*That looks really bad!* With a quick but silent sideways turn, Avan maneuvered himself with his back pressed against the wall of the house and looked through the window sills again.

Patris seemed unconscious, while the viscous red lifeblood slowly flowed out of his veins at the throat and, thanks to gravity, landed in the glass containers.

*Like an animal being bled at the butcher's... And it was because of looks like that that I became a vegetarian!* Avan's goose bumps ran down his spine as he imagined how he would feel so helpless in Patris' place.

He could see his teammate's life leaving him drop by drop, and Avan thought feverishly about what he could do. *Think, think Avan! What can I do? Two suspected vampires, and my sphere of influence is too small. Can I lure them out? Distract and kill them? Argh...!*

Before he couldn't come to an agreement, Avan went with the first idea that came to his mind.

He crept away from the window and to the side of the house, where he could definitely feel and see one of the two vampires in his sphere of influence. With a wave of two of his fingers, two midnight black spheres were conjured from under one of the torture tables with tools on it, just out of sight of both bloodsuckers. Another brief mental command, and the two spheres merged together, growing thinner and longer until the barely discernible black wire rope hovered beneath the table like a small ball of wool. Exactly the same tactic Avan had used on Xavier's descendant was now within immediate reach of the two whispering vampires, just waiting for the command to strike.

*Okay, that's done. Next...* And with that, a bronze coin plopped out on the table, right out of Avan's inventory, only to fall to the floor a second later with a metallic clear sound.

Both vampires turned jerkily and inhumanly fast to the bronze coin's point of impact and bared their teeth, while a kind of guttural hiss sounded from their mouths. *Visibly heightened hearing, check.* Avan made a mental note as he looked at the reaction and twitching ears of the creature that was in his sphere of influence.

The vampire farther away and out of Avan's range hissed something unintelligible in that guttural language to the closer vampire, who gave a short hissing reply as he looked around the room and slowly approached the bronze coin on the floor. *Oh damn it, come on you fucking bloodsucker!* Avan cursed, as the distraction was meant to lure both vampires into his sphere of influence and then kill them with the almost invisible celestial ropes under the table. The front vampire stepped closer, sniffed, twitched his ears, and then carefully bent down to pick up the bronze coin.

He looked at the coin and turned it between his left hand while his black fingernails of the other hand poked at the metal piece and made a clear sound.

With a hiss that sounded an awful lot like a laugh, the bloodsucker turned away from Avan's position and showed the coin between his fingers to his colleague, who stomped over, frowning and angry at the laughter.

Just as the second vampire finally stepped within reach, the ball of mana unraveled from under the table and slithered unseen along the floor and into the shadows at the back of the two.

Another kind of hissing, gurgling, and wet splatter landed all around the inside of the hut in a certain radius, and sliced remains of two vampires fell on the wooden floorboards of the house.

*God damn it, that actually had something...* With a barely suppressed malicious grin on his lips, Avan crept up to the front door, took one last look around, and then opened the door a crack to slip inside.

The squeak of the door closing behind Avan was all that could be heard inside the hut, along with the shallow breathing of Patris and the quiet drips in the glass containers.

A few steps deeper into the room, while the wooden floorboards made telltale noises.

"Patris?" Came a whisper from Avan when he was finally within reach of his team mate. But there was no response to the call of the name.

*Fucking hell.* Came the next realization, just as his sphere of influence covered the entire wooden scaffold and he perceived the deadly void of blood from the man in front of him.

A few more quick steps and a reach around to the right, two turns on a crank hidden from the front, and the whole wooden scaffold turned Patris 180 degrees upright over. Avan quickly pulled the two tubes out of his friend's throat, which were equipped with metal needles at the front, with a wet smacking sound, and golden-silver mana flowed from a two meter surrounding area in a hazy mist to the wounds and closed them in a fraction of a second.

"Patris! Wake the fuck up! Dani is going to kill me, and you right along with it, if we let you die here now!" Avan whispered urgently to the unconscious man in front of him, while mana mist continued to penetrate his pores, trying to counteract the anemia.

A clap echoed through the hut, and Avan instinctively flinched at the overly loud sound in the silence, while a second and a third followed immediately. Red handprints appeared on Patris' cheeks, and Avan was about to strike a fourth blow to his left side when his opponent's eyelids began to twitch.

"Fuck my life... Wake up, you sleepyhead! Your prince is here! But I'm certainly not kissing you awake.... Dani can do that if she wants to." A confused and visibly delirious Patris opened his eyes and stared at him blinking, eyes totally unfocused.

A few seconds and blinks later, and a shake of the head followed as the cloudy eyes slowly cleared and the pupils sharpened. "What - the - bloody - hell...?" Came a groan from the young man's throat as he saw Avan standing in front of him, grinning mischievously, standing in a room full of red blood splatters and a few pieces of flesh still hanging on the walls.

"Well? Slept in, princess?" Avan chuckled in response, grinning even more at Patris. "Now let's get out of these blankets! You've got to get out of here fast, and I've got cleaning to do!"

Patris just had a huge question mark on his face, looking at his facial expression, and didn't even understand how he had gotten here. Just as a panicked expression flitted across his face, Avan beat him to it again. "Yes, yes. Dani and Jen are both still in the cage, but otherwise they're fine! But not YOU! So get off your ass." And suddenly the leather buckles on both arms and legs loosened as the mana mist ate its way through at Avan's mental command, and an exhausted and weak warrior toppled forward into Avan's arms.

Without waiting any longer, he hoisted the young warrior, still trembling from blood loss, into a princess carry and quickly brought him forward to the door to set him down on the floor in the only clean corner of the interior, leaning against the wall.

"Be right back. Don't run!" Came another macabre quip from Avan, at which even he grimaced momentarily at all the cringe. But it was liberating to laugh at the situation, especially now that it was defused and stress was off Avan's shoulders. Patris was, according to his own diagnosis and the mana mist that had healed him so far, over the hill and no longer in immediate danger of death, so Avan could now take care of eliminating the traces of the two ex-vampires.

He summoned the maximum number of his summonable forms and dispersed them all into the paper-thin mist that he could maintain in his concentration. The room filled with a shiny golden-silver haze, as if looking into a night sky that instead of being black was completely silver and dotted with millions of golden twinkling stars.

The haze spread out and had only one command; to eliminate any remains of the vampire remains and if possible to decompose them into the smallest atoms.

At first, Avan himself did not know if it worked as he imagined, when the haze settled on all the blood and remains of the former bloodsuckers and condensed there into silver-gold. But when the first of these silver heaps floated back up and flew to the next bloodstain, it didn't leave even the slightest bit of red, let alone remnants of clothing or anything else that would indicate the vampires.

A relieved sigh escaped Avan's throat, and he walked leisurely and slowly through the room, always making sure that his two meters of influence covered other vampire remains and could be reached by his mana mist. Little by little, more of the torn vampires disappeared, until after a few minutes there was not even a smell of blood or death in the air. Even the blood in the two glass containers had completely disappeared!

Thrilled and yet somewhat awestruck as all the unspoken possibilities flashed through his mind at the sight, Avan stood staring at the completely cleaned interior for a single heartbeat.

Shaking his head, he turned around and had to laugh softly again when he saw Patris lightly snoring on the floor next to the door, drool dripping from the corner of his mouth onto his undershirt, and making soft guttural noises as he slept.

"Good night, princess..." Avan laughed inwardly and lifted the exhausted warrior back up in his arms as he carefully slipped through the door with him, walking in the shadows of the other buildings to the back right near the outer wall. Between two houses and behind a water barrel, for whatever they had placed a water barrel here, he let Patris slide to the ground and hid him behind it so that he was not seen from the front.

With the first task and the liberation of his team mate successfully, it went on on quiet steps to the second house further in front near the wall, directly to the right of the house in which Avan had previously taken Patris out.

Inside was the second missing man of the group, or rather the guard of Jen, who was also hanging upside down from exactly the same construction as Patris before.

Something tightened Avan's insides dangerously as he peered through the front windowsills, for Linob's blood was dripping dangerously slowly and only very sluggishly through the two hoses, almost as if the body hanging there were already almost completely drained of blood.