Chapter 4-111: Going with the Flow (1/2)

This is Awesome!, the Mick thought to himself, surging through the Ocean Dragon forms with a glee and enthusiasm he had not felt in decades.

The Blooded were a powerful race. Although outwardly human, they naturally became Tomb-Tainted when they reached maturity, and their physiology began to emulate those of the vampires their ancestry was tied to. Although they didn’t gain the life-draining touch of a vampire, they could eventually learn and gain most of the magical powers of a true vampire... and when they did, if they died, they arose as true vampires if their bodies were intact.

The Blooded Clans had lived in secret among humans, magic and the very nature of the world subduing any belief in them, and in general, things had been quiet and humans oblivious to their existences, except for fanciful tales few believed.

Then the Shroud had come, and everything had fallen apart.

He had only been a wee lad when the Shroud swept across the sky, and he could still vividly recall the sensation of power swelling as it swept past him, as well as the sense of doom falling upon him and everyone he knew.

Mild glamours couldn’t hide their appearances now, and the clans of the Tomb had been slaughtered along with all the truly undead creatures that had started to rise in the fear and horror of the masses. Sure, they were tough, and strong, stronger than any normal human... but with the rise of magic came the Priests, the Paladins, the Wizards, the Sorcerers, the Witches, springing into existence full force, and suddenly their massive physical advantages were just advantages among other advantages.

Worse had been the opportunists of his own people, taking advantage of the chaos to settle grudges centuries in the making.

He had escaped the slaughter of his clan and the ancestors who rose from their silent crypts, swollen with a thirst for blood and a mad fear of the Shroud, and who were highly unprepared for the new Powered... armed with guns. The mobs had been egged on by agents of other clans, who had contributed to the slaughter with murders of their own against those of Clan Fynnachl who had escaped the rise of humans.

He had used the fact he was young and hadn’t fully matured into his power to survive that backlash, and fled first his native land, and when the last of his clan members were slaughtered in New York, flee this land too, heading for Australia, where he had fallen in with the remnants of the Japanese who had managed to flee there after their homeland was overrun.

That was where he had learned to use a sword, and use it well enough to inspire fear in others. He had a keen memory, and had marked all the clans that had turned on them to settle their own past grudges, and was determined to get revenge for his family: all three of his brothers, two sisters, his mother, father, four uncles and two aunts by blood, his grandfather, so many cousins and kin...

Hearing that a motley clan of Blooded survivors had managed to assemble themselves in Detroit, right next to the auspices of the new Heavenbound Hall rising openly there, he had quit Australia and returned here, joining them as the sole survivor of his clan. He took a job as an enforcer against Blooded who stepped over the line, and distinguishing himself rapidly.

He had learned what magic he could, but it was a difficult task, as any studies in magic that didn’t involve developing the natural gifts of his people were annoyingly hard to master, and the easiest path, necromancy, was a path straight to damnation. He wanted more than that, more than the path that led to the grave and unlife beyond it... and then, likely very quickly, a death by outraged normal humans who refused to act like oblivious, meek prey anymore.

This... this was more progress than he’d been able to make in years.

Smior was starting to come to life in his hands. As the essence of his ki changed and aligned to the Ocean Dragon, the blade became more fluid, livelier, eager to attack and quicker to pull back to proper guard. As he whirled through the katas with his Blade, he could feel them burning into him smoother, cleaner, sharper, surer, fusing into the blood surging through him, pure and sure and eager to move.

He was rediscovering a joy for the sword he had not felt in years. It had devolved to just a tool for him to get his work done, bereft of the elegance and fascination he had once felt for it. Rediscovering it was like being young again.

He couldn’t wait to kill some of the bastards with it!

As he moved through all the katas for the hundredth time and more, he could feel every little surge of improvement, attunement, and alignment, and with the great feral patience of the Blooded, and the glee of a returned devotee, he began again...

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Sama watched the Blooded swordsman start again, and nodded to herself.

She had already moved his car around from the front of the forge to the back and out of sight, expediently lifting the front end off the ground and dragging it back here while The Mick was doing katas. That had been about 2 AM the first morning, when he was repeating the basic katas for the fiftieth time.

She’d shown him the advanced katas yesterday, a six-hour process he had devoured with obsessive need, leapfrogging and hurdling past stages of accomplishment and comprehension that should have taken months to cross with the wondrous miracle of a whole damn lot of backlogged Karma devoted to the sword that he wasn’t able to spend, because he didn’t know what to spend it on.

The Mick was a Racial Eight, an impressive achievement, putting him at the elite of the neo-vampire clans of the Blooded, but his Melee Levels had naturally lagged behind with the seductive ease of advancement of natural fighting skill and craploads of Stat advances and potential magical abilities that made the pseudo-undead more and more like vampires.

He was Tome-Tainted. It almost goggled her mind to think of it... in other words, he was more like a normal human, with none of the true affinity for negative energy and death magic that a neo-vampire would have. Oh, he was still drawn to it more than a human would be, by the very nature of the power of his blood, but true undead were drawn to necromancy like moths to flames.

He was also extremely resistant to negative energy, Sama could feel the defiance in the air around him. He had committed to his path, however quietly, and was walking it in anger and disdain for those of his own kind. It made him singularly focused, and also represented a LOT of repressed anger.