Prince of the Morning Star

by Heir of the void

When a young man is cast into a ruined world inhabited by monsters and within the grasp of vampires, the only edge that might give him a chance to survive is strange magic granted to him by a maybe fallen angel. But though he finds a third group in the ashes of Japan, one descended from the Navy of his homeland and wielding the eldritch Ars Machina, humanity may yet fade away.

1. Chapter 1

So, this started as an S.I., though I made some modifications to the Insert, and now I have this. Enjoy.

Prince of the Morning Star

Chapter 01:

I stepped out of the building and into the sunlight and looked around. Something, I couldn't quite say what, was different. Nothing quite looked the same anymore. My legally mandated education was finished, and I was moving on into a new chapter of-

Everything froze. A stray newspaper blowing in the wind, a bird gliding down from the top of a small tree, even a cloud lazily drifting across the sun.

For a moment, the world was still. Then, as the color seemed to fade from everything, the world seemed to dissolve like sand in the wind, everything breaking into infinitesimally small particles and blowing away before vanishing entirely.

Within seconds, I was standing on a jet black plane under a sky of pure empty white. I looked around, the shock of... whatever it was that was happening failing to sink in.

The black plane seemed to stretch out to infinity under the white sky, not curving away like the surface of the earth. As I turned around slowly, I saw nothing but level black in all directions.

Completing a full revolution, I returned to my original facing. The world was empty.

"There are those who take lives."

The voice was not particularly loud, but it seemed to speak from everywhere. It was deep and incredibly resonating. While I couldn't say what marked it as special, I knew, instinctively, that the speaker was a being of incomprehensible power. The merest sliver of its shadow existed in a start of being impossible for a human mind to even understand in abstraction.

"They chose this path, and it benefits them. This is readily apparent."

The voice said nothing for a moment. It was a deeper scilence than I had ever heard.

"There are others who save lives." The voice said. "This burden can be heavy, but it is also clearly just. Thus, it clear why they make such a choice."

Stillness returned. It lasted for an instant, then died an eon later.

"But most are neither of these. They simply exist, being destroyed or saved. They have no power over their future, and there is a freedom in this. Nothing must concern them, because nothing they do can change anything. They cannot improve something, but nor can they ever do any true harm. Some know this and chose this role, but for most, it is never a conscious choice."

I said nothing. I had no idea what I would say, and I could not comprehend how it could matter.

"There is always some degree of choice, but it rarely exists without external influence. But if you possessed complete freedom, what path would you chose?"

I paused for a moment, but the choice was obvious.

"I would be one who protects others." I said. "I would stand against those who would do harm, and cut at the root rather than treating the symptoms."

"You are mixing metaphors." The voice said. "But this true. More pertinently, it is the desired answer. You are suitable to advance."

"Advance to what?" I asked, before I could think better of it. "Am I dead?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes. Death is such an interesting concept. Certainly, your body is no longer conducting biological processes, and your soul is no longer congruent with and point that could be reached from you world of residence. But you continue to exist, and you still possess causal potential in this metasolution, though a different answer may have changed that."

"That's reassuring." I muttered. I was having trouble processing how close I had come to... something bad.

"You will be moving forward shortly." The voice said. "And you will face much greater threats before long."

Abruptly, a large desk that appeared to be an extension of the ground appeared, along with a chair of similar construction. A plain knife of polished steel, a bowl of dull gold with angular runes the color of ash carved into it, and a plain white candle standing in an obsidian holder sat in a neat row on the desk.

A plain golden ring sat in front of them.

"Your trials will be arduous, but I can offer you power. It will be of great assistance, but such power always carries a cost. If you wish to claim it, then you know how."

And much to my surprise, I did.

The decision was nearly instant. I was nothing. Maybe I was a bit smarter than some, but I possessed nothing to leverage. If I was really going to face serious, probably deadly, challenge, I needed an edge.

I stepped forward and sat down, pulling the chair forward toward the desk. All four objects were within easy reach, but I picked up the ring first and examined it.

Despite the gravity of the situation, all I could think about was how much it looked like the One Ring.

Placing the ring back on the table, I picked up the silver knife. It was formed from a single piece of metal, and the handle transitioned to the blade without any type of guard. I placed my left thumb and pointer finger on the wick of the candle, pressed it between my fingers, and made a snapping motion and withdrew my hand. Half a second late, the candle burst to life, though it burned with a rushing bluish flame more like a bunsen burner than any candle I knew of.

Moving my hand down to the very end of the knife's handle, I placed the point of the knife just under the tip of the flame, where the temperature would be the highest. Carefully, I pushed the knife through the blaze, lifting it free when the handle began to enter the flame.

I repeated this process once, then began a third pass. This time, I thought I could see faintly glowing white patterns on the blade as it passed through the flame, but they faded before I could be sure of anything.

Rotating the knife ninety degrees, I placed the base of the blade in the flame, left side facing down. I slowly pulled it out of the fire, replaced it, and withdrew it again.

As I was completing the third pass on the left side of the blade, I realized that the handle of the knife seemed to be getting colder as I ran it through the flame, though I could faintly feel the heat from the candle on my hand.

Beginning the same process with the right side of the blade, I noticed that the knife looked... different, somehow. Like it was more real than before I had begun treating it.

Finishing the third cycle with the right side of the knife, I pushed the candle back slightly, and then pulled the blow towards me. It was about the size of a soup bowl, though it had significantly thicker walls and thus would hold somewhat less.

I placed the tip of the knife on the edge of my left palm below my pointer finger and took a deep breath. It had to be the left hand; it was close to the heart, but a hand had a powerful cognitive connection to the idea of a ring, and thus was ideal.

Holding my hand over the bowl, I began to cut diagonally across my palm. It occurred to me that this was probably some form of blood magic, and that was maybe a bad thing.

The knife cut easily, with surprisingly little pain. I had never cut human flesh, but I sometimes helped with the butchering on the occasional hunting trip, and the knifework that required was always much harder.

I felt oddly detached as I saw blood well up from the cut, far more than from any of the nicks I'd received when building my miniatures. It was probably more blood than I'd ever lost at once before, and I was fairly sure the cut was bleeding a lot more than it should have.

But really, I was probably the idiot for assuming that anything would be normal at this point.

The blood running down my hand began to trickle into the bowl and pool in the bottom as I finished the cut. As the bowl filled, the blackened runes carved into it began to glow with a soft white light.

As once the bowl was perhaps a quarter full, I pick up the ring with my good hand, held it over the bowl, and let it fall.

Time seemed to slow as the bottom of the ring contacted the surface of the fluid in the bowl. The candle went out, the glowing runes on the bowl went dark, and as the blood seemed to leap upwards and engulf the ring, light vanished.

I felt a flare of pain leagues apart from anything I had ever considered flare across the cut on my left hand. Then my heart filled with fire, putting the pain in my hand to shame. For a moment, everything I was submerged, and I could feel myself slipping from consciousness.

Then something vaguely like a spike pierced my brow, and for a moment, I was not.

I existed again. I had no way of judging how long I had been gone, but somehow I knew it was only a moment. My mind felt different somehow. It was hard to put into words, but the best comparison I could make was that it felt like I had been disassembled, carefully and thoroughly cleaned, examined, and polished, and then reassembled. I had no idea how I knew this.

A point of light appeared at eye level a few feet away from my face, quickly growing into a flame larger than a man as light returned.

I was standing on a platform of polished black marble perhaps twenty feet on a side, suspended in space and surrounded on all sides by a vortex of slowly rippling shades of blue and purple, most sufficiently dark as to be difficult to distinguish from the platform.

Then the massive flame in front of me flared up for a moment and then died, leaving behind a young woman unlike anything I had ever seen.

She was tall, probably a couple of inches taller than I was, and I was a few hairs under six feet. She had straight, jet-black hair that hung down to the nape of her neck, contrasting starkly with her radiant white skin. Her features were royal and perfect, but no so perfect that she appeared unnatural. She wore a strange costume of red and orange, highlighted by deep black. It fit her form perfectly from her neck down, extenuating her ample figure, thought the extensive elevated and flowing decorations made it surprisingly modest.

"I am Seylaifeil, lady of fire and shadow." She said in what sounded like a ceremonial tone, her voice surprisingly pleasant. "You have called and I have answered, and by Fire, Steel, and Blood our bond has been sealed. We shall walk the same path into the future, till sun is gone, till shade is gone, till flame is gone."

I raised an eyebrow. I had hit a maximum level of what and simply looped back around to being calm. A woman had appeared out of a column of fire and called herself Sey La Fe El, so things were starting to move back towards normal.

The fact that I could say that and be completely honest should probably have had me a lot more worried than I was.

"To be honest, though, I'm surprised you survived that." Seylaifeil said, her voice relaxing to what I assumed was a conversational tone. "Not many humans could."

"You seem remarkably unconcerned about that." I muttered. "And what would have killed me, anyway?"

"I am a spirit of paradox." Seylaifeil said simply. "Fire and Shadow, Light and Darkness; diametrically opposed and yet inherently codependant. Most human minds can't handle something like that, not truly. And if it had torn you apart?"

She shrugged, a surprisingly human gesture. "I had no connection to you, no reason for concern. Nothing like now."

"So... What now?" I asked. "I mean..."

"We are about to go into battle." Seylaifeil said, taking a step forward. "I believe we will be fighting Vampires."

I opened my mouth.

"Not those stupid sparkly Vampires." She said. "Think Stoker on crack. Plus, they rule most of what's left of the world, farming humans for blood in exchange for nominal protection from the post-apocalyptic abominations."

"Why are we ripping off Seraph of the End?" I muttered. "I think-"

"We aren't." Seylaifeil said plainly. "That's where were going. Or rather, where we are going is Seraph. Chicken, eggs, after all. It isn't really possible to say which came first."

"How do you-"

"I looked through your head." Seylaifeil said. "I'd make a joke about it being traumatizing, but frankly it was disappointingly tame. There were a few defects, which I fixed, and I changed a few other things, but-"

"You did-"

"The time for discussion has ended." Seylaifeil announced. "We have arrived."

"I-"

The entire world turned to no particular color at all.

[x]

I was standing on a ruined city street. Most of the buildings appeared to be intact, if decayed, but the few dilapidated vehicles I saw were clearly rusted and decayed into uselessness. If this was Seraph, then the world had ended eight years ago, so that was about right.

The concrete road and sidewalk were badly cracked, and the few signs that remained eligible were in Japanese. It occurred to me that it might be a problem that I had no knowledge of Moonspeak.

"That won't be a problem. I can translate anything intended as a language"

Seylaifeil's whispered voice echoed in my ear. I wasn't even surprised anymore.

Abruptly, the meaning of the signs was clear. They were pretty much the same as the signs in any American city I'd visited.

The sound of gunfire echoed in the distance, followed by fainter clangs of metal on metal. Apparently, the battle had already started.

"It might be worthwhile manifesting your armor." Seylaifeil said. "There are more than a few foes approaching, and they will not hesitate to end you."

"Great." I said. "How do I do that?"

"You already know." Seylaifeil replied. "And you will need to use my power to defend yourself. I specialized... Well, now we, specialize in Rapid-Action Cognitive/Somatic Kinetic Spellcraft, with a focus on Evocation and Conjuration."

"So its blow stuff up magic." I said.

"You could say that." Seylaifeil muttered.

"Good. That's my favorite kind."

I deployed my armor. I can't really say how, but calling it an act of will is probably as close as I can get without sixteen hours and a chalkboard.

The plate covering my body was a full suit that covered everything below my chin in intricately articulated rigid plates, though I felt no restriction on my movement or significant encumbrance as I took a few experimental steps.

The immaculate suit of plate armor was colored a bright, deep gold that managed to be resplendent, but not ostentatious or dangerously reflective. The gold was highlighted and ornamented by flowing veins of obsidian, giving it a unique contrast that reminded me of Seylaifeil's human appearance.

I heard quick, surprisingly light footsteps, rapidly moving towards me. Quickly, I ducked through the long-gone frontal display of some sort of retail store and began moving towards the back, where I took up a position behind a mostly-intact merchandise shelf.

Discretion is the better part of valor, and I had no idea how to fight.

From my hiding place, I had a fairly clear view of the street, and I watched as ten figures in grey robes with black trimming walked into view in a lose patrol pattern. Eight of them carried a variety of piercing or slashing close combat weapons, and the other two had heavy assault rifles.

Vampires.

The group was about halfway through my field of view went one of the vampires held up his free hand beside his head in the universal signal for 'halt'.

He said something to another vampire with a sword and a slightly more ornate uniform, probably a leader, and the unit began to fan out and approach my store.

I closed my eyes. They would find me, but trying to go through them would be suicide. I needed to act when I had some distance from them if I wanted any chance of survival.

Taking a deep breath, I turned around, locating the back door of the store, lowered my shoulder, and charged.

Smashing through the door in a cloud of rust and splinters, my momentum carried me forward into the street. I stumbled, then caught myself and began running.

I made it three steps before something struck my back, sending me sprawling.

Catching myself better than I would have expected, I turned to face the Vampire who had knocked me down.

She was tall, with short black hair pulled into a messy bun and a club at least eighteen inches long in the hands.

"What the hell are you?" She spat. "Those Demon Army freaks don't wear armor, and any other animal would know better than to run from their betters.

Then, moving with incredible speed and sinuous grace, she sprang forward and began smashing the vambrace on my left forearm with her club. It broke on the third blow, and then her fourth blow stuck my arm.

The bone broke instantly. Somehow, thought the sudden spike of agony, I felt blood begin trickling across my skin. It was painful, but I had recently experienced worse.

The vampire licked her lips and took a worrying step forward. "There's time for a quick drink. I might need it when we run into real warriors."

I realized I couldn't move my left hand at all. I started to panic, and any witty retort I might have been able to conjure fled. She had beaten me like I was nothing. As she stepped closer to me and bared her fangs, I realized I really was about to die.

The vampire smashed my right thigh, striking my tissue twice this time, her club dripping blood as she removed it from the wound. The surge of pain was incredible at first, but it began to fade almost immediately. Judging by the gradient of pain, I realized she had probably opened my femoral artery. Something seemed wrong. I shouldn't have been bleeding out so quickly. But that was a silly concern. I was clearly dying.

Separated from home by an incredible distance along an axis I couldn't even understand, falling to the enemy of mankind within minutes of my arrival, without having attempted even a single blow. No one who cared about me would ever find my body, or have the slightest inkling of what happened to me. I would simply become another unresolved disappearance, swiftly blown away on the winds of time.

The vampire leaned over me, and my terror finally faded into apathy.

I was lost and alone and so very cold.

"Will you end like this?" Seylaifeil whispered, a slight edge to her voice. "Are you really going to let yourself die so meaninglessly?"

And then I realized I could do something.

It was like I had something I had never noticed before. It wasn't like I was discovering my arms or sight; it was more like I had spent my whole life as a quadriplegic telemarketer who was fed intravenously and never left a small, dim closet.

I could feel something indescribable in the world around me, winds of light that spun in an infinitely complex and endlessly changing pattern. I could feel the patterns washing over me.

And I could feel the maelstrom coursing through every drop of blood and every inch of nerve in my body. A warm, comforting flame began to burn around my wounds, flesh knitting together as it was rejuvenated by the fire of life.

I held up my right hand, fingers spread, and pointed it at the vampire.

"dying stars." I muttered.

Silvery strands of light began firing from my fingertips in quick succession, time seeming to slow as they arced away from me in a wide fan.

The vampire never had a chance. She was standing in front of a shotgun, and she was struck by well over a dozen filaments of light all across her body. Each one burned a quarter-sized hole through the vampire's body as it passed. She looked down in shock, eyes widening in pain. Some horrible realization seemed to dawn on her face, and then she burned away. Flames spread outward from her wounds like lit paper, and within a second, she was reduced to dust.

For a moment, I sat still, hand outstretched, stunned. I had just done... Something, that was for sure. The world around me was still infused with wonderful light, but it was no longer overwhelming. Likewise, I could actually feel my wounds slowly knitting themselves closed.

Then, a groan of tortured steel filled the air, and I watched, mildly shocked, as the building in front of me collapsed. Apparently, the strands of light had been just as effective on reinforced concrete and structural steel as they were on vampire.

"Excellently done." Seylaifeil said. "Though try to avoid getting hit like that again. My cauterization blessing can repair extensive damage, but its almost exhausted for now. Also, more foes are approaching. Prepare yourself."

I barely had time to register her words. Just as she finished speaking, a grey-clad vampire appeared, charging over the top of the collapsed building. Not even pausing, it sprang off the pile of rubble in a long running jump, two of its comrades appeared behind it and imitated its maneuver.

Ballistic trajectory. Cavalry charge. Momentum.

"duskblade"

As I spoke, I tapped into the storm of power in my blood, Seylaifeil's power, but somehow differently than when I had killed the first vampire, it was the opposite face of that power, its mirror image. Different, yet identical.

On either side of me, a dozen tendrils of darkness sprang up from somewhere behind me and shot forward, growing into almost crystalline spears of obsidian black. In a moment, there was a small thicket of spears filling the space in front of me.

It would have been a simple thing to avoid, but the airborne vampires lacked any method to meaningfully alter their trajectory.

One of them took a spike to the eye and began disintegrating as she fell to the ground, but the chest wounds suffered by the other two as they crashed through the obsidian spears were apparently less than fatal.

I stepped back as the vampires dropped to the ground, one of them landing noticeably better than his blood-covered comrade. The bloodier vampire snarled, raising its sword over its head and charged.

"terminator line." The name referred to the outer edge of the illuminated side of a planet, but it was a cool name in any case.

A lance of light shot from my hand, ending the war for the charging vampire. His companion followed moments later. As the rest of the vampire squad charged over the ruined building, they each met a similar end.

Their tactics and battlefield doctrine seemed poor, even amateurish. These could be low quality troops, the vampire equivalent of conscripts, but after a moment of though, I realized that it wouldn't be unreasonable for even the best vampire soldiers to be extremely skilled at fighting, yet have a childish grasp if infantry tactics.

It was, in short, World War One. Military doctrine, in general, only advances when circumstances force it to; WWI was a bloodbath in large part because it was an industrial war being fought with Napoleonic methods. It took years to charge, for the German Stormtroopers and the British tanks to appear on the field.

I suppose I'd guess the vamps were the same way. Cursed Gear had been invented less than a decade ago, and the vampires in the series acted like there wasn't much else that could hurt them effectively. If they won every fight with raw power, why bother with skill?

"This may not be the time or the place for that." Seylaifeil said, sounding bemused. "We are in a war zone, and- No."

"What?" I muttered suddenly on alert.

"It's a Noble." Seylaifeil whispered. "A strong one."

I caught sight of the approaching noble just as she finished speaking.

The elite vampire was a tall, stately woman, approaching down the street to my right. She had long perfectly straight hair, jet black or extremely deep blue in color. She seemed to wear the bone-white robe of a Noble more like a gown or kimono, and as I watched, she withdrew a black metal rod around three and a half feet long from a sling on her back and held it in her right hand.

"My glaive." Her voice was surprisingly lacking in unpleasantness, though the metal tendril that grew out of the weapon several inches above her hand and arched back to sink into the back of her hand was a bit unsettling.

As the metal pierced her skin, the top of her staff seemed to shimmer for a moment. Then the shimmer moved upwards, leaving a gleaming blade of bright red steel behind it. Within a second, the overall length of the weapon had nearly doubled, the curved tip of the blade reaching well above the vampire's head.

"I am Morrigan Pendragon of the Thirteenth Progenitor." She declared, stopping a few ex-building lengths away from me. "I suppose you must prepare yourself for death."

"This is bad." Seylaifeil said, an unfamiliar edge of panic creeping into her voice. "We aren't ready to face a noble. Not even close. But we wouldn't have a chance of escaping... Try stalling for time. Miracles happen now and again."

I took a deep breath.

"You're all doomed, you know." I shouted, trying to purge my voice of fear.

"Is this some human bravado?" Morrigan responded. "I doubt you could assume your victory to be a forgone conclusion."

"Oh, I'm probably going to die horribly." I responded, feeling a flicker of... something in my chest. Probably just brain damage. "I'd say you have a good chance of butchering everyone in this city. But that's not it at all."

"Oh?" Morrigan said, tilting her head. "What is it, then?"

"There are a lot of facets to it. Psychology, sociology, even philosophy." I grined, slightly. "But at its heart, your problem is economics. People respond to incentives, and that is the heart of your problem."

The tip of her glaive dropped slightly. "Explain."

"In short, you are almost entirely dependent on fresh captives to maintain the productive human populations in your cities." I said. "Birthrate is pretty much zero. Demographics are part of your problem, but the bigger challenge is that you've created an large population with nothing to live for. A population with nothing to live for and no hope for the future will tend to have a very low birthrate. The Soviet Union taught us that."

I saw something on her face, and decided to roll the dice. "Despite your best efforts, suicide is rampant, and that isn't even touching on the random murders. Plus, a sufficiently powerful vampire, let's say Ferid Bathory, can and will drink blood directly from captives. You would know better than I would how likely that is to result in a death, but it can't help."

"As I understand it, humans can replace themselves."

"While you'd be technically correct, the devil is always in the details." I wasn't sure what benefit stalling could really have, but I was on a roll now.

I was almost glad I had to chance to die with this sort of witty aplomb; I could very well matter more dying here and delaying this Noble than I ever could have back home.

Besides, there are worse ways to go than being shanked by a regrettably attractive vampire noble after lecturing her on why her entire species sucks.

"See, there are some species don't do very well thrive in confinement, and with a few, it's simply impossible to maintain a captive population. Humans are interesting, because under the right conditions we can be almost anything. But you certainly haven't created a population that will want to perpetuate itself."

She said nothing.

"Even if you can overcome all the messy logistics issues in getting yourselves a supply of juvenile bloodbags, it takes a long time for them to grow to the point where they can fend for themselves. Who's going to get them there? I think the average vampire is perfectly equipped with the skills and temperament for that task, don't you?"

"It seems like such a little thing, really." I shrugged. "But in the end, it seems like it's always the small things that make all the difference."

"You seem different." The vampire muttered, narrowing her eyes. "Defend yourself."

Then she sprang into motion.

As she closed on me with incredible speed, I let lose a pair of terminator line shots, then sprang to the side.

"furnace blade." I muttered, clenching my right hand into a fist.

As the vampire parried both of my shots with her blade, a sword appeared around my hand. It seemed to be composed of blue-white flames rushing away from my hand, fastest down the blade, but with a wide flare forming a handguard and pomel.

"The point is, you're going to run out of people to eat at some point or another." I raised my sword to a guard position, consciously stopping myself from wondering why I knew what that was. "You can't let human society recover to restore the population, because then we would come gunning for you. But your own arrogance means you can't keep a slave population."

Morrigan swung her glaive in a wide horizontal swing. I blocked it, and the shock nearly made my arm go numb, but I was able to recover quickly enough to parry her second strike.

"And they say Pride goes before the fall."

I blocked her next attack, stepping back as I did so.

The vampire noble continued her offensive. I held her off, barely, though I lost ground steadily. About fifteen seconds after her first attack, I realized that she was playing with me. I should have died nearly instantly. I needed to figure something out.

As the vampire came at me with a high overhand strike, I blocked. The moment before her blade connected, I held out my off hand.

"dying stars." I shouted the... whatever it was, holding my fingers such that the filaments would, hopefully, be much more tightly grouped.

Morrigan's eyes widened in the fraction of an instant before the barrage struck. She began to leap back, but the streams of light struck just as she was leaving the ground, fouling the jump and knocking her off balance.

As she tried to recover, I charged, noting that while she was trailing smoke from upwards of twenty spots across her body, she was very much not at all dead, or even mildly perforated. I attacked, a simple straight thrust. No time for theatrics.

To be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no idea what happened next. Everything seemed to blur, and then I was sliding backwards across the ground. My armor stopped me from having my skin burned off, but it was still unpleasant.

I came to rest against a peice of concrete the size of a small car, which conveniently propped me up in a sitting position. Morrigan was standing a short distance away, the tip of her weapon held uncomfortable close to my face.

"I honestly did not expect to meet a kindred spirit on the battlefield." She said, the tone of her voice somewhat changed. "I have reached similar conclusions myself, though few concur. To my knowledge, I am the only Noble to have stooped so low as to study the livestock science of economics, and few of your people consider such things worth considering in this world."

"I'd imagine so. But then, time builds habits, and human blood has always been plentiful." I shrugged. "I'd imagine immortality begins rather strong habits."

Morrigan took a step forward, moving the tip of her glaive within a hair of my nose. Confidence, I suddenly felt the need to sneeze.

"Join me." Morrigan said. "This city will fall, but you don't have to die with it. Though most find it distasteful, I have recently begun to believe that my species requires new blood to survive. Together, we can save both our races. Together, we can become the progenitors of a new world order."

It was tempting. It really was. No one wants to die, and immortality alone would be pretty cool. I had already lost anyone I could worry about outliving, or that I might risk hurting. But the jackpot, the guaranteed position of safety in a largely unknown world... It was a very good offer.

But it would be wrong. I would become a monster, subsisting off the life of others. Even if I started with good intentions, even if I could resist the temptations of vampiric pride and decadence, it would be wrong.

Until that point, my life had been fairly easy, and it may have been the hardest decision I ever made, but I managed, somehow. I looked up at the vampire noble.

"Are you coming on to me?"

I tried to sound as honest, as serious, as possible. I mixed a hint of idiot in, just for good measure.

Morrigan stumbled backwards, eyes widening. "What... Are... Why... But... I..."

Unexpected.

"Well then," The vampire said, recovering her compose, mostly, "I am needed elsewhere. Die well, human."

Morrigan turned and jumped away, still slightly trailing smoke. I blinked a few times, then let out a long breath.

"I didn't actually expect you to survive that." Seylaifeil said bluntly.

"Well, thank you for the vote of confidence."

"If you consider-"

Seylaifeil was cut off by a series of deafening cracks. I glanced up just in time to see a formation of eight fighter jets arrayed in a wide 'V' shape shoot overhead. Just after I saw them, several small objects detached from each aircraft and tumbled out of sight behind the city wall. A series of low, rolling explosions drowned out all other sounds for a few seconds, then smoke began to rise from somewhere over the wall.

I tilted my head back, resting it on the block of concrete. With the adrenaline fading, I was quickly realizing exactly how exhausted I was. I hadn't really noticed it in the heat of the moment, but With a chance to think, I realized that several things didn't seem to make sense. First of all, I had been able to handle myself, somewhat, handle myself in a fight. I didn't have any sort of combat training, but Seylaifeil had mentioned something about-

"Yeah, I added some general combat ability in there." She said. "I had to burn some other things to make it fit in properly, but-"

"What did you burn?" I muttered, the fact that I had so little reaction worrying more than her statement itself, which then-

"It was nothing important." Seylaifeil said. "I mean, all those music classes you had to take in elementary school... well, after I was done, if your childhood really had been like that, your psychiatrist would be a rich man."

"And having retroactively lived it won't have that effect?"

"Probably." I got the distinct impression of a shrug. "You won't have any associative or somatic reinforcement, so I don't think it could be that bad."

I put my fingers on my temples. With my gauntlets on, it felt a bit odd, though that feeling was overshadowed by the realization that I had nearly forgotten about my armor. I felt it even less than most normal clothes, and wearing it felt somehow right.

I wasn't really sure how much more I wanted to think about this.

"Also, what about those fighter jets?" I asked, changing the subject. "I don't recall there being any of those in the story."

"Well, I only know as much as you do about why, but I got a better look at them. The airframe looked like an F-22, but with a lot of modifications." Seylaifeil paused for a moment. "The Roundels were US Navy."

"But... That doesn't make any sense."

"But it's the truth." I got the impression of another shrug. "Perhaps your outside information isn't completely reliable."

I looked down. That knowledge had been the one major leg up I had in this world; the powers granted by the ring, while formidable, didn't seem to stack up with a Vampire Noble or a Black Demon-Series weapon; with my luck, they probably wouldn't get me anything other than an all-expense-paid trip to the Japanese Imperial Demon Army Super Fun Torture Labs.

"Don't forget the Kingmaker Scenario." Seylaifeil said. "The Demon Army is far from monolithic. By working with one faction, there is a chance you could ensure that you are on the winning side."

"I suppose. I guess being on the right side-" I stopped.

A strange sound filled the air, something like a rapid, rhythmic tapping of metal on cloth-wrapped stone.

"We've got company." Seylaifeil announced. "Four, closing fast."

I sprang to my feet and turned to face the source of the sound, which was somewhere on the other side of the concrete block I had been leaning on. When the four approaching contacts came into sight, I received final confirmation that this world was not as I had expected it.

Each of the approaching soldiers resembled a knight in armor, if that armor was powered tactical plate mail designed for future special forces. It was the same jet black as their mounts, with the exception of a bright, featureless faceplate.

In the place of lances, they carried a variety of rather large firearms somewhat bulkier than I would have expected for the size, each weapon complete with an array of glowing Tron Lines. Shoulder-mounted weapons designed along similar lines rounded out their weapons loadout.

Of course, the most obvious thing was that, in place of an armored warhorse, each man rode a massive obsidian robotic spider.

The spiders were immense, easily the size of a small car, which did nothing to diminish their sleek, dangerous appearance. There legs, far from the spindly affairs of normal spiders, were thick, armored appendages, each ending in a complex foot. They moved with an easy, predatory grace completely at odds with their almost cyberpunk aesthetic.

However, as I took a closer look, I realized they weren't, technically speaking, spiders. I counted sixteen legs on each thing, divided into groups on each of the four 'corners' of the entity. Furthermore, the legs never rose above the level of their mountings, and resembled those of a large mammal more than anything else.

The spider-knights closed on me shockingly quickly. As they came within a hundred feet of me, the leader held up his hand in the universal 'halt' signal. He held still as his unit stopped behind him. A few seconds passed.

Then he raised his massive weapon and leveled it at my chest. I glanced down at my breastplate. What the hell. I was on a roll.

"You know, the laser sight dot doesn't really work if you're standing right in front of me." I said mildly.

"Who are you, and what is your allegiance?" The lead knight declared. "Answer quickly, or I will end you."

The pitch of the knight's voice was somewhat low, but unmistakably female. Huh.

A second knight moved up next to the leader and turned toward her. "Sir, I just got off the horn with Virginia, and they said the JIDA has finally agreed we need the big guns."

He glanced at me. "Who's that guy? He's putting off way too much IR too be a vamp, and for some strange reason I don't think he's a horseman."

"He could be a spy and a traitor." The leader shot back.

"A spy for who, exactly?" The second soldier responded, gesturing with his large tri-barreled cannon. "I saw him kill like fourteen vampires on one of the drone feeds."

He paused for a moment. "I know! Maybe he's working for a post-apocalyptic street gang! He's good way better kit than I'd expect, but I'm sure we can win him over.

He looked at me. "Hey. Great work on those vampires. We could use someone with those sort of skills on our crew. We've got bacon, air conditioning, bacon, and running water. You want in?"

"What are you doing?" The commander demanded. "You think that-"

"Yeah, sure." I said. "It's dangerous to go alone, after all. What's the current situation?"

"Vampire airmobile units have landed in the south and southwestern sectors, but they are isolated and mostly contained, at least for the time being." A third soldier said.

This one also sounded female, though her armored silhouette was shorter and slimmer than any of her comrades.

"The west wall was breached less than thirty minutes ago, and the breach was seized by two reinforced vampire assault companies. The Enterprise air wing engaged and destroyed follow-on forces, but more are likely approaching."

"Thanks, Sara." The commander muttered, then turned to the seconded soldier to have spoken. "Virgil, grab the unknown. We're moving to reinforce the JIDA units engaging the vampire command unit."

I wasn't sure what that meant. Unless Virgil was telekinetic, there was no way he could touch anything on the ground from his position on his mount.

What came next, and for at least a few minutes thereafter, was rather unpleasant. Oddly, it was even more terrifying than facing down Morrigan; that had been a sort of acute, primal fear.

Being picked up by two giant robotic spider legs, and then carried five feet above the pavement as said spider proceed to take off at speeds that would have put the best racehorses in the world to shame. Not only was I in an immediate, primal panic mode, but I also had time to think about it. I had no idea how the spider was even holding me, but I could feel the wind rushing past me. Drag force is a product of the square of relative velocity, and the human body has a terrible coefficient of drag, so... Yeah.

Eventually, it stopped. Vergil's spider dropped me on the ground. I lay there for a few seconds, then stood up. I wasn't dizzy, given the relative lack of rotational motion, but I had been holding my breath longer than most physicians consider 'healthy'.

Apparently, we were standing on the roof of a five or six story building, overlooking a large open space. It was impossible to say what the space had originally been, as it had been fairly thoroughly destroyed. Yūichirō, with his single massive, oily wing shedding drops of pitch-black fluid, seemed to be a leading contributor to this destruction.

Shit. Yu had gone Seraph. I looked closer, and I could see the other members of his squad. Kimizuki was sprawled on his stomach, uniform torn to expose his neck. Shinoa was crumpled against a collapsed wall, a dark stain spreading across the left collar of her uniform. Mitsuba was lying on her back, one arm over her chest, a partial imitation of a pharaoh's burial pose. Yoichi, propped up against a wall, appeared conscious, but was clearly immobile.

From my position, I could see the Demon Army main forces assembled in a broad half-circle around the battlefield with glittering demon weapons at the ready, most bedecked in pristine black and green uniforms.

However, there were also solider in the arc in what I would have more readily recognized as battle dress; full body suits of articulated futuristic battleplate. Their armor was primarily colored a deep crimson. Too rich to be called blood red, perhaps the uniform of an Imperial British Infantryman would share the color after a long campaign. Silver, the dull shade of a denarius minted long before the birth of Christ, featured prominently as a secondary color and highlight.

These men carried more familiar weapons, mostly assault rifles with a few of the glowing lines featured on the armaments of the spider knights. Their formations seemed to be more concentrated than those of the JIDA squads, and slightly further away from the central conflict.

I watched, moments later, as Shinoa leapt to her feet, embracing a berserk Yu and somehow dragging him back to his senses, his wing vanishing and his face returning to normal.

"Virginia says splash in fifteen seconds, Time On Target four." Vergil announced. "Shields up."

"I'm reinforcing your armor." Seylaifeil said.

I stepped behind Vergil's spider. Seylaifeil sounded nervous, and I wasn't sure I wanted to meet anything that could unnerve her. I didn't know-

The world ended. Rather than hearing it, I felt the sound just a moment before the blast wave arrived. The shock front washed over me like a tsunami, and I was barely able to keep myself on my feet. The storm of light unleashed by the barrage over the focal point of the vampire forces was like watching solid lighting, utterly different than any other explosion I had seen.

Taken together, the effect was awesome. Not the weak, diluted way most people think of when they say the world, but in the literal sense; stunning the observer with an amazing, overwhelming awe.

It took me a moment to realize that the odd tickling sensation in my ears was Seylaifeil's Cauterization ability repairing my hearing.

"Soldiers of the Republic." The spider squad leader declared, mere seconds after the shock wave passed. "By the Ars Machina, the souls of our weapons, let us cleanse this city of these abominations!"

Perhaps I had been too distracted by one thing or another to notice it, but each of the knights and their spiders emitted a sort of ethereal glow, much like what I had seen in connection with the power Seylaifeil had granted me, which began to grow stronger as the leader spoke.

Then she raised her weapon and pointed it forward. A pair of machine guns on the head of her spider began spitting fire as her mount charged forwards and leapt off the edge of the building. Her squadmates followed in short order, each vanishing into the cloud of dust.

"You aren't the sort of man who would be happy living to a ripe old age, right?" Seylaifeil interjected.

"Wait, why-"

"I thought so." She said. "Good."

"I don't think-"

A wave of fire swept down from my head, tracing along what felt like every nerve of my body. I felt a slight weight appear on the backs of my thighs, and a pleasant warmth gather across my shoulder blades.

"I think I'm starting to get a better idea of how to alloy my power with you." Seylaifeil said. "But you... Might want to get some serious practice in if you want to try this again. Our bond is new enough that it's fairly plastic. Once that expires, I'm not sure how long it will be before you can do this again."

I glanced backwards. Attached to each of my thighs was what looked like a miniature fighter jet sans cockpit, complete with ailerons and thrust vectoring plates, nose facing the sky. It looked oddly like a TSF jump unit, actually.

It only took Seylaifeil a few moments to explain what I had to do. It seemed foolish, but I didn't see any way to access the interior of the building from the roof, so short of cutting my down through the structure, it was my only way down.

I walked to the center of the roof, then activated my Jump Units as I charged towards the edge. I certainly felt decreasingly heavy as I ran, but three steps from the edge, when I was beginning to worry it wouldn't work, the warmth in my back exploded.

And I rose into the air on wings of light.

Only glimpses of those wings were visible to me, but after the battle I learned that my wings resembled of a filigree of molten gold suspended in the air, forming an intricate pattern in three dimensions extending for nearly a dozen feet on either side of me.

Surveying the battlefield from the air, I saw that the cloud of dust created by the battleship barrage, for that was the only thing it could have been, was clearing quickly, revealing a disturbing number of vampires who had clearly survived the blast without suffering fatal injuries. Dozens of discarded vampire weapons scattered across the ground indicated many of the undead had been slain, but the strike was far from the deathblow it would have been against a human force.

The battle had developed into a melee, five man squads of JIDA warriors maneuvering in open formations against the larger bands of vampires. The soldiers in red formed a smaller number of larger formations, men in ranks laying down a hail of automatic fire, holding the vampires at bay.

I spotted a pair of Demon Army soldiers somewhat separated from any other human units. A large band of vampires cut them off from the main body of the JIDA force, and a large band of vamps was in the process of surrounding them.

Wobbling in the air as I turned towards the pair, I held out my left arm in an attempt to maintain stability, I began firing terminator lines from my right hand. I scored a few hits with the beams of light, but the movement to aim them cost me any stability I had, and I tumbled into one of the vampire soldiers.

He seemed almost as surprised at this turn of events as I was, but was still gracious enough to cushion my landing. The vampire dropped his weapon as I impacted, and I managed to get on top as we went to ground. As we skidded to a stop, I raised my fist to strike.

I would like to point out that I have no particular skill with hand-to-hand combat. However, at that moment, I learned that there are certain circumstances under which, if you are wrapped in an inch of ultrastrong enchanted powered metal and your opponent is not, skill becomes irrelevant.

I ended that monster, then stood to continue to fight.

And that was what I did, fighting and killing in a whirlwind of light to the slow, apocalyptic tempo of the Virginia's big guns. I don't believe I was in full control of myself anymore at that point; even in the lulls of the battle, I felt a massive pressure driving me forward, a physical pressure in my limbs as much as a mental drive. It was like standing under a bolt of lightning, trying to hold it away from the ground.

But once I actually closed to engage the enemy... I'm not really sure what happened. Each of the high-intensity fights were holes in my memory.

Eventually, I could feel the atmosphere of the battle shift. Moments later, Vampire units began to break off from the fight and retreat. Their heavy infantry disengaged first, moving backwards in coordinated units of up to a dozen. The human forces surged, the demon army squads charging forward while the soldiers in red broke their volley line and began advancing in leapfrogging platoons.

The Nobility retreated next, most of them launching a flurry of vicious attacks, and then flinging themselves into supernaturally powerful jumps that carried them clear of the Demon Army squads engaging them in CQC. A few nobles who happened to be close to the groups of armored soldiers were shot down mid-leap by a fusillades of flickering razor-straight silver lighting, but most landed and dashed inside buildings or behind rubble piles and out of sight.

More than a few of the Vampires, those with plain grey robes and mundane weapons, didn't retreat at all. They held for a moment, but as the blazing fury drove me to charge forward, Demon Army soldiers breached their line in a dozen places amid clouds of ash.

That didn't concern me. I charged half a dozen blocks from the battle line, fire in my eyes, in search of blood. It was all that really mattered to me at that stage, and a distant part of me was somewhat uncomfortable with that.

I crashed through an intact door and into one of the areas that had received the tender ministrations of Virginia's guns. The front wall of the building had survived, though everything else was gone. An area three blocks on a side had been leveled, and there was little ground outside the blast craters not covered in rubble. I stopped, surveying the beautiful desolation, trying to force the idea that I was advancing too far beyond the main force though my head.

My eyes caught a flicker of motion.

Raising my furnace blade to a guard position, I began to move toward it. There was a figure half-buried under the rubble, a figure in bone-white robes stained dark red. As I came within a few paces, the face of the figure turned, or perhaps rolled, to look at me.

It was Morrigan.

A wave of confusion rolled over my mind, displacing the inferno of fury in an instant. Everything hurt, and I suddenly realized just how tired I was.

Tired and so very cold.

Shaking my head and trying to focus, I took a step toward the pinned Vampire Lady. She lay in a pool of blood, her left arm and left leg gone, and her right limbs covered by a concrete slab. Her eyes focused for a moment and it her lips separated, but then her face went slack.

I suppose she wanted me to kill her.

As I lowered my blade to the concrete slab, I told myself I wasn't giving her that mercy.

The concrete covering her chest crumbled easily, but a reinforcing beam ran across the Vampire's elbow and thigh, and it was apparently beyond my remaining strength to cut it.

Steeling myself, I cut both her remaining limbs at the shoulder, something inside me finding the fact that I'd find this unpleasant hilariously ironic.

Staggering as I pulled the torso free, I picked up the vampire torso and began walking back towards the human lines. I had barely made it out of the building when I was spotted by a band of the soldiers in red, who appeared to be guarding the landing site for some kind of VTOL dropship.

As the craft touched down and its assault ramp dropped, ranks of soldiers in slightly different crimson armor advanced out. They disembarked and took up combat positions quickly, and as the original unit began to embark, I started walking toward them. Several of the new arrivals leveled weapons at me, but one of the soldiers in the other group said something, and they stood down.

The original group boarded, and I walked up the ramp behind them, attracting more nobs of appreciation and thumbs up than the odd looks I expected. There were plenty of empty seats on the dropship.

I really hoped that didn't mean the obvious.

I propped Morrigan the 'armless vampire up on one of the empty seats and sat down next to her. She appeared to be comatose, and I was reasonably sure vampires couldn't regrow limbs fast enough for her to be a threat in any reasonable time scale.

As the assault ramp began to return to its raised position, one of the soldiers sat down across from me and removed her helmet. I noticed something about her face seemed odd; maybe it was the lines of light that periodically appeared to drift across her skin.

"That could have gotten pretty bad." She said. "But the plan worked out fine. I guess I should thank you for doing your part too; you did a lot of damage out there."

I muttered something indistinct. I wasn't really sure what I could say anymore.

The soldier tilted her head toward the torso on the seat next to me. "So... Spoils of war?"

She may have said that a bit too eagerly. Maybe.

"I had a chance to grab a Noble, so I did." I said, vaguely aware of something. "Could be useful for intelligence or research. If not, we could always feed her into the incinerator later, so there's no real chance of loss."

The armored girl raised her hand to cover a laugh, and as she did so, I saw something.

The Eagle, Globe, and Anchor.

"You're Marines?" I muttered. "American?"

"Yeah." She said. "USEFMC. Only Marines left, as far as we know."

"Please... Don't give this prisoner to the Demon Army." I said. "I think she could be used for better things than a new Demon Weapon. Promise..."

"I'll do what I can, but I'm only a Captain." She said. "I'm not sure-"

"Just..."

Then I did the reasonable thing, and passed out.

[x]

I woke up under an unfamiliar ceiling.

That wasn't a surprise. What was surprising was that I felt fine, if slightly stiff from a long rest, but fine.

"Welcome back to the world of the living." A somewhat deep but clearly female voice said. "Or one we're contesting, at any rate."

I sat up and looked at the speaker. It took me a moment to place her short brown hair blue eyes, and the subtle but inexplicably odd look of her skin. She was the Marine Captain from... Before I passed out.

"You were out for two days, so it's past time you got out of bed." She said, walking toward the curtain-covered window. "We've got a world to save. Doctor Valentine took an interest in your case, so your bloodsucker body pillow is still alive. Unfortunately for you, that means Doctor Valentine now knows who you are, which is something most of us try to avoid is."

I stood up and walked up to the window next to her, marveling at my apparent recovery. I would need to get answers, information to work with before I could proceed.

"I'm Fealty, by the way." She said. "Captain Fealty Kranz. I'm guessing you're not from around here."

With that, she threw open the curtains, and I was looking down on a cityscape of glass, stone, and steel. It was laid out in a neat grid pattern, with wide streets and ongoing construction everywhere I looked.

"Welcome to New Constantinople."

[]

So this is a thing now. The next chapters won't be as... Messy... And we might even find out what's going on. Leave a review, by order of the Inquisition.