Chapter 3: The Death Dealer's Mistake
Nathaniel
The metro tunnels had been quiet for three nights.
I crouched in the shadows of an abandoned platform, UV pistol in hand, listening to the distant rumble of late-night trains on still-active lines. Somewhere in this maze of forgotten infrastructure, two Lycans were hunting.
And I intended to hunt them first.
The mission was simple enough. Reconnaissance teams had tracked unusual Lycan activity near Nyugati Terminus. Two wolves, possibly three, using the abandoned sections as a transit corridor between their den and the surface. My job: confirm numbers, eliminate if possible, report if overwhelming.
Death Dealer training made me confident it would be the former. I'd been killing Lycans for eighty years. Two more wouldn't make a difference.
My communicator crackled. Soren's voice, distorted by distance.
"Nathaniel. Status."
"Approaching the maintenance corridor. Scent trail is fresh."
"Don't engage until you have visual confirmation of numbers."
"Understood."
I killed the connection. Soren was cautious by nature. Useful for training, annoying for field work. But he'd trained me well enough that I could ignore his caution when necessary.
The scent trail led deeper into the tunnels. Lycan musk—part wolf, part something else, part hatred centuries old—painted a clear path through the darkness. My vampire eyes adjusted, turning pitch black into shadowed gray. Two sets of tracks. Both in human form currently. Both heading toward the junction ahead.
I followed.
Lucius
The maintenance tunnel was colder than the sewers.
I'd tracked the Blood Appraisal reading for over an hour. [ 45 BP ], moving through the abandoned metro system with purpose. Not a random patrol—a hunt. The signature's movements were too deliberate, too tactical.
A Death Dealer. Probably hunting something.
Which meant an opportunity.
The system's logic was cruel but clear. Humans provided 2-5 BP each. The market's blood dolls offered 4 BP per feeding with strict limitations. But a Death Dealer—a combat-trained vampire with decades or centuries of refined bloodline—represented a quantum leap in power acquisition.
[ BLOOD APPRAISAL: VAMPIRE (DEATH DEALER CLASS) ]
[ APPROXIMATE BP VALUE: 45 ]
[ ASSESSMENT: STRONG. CAUTION ADVISED. ]
Forty-five points. More than I'd accumulated in two days of careful feeding. Enough to push toward the first gene tree threshold.
But also enough to kill me six times over if I attacked directly.
I needed a better approach. The Death Dealer was hunting something—probably Lycans, given the location and his equipment loadout. If I waited, let the targets soften each other, then picked off the survivor...
"Vulture tactics," I muttered. "How the mighty have fallen."
But vultures survived. That was the point.
I found a maintenance alcove with good sightlines and settled in to wait. The surgeon in me appreciated the irony—spending forty-seven minutes motionless, just like waiting for the right moment in an operation. Patience was patience, regardless of context.
The Death Dealer appeared at the junction first. Tall, lean, moving with the predatory grace I'd seen in Soren. Black leather coat. Two pistols—silver-loaded, probably. Focused entirely on the tunnel ahead.
He didn't see me.
He also didn't see the Lycans until they opened fire.
Nathaniel
The first round caught me in the shoulder.
UV ammunition. The burst of light scorched through leather and flesh, carving a smoking hole that ignited every nerve ending in my arm. I threw myself sideways, rolling behind a concrete pillar as two more rounds sparked off the floor where I'd stood.
"Death Dealer!"
The voice was wrong. Not feral. Not howling. Human speech, calm and controlled.
I risked a glance. Two figures emerged from a side tunnel—one male, massive, easily seven feet tall with the build of a weightlifter. The other female, smaller, faster, already flanking left with a submachine gun that gleamed with UV modifications.
Lycans. But smart ones. Armed ones.
The big one—Raze, if the intel was accurate—charged straight at my pillar. I fired twice, silver rounds punching into his torso. He didn't stop. The wounds closed before he'd taken three more steps.
The female—Trix, probably—opened up with suppressing fire. UV rounds peppered the concrete, each impact releasing bursts of burning light. I couldn't stay behind cover. Couldn't advance into a crossfire.
Soren was right. Should have confirmed numbers.
I broke left, sprinting for another cluster of pillars. Trix tracked me, rounds sparking at my heels. Raze roared and leaped, clearing twenty feet to land between me and escape.
So be it.
I drew my second pistol and charged.
Lucius
The firefight was louder than I expected.
Gunfire echoed through the tunnels, punctuated by the deeper percussion of impacting bodies and the screech of UV ammunition. I crept forward, Blood Appraisal painting the chaos in glowing numbers.
The Death Dealer: [ 45 BP ], moving fast, taking hits that would have killed a human ten times over.
The large Lycan: [ 52 BP ], terrifying regeneration, silver rounds causing visible damage but not slowing him.
The female Lycan: [ 38 BP ], hanging back, controlling the engagement with suppressing fire.
Three-way chaos. Exactly what I'd hoped for.
I positioned myself in an overlooked maintenance tunnel, watching the battle unfold. The Death Dealer was good—decades of combat experience evident in every movement—but outnumbered and outgunned. The big Lycan was taking punishment that should have killed him, shrugging off silver like minor inconveniences. The female was the weak link, but smart enough to stay at range.
The Death Dealer scored a direct hit on the big Lycan's knee. Silver round, close range. The leg buckled. The Lycan went down.
The female screamed something in a language I didn't recognize and opened fire with everything she had. UV rounds poured across the junction, catching the Death Dealer in a blazing crossfire. He dove, rolled, came up shooting—
And spotted me.
Our eyes met across twenty feet of gunfire and chaos. His expression shifted from combat focus to confusion to suspicion in less than a second.
"Fledgling?"
The female Lycan's round caught him in the side of the head.
Not a kill shot—vampires were harder to kill than that—but enough to send him spinning into the wall. The big Lycan was already healing, pushing himself upright, turning toward the fallen Death Dealer with murder in his yellow eyes.
And the female Lycan turned toward me.
"Another one?"
Her voice was sharp. Angry. The submachine gun rose.
I ran.
UV rounds chewed the concrete behind me as I sprinted into the side tunnel. The narrow passage—too small for the big Lycan, too dark for accurate shooting—bought me seconds. I heard the female cursing, heard the big one roaring, heard the wet sounds of violence as the Death Dealer made his final stand.
I didn't stop running until the sounds faded.
Twenty Minutes Later
The junction was quiet when I returned.
Two bodies lay among the rubble. The Death Dealer—Nathaniel, based on his equipment tags—had escaped, but left blood trails leading into the eastern tunnels. Badly wounded. Probably survivable for a vampire of his power level, but not an immediate threat.
The big Lycan was gone too. But the female...
Trix lay against the wall, chest torn open, silver poisoning spreading through her system. Her regeneration was trying—I could see the flesh knitting and unknitting, fighting a losing battle against the metal embedded in her organs.
She was dying. But not dead yet.
[ BLOOD APPRAISAL: LYCAN FEMALE ]
[ APPROXIMATE BP VALUE: 38 ]
[ STATUS: CRITICAL. SILVER POISONING INHIBITING REGENERATION. DEATH IMMINENT. ]
I approached slowly. Her eyes tracked me—golden, fading, full of hatred.
"Vampire," she spat. Blood bubbled from her lips. "Come to... finish..."
"Something like that."
The feeding was different than humans. The blood tasted wrong—feral, hot, thick with something that burned going down. But the system didn't care about flavor.
[ BP ACQUIRED: 30 ]
[ MEMORY SIPHON LV.1 ACTIVATED ]
[ RANDOM MEMORY FRAGMENTS ACQUIRED: 4 ]
[ FRAGMENT 1: Pack structure—hierarchy based on strength, loyalty tested through combat ]
[ FRAGMENT 2: Hatred—vampires killed her brother in a raid three months ago, she volunteered for this mission ]
[ FRAGMENT 3: Someone called "Lucian"—reverence, devotion, he speaks of freedom and revenge ]
[ FRAGMENT 4: The war isn't over—both sides think they're winning, both sides are bleeding ]
But then came something else. Something the system hadn't shown before.
[ ALERT: LYCAN GENE TREE DETECTED ]
[ HYBRID FUSION PROTOCOL AVAILABLE IF VAMPIRE GENE TREE ALSO DEVELOPED ]
[ NOTE: HOST HAS CONSUMED LYCAN BLOODLINE ESSENCE. HYBRID EVOLUTION PATH UNLOCKED FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT. ]
I pulled back from the corpse, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. The Lycan blood sat heavy in my stomach—wrong, uncomfortable, but not rejected. The system had absorbed it, cataloged it, filed it away for future use.
Hybrid. The word echoed in my mind.
I knew what hybrids meant in this world. Michael Corvin, the first successful fusion of vampire and Lycan bloodlines. Marcus, the abomination that came from the original mixing. Power beyond either species alone.
And now the path was open to me.
[ CURRENT BP: 36/100 ]
[ GENE TREES DETECTED: VAMPIRE (LOCKED), LYCAN (LOCKED) ]
[ UNLOCK THRESHOLD: 100 BP REQUIRED FOR FIRST GENE TREE ACCESS ]
Sixty-four points to the first threshold. More than I'd earned in three days. But not impossible—not with targets like the one I'd just drained.
The UV round that had grazed my shoulder during my escape still burned. The flesh was healing, but slowly—fledgling regeneration was nothing compared to what I'd seen from the other vampires. My coat had a new hole, joining the blood stains from my sire's death.
I needed shelter. Time to recover. Time to plan.
But more than that, I needed to stop almost dying every night.
The sewers welcomed me back with their familiar stench. I found my alcove, settled against the damp concrete, and pulled stolen medical supplies from my coat. Antiseptic—useless for a vampire, probably, but old habits died hard. Bandages. A suture kit I'd palmed from a hospital dumpster.
The surgeon's hands took over, cleaning the wound, assessing the damage, planning the treatment. Some things transcended species.
[ QUEST COMPLETE: SURVIVE THE FIRST NIGHT ]
[ REWARD: 10 BP ]
[ CURRENT BP: 46/100 ]
[ NEW QUEST AVAILABLE: REACH 100 BP THRESHOLD ]
[ REWARD: FIRST GENE TREE ACCESS ]
Forty-six points. Fifty-four to go.
The system displayed my status—hunger timer reset, wound healing at reduced rate, no immediate threats detected. Nathaniel was out there somewhere, wounded and potentially vengeful. The big Lycan—Raze?—had survived and might remember my face.
Problems for later.
Right now, I had a countdown, a gene tree waiting to unlock, and memories of someone called Lucian burning in my borrowed blood.
I closed my eyes. Not to sleep—vampires didn't sleep, not really—but to process. To plan.
The next hunt would need to be smarter. Faster. More efficient.
The next hunt would bring me closer to what I needed to become.
I reached for the suture kit and got to work on my shoulder.
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