Not What She Wanted {Sparda}

[Sparda]

The slug struck home, and the cobra exploded, rent apart by the force of the impact. A clean shot like that on the vampire would cause her no end of problems, but he had to hit her first. The tentacles paused, coiled back to strike, as the familiars appeared to withdraw for just a moment. His yellow eyes followed the vampire to the rooftop. The coat was gone, her body shrouded in elongated hair, and a familiar chill crawled up his spine. He knew what this meant.

At the sound of thunderous footsteps, he turned to face the shadowy form of the Tyrant she had taken for a familiar.

"Oh, what the f-"

Blades clashed with a shriek of metal as he brought up his sword to block the Tyrant's swing. Though he was pushed a good few feet along the road, his arm didn't falter, and the glowing blade of his sword keened loudly against the Tyrant's own. He lifted the Anathema past the blades, pointed it straight at the Tyrant's face, and pulled the trigger.

[Luca Valentine]

"What's wrong, Sweetie? You were talking all that good stuff a moment ago."

The tyrant took the full force of the blast to the face, and started to mutate from the damage becoming something far more sinsister. It pulled back and then stepped forward again with another strike aimed for the BOW's head. Maricul had a girn on her face now, this was only the tip of the ice berg and if the man kept picking away at her he was bound to find more.

[Sparda]

He had watched the footage, of course; but now that he was facing it for himself, twisted though it was by the vampire's dark influence, Robert was convinced indeed that this was no mere T-103. That obsolete plaything could never do what this beast was doing. Whoever was responsible for it in the first place had turned a T-103 into something far more dangerous.

It reeled back for another strike with its sword, and this time, Robert ducked low. As the blade passed through empty air, he lashed upwards with his own sword, an arcing blur of blue light, to lop off the Tyrant's weapon hand at the wrist. He followed up immediately with a pair of barking shots of the Anathema at its center of mass. It may have become a vampire's familiar, but familiars all had a breaking point, and it wouldn't take him long to find it.

[Luca Valentine]

Maricul withdrew the familiar. It was one she wasn't willing to part with just yet. Instead she opted to release the rest of her familiars to the man. Caskets came out of the ground and opened up to reveal Isafaro soldiers with their weapons raised. Hallowton guards with their spears and tower shields. Jherrazad soldiers with their muskets. Moon Valley soldiers with their rifles, and finally the Aircano's paladins with their swords and shields. They all marched at the freak. The one with rifles open fired on Sparda while the ones with bladed weapons closed in enough to use them. And last, but not least, was a man in white priest robes with a black whip in his hands. The man's name was Saul, Maricul's father and the first familiar she ever made.

Better call Saul.

[Sparda]

The Tyrant reeled back beneath the staggering impact of the two bullets - then vanished altogether. Rob squinted, swung the pistol around to aim in the direction of where the vampire waited on the rooftop. Before he could pull the trigger again, though, another chill of warning crept up his spine and stayed his hand.

All around him, seemingly out of the very asphalt underfoot, caskets of all shapes and colours burst into view. Their lids creaked open, and a veritable army of familiars stepped forth; soldiers almost every one, armed and emblazoned with such disparate weapons and insignias it was like they had been pulled from different pages of history. But they had been pulled in vast numbers, and every one of them was pointing their weapons at him.

He spared just one more look at the vampire. There was an instant of dawning understanding in his eyes. Then he blinked, and those eyes were aglow with violent intent. He turned back as the army of familiars began its march, and recoiled under a storm of gunfire. Even as any ordinary person would be reduced to a red stain on the asphalt, Robert stood his ground. Chunks of flesh were flayed off his body as slugs and pellets bit across it, sending long spatters of blood in all directions across the road, and he uttered a roar of agony that echoed into the night.

Then agony turned into rage.



He laboured to reach across his body to holster the Anathema and sheathe the Vengeant, and the instant he did, the flesh of both arms undulated and exploded. In a split-second mutation, he wielded now a massive rectangular shield of spiked, hardening flesh at the end of his left arm, and his right had transformed altogether into a writhing mass of tentacles tipped with enormous, scythe-like claws of bone. He braced against his shield, and the bullets of the familiars lost their purchase, now impacting harmlessly and falling away. With a bestial roar, the BOW charged into the throng.

Phantom soldiers were bowled over like pins in the path of his assault. Over the top of his shield, the clawed tentacles of his right arm lashed out to and fro, severing heads and bifurcating bodies. As those bodies fell in his wake, still more tentacles reached out from beneath his coat, latching onto the corpses with fanged, mouth-like appendages and dragging them along behind his seemingly unstoppable charge. Those bodies appeared to shrivel, emaciating in seconds, as the biomass of their conjured bodies was devoured by the roaring monster that Robert had become. Second by second, the leathery shield upon his left arm became tougher; the lashing tentacles of his right arm reached further and struck harder, even piercing and rending the shields of the Hallowton and Aircano soldiers. From within the mass of tentacles, one more struck out with a spindly hand wielding the Vengeant, its blade aglow and shrieking, and it sliced through those soldiers as if they carried no shields at all.

Robert killed, feasted, killed more effectively, feasted more ravenously. Helsing's new Angel of Death would not be stopped.

[Luca Valentine]

Where most people would've met the new form of the man with fear and agony, Maricul only grinned. The image reminded her of Alucard himself. Maybe not as terrifying, but still pretty damn close.

"So this is your true power. You were only playing with me before."

Another chill was felt through the air as a black witch hat appeared out of nowhere and Maricul placed it on her head. Long black hair down to her ankles wrapped around her body and formed black witch's robes as she was now bare foot. The wind around the two began to increase going hundreds miles per hour as it threatened to blow the tyrant away. Thunder clashed, and lightning struck the air. Maricul reached up her hand and pulled the lightning down to pierce the skull of the tyrant where he stood. She now had control of Mother Nature itself, and Mother Nature wasn't about to play nice.

"Allow me to properly introduce myself. I am Maricul Black of Aircano, and I was sired by the Apex Predator himself, Alucard. His blood runs through my veins and his fury runs through my heart, but it's not the monster, the Seductress, that should concern you..."

"It's the witch within you need to worry about."

[Sparda]

Against the howling winds, Sparda slammed his shield against the ground and braced against it, while spiny tendrils burrowed under the road for purchase in the earth. Beneath the lightning bolt that smote him where he stood he recoiled with a roar, but yellow eyes continued to stare up at the vampire when he straightened back up, flesh smoking.

"Trading introductions now?" he shouted against the wind. As he spoke, the tentacles at his right side coiled around each other, clawed extremities flexing at the end, in the vague shape of an arm."Let me make sure this leaves a lasting impression." As he lifted his right arm, fleshy tendrils erupted all around, from under the ground and under his coat. The broken corpses of the familiars he had slaughtered, along with those who still moved, were entangled and hoisted skyward by vines of bloody and mutated flesh with thorns of bone.

The entire mass moved as one, twisting and coiling through the air, carrying with it most of what remained of Maricul's army of familiars. By the time the movement stopped, Sparda was standing before a cross of thorns that towered a hundred feet behind him, and the street was filled with the wailing of the vampire's trapped familiars as the spiked tendrils slowly ripped them apart.

"My name is Sparda!" the BOW roared in challenge. "And I'm still hungry!"

[Luca Valentine]

Maricul waved her hands, and Robert would find himself in the middle of a hurricane that had appeared from thin air. Water came at full force tearing down buildings and threatening to drown out the BOW that stood on the ground while Maricul herself remained on higher ground to see the damage done. As she stood there she felt something strong, something dark, tingling every inch of her being. It couldn't be. Was it? Yes... It was... And now her revenge would be fully realized.

"I would love to stick around, but I sense I'm needed elsewhere."

Maricul turned around and disappeared into the darkness. The vampire that brought her into this world, the vampire known around the world as Alucard had been reawakened. And now her motives needed to be reassess as this was a fight that would not be easily met.

[Sparda]

The howling winds shaped into an outright hurricane around the BOW, and he found himself struggling to keep his anchored footing. So much the worse when the wave of water came crashing through the street, swallowing him up and nearly washing him away. He shut his mouth, screwed his eyes shut, and mentally howled in frustration. She had to be telling the truth - only a child of Alucard could wield this kind of freakish power.

From within the vortex at last came a volley of sinewy tentacles. Spiked extremities anchored in the ground, latched onto buildings, and with a roar against the raging noise, Sparda hauled himself free. The tentacles pulled him along the street until he could find cover against the wind, then he climbed to the top of the nearest flat roof to take a proper look around.

The vampire was gone.

"Shit," he sneered. "Round one's a draw, then." He knew he had some work ahead of him to confirm what he had been told. In all honesty, it would be foolish of him to take her at her word about who she was, even if her powers made a convincing case for her. He definitely couldn't bring this to Elias without making damned sure he knew what he was talking about. This would be a most challenging hunt.

Contenting himself with how he had feasted on her familiars, the BOW retracted his tentacles and turned to claw his way across the rooftops away from the scene.