Walworth Escape Route

~1 week, 6 days until transmission

The thunder of guns around Robb and Grace set a palpitatingly fast beat for them to follow.

Other guns, not the automatic rifle he currently held in his own white knuckle grip. There wasn't that much ammo left to go around, so the few shots left had been passed off to those who could actually aim worth a damn. For the rest, it was old bayonets and whatever improvised weapons could be found that had a chance of offering decent protection.

He wasn't complaining too much. He had magic to work with, and the empty gun was close enough to a spear for him to feel confident holding his ground.

No time to dwell. Lunge forward, take the nearest vampire in the neck with the pointy bit. Didn't kill it. Twist and slice. Dropped to the ground, dead. Eyes on the next target.

His breathing was turning ragged, swallowing down heavy lungfuls of cool night air as the battle wore on. He wasn't quite to the point where his vision started to blur just yet, but… it was getting there. Really shouldn't be on his feet doing as much activity as he was now. Also should have had more of his lost blood properly replaced, but… make do with what you have.

At least none have gotten close enough to take a second bite… yet…

Cold sweat dripped down his face beneath the shadows he'd wrapped around himself. As another vampire before him fell to a proper shanking, his Domain pulsed with deep purple energy, and from his position two additional humanoid dummies ran off in opposite directions. He began running in a third, to make it less obvious which one was actually him.

The vampires surrounding them immediately took notice and focused in on him. Some guessed incorrectly, following after his illusions, but a fair amount still managed to hone in on the correct one. It was dangerous for him to be the center of attention like this… but the tactic he and Grace had inadvertently developed depended on it.

With the vampires backs turned, she crashed into their flanks effortlessly, shattering bones with each strike. Always pushing. Her combat style was motion, constantly charging forward or using the terrain to align her charge with a new victim.

Never slowing down, even for a moment. She pounced at another vampire focusing one of Robb's shadows, teeth clenching around it's jugular while her whole body twisted in the air, up and over the vampires wounded shoulder. By the time her feet touched the ground, her opponent was fully exsanguinated and she was blitzing down the next one in her way.

Vampires were nominally ambush predators. Their biology favored large, explosive motions condensed into a single strike. If you were to ask any random survivor to describe the dangers of vamps, they'd give you that answer verbatim. But, evidently, Grace had discovered that if she never ended that single strike, she could do much more than ambush.

Like the Grim Reaper incarnate, where she went, death followed. Robb's magic was also hovering over her like a coat, misguiding and misdirecting any vampires smart enough to realize she was the far greater threat. Working together, it was a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation for the monsters besieging them.

For as long as he could stay conscious, at least. The time he would need to back off was approaching soon, but for now he could – no, he had to – hold out for a while longer.

He had a newfound respect for Martin, God rest his trapped soul. Leading from the front and maintaining constant streams of magic like this was exhausting.

At least the broad strokes of their situation were plain as day. They were holding out easily at the moment – even pushing the raiding vampires back, in some places – but on technicality, they were still at a bit of a loss. Something was holding up the river crossing. The sounds of gunshots on the other side had grown distant a while ago, and for the last five minutes nobody had managed to come-

"Contact rear!"

Several soldiers behind him suddenly swiveled their guns 180 degrees and began firing into their own camp. The sound of dead vamps gurgling on their last breaths followed soon after, but the fact that they'd somehow made it in there past their lines was telling.

They've figured out the mirror, Robb realized. Which means that there's nobody left on that side guarding the crossing.

"Cover up the glass!" he shouted over his shoulder to the soldiers behind him. "We've gotten everyone we can now!"

"But Colonel Morowitz still hasn't come through yet! We'd be abandoning him!"

Robb ducked a swipe from a vampire, before pinning it in place with his bayonet and allowing one of the linemen to take it out with a well placed shot. "He might be dead for all you know!" he retorted. "And if we don't take that mirror down now, we for sure will be once they send more than just one vamp across at a time! Cover it NOW!"

"Y-yes sir!"

The soldier he shouted at ran off to do as told, peeling around the corner of a building with purpose. Robb blinked in surprise, honestly not expecting to be treated as someone within the chain of command. Was it something about the way he spoke?

The vampires leaping down from the balconies above gave him too little time to figure it out. Before long, he was right back into the thick of things, hacking, slashing and stabbing frantically as his already flagging stamina depleted dangerously further.

What the -ngh- hell is their deal? He thought to himself. They realize that these losses are unsustainable for them, right? Even the warehouse ended up being a massacre for vamps, and we managed that as a gaggle of semi-trained numbskulls with a bit of raw power to back us up!

Something didn't add up for him. These vampires were willingly running headfirst into a professional fighting force, not just picking off randoms lurking in corners to get a quick fix. This was a concerted effort, sure, but it was also a concerted suicide.

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It was hard to read their faces even when he wasn't in the process of killing them himself, but he could almost swear there was something almost… fearful in the way they approached?

He scrutinized harder. To his surprise, the more he looked, the more confident he was in his assessment. They were running from something, pushing through them in an effort to get away. Hard to believe that the monsters that terrorized many a London night were afraid of something, but… the evidence was right in front of him. Which begged the question…

What on bloody earth are they even running from?

It was impossible to tell just from the battlefield around him. Even if he could pay attention to more than the ten-meter radius of his immediate vicinity, nothing obvious was apparent to him at the moment. Whatever it was, however, was bringing him into contact with more and more agitated vamps as time wore on.

"What's the holdup on that damn mirror?!" He shouted with a bit more urgency than he intended, but the soldiers bracing against the terrain providing cover fire made no mention of his slight panic.

One of them spoke up between shots. "They had to turn it into a chokepoint!" He popped two more rounds into the approaching mob, before hearing a click that caused him to curse under his breath. "Vamps started pouring in faster than we could kill for a split second, so they managed a beachhead before we could lock them all down!"

Now it was Robb's turn to curse. So long as that avenue was open, they were pinned right where they were unless they wanted to abandon the wounded entirely. Even if Dr. Helmut wasn't utterly immovable on that topic, he didn't even want to consider it himself. Someone needed to plug the breach, or they were going to end up in the path of whatever was egging these vamps on.

"I'm going in!" He shouted over his shoulder to Grace. "Hold them here until I get back, I can use my shadows to get close-"

He never got a chance to finish that sentence. From the haze at the end of the street, bellowing laughter resounded loud enough that it couldn't have been made by anything human.

Echoing off the concrete walls of the buildings around them, it whipped the vampires surrounding them into an abject frenzy. Suddenly, Robb and Grace both found themselves with significantly less breathing room to work with. Claws scrabbled at anything in their way. Sharp and jagged fangs could be found at almost every turn. If it weren't for the false positives his murky silhouettes provided them both, their positions would have been overrun in moments.

The sonorous laugh grew closer and closer, and with it the sound of carnage followed.

"Faster, you whelps! Faster, or I will feast on your essence myself, and there'll be nothing left for your poor sire Carte Mare to bring back with him! AHAHAHA!!!"

In the distance, Robb made out the first sights of one of the monsters so innately powerful, they'd been the stuff of legends within the Gentleman's Club before its fall.

An arch-vampire. One that, apparently, didn't discriminate in who it chose to slaughter. Lesser vampires fell to it in spades, only made easier by the large, two-handed sword this one spun around itself in deceptively lazy, swooping arcs that did little to hide the raw power behind each swing.

Like a spinning top of death, almost. It would seem that at least one other vampire had managed to develop a new fighting style around their enhanced physiology.

The ranks of normal vampires thinned out to almost nothing, the last few stragglers being picked off by gunfire just as often as they did the blade of their own leader. As the arch-vampire slowed to a halt about a dozen paces away from Robb and Grace, he hefted the flat of the blade over his shoulder with a fiendish grin, watching on in satisfaction as the frontline ground to an utter standstill.

"Ah, nothing like a proper slaughter to get things going in the morning," he sighed contentedly. "There's nothing quite like it, especially when you need to warm up for interesting duels like this."

"Duel! You mother-!"

One of the soldiers in the back almost broke ranks, before his fellows around him pulled him back behind the parapet. Restrained though he might be, they were a bit slow in covering his mouth.

"You killed my brother, you sadistic-!"

The ashen skin of the vampire's face curled back into an even more unsettling rictus. "Did I?" He asked in an outwardly pleasant tone. "Pleasure to make your acquantaince, then. I can't say I remember him specifically, but I'm sure he squealed like a damn pig before I spilled his steaming guts onto the ground."

A strangled cry of outrage answered his taunt, and the soldier redoubled his efforts to break ranks. Robb felt a pang of sympathy as he looked back, watching him struggle against his friends. The sentiment was something he understood all too well, having tried to rush off and save Martin himself when the warehouse had been attacked, but... well, now he also had the benefit of hindsight. The other soldiers had the right idea, keeping him held back like that.

Before things between the Remnant and the intruder could turn one-sidedly ugly, Grace stepped in between the two arguing parties and stared the arch-vampire in the face.

"Hello, Măcel." Her greeting was polite sounding, but her expression made it abundantly clear it was intended as anything but. "To what do I owe the displeasure? Unless you've decided to try testing the limits of our… understanding we came to last year."

"Hah!" He brandished the heavy blade in her direction, mimicking a quick swipe before bringing it back to rest on his shoulder. "Unfortunately, this has little to do with our feud. Which, for the record, I've upheld my side of the bargain on like a good little boy. You gonna be good too, Grace Henwood?"

Visible confusion – and more than a bit of apprehension – crossed Robb's face at the taller vampire's words.

"Grace… what the hell does he mean by bargain?"

She grunted with a hint of frustration. "Can we talk about this later, when our lives aren't being threatened?"

"No. I don't like what he's implying, so give me a five second explanation so I at least know you're not working with him currently."

She scowled. "...Fine. When I first came here, he was one of the first vampires I managed to stumble across. Unfortunately. For a while, I had no choice but to join his camp, because back then I was pretty much on the brink of death from starvation. Most of what I learned about fighting came from trying to kill him."

"And she got very, very good at it," Măcel finished. "But not quite good enough. I believe our last bout ended in… a draw, correct?"

"Regrettably," Grace snapped back. "I'd been hoping to be done with you for good."

"Hah! Spoken like a true killer!"

"Don't call me that."

Grace's voice lowered into the abhuman vocal register that all vampires shared. The barb must have hit extremely close to home. Normally her composure was nearly indistinguishable from a normal human.

"Oh, you wanna do something about it now?" Măcel taunted back. "Only one thing you gotta do, then! Just finish the job you started and kill me! I've told you time and time again, MIGHT MAKES RIGHT!"

He let out another peal of bellowing laughter, shuffling the sword off of his shoulder so that the tip dropped to the ground with a sharp clang.

"Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm not here as part of a personal visit." He swept his gaze over Robb and the rest of the gathered Palatial Remnant soldiers. "There's a new top dog around, and he's decided that every last one of you need to die. Horribly. Preferably with your bodies twisted into puddles of meat each more embarrassing than the last. As much as it pains me to say it, he's better than me at fighting, so… if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, you know?"

"So!" he snapped his fingers, the sound loud enough for everyone to hear despite the distance and the comparatively small movement. "I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't at least offer you a chance to join him too, right? Volunteer to become my thralls right now, and I promise you'll each have a place in my camp. You'll be guaranteed safety once this big plan of his really starts taking off, and more importantly won't be forced to do anything you don't want! Sounds like a good deal, no?"

"He's not mentioning the fact that he starts random fights with his thralls on a whim," Grace muttered to Robb. "To the death."

"Don't worry," he replied. "I wasn't planning on taking such a shit deal, anyways."

"And for anyone who doesn't step forward in the next… oh, I don't know… five minutes! If you don't volunteer by then, I have to assume you intend to fight me, for which I am flattered that you think yourselves a match. Unfortunately, I can't have any of you dying with even a shred of respect to your name. So, to fix this…"

Măcel put his finger and thumb in his mouth and whistled. A smaller, mostly normal-looking human stepped out from behind him, shirt in tatters and dragging his feet slightly. He was muttering to himself under his breath almost constantly, only pausing to breathe shallowly, and in each hand he held a bloody knife.

The mix of human to vampire blood on the blades was caked thick, and concerningly close to evenly distributed.

"Dear God…" Robb said softly, recognizing the face of the new arrival.

"I've decided you'll all make for fine practice for my new subordinate here!" the arch-vampire bellowed. "Once you've all finished making up your mind, then, I'll have a nice, refreshing duel with my first protege here, and you lot remaining will stress test my second!"

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