Chapter 25: Garlic burns everyone if you eat too much of it.

Of all the dark’s most fearsome denizens, none deserved their terrifying reputation more than the legendary vampire.

Powerful, elegant, and relentless in the pursuit of their prey, they were fearsome apex predators.

Of all the many breeds of undeath that existed, only the dreaded Lich stood higher in power than they. But Liches were a rare sight in the world, and even one of them could be brought down by a sufficiently experienced and ruthless drinker of blood.

Indeed, Vampires were the night’s uncontested royalty. As feared for their cruel, tactical acumen as they were for their ferocity in battle. To fall into one of their schemes was to wander alone in an inescapable labyrinth that offered only one true path of escape…

Death.

“No, no, no! Where did the guy with the axe come from?” moaned Clarity in great misery. “He’s tearing our lambs apart! Oh, this is so unfair!”

Of course, that reputation for brilliant scheming was mostly attributed to the older vampires who managed to survive for at least a thousand years. The younger ones, who were still growing into themselves, despite their comparatively great age to a human, could often be described as—

“Oh! He’s cutting them into bits! Yucky! This is so yucky! I haaaaate this!”

Dumb.

Charity was unkind with her response. “I’m not going to mince my words, little sister: You are boned.”

“No, no! We’re boned, Charity!” replied Clarity. “We’re boned! This is a team exercise! We’ll both be punished if we fail!”

“We? No. You? Yes! These stupid raids were your idea! You were the one who said we could wear them down over time. Well, look where your big idea got us! They’ve adapted to your so-called strategy and are eliminating your servants!”

“Nooooo, why aren’t they winning? It’s that darn Knight’s fault! If only she weren't here!”

“Our master warned us about her and that sword. You were the one who laughed oh so confidently and said, she’ll be no threat to us! Well, there she is, Clarity! There’s the non-threat who won’t be able to stop your wicked machinations! Why don’t you walk up to her and say hello?”

“Boo! I am booing you, Charity! You are mean and the only thing you know how to do is point out mistakes in hindsight!” said Clarity as she stuck out her tongue.

“I wanted to sink the boat, Clarity!" Charity fumed. "That would have been a much better plan than mesmerizing a bunch of bigoted humans and sending them to mindlessly throw their lives away against that Paladin’s blade!"

"No!" Clarity said stubbornly.

"Yes! All we had to do was let them get on the boat, and then sink it when it was too far out to sea for anyone to escape. That would have been a much easier victory, but nooooo, that didn’t have enough drama to suit you!"

“These are the nasty people who kept our poor master imprisoned for three hundred years! You really think drowning them like rats would have been satisfactory vengeance? No way! They were supposed to be gradually worn down, until sheer terror broke their dumb minds! And it would have worked too! It would have!”

A loud splatting sound caught their attention when one of their pet zealots was sent flying into a boulder by a mighty kick from the axe-wielding stranger.

“Seriously! Who is that guy?” asked Clarity.

“Don’t ask me,” her sister replied. “But that’s something else you failed to account for, isn’t it? Never underestimate the possibility of a hero showing up! No matter how deep we are into the plot, some do-gooder idiot could still appear out of nowhere. The narrative just loooooves its little heroes.”

Charity and Clarity weren’t sisters by birth, but rather, sisters by rebirth. But they had been together for so long that that distinction didn’t matter to them. They were both attractive, eerily pale women, Clarity a brunette, and Charity with raven colored hair.

They enjoyed being with each other and liked doing many of the same things and eating many of the same people. But where they differed was in their capacity for planning.

Charity was meticulous, obsessive, and without mercy.

Clarity was whimsical.

“Charity! I need your heeeeelp!”

Naturally, being whimsical meant that Clarity often needed assistance following through on her ideas.

“No!” Charity shouted. “No, no, no, not happening! You always do this, you little brat!”

“But it’s haaaard!” whined Clarity. “Please, please, please! You’re so much better at this than I am!”

“You’re wise to appeal to my ego, but foolish to believe I’ll capitulate! Clarity, if I keep doing your sums for you, you’ll never learn how to add!”

“I don’t want to do addition! I want to beat that stupid Paladin and her stupid sidekick!”

“Then I suggest you rally your troops,” Charity said coldly. She then crossed her arms and turned her face away whenever Clarity tried to make eye contact.

“Charity! Charity! Chaaaarity!" Clarity called desperately.

But this time, Charity refused to yield.

"Oh, fine! I’ll do it myself! You’re so mean, I hate you!” Clarity cried, before teleporting away.

Charity flinched a little at her sister’s words but remained resolute. “It’s for your own good, you brat!” she shouted into the night.

__

With my newfound axe in hand, I tore into the zealots like a dietician confronting a stubborn diabetic over where all the tollhouse cookies had gone.

“I don’t knoooow.”

“I think you dooooo.”

I was beginning to believe there was something seriously wrong with these guys.

Hear me out: a human’s primal instincts are not self-taught. They’re a sort of ancestral inheritance. An innate knowledge acquired over the millions of years of our species’ evolution. Or the couple thousands of years since Noah built his ark, depending on if you attended a real school or not.

What I’m getting at, is that despite some people being smarter or more adaptable than others, eventually all people will naturally arrive at the same conclusion: When your forces aren’t merely being beaten back, they’re being torn apart, you’re going to retreat.

Seriously, no matter how great your discipline and resolve are, your primal instincts know a losing situation when they see one and they’ll eventually assert themselves and cause you to flee for your life. It's human nature.

No one told that to these guys, though.

One of them came running towards me while wielding a spear. He made no attempt to use his reach advantage to get at me, didn’t react when I hacked it in half, and didn’t scream when I slashed his torso open. He just kept jabbing away at me until he got around to noticing he was dead, then he fell where he stood.

He didn’t make a sound. Not a single sound.

There was no reaction from his companions to his death, either.

Creepy, right? Wrong! Absolutely wrong. Worse than creepy. Insulting!

I’m putting forth a big effort here, aren’t I? Chopping people up sounds easy, but I assure you, it isn't! A lot of effort goes into looking stylish as you’re bouncing around slaying your foes with an axe. It’s hard work!

But when your killing blow connects in just the right way, and your victim’s adrenalin begins to fade and cause their stunned confusion to transition into mind searing agony, which then leads to them screaming their heads off...

(Up until the moment I cut their heads off!)

…that’s when I feel rewarded!

The screaming matters, darn it! The screams were the whole point! When the meat doesn’t react to the damage being inflicted on it, and their friends show indifference to their loss and kept on mindlessly attacking, that made me feel unacknowledged!

It was like I was a hardworking pizza deliveryman who didn’t get tipped!

Hey, man, I just carried twenty pizzas and five two liters of soda up your rickety stairs, and I got them to you on time, you cheapskate! At least give me a fiver! Gas is expensive!

Seriously, tip your darn delivery service people! It’s a crappy job!

Haha, well if it’s so difficult, then why don’t they just get a reeeeal job? Some snarky jerk might ask. Well, if they did have better jobs, then how would you be able to stay home and order food? Do you really feel entitled to blame others for not having higher paying employment in order to justify treating them like serfs, even though you’re the one benefiting from their lack of opportunities, you classicist monster?

Hmph! And to think they call me a villain!

So, yeah, fighting these Zealot guys sucked. But at least I got to watch Rachel go at it. She really was a dynamo! With every swing of that sword, her enemies died. She also kept doing that nifty trick where she’d throw her sword and it would return to her hand

But as capable as she was, I couldn’t help but notice that outside of her sword’s Mjolnir impression, it didn’t seem to have any ranged capabilities at all. For the most part, Rachel had to close in on her opponents in order to do her nasty work.

Know what else I noticed?

She was taking wounds. They healed so quickly that it was almost unnoticeable, but I still saw. One guy got her right across the face, opening her flesh up wide! Not only didn’t she so much as flinch, she retaliated with a killing slash to his throat and continued merrily on her way.

But that cut she’d taken hadn’t healed until she’d killed the guy who gave it to her. That was interesting...

Did you see that, Libby?

I did.

What do you think? My guess is that her sword is defensive in nature. Notice how she doesn’t get tired? And how quickly she recovers from hits?

I have. And I believe I now know the identity of her divine weapon.

Wooo, tell me! Can’t send a Christmas card without a name to put on it, y’know.

Of the fifty-two divine weapons currently registered, one of them, Humilitas, was noted for her ability to significantly enhance the defensive capabilities of her wielder. Her imbuements are all considered A+ ranked.

Humilitas is a girl? Libby! We have another sister! That’s awesome!

You consider me your…sister?

Of course, I do!

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Uhhhh…

What?

N-nothing. Nothing. Continuing, the imbuements carried by Humilitas are [Vengeance] [Unyielding] and [Resilience].

What do they do?

[Vengeance] bestows healing when Humilitas is used to injure or kill someone who has inflicted physical damage on her wielder. [Unyielding] provides bonuses to speed, strength, and endurance depending on how many enemies Humilitas faces. And [Resilience] encases the wielder of Humilitas in a suit of self-repairing armor.

If those are the only three Imbuements that the sword has, then that boomerang trick must be something that Rachel herself is doing.

That would seem likely.

Do you know what Humilitas sounds like to me, Libby? A weapon that specializes in anti-personnel defense. With specs like hers, she could destroy an entire army by herself, just as we’ve seen her doing tonight.

Agreed.

But it’s a crippling overspecialization, Libby! The requirements for close combat, and a large number of enemies in order maximize her output, that has to limit her effectiveness against opponents specialized in ranged tactics. And in a one-on-one duel, she’s almost completely useless except for that armor and the skill of her wielder.

What makes you say that?

Didn’t you say [Vengeance] requires a killing blow in order to use its healing effect? Well, what if Rachel can’t kill the one wounding her? What if he keeps out of her range? Sure, her armor’s self-repairing, but without that skill, Rachel isn’t. And if she’s only facing one opponent, [Unyielding] isn’t going to give her much of a buff.

…We could take her, Libby.

Max…

We could take her. We just need to control the environment. Like we did with that troll.

Max, Humilitas belongs to the Crown Blades! Even if we could defeat her, our chances of remaining anonymous would be destroyed! It’s too risky now—

Libby. Relax. It was just a hypothetical thought passing through my head. You know me, I like weighing the possibilities. I enjoy it when a risk pays off! But I need to get stronger. Seeing people like Rachel and that self-righteous pig, Denard, makes me realize how easy I’ve been taking it on myself.

How much experience have we gotten from these losers, anyway?

Twenty-five kills, three hundred experience points each, no useful Imbuements.

Pfffft. Are you sure we can’t go after Rachel?

POSITIVE.

Frustrated, I killed another zealot, this one babbling about his religion just like all the others. Raaaagh, this was taking forever!

“Rachel!” I called out. “Is this normal?”

“Is what normal?” she yelled back.

“The lack of reaction! These guys don’t try to protect themselves or their friends! Have they always been like this?”

“Come to think of it…yes!”

“And you’ve never wondered about the cause of this behavior?”

“Who cares why they’re doing it! My only interest is in defeating them!”

Oh, man. She was gorgeous and skilled and liked killing people, which should have been the trifecta of winning my heart! But sadly, Rachel was also a meathead. She couldn’t think past the weapon in her hand, and her urge to use it. That kind of impulsiveness was going to get her killed one day.

I speak from experience.

“Rachel, use your head! For this many people to be acting like this, however disorganized they are, that means someone is using them! You’ve got an enemy you haven’t seen yet, and they're trying to grind you down from the shadows!”

“What?”

Oh, for crying out loud.

“There’s a MASTERMIND, Rachel!”

“Then where is he? Why won’t he dare show himself? Because he’s a coward—"

A woman appeared behind Rachel. She made a sharp gesture with her hand and suddenly, Rachel wasn’t there anymore. She was airborne, and going east, screaming all the way into the horizon.

Yikes.

“Finally, Jeez,” the stranger said.

She was a brunette wearing a black cloak over an outfit that sort of reminded me of a roman soldier. Bare legged, with high-laced sandals, with a knee-length red skirt, and bronze chest armor. She was cute, but pale to the point of looking like she had consumption.

Her eyes were blood red and shone in the dark. Like two crimson embers.

I don’t think hers were a custom job like mine.

“Okay, um, hi? Hello?” she waved at me.

“Hi?” I responded.

“Hi!” she said cheerfully. “Uh, I’m Clarity?”

“Hey, Clarity. I’m Max?”

“Are you?”

“Yeah?”

“Then why do you keep making it sound like a question?” she sasked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Now you’re just teasing me!”

I looked around in confusion.

“Uh, Clarity? Are you in charge of these guys?” I asked her.

“Yeeees? Duh?”

“Okay. So, why are you making them attack us?”

“Uh, to kill you?”

“Is there a reason why you want to kill us?”

“Because the Pala-dians are bad! And you’re protecting them, so you’re bad too!”

“I’m not bad! If anything, I’m chaotic neutral! Check out my stat sheet!”

“Check your whaaaat?”

“This doesn’t feel like a very rewarding conversation, Clarity.”

“Rude!”

“Nah uh!”

“Yes!”

One of the defenders seemed to recognize something about Clarity. He made a complex symbol in the air with his hand, then clasped them together as if in prayer. “Stranger! Shield yourself in faith! An abomination stands before you!”

Before I could ask him what he meant, Clarity was on him. She made a slight reaching motion with her hand and gently brushed her fingers against his chest.

Uh…he exploded.

Just burst apart like a blood-filled balloon. Never seen anything like it.

Kinda’ cool, really.

Clarity dipped her fingers into some of the blood which had pooled on the ground and gave it a languorous lick of her tongue, relishing the taste.

That’s when I noticed how sharp her gleaming white teeth were and realized what it was I was dealing with.

“Yooooourtuuuuurn,” she said with smile.

Hoo boy.

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