Jay had long since lost count of how many vampires, noble alike had died by his hand.
Men and women.
The old.
The young.
Even those who had barely begun to live.
The numbers no longer mattered.
There was no road left behind him. Only the one that led forward, paved with ash.
Time itself had lost the will to mark his passage. The world existed only as a series of rooms, and he walked through them as one might walk through memories already half-forgotten.
He had stopped counting.
Numbers required distinction. They required faces, resistance, weight. What remained now was uniform silence, broken only by the sound of his boots against stone.
Clack
Clack
The echo followed him as a witness.
Corridors stretched endlessly, their gothic arches looming like rib cages picked clean. Chandeliers lay shattered across marble floors, their crystals ground to dust beneath his steps. Ancient banners hung in tatters, scorched by a heat that left no flame behind. The air itself felt exhausted, as if it had been forced to inhale death too many times in one night.
Jay walked.
Doors opened for him. Wards unravelled in his presence, sigils peeling apart like wet parchment as it burns in the Holy Anthem. Defensive magic teared apart, simply ceased as though it understood the futility of resisting.
Everywhere he passed, the world burns.
There was no blood on his blade.
There never was.
The violet fire that followed him left nothing behind. No remains to bury. No stains to cleanse. No proof that anyone had lived there at all. Only absence, carefully preserved like a cathedral emptied of its gods.
Behind him, Gasper followed.
Each step was an act of will. His breath came shallow, uneven, his fingers clenched around his hoodie as though letting go would cause him to vanish.
The silence pressed against his pointy ears until it rang louder than any scream. He did not look at the rooms Jay had already passed through. He could feel them, something that he don't want to imagine. The only thing in his mind right now is to meet Valerie.
The man in front of him did not hurry.
That frightened Gasper more than anything.
Jay's movements were calm, unbroken by doubt or fatigue. His posture remained straight, his pace constant. He did not glance at the destruction left in his wake. He did not pause to confirm the end of a life. He simply walked, as if the path ahead had already been decided long ago.
They moved from castle to castle, connected by bridges of black stone that stretched across open air.
The Tepes territory, once a kingdom of shadowed elegance, had become a mausoleum of ashes burn by the holy fire.
As Jay conducted the cadenza of death, its final discordant notes rang through the Tepes territory.
At last, they reached a stairwell descending deep into the heart of one of the main castle. The stone here was older, layered with magic meant to deter even the deadliest of magic.
It pulsed weakly as Jay approached.
Jay stopped.
The silence thickened.
He turned his head slightly, just enough for his voice to carry.
"Wait here." He said to Gasper.
Gasper froze, and then stopped on his way just as Jay said.
Jay began to descend.
Below him, the hall exploded with activity. Hundreds of vampire guards, the dregs of the Tepes military and black coat rushed into the light of the flickering torches.
It had been thirty minutes since Jay entered the Tepes Territory, and in that time, the entire eastern and southern sectors had been silenced. No messengers had escaped. No alarms had been rung. There was only a growing terrifying silence that had finally reached the heart of the Tepes territory.
The guards looked at the lone figure descending the stairs, their expressions a mix of confusion and disgusts.
"Human?"
Jay walked slowly, his steps steady as he descended from the upper floors down the stairs. His black coat fluttered with each step, and though he was unarmed, his dark hazel eyes swept across the hall with cold gaze.
"Kill him! He's just a human!"
"Don't be afraid! The King said the Holy Grail has nullified our weaknesses! Holy energy won't work on us anymore!"
"For Marius-sama! For the New Dawn!"
They screamed, a cacophony of screeching voices that sounded more like frightened animals than soldiers. Hundreds of them surged forward like a literal flock of bats, their eyes glowing with a predatory crimson gleam.
They launched a barrage of shadow projectiles and jagged shards of solidified darkness that hissed through the air like poisoned arrows.
Jay didn't slow down. He didn't even draw his sword.
Somewhere in the depths of his mind, a detached thought surfaced. There were hardly high-ranking Vampire nobles here. He had noticed it earlier, and the pattern had only grown clearer with every pile of ashes he left behind. Most of the vampires he had slain were fodder, low-ranking or not fighters at all. The high-rankings were rare enough that he could count them on his own two hand.
Where were the Elders? The lords who were meant to command the Tepes bloodline?
These guards were mostly just a mid-ranking Vampires. It was as though the true power of the castle had already drawn away to somewhere else.
It didn't matter. The anthem would march on.
As the shadow projectiles reached him, they didn't shatter against a shield. They simply passed through him. Jay walked through the barrage as if he were a ghost, his form flickering with the subtle distortion of Phantasmagoria.
The guards reached him, their claws and blades swinging in wide, desperate arcs. But every strike met only air. Jay walked through the middle of their formation, a phantom in a black coat as his body ignoring the fangs that sought his throat and the swords that aimed for his heart.
He moved through the crowd like a ship cutting through a sea, his eyes fixed solely on the massive rune-etched doors at the end of the hall.
The vampires stopped. The screaming died down, replaced by a suffocating confused dread. They turned, staring at Jay's back as he reached the doors. They had thrown everything at him, magic, steel, and tooth.
But it's all in vain.
Slowly, a slight fear creeping on in the hearts of those Vampire guards.
Jay stopped in front of the giant doors. He finally turned back then looking back at the hundreds of crimson eyes staring at him from the dark hall.
His gaze was hollow, yet for a fleeting heartbeat, a trace of melancholy stirred within his hazel eyes. A silent mourning for the lives he had glimpsed in that basement.
Then, he opened his palm.
A violet spark danced in the center of his hand.
Then the hall turned into purgatory.
A torrent of violet fire erupted from Jay's position, roaring outward like a tidal wave. It scorched them. The flames moved like the parting of the Red Sea, surging through the ranks of the vampires. Incinerate Anthem, a holy execution that denied even the possibility of ash.
The screams were brief. Air was ripped from their lungs, vocal cords destroyed before a sound could fully form. For a moment, the room filled with the harsh sizzle of flesh meeting divine heat. Then there was silence.
An absolute deafening silence.
Jay stood alone in front of the great door, his face illuminated by the dying violet glow of the floorboards. The hundreds of guards were gone. Not a bone, not a scrap of cloth remained.
Just ashes.
Hearing the silence, Gasper scrambled down the stairs, his eyes streaming with tears. He didn't look at the charred stone.
He ran straight for Jay, his heart hammering against his ribs. He could feel it now. Behind that door, Valerie was waiting.
Jay pushed the doors open.
The room beyond was an altar chamber, vast and cold. It was illuminated by hundreds of white candles that flickered with a nervous energy. The walls were covered in intricate, unrecognizable runes that seemed to squirm when not looked at directly.
Jay, whose knowledge of Thaumaturgy was vast, found himself unable to decipher a single line. It wasn't Zoroastrian Runes, nor was it Egyptian or Norse. It was something else.
In the center of the room, lying upon a stone altar, was the girl.
"Valerie!" Gasper shrieked, throwing himself toward the altar.
Valerie Tepes lay still, her short blonde hair fanned out across the stone. Her skin was the color of marble, and her chest barely moved. As Gasper reached her, her eyes fluttered open. They were hollow, not dead but empty, as if the soul had been scooped out.
"Valerie! Wake up! It's me! It's Gasper!" he cried, hugging her weakened frame, his tears wetting her dress.
"What have they done to you?" Gasper weep.
Through a Herculean effort of will, her lips parted. The voice that came out was a fragile thread, it was barely audible.
"...G...gas...per..."
Jay didn't join the reunion.
He stood ten feet away, before suddenly his Domain screaming a warning. He felt a presence in the darkness.
A cold, dense knot of power that had been watching from the shadows of the vaulted ceiling.
With a sharp flick of his wrist, Jay sent a spatial tear of Rupture toward the far corner of the room.
SHRIEK
The darkness split, but the figure within moved with a fluid terrifying ease, stepping out of the way of the rupture before it could close.
And then the figure in the darkness walked forward into the candlelight, his footsteps making no sound on the stone.
The man was young, appearing to be in his early twenties, with a handsome, aristocratic face that held a permanent condescending smirk. His silver hair was long and intricately braided, and he wore flowing silver robes adorned with accessories.
Jay's eyes narrowed. He recognized the signature immediately. The density of the mana, the ancient sour taste of the magical imprints inside it.
it was unmistakable.
"Devil," Jay muttered in a low voice.
"Now, now," the man said, spreading his hands in a theatrical gesture but his voice is calm and collected. "Is that a new human way to greet a person?... But i must say, I am impressed. To wipe out thousands of the Tepes' Vampires without so much as a drop of blood on your sleeve or even anyone noticing."
The Devil tilted his head, his silver eyes scanning Jay with clinical curiosity.
"But I don't understand. What could a wielder of the Incinerate Anthem possibly have to do with a messy internal squabble between the vampires?"
Jay's just stared at the man in front of him in a cold gaze. "Isn't that the question I should be asking you, Devil?"
The man smiled, and the gesture didn't reach his eyes. He lifted his right hand, making a formal, mocking bow.
"I am but a humble servant of the True Lucifer," he said.
Silver hair. The name of the Morning Star. Jay's mind raced through the lineages of the Underworld. Jay could pinpoint the devil's identity, or at least his lineage, though he was not entirely sure.
The man straightened up, his playful demeanor sharpening into something lethal.
"But I'm afraid you aren't welcomed in this place, Human."