Roland sighed as he wiped the blood from his sword, his eyes not straying from the young woman at his feet that he’d just killed.  Her skin was deathly pale, her canines sharpened to fangs, and while she had been alive, her aura had been polluted by demonic power.

She had been a vampire.

He, a number of his own knights, and a few knights from Trajan’s retinue had been sent out to wipe out a vampire nest that had been discovered about a week before, but they had run into a small party of vampires that attacked them on the road.

One of Trajan’s loaned knights, a man named Adalgrim, who had been attacked and nearly killed by the vampire Lewis in the same battle that had cost Leon his left arm, swore and asked no one in particular, “Where are all these things coming from?”

Roland couldn’t help but silently ask the same question.  After the incident with Lewis and the advisory council’s subsequent focus on vampires and other sources of demonic activity, it had seemed like vampires were coming out of the woodwork.  There had only been five vampiric incidents prior to Lewis’ attack, but after it, there had been more than a dozen.  Roland had been informed of the claim that it was one demon behind all of this—he didn’t know the claim was from Leon—and he was starting to believe it.  To him, it felt like they had kicked an anthill, and now all the ants were coming out to defend themselves.

The vampires were being killed fairly quickly by Legion forces, but there hadn’t been a single vampire above the fifth-tier that showed itself.  Even the dozen vampires that attacked Roland’s party had been sub-fifth-tier, and with a sixth-tier Paladin and numerous fifth-tier knights, the vampires had fallen in short order.

“Everyone all right?” Roland shouted to his twenty-strong force.  His eyes finally separated from the young woman that he’d killed and swept over his people, looking for any sign of injury.  Roland had focused on techniques to help in battle, but as a light mage, he had some skill in healing magic.

Fortunately, it seemed both squads following him were fine.

“We must be getting close,” Grim said.  “This must be a sizable nest, though, if it can send out half a dozen vampires to slow us down…”

Roland agreed, not that he’d argue with Grim in this matter.  Roland was a Paladin, but he knew he got that title because he was friends with Prince August.  Grim was a knight in the service of Prince Trajan, and one of the most knowledgeable experts on the subject of monsters that Roland had ever met.  The Paladin felt no resentment in the slightest about deferring to Grim on this matter at all.

This particular nest they were traveling to had been identified by a ritual performed by the Legions in the capital and pointed them to a nest about a hundred and fifty miles north of the city.  From what Roland understood, it was mostly just a ritual that could find missing things, and when combined with a demonic core, it could point to the closest instance of that power.  It could only identify certain amounts of that power, though, and the ritual would struggle to find even a single vampire unless it was quite close.  A sizable nest within three hundred miles of the ritual, however, was fairly easy to discover.

It was deep in the wild forests of the Central Territories, at least twenty miles from the closest human settlement of any note.  A strange place to build a nest given how far away the vampires would be from food, but it made them quite safe from discovery.  It also cued the Legion into realizing that there were probably powerful vampires there since they’d have to carry their food such a long way home.

The vampires could, of course, have some kind of transportation for their food, but the threat of powerful vampires was deemed too costly a wager to gamble the operation on, and so a Paladin was sent to eradicate the nest.  However, since the Brimstone Paladin was already out destroying another nest, Sapphire and Earthshaker refused to leave Octavius’ side, and Penitent and Bronze likewise didn’t leave the King, Roland, the weakest of the Paladins, was all that could be sent.

‘At least Prince Trajan sent some help with me…’ Roland thought to himself as the squad got moving again.  Roland’s own retinue wasn’t that powerful compared to those of the other Paladin’s, with only a handful of fifth-tier knights under his command.  Most of the knights that Trajan sent with him, though, were fifth-tier, along with Grim and several others who Trajan held in high esteem for their abilities to combat vampires and other such monsters.

These were fast knights, fast enough that before too much longer, they began to approach their goal.  They didn’t need to stop once, because as they approached, Grim was able to sense the incredibly powerful demonic power and lead them closer than the Legion maps in the capital were able to.

The vampire nest was a cave dug into the side of a short hill, surrounded by forest.  It was largely invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it, even though it was so far from any human civilization.

“This is it?” Roland asked.  He had little experience dealing with demons and their worshippers, so he couldn’t properly identify demonic power.

“This is it,” Grim confirmed, and the other experts nodded their agreement.

“This place is covered in demonic power,” one of them added as he wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“Very well,” Roland said.  “Stay on your guard, they obviously know we’re coming, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent those weaker vamps out to ambush us.”

The knights nodded.  None of them were below the fourth-tier, and they had all done this sort of thing before.  None of them lowered their guard even for a moment, not even before Roland and Grim confirmed their location.

“Let’s go,” Roland said, and the party advanced into the cave.  There was a door just deep enough inside to not be obvious from the outside, but it barely even slowed Roland down; he swung his sword twice, extending it with golden light and cutting the doors from the walls, sending them crashing to the floor.

The knights advanced, their footsteps light and their heavy armor making little noise.  All of them that were capable of it projected their magic senses.  They sensed nothing out of the ordinary and continued onward, though they maintained their professionalism, and none dropped their guard.

The lack of traps and defensive enchantments was a little disturbing, but all were grateful for it.  There wasn’t even so much as a single flare or fire mine, despite the air becoming choked with fire magic.

They moved on, eventually finding another small door.  This proved about as much an obstacle as the first set of doors, though, and Roland sliced through it like a knife through warm butter.  The knights then poured into the room beyond, quickly securing it.

It was just an entry hall, devoid of anything of note.  It did branch off with three more doors, though.

With a few quick hand gestures, Roland assigned the five knights from his squad and five from Trajan’s squad to follow him while the remaining ten knights secured the entry hall.  Then, he picked a direction and began moving through the cave system.

It wasn’t extensive, a fact that Roland quickly realized after moving through a barracks room, a kitchen—which had a dedicated ice room with dozens of jars of blood—a long living space, bathrooms, a few small recreation spaces, and a separated living space for whoever was the top vampire around.  There was enough space and enough amenities for about twenty people to live quite comfortably.  The rooms were laid out like a grid, and eventually, Roland made his way through the entire cave system save for a few rooms at the end which were at the end of another long hallway.

Roland grabbed five more knights and made his way to this hallway.  Everyone was on edge; they were in the middle of a vampire nest and they had yet to encounter a single living soul within, let alone a vampire.  They all came to the unspoken realization that if there were any vampires within the caves, then they would be within these last few rooms.  However, Roland and the knights hadn’t been careful when they moved through the caves, so there was no need to be slow and gentle.

Wasting no more time, Roland burst through the door at the end of the hallway, and the knights spilled into the room beyond.

Again, they found no living person.  Instead, what they found was a long round chamber with terraced seats sinking into the ground.  There were enough seats for about a hundred people, and at the center of the chamber, at the bottom of the seats, was what Roland could only assume was a sacrificial altar.  The stone below the altar was blackened like many fires had burned upon it, and the altar itself was wide and long enough for a person to lay upon it.  It had grooves carved into its surface that led back into a deep ‘bowl’ on one side of the altar, which had been stained brown with dried blood.

There were no more rooms to find.  The caves were empty.  No vampires, no corpses, nothing for the knights to find.

“Where in the hells are they?” one knight couldn’t help but ask aloud.

“If you heard that two squads of the Kingdom’s finest were about to break down your door, would you stick around?” Grim asked.  Vampires rarely stuck around if their cover was blown in his experience.

“Whatever, they’re not here,” Roland said.  “Secure the caves just in case they come back and look for any information we can use.”

The knights followed his order, scouring the caves for any scrap of information they might be able to find.  In the end, though, Roland only found two things of note.

The first was that the rooms hadn’t been cleared out as if the vampires moved, and neither were they messy enough to look like the vamps had left in a hurry.  The second was a set of long, thin tracks just outside the cave mouth that looked suspiciously like the wheels on a cheap, unenchanted carriage.

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“This is absolute bullshit,” a young, inhumanely pale man said as he stared out through the crack in the curtains covering the window of the cheap, unenchanted carriage he was riding in.

“Bullshit it may be,” the middle-aged woman sitting across from him said, neither of them thinking twice about using a curse word that insulted the entire Bull Kingdom, “but when our Lord says to do something, then we have little choice.”

“We make sacrifices to him for his power, a fair exchange, we’re not his slaves!” the young man complained.

“So you don’t want the power he promised?” the woman asked as she raised an eyebrow in amusement.

“Of course I do, I just don’t like cleaning up after other people’s messes,” the man replied.

The woman was the sire of the nest Roland was attempting to subdue.  The demon she and her nest sacrificed to would send his power to her, and then she, in turn, passed that power onto those she recruited, turning them into vampires as well.  The man across from her was one such ‘lesser’ vampire, a sixth-tier mage that she turned about a decade ago.

“I’ll admit that this is a little strange, though,” the woman said as she, too, peered outside through the curtains.  “I’ve never had to find and kill someone for our Lord…”

“Lewis never failed to kill someone before,” the man retorted.  “I guess the old man finally went off the deep end if he managed to get himself killed by such a young cub…”

Outside, the carriage was being pulled through the streets by a pair of small, somewhat sickly-looking horses.  Around them were about a dozen others on foot, armed with shortswords and dressed in thick clothes to act as armor and to hide some of their more obviously vampiric traits, like how thin and pale they were.  If they didn’t open their mouths and reveal their fangs, then few would be able to tell at a glance that they weren’t entirely human.

Around them, the people of the capital went about their daily lives, parting for the carriage and its escorts as they did for all the other vehicles that passed by, forgetting about it as soon as it left their sight.

“Whomever this ‘Leon Ursus’ is, I can’t help but pity him for killing Lewis and arousing our Lord’s anger,” the young man said as he closed his curtain.

“Indeed, I’d wager this means a great deal to him,” the woman replied.  “He didn’t say it outright when he spoke to me, but he did imply that this is such an important matter that he sent others within this Kingdom after this boy in addition to us…”

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