Cole had barely registered a dark blur sweeping down from the canopy before it hit the ground like a meteor, earth splitting in jagged fractures beneath the force of the figure’s sword. Cole lifted his ENVG-B, the blur giving way to the moonlit figure of a humanoid. Ten feet of shadow loomed over Mack, dark wings half-spread, and an immaculate coat flowing over armor – a style that’d make any edgelord cream his pants. seaʀᴄh thё NovelZone.fun website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
It was a Vampire Lord, alright – but that title barely covered it. In a world where any garden-variety vampire dropped to bullets like a human, maybe this one had the same weakness. Maybe. But it carried a hell of a lot more gravitas than that.
Its mere presence forced pressure into his chest, draining him, inducing uncertainty even despite his training. The way it made winning feel naïve, presumptuous – even absurd – it was almost enough to convince him that aura wasn’t just metaphorical.
It was real, as if there were some video game UI he couldn’t see. Debuff ticking down, willpower -30%, or some other bullshit that he had no control over.
Hell, if the shows Cole had seen were anything to go by, this would be around the part where the main villain stalled the fight for some grand monologue – dramatic posturing, a name-drop, maybe even a cryptic line about fate to really sell the moment.
Tough luck.
The only reprieve this creature offered was a slight tilt of its helmet, like a king regarding lesser beings. Or perhaps amusement, as if Mack’s dodge had earned him the smallest moment of notice. A pause before the inevitable. The unspoken challenge: Word? You really dodged that? Bet. Let’s see how long that lasts.
Cole had his rifle climbing before that gaudy sword even finished scarring the earth, stock braced against his shoulder. Even if the bastard had planned on a monologue, well, too bad – this wasn’t an anime, and there was no rule saying the villain got to finish his speech before the fight started.
Mack and Elina had the same idea, apparently. They’d thrown up some small flames for lighting. Tendrils of mud already nipped at the Vampire Lord’s boots before his sight locked onto center mass. Two cracks split the air – Elina’s shot from directly behind him and Mack’s from the ground where he’d rolled.
By the time his muzzle flashed, the target had disappeared without even a blur or shift – just a hard cut in reality, like a skipped frame. His mind knew what had happened before his body could even process it, but that didn’t mean he could stop it.
His own enhancement magic let him hit freeway speeds – past 60 miles per hour with enough acceleration and reinforcement to handle the g-forces. But the Vampire Lord? It hit top speed instantly – not even like a Bugatti tearing off the line, but as if the very concept of inertia didn’t apply. Just there, then here. The sheer disparity twisted his stomach into a knot.
Yeah, this world was broken – historical records had shown heroes and demons carving canyons, boiling seas, manipulating space and time to some extent.
And as ridiculous as this maneuver was, it still couldn’t stack up to those. It was not a teleport, not some trick of the eye; it was movement. Just… faster than his reaction speed.
A flash-step.
Cole didn’t waste precious milliseconds on futile evasion. If he couldn’t dodge the hit, he’d focus on damage mitigation instead.
The sword came at him horizontally, aiming to split his torso from his legs. Unlike the more amateur swings of the Mimics back at the castle, this wasn’t a simple cleave he could just deflect. The angle forced a hit no matter what – redirect it up, and he’d take a strike to the chest, leaving the heart and lungs at risk; send it down, and it’d smack into his legs.
Might as well go with the lesser poison.
He channeled mana into a barrier, deflecting downward. His shield flared blue-white in the darkness as he simultaneously reinforced his body – bones, muscles, organs – diverting every drop of mana he could spare into structural integrity. The brigandine would handle the edge, but blunt force trauma was still on the table. Newton’s laws still applied, even if this bastard seemed exempt.
The Vampire Lord's blade connected.
For a fraction of a second, the barrier held – then shattered like glass in the face of sabot. The sword’s arc continued unimpeded, slamming into Cole’s legs like a bat cracking against a fastball. He’d braced for impact, but bracing only went so far. The moment of contact sent a shockwave through his thighs, stripped away control, and before he could compensate, his stance was gone.
His lower body wrenched sideways first, torn out from under him before his torso could follow. The angle of the hit didn’t send him into a spin – it whipped him, full-force, into an arc he had no say in. Hell, it was as if he’d just been hooked by a speeding car.
He was weightless for a split second, tumbling and at the mercy of his momentum. Then, he noticed the thick, hardwood tree.
The trunk barely even slowed him down. The impact cracked through his legs and spine before the bark itself gave way. The sensation of breaking something that solid barely had time to register. The tree had completely folded under the force, splintering apart as he tore through it.
Then the ground caught him. The landing did a piss-poor job at redistributing his momentum. His back skidded first, tearing a trench through the forest floor before he came to an unceremonious stop, pain searing through every ounce of his body.
Thank God, the brigandine had prevented his legs from getting outright severed, but it hadn’t stopped the force. Every nerve screamed. His femurs felt like they’d been subjected to JNI ‘interrogation’, muscles locking up in pure shock response. His back was one continuous throb where he’d slammed through the tree, and his arms barely responded when he tried to move. Beneath the armor, he already knew he was bruising up, capillaries ruptures and tendons strained to the edge.
His body dragged him down, mind whispering to stay down and rest – even for a small moment. Through the haze, the Vampire Lord had already pivoted to its next target: Elina.
She sidestepped with barely a finger’s breadth to spare, unleashing a wave of fire as she retreated toward Mack. The flames washed over the demon’s armor without visible effect.
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The creature responded with impossible speed, sword whirling in an arc that Elina barely ducked under. The missed swing sliced a tree behind her, cutting though at least a few feet of wood with almost no visible resistance.
She backpedaled, already casting another spell – this time pulling moisture from the air that crystallized into ice shards. They smashed against the Vampire Lord’s helmet, shattering into fragments intended to obscure its vision.
Mack seized the opening, firing another shot while raising dozens of stone spikes between them and the threat, forcing the Vampire Lord back. But for how long? Seconds?
They were up against a level 17 demon, one with untold decades, perhaps even centuries, of experience.
On paper, the numbers suggested an advantage. Mack was Level 18, Elina 16. That should have been enough. But raw power didn’t mean anything in a fight where qualitative superiority outweighed quantitative progressions. This wasn’t a game with neat scaling mechanics.
Mack could probably punch above his Level with modernized magic, but his spellcasting repertoire remained limited. And experience? He had mere weeks of using magic. Combat experience from back home didn’t translate cleanly either. They’d fought plenty of asymmetrical engagements, but those were against humans with human limitations.
As for Elina, she carried Slayer Elite training, but her specialization wasn’t geared toward direct action. She obviously wasn’t a stranger to combat, but her skillset leaned toward support – force multipliers, sustainment, battlefield control. In any other fight, invaluable. Here? Against a close-quarters executioner with centuries of bloodshed hardcoded into its instincts? Less so.
And the Vampire Lord knew it.
It shifted its stance, flooding its blade with a sickly green glow. It lunged after Elina, swinging the blade in a diagonal sweep.
Elina read it early. The blade never touched her, and thank God it didn’t. The first tree in its path ceased to exist in one swing – obliterated, not cut. Splinters sprayed outward like shrapnel in a blast radius, shattering against the next trunk behind it. The shockwave carried through, cleaving clean fractures up the wood’s length, sending the second tree groaning to the ground. A third barely withstood the residual force, almost uprooted.
Mack fired the moment the Vampire Lord committed to its swing, timing the shot to land while the creature was mid-motion. A clean hit, center mass. At least, it should’ve been, if only the brain worked faster than the hands.
Whether it was the delay between visual processing and mortal reaction times, the lag between decision and muscle execution, or the time lost between neurons firing and the trigger finger obeying, it didn’t matter. That fraction of a second was all it needed.
By the time Mack’s muzzle flashed, the Vampire Lord had already flashed right, meters away from where the shot should’ve connected.
The Vampire Lord was beyond their ability to match individually. It certainly had them beat in strength and speed, but it wouldn’t be able to keep it up forever. Even the best fighters had limits; reaction times weren’t infinite. Unpredictability, numbers, pressure from every direction – that was their edge.
They just needed to break its rhythm, immobilize it for long enough for them to overwhelm it with firepower.
And, as much as he hated it, he had the perfect opportunity: use himself as bait. Still on the ground, placed his hand on the ground. The soil softened beneath his fingers, shifting under the surface – liquid where it counted, solid where it mattered. The top layer remained untouched, undisturbed.
Wrapping up with his trap, he exhaled through the pain and reached for his vest, grabbing two vials. He steeled himself as he popped the green one. Can’t be that bad, right? Down the hatch it went.
The potion hit harder than he’d expected. Heat flooded throughout his body, concentrating on his thighs. That healing magic Elina had performed on Mack on day one looked painful for good reason – it was painful. Everything that snapped back into place, all the forced regeneration – he felt it all. It was a full-body reset, in all its visceral immediacy.
His fingers twitched, still locked in a phantom recoil from the shock. Shit, he’d even go as far as calling this the best torture method he’d ever seen, expense aside. It hurt like hell, left no evidence, and could be performed in perpetuity.
But at least it made the blue’s bitterness a lot more tolerable. Mana rushed back into his system – not full, but it was enough for now.
Cole forced himself upright, fighting through the pained protests of damaged muscle. Time to get back in the fight. “Pin it down!”
The Vampire Lord snapped its head toward him in the middle of its swing. It gave up on Elina instantly, already halfway to Cole by the time his brain had caught up to the demon’s movements.
As terrifying as it was, the demon’s shifted priorities were exactly what he wanted to see – predator instinct, weaponized against itself. The moment its boots hit the soil, Cole willed the earth to soften. The surface layer collapsed beneath the Vampire Lord, mud swallowing its weight and tendrils snapping up to lock it in place.
For a brief moment, it worked. Cole fired his weapon.
But in that same instant, its sword whipped down in a clean arc. Mud blasted outward, moving fast enough to threaten him. Cole raised a barrier and worked his bolt, but the demon had already fallen back from the failing pit, rebounding off the nearest hardwood trunk.
Elina must have seen what Cole tried to do. She immediately liquefied the ground beneath herself, creating a moat of mud that spread outward. Mack caught on just as fast, transmuting the soil in a ten-foot radius around himself into a similar quagmire. If the Vampire Lord wanted to flash-step near any of them, it wouldn’t have any solid ground to work with.
The demon wasn’t dumb enough to wade through the mud. It continued its maneuver – kicking off a trunk with a force that splintered bark like cheap plywood before vanishing into the void above. Between the deepening evening and the dense canopy, it was as good as gone. Well, not gone per se, but invisible.
It was bound to come back for another strike. And if it wanted to play the vertical game…
“Bird spikes – trees!” Cole called to Mack, voice scraping his throat raw. Mack started channeling magic immediately. Earth coated the bark of the surrounding trees, jagged spikes spearing branches, ripping the canopy into a gauntlet. It wasn’t a total lockdown, though – Mack left gaps, little safe havens to force the demon to jump where they wanted instead of where it pleased.
Leaves and branches twitched overhead, inaudible over the gunshots coming from Miles and Ethan in the distance. It moved, but hadn’t come down yet. Mud or spikes?
It chose the latter. It launched itself toward one of Mack’s safe zones – predictable. Overconfident, too, and not without reason. Speed like this didn’t need to be unpredictable; the creature had raw, overwhelming velocity, and it was no doubt proud of it. It dashed like the very idea of being countered never factored in.
And sure, maybe they couldn’t hit it with their rifles, but that didn’t matter. Cole already had the answer. Mana surged, a fireball taking shape. Then, he multiplied the layers of air, bringing it closer to Mack’s concussive blast – a magic upgrade to a flashbang. Eyes and ears that sharp? Bet they’d love a sensory meltdown.
The demon hit its peak, mid-air and trajectory locked – a perfect target. Cole let it fly.
The spell burst loose, air snapping into a blinding flare and a thunderclap that punched through the trees, loud enough to make his own skull hum like a tuning fork despite the ear protection.
The effect was immediate, pressure front slamming into the Vampire Lord. The blast caught it square, a brutal shove against its vaulting momentum, pushing it slightly off course. It had wings, mere rudders steering the leap, but what good were they with no control left to guide? The flare must have seared retina-deep, its internal balance fucked, and those oh-so-vaunted senses buckled – crumpled like cheap tin under the barrage. No silver bullets or holy water handy, but this worked a damn sight better.
The demon didn’t recover. It slammed into the hardwood it’d aimed to spring from, bark splintering under the impact – a predator stripped of its bearings, speed and strength be damned. Still overpowered, sure, but flailing now, a free kill if anything in this busted world came that easy.
Cole didn’t wait for it to figure itself out – neither would Mack and Elina. All three of them opened fire.
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