It was getting difficult restraining myself from crying out. The vampire’s grip on my leg wasn’t easing up at all, no matter how much I kicked him, no matter how hard I tried to pull myself free.

Stupid. Stupid. This was where a weapon would have been useful, where I could have used something like a sword to chop through the bastard’s arm.

“Stop with your wasted effort,” the Thrall said. “This is what should have happened from the beginning. This is what you deserve.”

“Shut up,” I barked back.

“You’re weak. Just like every other human. Small and mortal. So easy to hurt, so simple to kill.”

The Thrall didn’t even seem to care about the stake through his chest. There was something off about it that disquieted me. His wound was smoking, though not as much as when Hamsik had blown his entire hand off. Had I missed his heart somehow? Could he shift his heart’s exact location within his body?

It wasn’t impossible. I had seen the guy move impossibly already. His leg and his spine had both refused natural human limits and just done what they had wanted. Why wouldn’t he be able to do the same to anything inside his body?

“Why do you have a vendetta against people?” I asked. “Against human beings?”

I was still trying to pull my foot away, but it was as much to get free as it was to counteract the Thrall. He was trying to drag my body in closer. And he was succeeding. My Vitality might have risen thanks to the Sacrifice, but my Power was still lower than his.

Pretty sure I had nothing to Sacrifice to raise that Attribute.

“Why shouldn’t I hate your very guts?” the Thrall asked.

I stared at him. “You were human too, once. You’re a Thrall now. You—”

“Don’t call us that.” His grip on my foot turned even more crushing. “Don’t you dare condescend to us, you maggot. This is why we will kill all of you. Because you don’t know the first thing about what it takes to walk the Woven Way. Your puny minds can’t imagine anything more than what your little human brain can comprehend.”

“And what the hell is it that you’re aiming for?”

“Immortality. Unlike you frail bags of flesh, we will never die. Unlike you who are bound to all your mortal needs, we will never be constrained and limited.” The more he talked, the surer he sounded. No, not just certain. He was zealous. A true believer in this… Woven Way. “We have the freedom to go beyond what we are. We have the power to claim all that we seek.”

“You think that makes it worth killing everyone indiscriminately? You think just because you’re superior, we all deserve to die for your whims? Not a chance!”

The Thrall just laughed yet again. “You fool, you’re already being killed. You just don’t know it.”

We were in a weird deadlock. I couldn’t free my foot, no matter how hard I tried. The mana exhaustion wasn’t helping either. But the longer we were stuck in this impasse, the more I could feel magical energy slowly trickling back in.

I just needed a bit more time.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

It had to help that I was showing genuine interest in what this bastard had to say, right?

“Haven’t you seen how they treat you?” the Thrall asked, rasping and fervorous. “Every time you get out of this shithole of Ring Four, don’t you see how they look at you? Don’t you feel how they feel about the fact that you’re nothing more than a measly, worthless, powerless human?”

He… wasn’t wrong. It almost made me stop pulling my leg against his continuous dragging motion. I had felt it. The way those guards had been treating people during rush hour. The way the other mages had eyed me when I had first entered the Mage Guild. The way almost every single human had been stuffed into Ring Four.

I had seen it every single day I had been in Zairgon. Human beings were at the lowest rung of whatever weird social order had taken root in this city. It was evident everywhere.

“That’s how you’re already being killed,” the Thrall continued, clearly delighted at being irrevocably right. “You’re being sequestered, limited, killed ever so slowly, generation upon generation, by design. Give it a century, and humans will be rarer in Zairgon than Elementals.”

“And that makes your actions right?”

“It makes it necessary.” He raised his voice, suddenly infuriated. “Because you and your kind, you’ll never fight back. You’ll never claim what you should have had all along. You’re weak and you’ll stay weak. Because not a one of you have any ambition. You’re not people, you’re cave-sheep waiting to be culled. And if you must be culled, then why not feed your betters while you’re at it? Why not help those who are actually going to make a difference?”

I breathed in and out, letting my heart and body settle. In some twisted, malformed way, the Thrall made sense. I didn’t know the full context of everything he was saying, and I was sure there were bigger pieces about the whole Thrall business that I was still missing.

But shit, I understood him.

I got why he and others like him would determine that any path to power was better than none. I got why becoming an unkillable vampire was so much better than continuing to rot away in Ring Four.

It was… starting to feel so obvious why there were so many Scarthralls now.

“That doesn’t make it right,” I said. I stared back, looked straight into those crimson eyes of his. “That doesn’t give you the right to kill and murder indiscriminately, to hurt others who are innocent, to tear away daughters from mothers, to destroy what little communities that Ring Four somehow managed to create. You’ve got no right to destroy it all.”

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“Right?” The Thrall laughed again. “That’s another thing you puny humans will never get. Rights and laws are suggestions. Limits to keep the weak safe from the strong. Because the strong will take what they deserve. There is no law higher than that, no right that supersedes it.”

I held back my frustrated growl. It wasn’t just at the stupid reasoning the vampire had given me. I still hadn’t recovered enough mana. What could I do? What did I—?

There. I grabbed a nearby wooden splinter. It was way too small to do anything to the Thrall, but it was more than jagged enough for my slash to split my skin and flesh with a harsh sting, blood spilling all over my arm. The Thrall’s eyes widened.

“You can take your might makes right,” I said. “And shove it down your throat!”

With the little mana channelling capacity that I had recovered, I Sacrificed my blood.

[ Sacrifice

You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Iron-ranked Parts of Yourself. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward

: Your blood is now infused with a [Minor] dose of mana for 1 hour ]

I laughed, a sudden euphoria arriving at the same time as the mana spreading out from my blood vessels. Threads of magic grew within me, returning enough mana for me to start using Infusion again. The Thrall’s eyes widened as he found it increasingly difficult to pull my weighted body closer.

More threads swirled within me, gathering more and more weight and power, pressing me down towards the ground. The bastard growled as he tried to haul me closer. I had almost lost all feeling in my legs, and I was pretty sure it would need serious healing even if it hadn’t been crushed yet thanks to the raised Vitality, but I was on the path to freedom.

More and more weight settled in me, more heaviness reprising itself. I couldn’t have moved myself even if I had wanted to. It was too much. The Thrall was grunting with exertion as he failed to pull me closer.

And then I let it all go.

I reversed it all. Instead of Infusion, I switched to Siphon in an instant. The severity of gravitational forces was cut to smithereens as I turned nearly weightless, my stomach churning in response. Then the jerking tug of the vampire yanked me towards him.

It was a gamble. Hypocritical, considering how I hated playing with chances. And it was a terrible one too.

I slammed into the stake and made it rip and twist through the vampire’s body. He shrieked out in agony. I could only hope I had finally struck his heart, but I couldn’t worry about it since my main goal was using surprise to free myself.

It worked to an extent. My leg was finally free from the vampire’s crushing grip. The pain was still there, still making me want to scream, but my limb wasn’t being pulped any longer.

I had been pulled into the Scarthrall too. The crash into the stake had also dislodged it, as I found to my dismay in the next instant. I had also freed the Scarthrall.

Who was on me the next instant.

I couldn’t curse. I could hardly squirm, much less move. His whole weight was on me, way worse than it had been when he had tried crushing my leg. Now, my chest and stomach were being flattened, his fangs open and drooling over me, inches away from ripping my face to shreds.

It was all I could do to hold his head back with my arms. His own good limb had pressed down on my neck, cutting off my airflow as he began choking the life out of me.

“You fool,” he crowed. He shrieked as the stake shifted again as we wrestled against each other. Vampiric spit daubed my face and neck and chest, burning wherever it touched. “You utter moron. I’m going to enjoy tearing you apart, piece by bloody pie—argh.”

Another scream as my struggling made the stake shift to the right even more.

I couldn’t reply. Could hardly even breathe. My lungs were screaming, my whole body trying to revolt. Black spots clouded my vision.

For just an instant, I wondered if this was it. If a drooling vampire was going to—

No. I had come back to life and I was not squandering the opportunity. I had survived a fucking ritual sacrifice, and I was not about to die to this stupid, fucking, piece of absolute shit.

So I found his heart and squeezed.

While one hand prevented the Thrall’s gnashing fangs from making bloody mincemeat of my face, my other arm had slipped past his neck. Something strange had caught my eye, even as blackness threatened to engulf all that I could see. Something that drove me to desperation, to the only thing I could rely on since Gravity wasn’t going to affect another living being.

My hand dug into the gory wound through his back, right at the point where the stake was spearing out. He shrieked again, suddenly panicking, and the pressure on my neck eased just enough to drag in a single squeak of air.

Enough to empower my strength to find what I had been seeking all along. He had been shrieking all this time because the stake’s motion was striking his heart while we struggled. So I stuffed my hand into the wound I myself had delivered, clutched the pulsing organ, and ripped it out of his back.

The vampire’s screech nearly deafened me.

“You, pus-breathing—” His words collapsed into a vomit of dark blood spilling all over me. “You. Will. Die!”

Just taking out his heart wasn’t doing the trick. I had no idea what part of the old myths’ conditions I hadn’t fulfilled. Was it because I had pulled the heart out with my own hands, not necessarily driven through it with a stake, that this bastard wasn’t dying?

I could hardly think.

But I had enough presence of mind to use Sacrifice.

“No,” I gasped. “I’m not dying… to you.”

The flash of energy behind us, the white threads running up my arm and burning away the vampiric heart with a furious power, glowed like a sun behind the Thrall’s back.

With my vision still fading, I barely managed to read the blue screen popping up in front of my face.

[ Sacrifice

You have Sacrificed 1 [Moderate] Heart of a Scarthrall. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward: Inherent Racial Potency of a Scarthrall now suffuses your body for 1 hour. All Attributes raised by 10 Ranks for 1 hour. ]

[ Affix Unlocked!

You have acquired a new Affix for your Sacrifice Aspect.

Affix: Emulation ]

The pressure lessened. I could hardly believe it. Sacrifice had worked.

“What… is…?”

The Scarthrall couldn’t even ask a proper question. Instead of coherent words, all that spilled from his mouth was more frothing dark blood.

I could hardly pay attention to him. Sacrifice hadn’t risen another rank despite the new Affix, but I could hardly care. The reward was burning through my body. Newfound strength empowered me, and I started pushing my opponent back.

But with it came more alarming changes.

My teeth were growing longer, sharpening to fangs. The smell of all the blood changed from metallic and disgusting to something almost horrifically alluring. Colours seemed to shift ever so little, the contrast of everything in the world turning sharper. When I spoke, my voice as a lot deeper, a lot more growly than normal.

“I’ve got claws now too,” I said, choking out the words as I could breathe again. “Asshole.”

Said claws were now digging into the Scarthrall’s face, puncturing into his skin to pour out more blood. He was screaming, but even that was a bloody gurgle. A distant part of me was surprised none of that blood had dripped into my eyes.

And the rest of me was focused entirely on killing this monster once and for all.