Blood Shaper

Book 5: Chapter 51

Kay stared down at the Royal Avalon as it was being loaded to set sail. He was on top of the stairs leading down to the docks, waiting on Eleniah to finish saying goodbye to everyone she needed to.

“Sure you can’t stay longer?” Alahna asked.

“I wish we could, just to let Eleniah spend more time with you and the rest of her family, but the messages from home are worrying me and these were written months ago.” He held up the letters that had arrived a couple of days ago. “Who knows what’s going on now? I need to get home and help.”

“I get it. I would never want to be away while something happens to my people.” She turned and looked behind them at the city that was being rebuilt.

They’d had a little over a week of relative peace after the last battle against the nanomachine menace, and rebuilding had begun quickly, aided by mages and manipulators that could almost grow buildings from the ground. Kay deeply understood why Earth Manipulators and Earth Mages were generally seen as some of the wealthiest magical Classes, but scenes like this really drove the point home.

Kay turned as well and watched workers haul supplies and building blocks while mages and manipulators floated them around, assembling them into recreations of the buildings that had been lost. When the nanomachines had been energized by that blue glow they had leveled everything as they consumed more and more to fuel their propagation, leaving bare dirt behind. He explosion Eleniah had made with her two Class Skills hadn’t helped either, and almost half a square mile of buildings and possessions had been lost. The empty space made it easy to rebuild since there was no rubble to clean for most of the city, but it also meant there was nothing to bury when it came to the people that had been lost.

The causalities had been low according to everyone Kay had spoken too, only a few hundred in total and less than a dozen of those being civilians. Someone in the know had spotted the black shapes breaching the surface of the ocean as they approached Sel and had immediately started an evacuation. Only a few civilians hadn’t left, the stubborn kind that would have refused to leave in the face of any disaster. Everyone was telling Kay that they were so lucky to lose so few people, but all he could feel was shame for letting any die at all.

Two of the deaths were his own people, members of the Blood Guard. He’d been separated from them during the battle, as much from his own reckless charge into the fray as anything else, and they’d been unable to fight there way to him. They’d ended up retreating from the growing mass with everyone else that couldn’t burn away huge swathes of nanomachines, and two of his had fallen protecting other while they’d made their escape. Lauren had lost her entire lower half trying to keep them both alive and had only survive thanks to the surviving Blood Guard and some other’s donating blood to her so she could heal.

Kay took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I could-“

“Don’t.” Alahna clapped a hand over his mouth. “This is a hard lesson to learn, especially for people who end up being leaders, but don’t let this get to you. Don’t blame yourself. It’s harder to do than it is to say it, but its true. When it comes to fights you’ve picked, battles you’ve started, or wars you declare where you are knowingly sending people to die, that’s when it is absolutely on you and you should never let yourself forget those lives lost. But this?” She shook her head. “They came to us with no warning and no attempts at diplomacy, actively scouting us out to do violence to us. They would have come here and killed people even if you had been on the other side of the world. You saved lives by being here to push that monster back and slow it down enough to let Eleniah kill that core. Without you we’d have to worry about another one of those things coming back in years or decades instead of erasing them all entirely. Don’t take the blame for this, because you did nothing wrong, and everything right.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Fine. You did the best you could with what you had and what you knew.”

“I can take that.” He closed his eyes and tried to let the feelings wash over him. She was completely right, it was much easier to say than to do, but he heard the truth in her words. He felt someone step up next to him and take his hand and he looked to see Eleniah gazing a few inches up into his face.

“You alright?”

“No, but I’ll get better.”

They were both healed up, Eleniah after seeing a few healers and Kay after receiving a copious amount of generously donated blood and seeing a few healers. His jaw was still tender and Eleniah still grimaced when she walked now and then, but they were tier five, they’d be back in top shape after a few days.

“Alright, Alahna, this is it. We’ll be seeing you.”

“Damn straight you will, you’re going to be visiting, the both of you and I’ll be coming to visit you once things calm down on both our ends. Or if you need big help with anything. Would never do to not return a favor.” She took a step toward Eleniah, then paused. “Oh, don’t forget to send some of that anti-eldritch knowledge your going to be developing when you get something stable working. That’s the kind of thing every nation needs to have.”

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“It’s all in the trade deals,” Kay replied, gesturing at the negotiators down below that were starting to board. “But I won’t forget.”

“Thank you. With this level of trade and the connections between out dynasties there’s a good chance we’ll end up in a full alliance sometime soon.”

“No promises, we don’t have that kind of formal connection yet.” Kay very purposefully didn’t look at Eleniah when he said that.

Alahna grabbed a hug from her cousin and they traded “I love yous” and some more personal promises about correspondence. The Alahna stepped forward and shook Kay’s hand. “Thank you, your majesty King Kay of Avalon. Without your help everyone here would have been completely fucked. As I said before, completely separate from anything the System has offered you or any rewards or favors traded between our nations, I owe you one.” She nodded over his hand deeply enough that it was almost a bow.

“I won’t forget that either. I’m happy to have been able to help, but I will call you on that in a time of need.”

“I expect nothing else. Eleniah, King Kay, have a safe trip home.”

“We’ll do our best. And tell Miri I said goodbye, please. I would do it myself but I haven’t been able to find her the last couple of days.”

Both of the cousins shot him disbelieving looks.

“What?”

“You’ll figure it out,” Alahna sighed at him, shaking her head. “I’ll tell her you said that next time you see her.” She nodded deeply to him again, then turned and left, ranks of her royal guards closing in around her as she moved out of sight.

Eleniah pushed in close so that she was up against his side while they walked down. “Hey, Kat?’

“Yeah?”

“Make sure you don’t leave my side until after we’ve set off.”

He glanced down at the top of her head. “Sure? I mean, I’m always happy to spend time with you, but why?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“Why are you both saying that to me?”

“Do you know what I’m about to say to you?”

“I can guess, but that doesn’t explain- You know what. Never mind. I’ll figure it out.”

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Glowl, King of Nelam, roared with rage as he slammed a gold mace into one of the beastkin trying to climb up his armor to get to his head, crushing their ribs. He swung out in every direction, the gold ripped from the walls and decorations of his castle fashioned into arms and armor to replace the sets he had already lost in what felt like an unending series of battles to fight off the hordes trying to kill him. His nobles had betrayed him, his citizens had abandoned him, and he only had a handful of his most loyal retainers and servants left with him. Even they might leave soon, as this most recent incursion from a mob of escaped slaves after his head had pushed back his line of control from the district surrounding his castle to just the castle itself.

Still bellowing, Glowl threw out a wave of sharpened metal then pulled it back to him, slicing through beastkin going out and coming back, decimating the enemy in front of him. It cleared up enough space for him to start pushing the front further back and a few seconds later the beastkin started to rout. Roaring in triumph and picking off the slower ones at the edge of the retreating mob, Glowl brandished his weapons and shouted expletives at them as they ran, cementing his place above them.

A jolt of pain radiated through his shoulder and down his arm, and Glowl cursed as the toxic wound that still lingered from that traitor’s attack flared up again. It had been months, and all throughout the tumultuous upheaval and the steady loss of territory, it refused to heal more than it had. It festered and wept pus constantly and the pain from it was agonizing at times. He needed constant healing items to keep it under control, and his last remaining healer was getting worked to the bone keeping his troops alive and treating the infected stab.

Glowl swore his vengeance once again against the traitor Kurtis Nel, that Outworlder brat that had started all this, and all the others that had failed him, turned against him, or stymied him on his eventual rise to ultimate power. He was the Glowl, King of Nelam, and nothing would stop him! Nothing! He would reclaim his nation, he would punish those set against him, he would regain his former power from his Class, then surpass it, and he would never. Be. Stopped!

His troops jostled uneasily, drawing Glowl out of his internal world and he opened his mouth to scream at them. He froze when he saw what they did, what had actually driven the swarm of escaped slaves to run. A horde of maddened vampyr rushed at them, the leading elements stopping to chomp and rip at each soldier and knight who fell, tearing them apart and supping at the blood that spurted from their limbs. Hundreds came, enough to outnumber Glowl and his people ten to one, and all Glowl could see was a sea of glowing red eyes before they swarmed him and started to drag him down to the ground. He managed to kill two or three of them before they completely covered him and stopped him from moving, and then the bites began.

They burned! Oh, how they burned! It was beyond any pain he had ever experienced, beyond even the cursed wound in his shoulder at its worst, for it burned not only at the site of the bites but throughout his body as well, tainted corruption bleeding through him. He didn’t have words to describe the horror he could feel wracking his body without stop as the vampyr bit him over and over again. Things inside him were twisting and changing as dozens of vampyr pumped their venom into him and drank his blood.

He desperately drove the gold under his control into his body, using the gaping holes bitten into him to chase after the corruption flowing into him. Fangs and gaping maws were driven back as he filled himself with liquid metal, burning, ripping, tearing, and grasping at every bit of venom he could reach as he frantically tried to save himself. He wouldn’t die here, he wouldn’t!

But even as he did his best to crush his problems with force, the way he always had, the venom sunk deeper into his body. It began ignoring the gold trying to destroy it, and then it began corrupting the gold too.

The last things he felt as the pain overtook him and everything faded to black were the injury from the traitor’s dagger starting to burn with the same pain as the vampyr’s bites, the gold he’d forced inside himself begin to twist and change into something else, and his teeth growing longer in his mouth.

The edges of his mind began to feel warped, twisted beyond anything he could have imagined. In a desperate attempt to save itself, his brain shut down, hoping to conserve energy as his body battled this new infection it had no experience with. A useless maneuver in fighting the vampyr infection, but it did keep Glowl from having to feel the pain and horror of his body twisting and warping as he died and a tainted, golden monster grew from the husk that used to be him.

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