofia smiled.
“You can call
L,” Luo joined in.
Both of them turned to look at him.
“Uh. Nevermind…”
Adam suppressed a laugh. “Co on,” he told them.
The Blue Pavilion was located in the north-eastern corner of the Pleasure district, which seed to be where the most expensive brothels, restaurants, bathhouses, and massage parlours were located, which Adam thought was strange, given that the corner bordered the Garrison district.
He made a note of the bloodfiends they passed on the way there and what places they hung out in, but given the proprietor’s warning, they all wanted to go to the mysterious brothel first.
It may also give us a clue to the bloodfiends’ lair.
I feel fairly confident it isn’t in the Pious district, but that still leaves six to go, and even with my blood sense, I can’t really distinguish any specific clues. If only it had been easier to detect the second-generation bloodfiends, then I might’ve been able to find it right away.
The two won trailed a bit behind as they talked about sothing from Stage Seven that they both seed to find funny. Luo took the opportunity to sidle up to Adam.
“Sothing wrong?” Adam asked him, sensing that he had a question.
“It’s not really important, but I was just wondering, were you in the army before all of this?”
Adam was surprised by the question.
“No. I was an accountant,” he then replied a mont later.
“I thought you might’ve had so training,” Luo remarked. “The way you’re able to stay calm and keep us all together, and the way you handled Aeran… Plus, when you killed that bloodfiend earlier, you were so precise with your dagger, even though your weapons are both ranged.”
He’s been paying attention.
My thoughts about Aeran and Kat being like professional killers clearly lacked a lot of self-awareness.
“I guess I’ve just always been calm under pressure,” Adam lied.
It was by far the biggest lie he’d told anyone, but Luo took him at his word.
“It’s just, the way you stabbed the vampire in the neck to sever her throat so she couldn’t call for help… How do you even co up with sothing like that? I don’t think I’ll get that picture out of my mind anyti soon.”
“That’s what sticks with you and not the corpse she’d flayed?” Adam asked.
“The gory stuff is just like splatter films to , so I don’t really think about it,” Luo said.
“You know, you’re pretty tough yourself,” Adam replied. “You fired your crossbow at the Patriarch, despite having a broken arm, and you helped Sofia walk even though you were injured too. That’s not sothing just anyone would do.”
The praise clearly embarrassed Luo, and he looked away for a mont. Then he asked in a serious tone, while looking at the buildings they were passing and the people out front that wanted them to co inside, “Do you think we can survive this Stage?”
“The next night will be a challenge,” Adam replied honestly. “But I think we should keep going at the pace we’re at. When we find the Godstone, it may be a good idea for you all to take it and finish the Stage.”
“You’re planning on staying until the end?” Luo asked.
“I have to kill all the bloodfiends,” Adam told him.
“Right… otherwise your crazy patron will punish you,” Luo added.
“Bingo.”
“I hope you won’t hate
for it, but if we find the Godstone, I’ll leave Moonport right away,” Luo admitted.
“I won't,” Adam reassured him.
A few minutes later they arrived at the north-eastern corner of the Pleasure district, and imdiately the expensive nature of the area was made clear by the fact that every brothel and building stood apart from the others, with lush gardens and statues dotted around, and beautiful n and won lounging by fountains and sitting half-naked in shallow pools. It looked more like the Wine district, which only confused Adam more about its placent being so close to the Garrison.
The Blue Pavilion was easy enough to spot from a distance, since it was a white three-storey building shaped like a crescent with a blue wooden pavilion out in front of it, inside of which was a fancy-looking restaurant.
Before they even got close to the place though, Adam could sense bloodfiends all over the main building, many lesser ones hiding inside the rooms. As he scrutinised the employees of the brothel from afar, he noticed at least four that might be third-generation bloodfiends, and one that seed to be a second-generation. There were also quite a few ghouls, all of which had been placed together in the basent below the building.
Adam stopped next to a fountain and turned to the others. “Kat was right. The place is infested, with almost every room having a lesser fiend lying in wait. It seems Gilded Gillian is sending people to their deaths in search of his eye.”
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