Chapter 90: [Magic Castle Bonus 1/3] Temporary Act [2]

The dark smoke around Alden stopped moving slowly. It grew thicker and wrapped tightly around him, moved by an invisible force. It got darker until the air felt so dangerous that the remaining vampires backed away without even thinking about it.

Then his hair started to change.

Strand by strand. Dark brown faded away and a much deeper color took over, a black that swallowed light instead of shining back.

Small bits broke off the ends and melted into the cold air like small threads of black fire.

The power around every single strand felt heavy, the sort of weight you feel inside your chest right before you truly know what you are feeling.

Alden raised his head slowly.

From both sides of his face, dark fragments surfaced. They crawled across his skin the way frost crawls across glass connecting at the center to form a sleek metallic mask that covered everything below his eyes. The edges sealed against his cheeks without a gap.

Only his eyes were visible. Two points of burning crimson inside all that dark.

His hands came last. Black spread from his knuckles inward, dense and metallic, crawling up to his wrists and hardening into gauntlets that breathed slow trails of abyssal smoke. He turned one hand over, looked at it for a moment.

Then closed it into a fist.

CRACK.

The sound cut through the pass like a stone through ice.

The vampires who had been advancing stopped.

Augustus stared at the figure in front of him. For one long moment, the entire mountain pass held its breath.

Then he threw his head back and laughed.

"HAHAHA! Now we’re talking!" He raised his sword high, blood dripping from his fingers, his face stretched into the grin of someone who has completely let go of sanity and found it freeing. "Let’s do this to the death, commoner! No more tricks! No more pathetic surrenders! FIGHT ME—"

A blur.

That was all Augustus registered before the hand closed around his face.

There was no movement he could track. No approach or windup or even a warning. One moment Alden was ten yards away. The next, his black-gauntleted hand had Augustus’s entire face in its grip, fingers pressing into his skull from every side.

Augustus’s eyes went wide.

Then the ground came up very fast.

BOOM.

Alden drove him headfirst into the frozen earth and the impact detonated through the snowfield like something had exploded underground.

Fissures shot outward from Augustus’s head in every direction, bedrock slabs launching into the air, a thick cloud of pulverized frost swallowing the crater whole.

Alden stood up straight and took one calm step back.

Everything went quiet.

Then, from inside the dust cloud "...Heh." letting out a soft, wet laugh.

Augustus pushed himself up from the shattered ground.

His face was completely covered in blood — forehead, cheeks, chin, his golden hair dark red with it.

He pressed one hand to the crater’s edge and pulled himself to his knees, and the grin on his ruined face was the grin of something that had stopped caring about pain.

"Finally." He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "You finally started. I knew it — I knew you were hiding it all along."

He spread his arms wide, blood dripping from his elbows.

"But it’s useless."

The gashes across his skull began to close. Flesh stitching back together, bone reforming, skin sealing from the edges inward.

The severe fractures disappeared in seconds. The lacerations on his face pulled shut and vanished. In under a minute, nothing remained except the smear of drying blood on otherwise unmarked skin.

Augustus held up one hand and watched his knuckles complete themselves.

"DID YOU SEE THAT?!" He slammed his fist against his chest. "No matter what you do — I come back! I am immortal!"

His hand found the inside of his shredded tunic.

Alden’s eyes moved to it slightly.

Augustus felt the look and smiled wider. He pulled out the tiny glass bottle — thick red liquid inside, beating slowly like a living heart. He raised it high above his head.

"Pure progenitor blood. The real thing. The source of everything I am now." His thumb popped the top open. "Let’s see what happens when I drink every drop."

He tipped it back and drank.

The silence lasted almost three seconds.

Then Augustus screamed.

"AAAAAAAAAGHHHH—"

The light that exploded from his body was wrong — red-black radiance blasting outward in a few yard ring, wiping the snow away in an instant, carving black scorch marks into the bedrock.

The lightning that followed didn’t arc like normal mana. It discharged in massive furious serpents that struck the ground repeatedly, each impact leaving molten scars in the frozen earth.

His body changed.

His shoulders broadened with a sound like breaking timber. His chest surged outward. His arms thickened, veins rising black and cord-like beneath the skin, muscle fibers twisting under the surface as the progenitor blood tried to use every part of him at once.

His royal tunic shredded across his frame and fell away in pieces.

The vampires at the edge of the field had never stopped during the whole battle, but now they backed away. Their body instincts were stronger than their training.

"His mana..." one of them said, barely above a breath. "It’s overflowing."

Augustus lowered his head. His chest heaved with breaths that came out as steam clouds. When he raised it again, his eyes had changed — the whites had turned completely black, leaving only crimson pupils burning inside the darkness like two coals in a furnace.

He spread his arms wide and lightning erupted in every direction.

"THIS—"

The ice ridges nearby shattered into dust.

"—IS MY PEAK."

The pressure hit the valley floor like a wave, the ground trembling under it, the air bending slightly near his body.

He locked those black-and-red eyes onto Alden and the smile that tore across his mutated face was something you wouldn’t forget.

"Show me," he said. "Show me you can keep up with this."

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Author’s Note: Special thanks to Midnight for the castle ;)