“It seems you recognize it.”
Elias turned his muzzle slightly, keeping the owl-head pattern on the grip within the woman's line of sight, though he didn't lower the gun from her chest.
Her half-step backward just now had been incredibly swift.
It didn't look like she had simply recognized a pattern; rather, it seemed she knew exactly what lay behind this gun.
The woman didn't answer.
She recognized the owl, but she clearly had no intention of giving Elias the answer for free.
The fleeting alarm in her crimson eyes quickly receded, replaced by a much more direct possessiveness.
This only made Elias more certain that the origins of this gun were likely far more troublesome than he had imagined.
Her gaze flicked back and forth between Elias and the elemental revolver. Suddenly, she reached out, snatched the reddish-brown notebook off the table, and tucked it beneath her black cloak.
Immediately afterward, the darkness covering her body rapidly expanded outward.
Her black dress billowed even though there was no wind.
Two sharp fangs slowly slid from her lips, and her once neatly trimmed fingernails lengthened inch by inch, gleaming with a dark-red sheen.
Her slender body seemed to have cast off some sort of restraint.
Her bones emitted a series of rapid, subtle pops. New flesh quickly grew over the shoulder that had been grazed by the radiance bullet, and the silver-burned scars on the back of her hand healed within a few breaths.
Any trace of her earlier hesitation completely vanished.
“Leave the gun behind,” the woman said, her tone growing firm once more. “And I might let you leave here alive.”
“Holy crap,” Elias muttered, nearly taken aback by her sheer audacity. “You didn't put up a single copper of capital, yet you're demanding two pieces of merchandise right off the bat? You Kindred are certainly overbearing.”
The woman glared at him coldly. “I am not negotiating with you.”
“What a coincidence.” Elias pressed his thumb against the cylinder, the smile fading from his face. “I wasn't planning on asking for your opinion either.”
A dense fluttering of wings suddenly echoed from the ceiling of the basement.
At first, it was just a few beats, but the sound quickly merged into a continuous, deafening din.
A massive swarm of bats poured out from where the wooden beams met the darkness, swooping toward Elias in a thick, black cloud.
Their damp, leathery wings beat the air, kicking up a cold draft laden with dust and a metallic stench.
The leading bats didn't even try to avoid his muzzle, acting as if they didn't care in the slightest about being blasted to pieces on the spot.
They slammed into his 【Moonlight Barrier】 one after another.
The cool, translucent barrier rippled like water under the impact. The bats were bounced away only to immediately wheel back around.
Their shrill squeaks, combined with the frantic beating of their wings, completely blocked his line of sight in the blink of an eye.
Elias's wrist, which held the gun, could clearly feel his spirituality being shaved away bit by bit.
However, he didn't relax just because the barrier remained intact.
These bats weren't trying to bite him at all.
With so many of them, if they actually wanted to break through the barrier with their teeth, they would have to line up and take a number first.
They were simply obscuring his vision.
His 【Malice Perception】 suddenly flared with a warning from diagonally below.
Elias immediately snapped his muzzle downward.
A dark-red whip was already snaking along the floor, looping around the outer edge of the 【Moonlight Barrier】.
The tip of the whip didn't attack him; instead, it wrapped precisely around one of the pure silver nails wedged in the floorboard crevices.
With a sharp yank of the woman's arm, the silver nail was forcibly ripped out. It traced a cold arc through the air before clattering against the distant wall.
The three silver traps Elias had laid out around his position suddenly had a gap.
She wasn't rushing to attack.
She was clearing a safe landing spot for herself to close the distance.
She even knew to clear traps first?
Elias spun the cylinder, rotating an ice-blue bullet into the firing position.
This was far more professional than the usual Mist Veil Society members who did nothing but rush in to die.
The gunshot rang out immediately.
The woman instantly retracted her blood whip and retreated into the shadows.
But the target of his freezing bullet wasn't her at all.
The bullet struck the wooden floorboards in the center of the basement.
Ice-blue spirituality erupted violently, and a thick layer of white frost spread rapidly along the crevices of the wood, freezing most of the floor into a smooth sheet of ice in the blink of an eye.
The chill crawled up his boots, and a dense white mist quickly condensed in the air.
The wooden boards cracked one after another from the freezing cold, but this also covered most of the uneven spots in the basement where shadows could hide.
Immediately following that, several spheres of 【Hexfire】 ignited simultaneously in different spots.
The light shone onto the ice, reflecting off the smooth surface onto the walls, beams, and the underside of the long table.
Each sphere of Hexfire multiplied into over a dozen dazzling patches of light.
The shadows that had once merged into a single shroud were instantly sliced to ribbons.
Aggravated by the intense light, the swirling bats lost their formation.
They screeched and crashed into the walls, no longer able to maintain their dense screen.
Just as the woman was about to melt into the shadows along the wall, the flowing darkness was torn apart by beams of light coming from multiple directions.
She was forced to reveal herself once more.
“Should we keep the lights on while we do business?” Elias aimed his gun at her, his tone incredibly sincere. “It saves everyone a lot of trouble.”
“You think this is enough to stop me?” The woman snapped her head up.
This time, she didn't try to manipulate blood threads or look for new shadows.
With the Hexfire and the ice blocking her best methods, she simply opted for the most straightforward approach—relying on the physical capabilities of the Kindred, which far surpassed those of humans, to tear the man before her to shreds.
As she spoke, the ice beneath her feet shattered with a loud crack.
Propelled by sheer physical force, her seemingly slender body lunged forward. She leaped straight over the silver wire, bypassed the flank of the 【Moonlight Barrier】, and landed right in the gap left by the missing silver nail.
She was so fast she was nothing but a blurred black silhouette.
Elias had barely caught sight of her pale face before five razor-sharp claws were already closing in on his throat.
He activated 【Shifting Afterimage】 a split second in advance.
His body glided half a step to the side.
The distance wasn't great, but it was just enough to let those pale claws brush past his neck, tearing through nothing but the afterimage that had yet to dissipate.
The woman's pupils shrank.
She wanted to pull back, but the momentum of her lunge carried her forward.
Elias had already turned with the flow of his movement.
His thumb spun the cylinder.
Click.
The long-dormant, grayish-white bullet with the crescent wax seal on its surface finally rotated into the firing position.
There was less than a single step between them.
No aiming was necessary.
Elias pressed the muzzle against the woman's ribs and pulled the trigger.
Bang!
The grayish-white bullet spun and sank deep into the Kindred's body.
There was no burst of fire, nor did any frost erupt.
Instead, the toll of a bell from some distant sea suddenly echoed through the basement.
Dong—
The sound wasn't loud, yet it caused all the surrounding bats to instantly lose control and rain down onto the ice with a flurry of soft thuds.
The tolling of the bell seemed to bypass their ears, resonating directly from the depths of their spiritual bodies.
Elias's hand holding the gun went numb as well. He could clearly feel that the long-stored death sentence within the cylinder had completely vanished.
The woman's body froze at that exact moment.
A black-and-silver crescent wax seal emerged on her ribs, rapidly sliding across her pale skin toward her chest.
“What is this?!”
The woman's eyes went wide.
For the first time, she showed genuine terror. She reached out to grab Elias, but her five long claws rapidly retracted halfway through her reach.
“What did you do to me?!”
“Nothing much.”
Elias took a step back, widening the distance again as he looked down at her.
“I merely gifted you the death sentence that was once settled upon me.”
The crescent wax seal fully closed.
The crimson light in the woman's eyes instantly died out.
Her fangs retracted, her sharp nails returned to normal, and the darkness covering her body collapsed to the floor like a structure losing its support.
Her body went completely limp and collapsed.
The back of her head hit the ice with a sickening thud.
The bats that had been fluttering around curled up on the ice, struggling as their frantic thrashing slowly ground to a halt.
There was no breathing.
There was no heartbeat.
Yet, the dark-red spirituality belonging to the Kindred did not dissipate. Instead, it fully retreated into the depths of her body, as if the death sentence had forcibly suppressed it into a deep slumber.
“Though, I suppose this trick isn't quite as effective against you vampires,” Elias muttered, pursing his lips.
The curse had indeed sentenced her to death.
The problem was, the Kindred weren't living humans in the normal sense to begin with.
Death hadn't taken her away; it had merely put her body into a state of suspended animation akin to a corpse.
“And here I thought I finally had a one-shot kill spell,” Elias said, somewhat disappointed. “Turns out the very first test subject broke the mechanics.”
Disappointment aside, he still had a job to do.
He didn't approach immediately. Instead, he used his Roaring Cane to hook the pure silver wire off the ground and gently tapped it against the back of the woman's hand.
White smoke hissed once more.
She didn't react at all.
Only then did Elias retrieve two short hardwood stakes from the trickster pocket dimension using 【Trickster's Fingertips】.
When a Kindred was incapacitated, driving wooden stakes into their body would plunge them into an indefinite state of paralysis.
He hadn't bought these things just for decoration.
Elias dragged the woman by her arms and laid her out on the ice in a perfect crucifix shape.
Then, humming the theme song of a certain blue fat cat, he picked up the Roaring Cane and lined up its brass head with the end of the first stake.
Thud!
The first stake pierced her left palm and wedged itself deeply into the floorboards below.
Thud!
The second stake pinned her right hand securely.
The woman's body twitched slightly before losing all response once more.
“Not bad. Pretty standard, actually,” Elias muttered, stepping back half a pace to admire his handywork.
In his past life, there was a theory that Judas had turned into a vampire after betraying Jesus.
Some classic vampire movie seemed to have used a similar setting as well.
By laying out this vampire in a crucifix shape, he could consider it avenging the brother of Heavenly King Hong.
With that finished, Elias's gaze finally settled on the reddish-brown notebook the woman had tucked under her cloak.
Threads of spirituality quietly crept forward.
【Sleight of Hand】.
An unconscious hand could no longer hold onto anything.
The notebook slid out from beneath the black cloak, skimmed across the surface of the ice, and flew straight into Elias's waiting hand.
He weighed the notebook in his hand, then glanced back down at the Kindred pinned to the floor.
“Sorry about that. Sleep tight. The book is mine.”
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