Chapter 18
I spent nearly an hour cleaning.
An hour during which my newfound Master Clockmaker skill waged a merciless war on disorder.
Every tool lying at the wrong angle, every reagent stain on the countertop registered as a personal insult.
This wasn't just cleaning — it was calibration.
Bringing my world into alignment with my new, crystalline perception of it.
While my hands worked, my head ran.
There were plenty of thoughts, but they weren't swarming in panic anymore.
The mind of a master was approaching the Vampire problem not as an existential threat, but as a malfunction in the complex mechanism of my survival — a malfunction that needed to be fixed.
The fact that I hadn't yet found an elegant solution was a wound to my new instincts.
Sleep held no appeal.
The adrenaline from the day's events, combined with the sharp awareness of my situation, worked better than coffee.
Since that was the case, there was no point wasting time.
I decided to replenish my supply of Potions of Intellect.
All the components were at hand, and with my clockwork skill in play, the process ran like clockwork.
Every movement was precise, every measurement exact.
I even caught a couple of minor design flaws in my Marx Generator that could be corrected later.
[Created Potion "Potion of Intellect." Difficulty: Normal. Received +30 OP!]
...
[Created Potion "Potion of Intellect." Difficulty: Normal. Received +10 OP!]
Five flasks brought a total of 80 OP, bringing my balance to an even 200.
A nice bonus.
By the time I finished, the horizon outside had already gone pink.
Dawn.
Since they hadn't shown up overnight, my lair wasn't compromised yet.
I rigged a simple tripwire alarm at both the garage entrance and the house door, then collapsed onto the bed without undressing and was out the moment I hit the mattress.
Waking up at one in the afternoon felt like crawling through wet concrete.
No motivation, none of the overflowing energy I'd had the past few days.
Just flat apathy, a low hum of irritation, and the cold understanding that every hour I sat still was an hour I was handing to my enemies.
This wasn't a fox scratching at the door.
It was kicking it down.
I didn't hesitate.
I cracked open one of the fresh flasks.
The familiar cold of the Potion of Intellect swept the apathy away and replaced it with sharp, analytical clarity.
I sat down in front of my laptop and started organizing my thoughts.
Assets:
Skills: Master Clockmaker — invaluable for crafting, useless in a fight.
And my main trump card: the Inventory touch.
The ability that had swallowed the Vampires along with their car.
It still satisfied me immensely that Vampires, as undead, were classified as "non-living" by the System.
That was my joker card, and the moment the enemy figured it out, I'd lose it.
Equipment: UV Projector "Daylight."
Ten Muscle Stimulator injectors.
A legal self-defense kit — heavy-duty pepper sprays, a couple of tasers, a tactical baton.
And a Level 4 body armor vest.
I'd tried it on — thirteen kilograms felt like a cast-iron slab.
But under the Stimulator, I wouldn't just be able to walk in it.
I'd be able to run.
Resources: Around $19,000 in cash.
My Honda.
And the Toyota with Vampires inside it — a potential kinetic weapon.
I could drop it from height or materialize it directly in an enemy's path.
The idea of sourcing something heavier, like a freight container or train car, was tempting, but impractical.
Vampires, based on everything I knew from my meta-knowledge, were almost universally fast and agile.
Brute force wasn't the answer — accuracy and cunning were.
The Problem:
I was being hunted by an organized group of supernatural predators — a clan, a family, something structured and experienced.
Possible Solutions:
Run.
Leave the city, the country.
But that wasn't living; that was surviving in a state of permanent fear.
They would find me eventually.
If not this week, then in a month.
You can't run from your problems, and you definitely can't run from yourself.
Option rejected.
Fight.
The only logical path — but with caveats.
I was weak in direct confrontation.
Even with the Stimulator.
Even with the armor, the projector, and the Inventory, I'd lose against a squad of experienced Vampires.
Head-on combat was off the table.
I needed to fight asymmetrically, leveraging my only real advantage: my mind.
The problem was compounded by the fact that I couldn't just pause the threat — I needed to end it, kill it at the root, make them leave me alone permanently.
That called for a definitive solution.
Not the conceptual Necronomicon from Arcanum I'd been quietly fantasizing about — no, I needed heavy artillery.
I leaned back in my chair and let my enhanced brain sift through terabytes of information absorbed over a lifetime.
Comics, movies, TV series, fan wikis.
All that seemingly useless geek culture was now my primary arsenal.
My brain built schematics, discarded dead ends, traced connections.
And then it found one.
The picture snapped together.
Like the last tumbler of a complex lock clicking into place, swinging the door open.
In this world — if I was lucky, maybe even in this very city — there was one particular figure.
Not a hero in shining armor, not some omnipotent cosmic entity.
A specialist with an extremely narrow focus.
Someone for whom fighting Vampires was not just a mission, but a life's work.
Someone with the knowledge, the experience, and the tools to solve my problem once and for all.
The plan was insane.
Dangerous.
There was a real chance they'd simply hang up on me — or, at worst, kill me the moment I tried to make contact.
But it was the only plan that could actually work.
All that was left was finding him.
Eric Brooks, better known as Blade — the most effective Vampire killer in the area, and one of the key players on the "shadow" side of this world, hidden from ordinary people just as the Vampires themselves were.
My memory supplied the relevant details: depending on the version, he was either a dhampir free of the usual Vampire weaknesses, or a purely human operative with exceptional training and possibly Chi-based abilities.
Different iterations of Blade existed across the multiverse.
I could only hope that mine would be reasonable enough to talk to.
Plan accepted.
Crazy, but correct.
The hardest part remained: finding someone in a world of billions who almost certainly didn't want to be found.
I had no leads whatsoever — just a name and scraps of meta-knowledge.
My only real tools were his potential digital footprint, thin as it might be, and a brain currently running on the Potion of Intellect.
A second question followed immediately: how do I get him interested?
Would the legendary Blade — arguably the world's greatest Vampire hunter — care about the problems of some nobody that Vampires, whom he culled in droves, wanted dead?
Probably not.
But I had no intention of showing up empty-handed.
Social capital among the significant players of this world was priceless, especially among those who wouldn't want to dissect me in an underground lab.
And situations like mine were the best currency for earning it, as long as both parties walked away with something.
I had something to offer.
It wasn't for nothing that I carried the self-awarded title of garage proto-genius.
Time to start.
I spun up a virtual machine, chained it through a VPN routed across several countries, then opened Tor.
Not bulletproof protection, but in the terabytes of junk traffic flooding the internet every second, a quiet search for the reasonably common name "Eric Brooks" should dissolve without a trace.
Social media was a dead end from the start.
Looking there would be like hunting a needle in a haystack after dumping ten more haystacks on top.
My approach was different.
The Potion-enhanced brain functioned like a precision search algorithm, cutting through gigabytes of noise against a tight set of criteria:
Name: Eric Brooks (or Brook).
Ethnicity: Black (probability >98%).
Origin: British (probability >80%).
Physical build: Athletic or heavily athletic.
Optional: Possible military background.
I worked through news archives, government records, digitized newspaper clippings.
Dozens of Eric Brookses scrolled past — footballers, musicians, politicians, ordinary workers — each one assessed and rejected in seconds.
Then, nearly an hour in, a trail led me to a dusty corner of a forum for military award collectors: a thread about the Order of the British Empire.
A prestigious decoration, bestowed by the Crown for exceptional contributions to public safety, science, or the arts.
In 2003, seventy-nine people received it.
Among them was a certain Eric Brook.
The post included an old, grainy photograph from a British newspaper.
Amid a crowd of people in formal suits stood a tall, powerfully built Black man.
He was wearing a long leather coat that had absolutely no business being at a ceremony like this.
The Order was pinned carelessly to the lapel, and a fake, strained smile was frozen on his face — the look of someone who had been dragged from a dark basement into a spotlight and hated every single second of it.
Bingo.
That was him.
I had a trail.
A direct search for Blade would be hopeless, but now I had a fixed point in time and space: the awards ceremony.
And there had been other people there.
His circle.
I kept pulling at the thread, running the names of everyone who had received the award that day.
Writers, actors, scientists — all misses.
Then I landed on Ben Carper.
Another photo, different newspaper.
A hard-looking man of about forty, built like a soldier, who had also shown up to the ceremony in wholly inappropriate clothing — a field jacket — and whose smile was just as forced and hollow as Blade's.
Two sore thumbs in a room full of high society.
They definitely knew each other.
Unlike Blade, Ben Carper left a much cleaner footprint.
I had a social media account in under a minute.
A man now fifty-six, retired British Army.
He seemed to live a quiet pensioner's life — fishing photos, the occasional picture with his wife.
No phone number publicly listed, of course.
Time for a risky move.
Running a data lookup on Blade directly would be suicide — that kind of query would trigger someone, somewhere.
But on a modest British pensioner?
The risk was minimal.
I went to a shadow forum, found a trusted operator, transferred $100 in cryptocurrency, and waited.
Thirty minutes later, a message landed in my secure inbox: a single line containing a British phone number.
Quick anonymous Skype registration — my SIM card had been out of my phone for a while now — thirty dollars for a package of international calls, and then I was sitting there staring at the laptop screen.
Two o'clock in the afternoon my time.
In Britain, depending on where he lived, somewhere between five and seven in the evening.
Perfect timing.
My heart was hammering.
I had crossed from theory into practice.
One button press and I'd be invading a world I couldn't easily walk away from.
A moment's hesitation — then I hit call.
Long, drawn-out international rings... and finally a click.
A calm male voice with a British accent came through the laptop speaker.
"Hello?"
"Ben Carper?"
I kept my voice as steady as I could.
"Speaking."
Short, clipped.
A sergeant's delivery, no pleasantries.
Understanding that long preambles were wasted on a man like this, I went all in.
"I need Eric Brooks. Get me to him. It's urgent."
Silence fell on the other end.
Long, heavy, suffocating.
I was already convinced he'd just hang up.
"Who's asking?"
The voice turned colder still, if that was even possible.
"Someone in serious trouble. The kind of trouble that lurks in shadows and comes with a pale complexion."
Veiled just enough that a friend would understand and a stranger would write me off as a crank.
"No idea what you're on about, mate," came the predictable reply.
"And I don't know any Brookses. I'm not a helpline for paranoids."
He hadn't hung up.
That was everything.
He was waiting to see what I said next.
A test, then.
Fine — I'd play the role he wanted to hear.
The desperate client.
"I'm not asking for a helpline!"
I let some deliberate pathos and tremor creep into my voice.
"I need a specialist. The best one. Someone who can save my modest little life — or maybe this whole damn world. I'm nineteen. I've barely lived. Please. Pass it on to him. He'll understand."
I put every ounce of sincerity I could manufacture into that last sentence.
Then: the short, flat beeps of a disconnected call.
He'd hung up.
Failure.
A complete, resounding failure.
I hadn't convinced the old, hardened soldier who had probably sent more humans and inhuman things to the next world than I'd encountered in my entire life.
My half-baked genius scheme to reach Blade had collapsed before it ever got started.
Plan B, then.
A panicked, sloppy, deeply unpleasant plan B.
I needed to extract one Vampire from the Toyota.
Place it in the Inventory separately from the car.
Then interrogate it in the garage under the UV floodlights, body armor on, Stimulator within reach.
At least then I'd know who they were and what they wanted.
But how in hell was I supposed to pull one creature out of a locked car sitting in my pocket dimension?
Summon the whole car back into reality?
The doors would be locked.
And while I was breaking them open, the things inside — if they were even still "alive" in any functional sense — would...
No.
Too risky.
Maybe the smarter play was to drive the Honda into the Financial District and serve myself as bait?
An idiotic idea.
Then a sharp, unfamiliar ringtone cut through the silence from the laptop — Skype, incoming call.
The caller ID was a meaningless string of characters.
My heart lurched, then began hammering.
It could be anyone.
They could have traced the laptop.
But the instinct that danger had sharpened in me over the past twenty-four hours screamed: answer it.
I hit the green button.
"Yo. You the one looking for a specialist?"
A low, rough voice came from the speakers.
British again, but different — deeper, with a grating undertone.
Like gravel rolling in a drum.
Could it be...?
"Do you... know about bloodsuckers?"
That was all I managed to get out.
"I know they suck. But in my experience — not blood."
The voice chuckled roughly at its own joke.
"So. Fill me in on the details. I'll give you the rate card when I'm on-site."
It was him.
Blade.
Carper had actually passed on the message.
"Yes — yes, of course!"
I cleared my throat and tried to collect myself.
"It all started yesterday. New York, Manhattan. I left campus, got into my car, and almost immediately realized I was being followed..."
I gave him the short version of the chase, carefully leaving out any mention of the Inventory and exactly how I'd lost them.
I said I'd just managed to shake them in city traffic.
My story had more holes in it than a chain-link fence, but Blade let me finish without interrupting, then asked exactly one question — the only one that mattered:
"Alright. Now tell me — what the hell made them come after you in the first place? You don't sound like the type to get on their radar."
"Um..." I hesitated.
"Apparently because I took a Ghost Orchid."
And before he could respond, I added quickly:
"But I had no idea it belonged to anyone! I swear. I was walking through the park at night and saw something incredible blooming on a tree. How was I supposed to just walk past that?"
Silence, and then a dry, sarcastic chuckle.
"Right. Just happened to be in a spot at night that's considered sacred among people in the know. Just happened to know the name of the rarest mystical ingredient on the market. Just happened to be able to see it and take it, unlike ninety-nine percent of ordinary people. And the cherry on top — just happened to know the shadow side of this world exists, and knew enough to track down someone like me. Kid, you are a terrible liar."
It was like being hit with a bucket of ice water.
He'd seen straight through me.
"Okay," I swallowed.
"I didn't find the flower by accident. But I genuinely didn't know it had owners — that part is true. As for why I needed it... I'd rather discuss that face to face. It may have a direct bearing on what I'm able to pay you. For a rough sense of the scale, watch the movie Limitless."
That was my only card left to play — shifting the conversation from "help a broke student" to "I have something that might actually interest you," and throwing out a hint bold enough to stick.
"Hmm. Fair enough. You've got my attention," he said after a brief pause.
"And this is too much open-channel chatter, even through a secure line. Alright — I'll be in New York in eight hours. Manhattan, Lily and Millie Cafe. You know it? A signature burger and a story worth believing are on you."
He paused, then added with a shade of dark humor:
"And try to stay alive until then."
The call ended.
I leaned back in my chair and let out a long breath, feeling the exhaustion spread through me all at once.
Fear tangled with euphoria.
I'd done it.
I was going to live.
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