The vampyr stood slightly elevated from his thralls as they worked to carve the sigils given to him by the Powerful One. The leader of the vampyr had given him a task, and he would see it through if only to gain from it and grow strong enough to overthrow the Powerful One. His thralls continued to carve the sigils properly as he watched, and the vampyr went back to trying to think of a new name. His goal was the pursuit of true power, and his most recent name had been discarded in that pursuit. Each name that vanished from his mind took with it more of his past, more of his failures, and left only strength. He felt that every day, his distant memories of when he’d been less than he was now faded away, and he was glad. The old him had wanted things like understanding, friendship, and safety. The old him was a fool. Those were all lies that could only fall before the truth of power. Power was everything, and someday, he would be the most powerful being the world had ever seen. He would overthrow the Powerful one and become… become…?

He snarled as one of his thralls collapsed, the magic powering it finally running out. There was always a flaw in one of them. The magic he imparted into each body he gathered, a mixture of his old necromancy and the blood magics he’d gained when he’d been transformed into his new self, usually lasted for multiple days before needing refreshing, but every once in a while one of the thralls randomly collapsed as they ran out of magic. His remaining thralls temporarily stopped carving to drag a few more bodies over, which he raised as replacements, and then the creation of the ritual circles resumed.

The building anticipation inside of him, as he waited for the ritual to complete, had him twitching, wanting nothing more than to find someone to show his power to, a witness to reveal how he had become so much more than the weakling he’d been before he’d been shown true power and evolved into something greater! He wished he could have that foolish woman that simpered at the Powerful One’s feet in attendance to his ascension to even greater heights, but she was somewhere else doing other work at the bidding of the Powerful One and couldn’t be here. The vampyr sneered at the thought of her. She gave herself and others foolish titles that somehow sorted them into categories, always referring to him as some kind of “arrogant being” or something. Her entire system of sorting was moronic, there were only the strong and the weak, and he was strong. She was strong in body and magic but weak in mind because she worshiped the Powerful One instead of seeing what he truly was, a target! A goal to reach and eventually overcome! Soon, he would reach those heights! Getting stronger was all there was, all there ever could be! He was better than her in so many ways; even his creation of the ritual circle was better than hers, for she’d spoken of it taking multiple days to complete, and here he was almost done in just a few hours!

The light of the sun glinting through the trees distracted him, and he frowned as he blocked the rays from his eyes with a hand. The sun’s position was strange; he’d already seen it pass through that section of trees there, and last he’d looked, it had been sitting on that large rock, but that didn’t make any sense. The sun moved across the sky in the other direction, so the only way it could be there was if at least a day had passed, but that wasn’t possible; it had only been a few hours. The sun looked quite nice, though. It wasn’t exactly the same, but the light dancing through the leaves that swayed gently in the light wind reminded him of home before everything had happened. Before the monsters had come… Before…?

He snarled again as another of his thralls collapsed, but he didn’t have any more bodies to use. It didn’t matter, though; the circle was almost complete at that point. He ended up jumping down from his perch and helping to carve the last few sigils himself. When the last one was complete, and the circle was closed, he grinned ferociously. There could be only one goal of an undertaking such as this. Power! The Powerful One was powerful because he strove ever onward for more and more power! The vampyr would steal the secrets of this ritual and grow stronger himself; it was why he followed the whims of the Powerful One to steal his secrets!

As the circles and sigils began to glow with magic, he stared hungrily at them, never taking his eyes off of them so there was no chance of losing even the tiniest piece of a secret on his path to power. However, the more he stared at the glowing ritual, the stranger his thoughts became. Why… why was it so important he be strong? Why was he out here, performing some ritual for some other vampyr? He didn’t even like the man, who was constantly raving about how magnificent he was. How did anything he said or did equate to growing more powerful? The longer he watched the ritual, the more questions he had. What was going on? Why did he have these undead monstrosities with him? He’d sworn an oath to never create such abominations, to only work with bones and never those of a thinking being. What was happening? How had he gotten here?

What… what… what was his name?

With a surge of energy and a flare of light, the ritual completed. The slow draw of eldritch energy out of the vampyr that served as the power source jumped in intensity, yanking out the last of the eldritch power from his body in a matter of seconds. The vampyr’s body crumbled like burnt paper as the vampire virus, mutated beyond recognition, consumed his flesh. The delicate balance between eldritch energy and corrupted virus tilted too far in one direction, and the damaged body sustained at the razor's edge of the two destructive states of being breathed its last breath.

The ritual circles grew brighter and brighter as the last drops of eldritch power that the vampire had contained brought the ritual to full power. If anyone nearby had been nearby and had possessed the senses necessary to describe what happened, they would have compared it to the sound of a massive wall cracking as something powerful on the other side started pushing its way through.

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“I wonder,” Kay shouted from above as he chased Glowl across the battlefield, “How is your Class reacting to this?” He waved his hand, and a wall rose from the pool of blood that floated beneath him, blocking the flying gold fist Glowl sent flying his way before crushing it underneath the weight of the wall. Stealing from his enemy, Kay created a giant hand from the pool and set it down at Glowl like he was smacking a bug.

The king of Nelam managed to create a shelter above him that gave him just enough time to roll out of the way before he got squished.

“I already know about the perception aspect of your Class; the more powerful and domineering others see you as, the stronger you get. Is this making you weaker? Your surviving soldiers are watching you get smacked around by someone so much younger and less experienced than you. Is that sapping away your strength? Am I making you weaker the longer this battle goes on? Because if I am, it isn’t going to last much longer.” Kay hoped that was the case and was actively trying to make it go faster by taunting him loudly enough so as many people could hear it as possible.

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Glowl screamed in rage. He threw his arms toward the sky, and two spiked golden pillars erupted from underneath Kay. They aimed to slam into him, pushing right through the pool he had swirling beneath his feet. Kay rocketed upward, using his armor as a focus for his Blood Manipulation to pull himself into the sky faster than the pillars could rise. They soon reached their maximum height, and Kay was still in the air above them, completely untouched. With a smirk that Glowl couldn’t see, but Kay hoped he conveyed with his body language, Kay wrapped the pillars in countless tendrils and shattered them into pieces. A handful of those pieces stopped falling in mid-air and launched themselves at him, but they were so much weaker than Glowl’s previous attacks that Kay barely acknowledged the chunks bouncing off his defenses.

“Is that all you have left?” Kay floated down, hovering over Glowl imperiously. “Has your army lost all respect from you, and you’ve lost all your power, or have your ineffective displays finally sapped all your mana? Oh, is it both? Are you at the end of your rope with nothing left to give?” There was absolutely no way that was possible, at least in the first part. Tier five Classes were combinations of multiple tier four Classes. There was no way he had made a Class that was completely reliant on his perception-based power boosts, but hopefully, he’d drained away all of that boost.

Another gold fist shot out from Glowl, followed by his weapon changing from a great axe to a spear and Glowl throwing it at Kay. Kay backhanded the fist away and caught the spear. He dropped it derisively into the swirling pool and let it spin around and around.

“And there go your last dregs. Anything to say before you go?”

Glowl just snarled at him hoarsely.

“Very well. Goodbye, King Glowl of Nelam.” Kay raised one hand above his head and formed a massive swirling ball of blood above it, looking like multiple whirlpools trapped in a sphere, all fighting for dominance.

Glowl’s eyes snapped to the side, wide open in confusion and not a small amount of fear. Kay knew that trick and knew better than to fall for it, but something had his body turning anyway. A rush of heat boiled through his veins as his heart began to pump faster and faster. Something was coming, something wrong. It was similar to his exposures to eldritch energy, but this was different. It still felt corrupted and nasty, but it was as if the rot was tainted with a decaying orange instead of a decaying banana; there was a tangible difference in the sensations. His fangs dropped into his mouth as his head snapped around to see what was generating that disgusting feeling.

The sky was wrong. Something was wrong with the sky because the sky wasn’t supposed to have cracks in it. And somehow, the cracks in the sky were sideways through the sky, which was unnatural and unnerving. Silently, the cracks expanded. No matter which way Kay turned his head, they remained sideways to him even as they grew large enough to cover all of Avalon. Just as silently, the cracks exploded inward, inward but sideways as they imploded away from everything, and something came out of the hole that was left.

It was a scaled elephantine leg that descended from the hole, landing on top of a hill near the entrance to the valley. The hill where it landed warped and twisted at the let’s foot came down, and then something happened. It wasn’t anything Kay could explain, but as the foot landed down, the area where it touched down just stopped being, and for the briefest moment, it felt like that spot never had been. The wrongness radiating from the single leg was different from the eldritch taint Kay had felt before; it was less personal and more abstract, but he could feel the taint of it through every piece of him as he instinctively hissed at the interloper breaking into a world it didn’t belong in.

A sudden glowing light reminded Kay of the ongoing battle, and he turned back to find Glowl glowing with golden light. Expecting an attack, Kay swung the swirling mass of blood in front of him as a shield. The light grew bright enough to blind, then flashed once, vanishing in a single moment. Kay peeked over his impromptu shield and saw a large pile of coins and gold bars scattered on the ground where Glowl had been. He stared at me in confusion for a moment before he realized what had happened. “Dammit, he had an escaped Skill? That fucker literally paid his way out of danger with gold.”

The sound of something massive moving through the air echoed across the field, and Kay once more dragged his attention away from Glowl to focus on the leg. It stretched out, stepping closer to Avalon as it traveled. The hole never moved from its position in the sky, but somehow, the leg took multiple steps closer without ever changing in size. And all of it was sideways as if Kay was staring at a picture that always faced you, but it was a single gargantuan leg that was moving closer. Kay hated the leg with everything in his body, and he couldn’t figure out where that feeling was coming from. Another distraction from the rapidly changing situation appeared in the form of a System message.

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New Racial Characteristics Discovered!

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As a new and technically unnatural sapient species to Torotia, any newly discovered information regarding your new race will be added to your Status and to the Status of any other members of your new race as new information is discovered. This information will remain in the Status of all members of your race for ten biological generations or until that information reaches a level of acknowledgeable by the sapient beings of Torotia that the System determines counts as “general knowledge”.

New Characteristics:

Eldritch Antithesis: The System played an integral part in the existence of your species in this world and the possibility for the first vampire to even exist. Long ago, a vampire Outworlder landed in this realm and brought with them a taint from another realm. The taint came from a reality that stands opposed to the nature of this reality, and as they come into contact, they war to see which reality will overwrite the other. That is what eldritch is, an outside existence that threatens this one. The System has taken its due in assisting the vampire species to exist on Torotia and has made changes. All Torotian vampires can instinctively sense eldritch taint and will be instinctively drawn to seek it out and destroy the source of it. The existence of all Torotian vampires is deeply rooted in this reality, making them the perfect defenders of it. All Torotian vampires are heavily resistant to eldritch corruption and will have any Classes or Skills dedicated to wiping out eldritch taint heavily empowered.

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“Okay,” Kay said after speed-reading the prompt, “I get it, kind of, but fuck you, System. This is some Machiavellian bullshit.”

Kenneth Davis. The barrier between realities has been greatly weakened across a massive area. All eldritch incursions must be removed to allow for repairs to the barrier between realities. Other incursions will be handled; you must end the local eldritch incursion. Drive off or destroy the local incursion so the System can repair the barrier between worlds.

“Yeah, fuck you big time.”