Curses!

Selene ducked under another beam of concentrated energy, crouching down with one hand on the ground as she did so. Harnessing as much of her recently enhanced strength as she could, she launched herself forward while making sure to stay low. She'd learned from previous attempts that it was important to be able to change directions in a split second when her opponent managed to line up another shot.

It had taken her a few minutes of effort, but she managed to get a feel for her new power. For some reason, she was much stronger and more agile than she'd been previously. Although the exact cause escaped her at the moment, she figured it had to do with the time she'd lost between being interrogated and waking up next to the boss.

The male vampire landed again, once more taking a shooting stance and letting loose with a pair of shots before resuming his retreat. Selene was able to dodge the first and block the second, but she had to slow herself to do so, and as a result the distance between them increased again.

[Gah! This guy is so frustrating.] She thought to herself.

Not only was he intentionally fighting in a way that kept her from doing anything, but she could clearly tell from his expression and the way he was carrying himself that he wasn't taking this situation seriously.

When this cycle had repeated itself for the eighth time, she finally snapped. "By the gods! Why won't you just sit still and let me hit you?!"

The sniper stopped for a moment, lowering his rifle slightly while raising an eyebrow as if the two were somehow balanced. "I am intentionally buying time until Esmerelda is done with the Dragonknight. She would be upset if I finished you off before she had a chance to play."

"Grrr. And you call yourself a man?! Just stand and fight!" She yelled while leaping into another charge, only to be forced to slide to the right to avoid a beam of energy that would have split her head in two.

"Why should I do that?" He replied calmly, a hint of amusement in his voice. "Why sacrifice my advantages and fight you on your own terms?"

"Because it's cowardly! It's dishonorable! That's why!" She yelled while throwing herself to the side again to dodge another burst of fire.

"There is no such thing as honor in a fight. There are only winners and losers, and while I don't think I'll be beaten even if I took you on in close combat, there is no reason to risk it when I have the ability to defeat you from a distance. It's just a matter of waiting until you've expended your stamina."

Selene took cover behind a bush, only to be forced to move again as her hiding spot was lanced with several blasts. Gritting her teeth, she muttered to herself. "I understand all that. Ain't nothing special about honor when it comes right down to it. Which is why I'm going to do this."

She opened her mouth and made use of her unique skill. It was unlikely to succeed against a powerful undead opponent, but she only needed him to be affected a little. A low tonal hum spread throughout the area, resonating strangely in the open air. The male vampire hesitated for the first time since they'd started fighting. His arms slackened and the barrel of his weapon dipped towards the ground.

"Chance!" She shouted while moving as quickly as possible, shortening the distance as much as possible before his distraction ended, readying her newly made staff as she did.

The vampire snapped his head back up with a start, muttering, "What…"

His legs tightened in preparation for jumping back, but by that point it was already too late.

"Gotcha!" Selene yelled while swinging her weapon with all of her might.

It looked like she was about to cave the irritating man's head, but his form suddenly blurred and shifted, briefly disappearing and reappearing some distance away.

"Well, well. Looks like you've got a few tricks yourself." He griped while examining the damage that was done to his rifle in the brief exchange. While Selene wasn't able to actually injure him, she had succeeded in rendering his weapon unusable.

After dropping the bent remnants of his gun, the vampire drew a knife, held it in a reverse grip and took a combat stance. "Alright, I guess I can take you on."

The aura he exuded changed, taking on a far more hostile air. Feeling his killing intent, she began to suspect that she might have made a mistake.

[Ah...I think I made him upset.]

---------------------------------------

"Curse Resistance? Are you kidding me?" Esmerelda muttered in disbelief. "I've used this ability on all kinds of people, including a High Priest of the sun goddess, and never had any issue. Also did you really just rank up a skill in the middle of battle? I thought that shit only happened in the stories. Maybe I should have paid more attention to these."

She reached into her clothes and pulled out a small packet of paper. Concerned that she might be trying to activate some kind of scroll, Mike concentrated mana in his eyes, momentarily enhancing his eyesight. With it, he was able to just barely make out the contents of the cover page.

A slightly distorted woodcut image depicted an obscenely muscular man laying on the ground, covered by several wounds and gritting his teeth as if he were in pain. Looming over him was a grinning skeleton wreathed in evil energy. The caption at the very bottom read, "This curse will stop my heart if I don't do something! My only hope is to break through to the next level!"

Feeling a strange sense of emotional detachment, his gaze slid over to the title, which was boldly emblazoned at the top of the page in large gothic letters. "The Deadly Undead Menace: The Dragonknight confronts his most dangerous enemy yet, a lich's death curse!"

"I figured you'd have some resistance." Esmerelda continued while flipping through the packet of papers. "But I've faced enemies with skills like yours before, and never has there been an instance where they could comprehensively free themselves from my ability like this. I'm starting to wonder if you might just be as amazing as these stories suggest."

"I am completely unrelated to those trashy accounts, and I recommend that you don't take them seriously." Mike shot back calmly, even though he was currently experiencing a deep depression.

"Are you sure?" She asked, seemingly surprised. "I've heard from a few reliable sources that these are pretty accurate. If one ignores the minor theatrical embellishments, that is."

Mike gritted his teeth in mild frustration before answering. "While they might be based on my activities, I can promise you that they are wildly inaccurate. Those poorly written trash fiction books in no way reflect what actually happened."

She frowned. "Hey! They may be trashy, but at least you come out looking like a hero. You don't want to know what kinds of things they've written about me. 'Blood Maiden of the Darkest Night,' what kind of disgusting title is that? Honestly, if I didn't find the whole thing a little flattering, I would have burnt the printers to the ground a long time ago. Besides, these aren't too bad, all things considered. They could be a lot worse."

"Let me tell you...no, why the hell are we arguing about crappy fanfics in the middle of a fight?"

"I was just waiting for my mana to regenerate," She replied with a smile, "which I'm assuming is the same for you. Hopefully, you can make use of some more interesting tactics in this round. I plan on going quite heavy from the start, so you best be prepared. I want to enjoy this fight before the boring people start showing up and we put an end to you."

Mike felt a chill run down his spine. "What do you mean by that?"

Her smile took on a sadistic cast as she explained, "Well, you broke the god of vampires out of his prison, did you think that the most powerful members of the world's only truly immortal race would simply let that slide. Poor boy, you've become a target for every single one of my kind, we just happened to be closest."

He swore mentally, kicking himself for not coming to that conclusion earlier. Something about the entire experience of meeting a god in the flesh had seemed so surreal that he hadn't thought through the implications. Looking at it objectively, if there was a being capable of driving an entire race insane merely by existing, it would make sense that they would do anything to try to bring him under their control.

Considering the nature of their subtle continent spanning organization, one could even argue that they were facing an existential threat. If Aberth simply steps out into the world, it could, in one fell swoop, end up destroying everything tried to build in the millennia since his imprisonment.

His mind echoed with distant laughter from the dark being residing inside, but he silenced it with a brief rush of Life Magic.

[Alright, I need to think of mitigation methods. They've been targeting me ever since Wyrport, if Brutus is anything to go by...But they haven't done anything else up to this point, have they? Judging by little miss terrible literary taste here, that wasn't because they lacked sufficiently powerful members to take me on. What could be the reason for that? A change in strategy? Factional disagreement? Was Brutus acting against his orders? No, that didn't seem like the case.]

"Phew. That's a fairly impressive burst of mental activity you just had there." Esmerelda interrupted his thoughts with an arrogant smirk on her face. "I don't know exactly what you're thinking, but I can probably guess."

Not wanting to wait on her to get to the point, he asked. "Who rules the Court of the Undying?"

"That would be the Queen."

"How would I meet her?"

The vampire's eyes sharpened, turning almost feral. Suddenly, he could feel a wash of intense hostility rising from her. It was a level of bloodlust that nearly overwhelmed his senses with its intensity.

"Livestock meeting with the Queen? You must be joking. You aren't good enough to grovel at her feet, let alone speak with her. It seems I need to teach you your place."

A dark and ominous energy began emanating from her. Mike leapt back a few meters to avoid being wrapped up in it. As he prepared himself for the second round of fighting, he had time to think, [So the Queen is treated as sacrosanct. Since she also nominally rules the Court of the Undying, she probably has a high level of authority over the rest of the vampires. If I can make a deal with her, then I might just be able to avoid the worst case scenario of being hunted by Tier 4 bloodsuckers for the rest of my life.]

"Is that what you think?" He shouted back while preparing his own mana. "Then it must really piss you off to know that you need me. Without me there is no way of finding your god. So, before figuring out which of us is stronger, maybe you should reconsider negotiation."

"I don't negotiate with insects!" She screamed before unleashing a wave of dark energy in his direction.

Suspecting that this was yet another curse, Mike immediately flew up into the air while chanting the spell for a fireball. As a low difficulty chant with little mana invested, he didn't expect it to do much to the already quasi immortal being, but he hoped that it would prove sufficiently distracting to prevent her from doing whatever she was planning.

Unfortunately, her intentions proved harder to read than he realized. The wave of dark energy followed him in a manner similar to the way her previous ability had, washing over him before he had a chance to do anything to stop it.

At first, it didn't look like the spell had done anything, but then he noticed a thin line of black smoke that seemed to stretch from his abdomen to the cloud of debris surrounding Esmerelda. He was already beginning to suspect the nature of this new spell when the vampire burst out of the dust and began charging at him through the air.

"Now there is no escape for you!" She yelled triumphantly as she rose towards him, arms outstretched.