|
|
The Well Blooded PathHer specialty was hardly combat. She was the propaganda and intelligence monger of the Majestics. It was she that devised many of the programs that lured in students and attracted the future leaders of the world to the halls of BattleMaster High. The human spirit was her tool to beckon and cultivate. More than one political leader in this vast universe had become her pet student in her 50-some years of tenure as a Majestic. Her whims had directed the course of many worlds in her time. She was not about ready to allow the whims of mere fledglings destroy her plans. Her specialty may not have been combat, but she was far more seasoned in the art of battle than those that had come before her on the battlefield that day. Centuries of observing humanity, and 50 years of perfecting the art of manipulating humanity among the Majestics had given her ample time to observe the art of war, and decipher its innate properties. She had never fought a day in her life before that bitter day when BattleMaster High, but her watchful eye had made her a far more deadly foe than the students that had trained all of their lives in the arts of the sword, the fist, the gun, and the chi. The body count she amassed matched the number of minutes that she had wielded a blade... perfectly... Glethen adjusted the tubing running from his cybernetic right arm to his neck, allowing the precious blood that flowed through it to more easily find its way to his weapon of choice. Glethen carried only a small suitcase and a sword on his person as he attempted to flee the ravaged school campus. The sword was simple enough. It was meant to cleave any that stood in his way, just as all swords are designed to do. A small channel ran down the blade, just as many swords have, allowing the blood to run down the blade to avoid the blade to stick within one's foe and become irremovable. The blood of Glethen's victims as he fled from BattleMaster High drained down this blade just as readily as any other sword. The archaic nature of the blade was almost unsettling for Glethen. It was all he had time to seize as he fled the burning building. It took mere moments to fashion the proper devices from within his suitcase to the blade so it would feed him to blood from his victims into his transfusion device built into his arm, but the simplicity of the blade, in its primitive elegance, struck the thaumaturgist as ironic. All of his fantastical devices had been destroyed in the fire. Devices that harnessed countless natural and unnatural forces of the world. To be forced to fight for his life with a simple blade as his companion... the gods surely were laughing at him at this moment. With the first minute of the ninth hour, Majestic 6 lost contact with Majestic 11. Her last comrade in arms had fallen to the rebellion. That minute, no lives were taken. Her cycle of death was broken. With the second minute of the ninth hour, a dark figure approached the 480 corpses. Were he like his parents, the hunger would have risen at the site of so much lingering blood. The vampire within him, though, was never awakened. The need for blood, his lust for the power that lingered within the life fluids of living beings, it was purely psychological. Glethen was born to a vampire family. The botched birth, the only of his kind. The vampire within never awakened. He never needed to taste blood. Yet... society forces things on the individual. Glethen developed a desire to partake of blood. But the driving desire to drink... it was not pure. And so he observed the pools of blood surrounding a solitary woman who appeared in her mid forties. She wielded only a dagger and a maniacal gleam in her eyes. He ignored the nigh-oceans of red power surrounding him, and lifted his sword in a battle stance. The woman did likewise. The fight was horribly quick. The dagger of the wizen woman struck first, ramming through the gut of Glethen, splattering his innards and allowing them to join the sea of blood surrounding the two. Mere moments later, as her blade still remained within Glethen's body, Glethen's own sword met its mark, ramming straight through the woman's heart. For an instant, the heart remained impaled atop the broadsword before being assimilated along with the woman's blood via the sword. The process was brief, for it takes mere seconds for Glethen's devices to deconstruct bodily organs and condense them to their base elements so they can be consumed along with the blood of his victims. An unsettling site. Unfortunately, no one was alive to witness the act. Better to witness horror than to be incapable of witnessing it at all... Glethen is not well loved among his parents' kind. Most find him to be a heretic and an abomination. He has taken the arts of feeding off of the living and turned them into a precise science. The very act of turning their organic and natural process into cold, hard, artificial hypotheses and equations bothers most intelligent vampires to the core. Others simply resent the fact that Glethen has spent the better part of the past decade hunting down their kind for his experiments. Either way, vampire-kind has little love for the artificial feaster known as Glethen DelMura. The letter from the mistress of his former home, the Covenant of Mystra, was most welcome. His current dwelling had been under constant assault by his "brethren" and he welcomed the excuse to leave his abode, decimate the bothersome insects, and venture forth to what he hoped to be his new home: Khazan. Glethen wiped the remaining blood off of the spike before retracting the implement back into his cybernetic hand and dropped the handkerchief he used on top of the now rapidly decomposing vampire. One, two, three steps later, and he was aboard the Amber Express, welcomed by the polite applause of the other passengers who witnessed his magnificent extermination of the vampire from their seats... |
