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Chapter 78: The Bloody Massacre II
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Blade held a sword in one hand, a stake in the other, his senses scanning the encircling dark.
"Don't celebrate yet, Stark," Blade's voice was taut. "He wasn't alone. That was the greeting party."
The words hung in the frozen air. From the inky blackness of the forest on all sides, pairs of crimson eyes ignited. One pair. Then ten. Then fifty.
A silent, closing circle of snarling mouths, twitching claws, and ancient, ravenous hatred.
The air filled with the low, collective hiss of a hundred vampires, a sound like gas escaping a tomb.
The headlights of the truck illuminated the advancing front line; a horrifying mosaic of eras and deaths.
Medieval peasants in rags stood beside WWI soldiers in tattered greatcoats, their pallid faces staring blankly.
A woman in a rotting ball gown shuffled beside a snarling creature in modern tactical gear.
This was Dracula's legion. The forgotten, the turned, the eternally hungry.
It seems that this is Dracula's welcome party.
And he'd sent an army to do it.
[ORBITAL IRON MAN DROP! Another classic.]
[That's so badass!]
[Ahm, guys, how can they win?!]
[Hmm, yea, I watched Blade movies, and he struggled against vampires, let alone hordes of them.]
[Comics Blade against vampires is broken, trust.]
Staying in the truck was a deathtrap; a metal coffin waiting to be pried open by a hundred claws.
Thus they followed alone Blade, leaping out of the truck.
Adam's Null suit was the first to respond to his silent command. The central chest piece flew from the truck's open cargo door, slamming onto his torso with magnetic finality.
The rest of the suit unfolded from its storage rig in a symphony of whirring actuators and sliding plates, encasing him in matte white and black composite.
The six mechanical arms, each tipped with different implements; blades, emitters, manipulators; snaked out and planted themselves on the ground, lifting him onto a multi-limbed perch.
He looked like a technological scorpion-king.
Blade watched as Tony too walked to his suit, opening for him and welcoming him within, then closing with a satisfying click.
He hadn't known what to expect from the billionaire, but a normal human would have been a liability.
Therefore, he assumed that Adam knew what he was doing and wouldn't bring a useless liability with them.
Indeed.
The armor, now wrapping itself around Tony Stark in a cascade of gleaming silver and gold components, answered that question.
Iron Man. The name from the news reports. So, the world's most public genius was also a one-man armored division.
Good. They wouldn't be dead weight.
Tony himself felt a surreal disconnect as the faceplate sealed. The HUD lit up with targeting reticles and threat assessments, analyzing the incoming threat.
Vampires are real. The intellectual acceptance from the diner was gone, replaced by visceral, sensor-confirmed reality.
The world wasn't just fucked; it was Gothic horror novel fucked. His paranoia wasn't a disorder anymore; it was the only sane response to a universe that included undead legions.
"The truck has something we must protect," Adam's voice came through the comms, calm amidst the rising hiss from the woods. "We move with it. Don't let them bog us down."
As if on cue, the truck's engine revved. It began to roll forward along the narrow road, its path illuminated by its own powerful lights. No one was in the driver's seat.
Alice, integrated into the vehicle's nervous system, guided it with silent precision.
Adam's mechanical arms flexed, lifting him onto the roof of the moving truck with arachnid grace.
He stood there, a hooded sentinel, his cybernetic eye sweeping the darkness, its mechanical force-enhanced optics piercing the gloom to reveal the shifting, clustered low heat signatures waiting to pounce.
Tony rose on repulsor jets, a brief flare of light in the oppressive dark, before landing with a heavy clang beside Adam on the roof.
He raised his gauntlets, the repulsors within humming with a building, blue-white charge.
"Just like the Hampton's, but with less champagne and more… teeth," He quipped, the bravado automatic, a defense mechanism against the crawling dread.
Blade didn't bother with the roof. He leaped, a fluid motion of pure athleticism, and caught the side of the truck, hauling himself up to perch on the running board like a predatory bird.
The wind whipped his trench coat. He drew his sword; a length of polished silver that gleamed wickedly; and a stake of aged hawthorn from his coat.
A fierce, almost joyful smile touched his lips, baring his own teeth. The scent of decay, of ancient bloodlust, was overwhelming.
This was no wild goose chase. Adam hadn't lied. He wasn't mistaken. Dracula was here. And Blade lived for this hunt.
The convoy; a self-driving tech-truck topped with a technopath, an iron avenger, and flanked by a vampire hunter; moved down the haunted road.
The circle of crimson eyes in the woods moved with it, a silent, pacing escort of nightmares.
Standing atop the truck, Adam was acutely aware of his body's limitations.
His cybernetic eye was a marvel. Augmented by Mechanical Force, it could see the tiniest of signs, calculate trajectories, zoom to macro-detail, and filter spectra.
It had tracked the first vampire's blur with ease. But his right eye, his original hazel one, was painfully ordinary.
In this profound darkness, it was nearly useless, seeing only vague shapes and the occasional glint of fang or claw.
A flaw, he noted clinically.
When I rewrite the template, when I become a vampire, I'll have to decide what to keep and what to upgrade.
If his human eye was still useless even then, then he might as well change it, and maybe transform some of his other body parts too.
The tension snapped.
It was a ripple of opportunistic hunger. A vampire, this one clad in the moth-eaten uniform of a bygone European army, burst from the tree line to the right with a guttural snarl.
It moved faster than a striking snake, aiming to drag Blade from his perch.
Blade was faster.
He most certainly wouldn't step back; instead, he stepped into the lunge. The silver sword flashed, a horizontal arc that met the vampire's outstretched claws.
There was a sizzling hiss as the silver severed bone and tendon, the stump smoking.
Before the creature could scream, Blade's other hand drove the hawthorn stake through its tunic.
It pierced the heart with a wet thunk. The vampire's red eyes widened, then extinguished.
Its body desiccated, crumbling into a pile of ancient dust and moldering cloth that was swept away by the truck's wake.
The dam broke.
They came from everywhere. A wave of pallid, snarling death poured from the forest.
"Light show!" Tony yelled. He raised both palms. Twin repulsor beams, tuned to a broad dispersal, lanced out.
They weren't just lasers of pure force. That would've been effective, sure, but targeting weaknesses is how he and Adam worked.
Thus, they worked together to recalibrate the emitters and much of their tech on the fly.
The beams now pulsed with a harsh, ultraviolet-rich frequency. Vampires caught in the wide cones shrieked from agony.
Their skin blistered and smoked as if under a sudden, brutal sunlamp. They staggered back, clawing at their faces.
But others surged past their blinded kin. One leaped impossibly high, aiming for Tony from above.
A mechanical arm from Adam's suit shot up with a nozzle. It emitted a fine, pressurized mist that glittered in the truck's lights; a colloidal suspension of powdered silver and concentrated garlic extract.
The vampire flew through the cloud, and its scream turned into a choking, burning gasp.
Its momentum was further stopped by another mechanical arm, forcing it to fall onto the roof, writhing, its flesh bubbling.
Tony finished it with a precise, low-powered repulsor blast to the head, which exploded in a shower of dust and bone fragments.
Two more vaulted onto the left side of the truck, scrambling towards Adam.
His other mechanical arms became a whirlwind. One arm ended in a vibro-blade, humming at a frequency that shattered vampire bone.
It decapitated the first with a clean sweep. The second arm terminated in a compact sonic emitter.
Adam triggered it, and a focused cone of ultra-high frequency sound hit the second vampire.
The creature clutched its ears, blood seeping from them, its balance destroyed.
A third arm, tipped with a pneumatic spike, shot forward and impaled it through the chest, pinning it to the truck's roof before retracting, leaving a dissolving corpse.
Blade was a dance of death on the running board. He was a fusion of martial arts and vampire-specific butchery.
He used his sword to parry claws, sever limbs, and deliver slashing wounds that sizzled with silver-poison.
His stake was always in motion, finding hearts in the chaos. He moved with an economy that made the vampires look clumsy.
One creature, faster than the rest, managed to grab his coat. Blade didn't struggle; he spun into the grip, sinking his teeth into the vampire's wrist and pulling back, shredding it apart, and staking it in the same motion.
Every kill spoke of hate, shredding them apart, and when they finally managed to disarm his sword, Blade did nothing but leap back for a split second before jumping back in.
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[ 1000 Power Stones For An Extra Chapter! ]
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