The deserters that were attacking the city of London were shocked by what they saw. The great walls that should have been destroyed when the vampires attacked had been fully repaired and, in fact, had even been improved. This confusion about how to proceed left the deserter army scrambling to decide on a method of attack, but the ‘puppet masters’ of this insurgent army were unconcerned with the fact that their pawns now needed to assemble the ‘gifts’ that had been given to them. The reason so many former soldiers and civilians had taken up arms against the rather benign governance of House Dracones was simple; the nobles that had fled the city in the day prior to House Dracones’ occupation of London had returned, and they wanted their homes, positions and power back.

It did not bother them when they fled, as they expected the ‘savage and evil vampires’ to simply loot and slaughter everything and everyone and then leave, but instead of being able to return to looted manors and mansions they now had been forced to wait for several weeks as the occupation continued. By the middle of the second week they had had enough and began to gather those who refused to submit to the new undead overlords who now ruled the county with a rather soft fist.

It was now the beginning of the fourth week and the forces gathered by them would have been enough to deal with a small army of undead, but they were not dealing with a group of normal undead. They were dealing with the battle maniacs of House Dracones, the most martial of the Five Great Houses, and they were most certainly not prepared for the fight they were about to get.

The deserters did not use true formations; thus, they could be considered more like a horde of undead rather than a full army of the living. The undisciplined commoners and the partially disciplined ex-soldiers were all massed together, and therefore the use of standard military tactics was impossible. The nobles could only just throw the mass of bodies at the city and hope for the best.

As the siege ladders were hastily constructed, the sound of something could be heard from beyond the walls and inside the city, and it was growing louder and closer. It sounded an awful lot like a kind of insult, but the loudness and drawn out nature of the sound made it impossible for the humans to truly understand until it was finished. The sound could even be heard by the nobles at the back of the brigand army.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkkkkkkk!”

The mass of living bodies paused and one noble in particular asked, “What the bloody hell is that?”

“Yoooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!”

And then, from behind the wall came the sounds of small explosions as the ‘Blood Dragons’ of House Dracones kicked off the ground and leapt clean over the ramparts. As the younger and least powerful of the House landed in front of the advancing force of brigands, the older and more powerful ones fell right into the center of the noble-controlled forces. Valka, on the other hand, was still in the air.

Using her vampiric power, she kept rising higher and higher, until the people below were the size of roaches. Smiling as she sighted the camp where the leaders of the insurrection were watching the fight unfold, she rocketed down to the wooden palisade that surrounded the hastily made headquarters.

With a thunderous sonic boom, she slammed into the ground with the force of an artillery shell, carving a massive crater into the earth. Rising to her feet, she rushed past the scattered guards, killing each of them with a clean decapitation. Rather than use the only entrance into the wooden fort that existed, she decided to make her own and smashed through the side of the palisade and into the midst of the nobles. With a sneer and a look of contempt, she let her massive battle-axe rest on her right shoulder. Her eyes swept over the startled elite and then slammed her axe down onto the ground, carving out a small rut in the hardened earth.

“There was a wall here. Now there isn’t. Who wants to be a wall?”

Three sentences were all the courtesy that she would give the dishonorable bastards who refused to yield to their victorious and honorable conquerors. In her mind it was three sentences too much, but the Code dictated that foes must be given the opportunity to surrender, and the words she had just spoken would be enough to cover all the bases. Now she just had to wait for the rebels to give a response.

And they did.

“Guards! The parasites are here! Attack, no, defend us!”

Valka secretly cheered in delight as her demands for surrender were refused. She once again lifted her massive double-headed axe and pulled a second one out of her Item Box. As the bodyguards rushed in. The relatively well-armed soldiers formed a semi-circle around Valka who tapped her foot as she began to take a deep breath.

“Well, I DID give them the option to give up. They didn’t take it, so now they have to die.”, Valka thought to herself as she waited for her foes to ready themselves. When she deemed them to have prepared for her onslaught, she closed her eyes and gulped in even more air before emitting a thunderous shout.

“RRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!”

The force of the air pressure and loudness of her shout caused the entire roomful of mortals to flinch (and some had heart attacks) which was what Valka was hoping for. She began to swing her twin axes around like a woman possessed and with a few swift and rather unwieldy strikes, the (relatively) heavily armed and armored elite bodyguard unit was torn apart into shreds of metal, cloth and meat. The smell of blood began to fill Valka’s nostrils and her breathing became heavier as she slowly lost herself to the Red Rage. Laughter started to come from the vampiric amazoness, which quickly devolved into something maniacal as she let the Berserker Fury overwhelm her.

She vanished for a moment, only to reappear behind one unfortunate nobleman who soon had both of Valka’s axes buried deep into his body. Reaching back into her Item Box, she pulled out a great-sword and screamed at the top of her lungs towards the frightened group of mortals.

“AH’M GONNA DRIVE THIS BABY SO FAR UP YER ASS YE’LL CRY LIKE A CONSORT OF CARMILLA ‘FORE IT COMES OUT YER MOUTH AND YE DIE OF BLOOD LOSS! GET READY, YE PANSY-ASS, SHIT-EATING, COUSIN-FUCKING, MILK-DRINKING FUCKWITS! HERE AH COME!”

And with that, the slaughter began.

...

As Valka tore apart the main encampment, her kin were busy slaughtering the fools who had thought to besiege the city they were occupying. The men and women that made up House Dracones became a crimson blur of blades, fangs and claws, their red-painted armor becoming dyed in the blood and gore of the battlefield. Axes, maces and swords were swung with what seemed to be wild abandon but was a martial art that had been made by Valka herself. A mix of overwhelming force, pure savagery and precision strikes made up the style known as “Todesdrache’s Talons” and the devastating effect it had when its user was surrounded by weaker foes was enormous.

With each second that passed, the numbers of those who decided to stick around to face the tempest of steel and blood were fewer and fewer and the numbers of those that abandoned all hope of facing the undead apocalypse were more and more numerous. Soon, the only ones left outside the city walls were the gore-covered forms of the ‘Blood Dragons’ of House Dracones.

As per their traditions and code, they could not enter the city until their Red Rage had been overcome, and thus they used what little spell-casting power they possessed to gather the fallen blood of their foes into a series of undulating blobs of crimson liquid.The eldest members of the House fetched large oaken barrels from their limited Item Boxes and forced the blobs of red fluid into them. These would be handed off to Valka once she herself had exited her Berserker Fury and would become the basis for the only drink in existence that could put a vampire under the table. As the limited sanity of the vampires began to fade, they all simultaneously entered a state of hibernation, the only way to avoid hurting the innocent in their frenzied state.

As the vampires stood in silence, a single young boy rushed to the walls, hoping beyond hope that the woman he loved was alright. Needless to say, he had nothing to worry about, as Valka was just sleeping off her fury. It was a good thing that the young man was stopped before he could go out onto the field, or else Valka’s new boy-toy would have been torn to shreds.

This young boy was a traitor to his race, but he couldn’t care less about that. Love was in the air, and it was a love of crimson red.