For a moment, Leon remained silent instead of responding to the vampire. The room was cursed, but he didn't know what the curse was, so he took a step back out of the room. Or rather, he tried.
His legs wouldn't go past the doorframe. It wasn't like there was an invisible wall stopping him either. His legs just absolutely refused to step out of the room.
Darkwing seemed to notice something was amiss.
"Wild Card, what's wrong?" he murmured.
"...Midnight City is under new management," Leon replied to the vampire's words, tucking a hand around his back. From his palm, he conjured a 2d plane with a series of sentences displayed to the Guardians. "You vampires are getting evicted because of all the shit you've been stirring. If you have any complaints, take it up with my boss. If not, you can go fuck off."
"Such disrespect." The vampire chuckled, fangs bared. "You truly are an irritating little gnat. Because of you, all those years of preparation has turned to dust. But no matter. I will simply have to start again. Time is a currency I have in abundance."
"You really think we'll let you get out of here alive?"
[The room is cursed. I've taken one step in and I physically can't step back out. There might also be other traps set in here. As soon as you can, retreat and call for backup. I'll hold them off until backup is here.]
"No! There has to be another way!" Darkwing whispered harsh.
Green Ghost chimed in. "We're not leaving you to fend for yourself. Can't you just break the curse?"
Leon mentally clicked his tongue at their words. This was his chance to get some sweet, sweet gacha points without any interference and they were pointblocking him.
[It'll take too much time and I don't think they'll let me. I know this is rather arrogant of me to say, but if you step in the room, we'll just be surrounded. Then I'll have to hold back and worry about protecting all of you. Please trust in me. I won't die to these dipshits.]
Leon much preferred death by loss of breath between the thighs of a gorgeous woman.
Taking the silence of the Guardians as confirmation, he decided to turn himself into a more enticing target by embracing the danger zone.
"You know," Leon began saying, moving to the center of the room as the Guardians reached out to him and whispered words of protest, "you give me the vibes of Dracula. Your intimidating stare, your regal attire, and the aura of power you give off just yell 'Dracula, Lord of the Vampires'. So, are you really him?"
Leon sensed the Guardians leave.
"...An accurate deduction," Dracula confirmed. A relaxed smile occupied his face. "Which is why I do not know if I should call you brave or foolish. You clearly understand that you have already been caught in a trap and have informed your allies who have already left you. And yet, you choose to place yourself in the most dangerous position and confront us all by your lonesome?"
"What can I say?" Leon spread his arms wide, activating Voltaic Reinforcement and Flow Method. A crackling cloak of lightning enveloped him as his energy began circulating in his body. "I just love a challenge."
He didn't need Removal for this, only Fight Mode. Danger Rating just rated dear old Dracula and Midnight Magician as Dangerous.
"A challenge?" Dracula bowed his head, covering his eyes as his shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. "Oh, how I've missed encountering men with such... bravado. This will be most entertaining indeed. Victor, release the hounds. As the host, it is only appropriate that we satisfy our guest's desire for a challenge."
Hounds?
Victor, the Midnight Magician, held out a hand and muttered under his breath, "Open!"
The twelve coffins opened all at once, their lids crashing into the ground with resounding thuds. What appeared as normal men and women stumbled out of the coffins, falling to their knees. But within moments, they changed.
Sharp claws dug into stone. Fur emerged, covering every inch of skin. Their heads turned into those of a wolf's while their bodies grew in size and muscle.
Twelve werewolves rose to their feet, and almost immediately, their pure red eyes locked onto Leon. With their teeth bared, each one lowered their body and went on all fours, as if preparing to pounce on their victim.
Dracula's eyes turned cold. "Devour him."
The werewolves closest to Leon pounced, closing the distance with superhuman speed. Leon grinned.
Come to papa.
0.00 seconds.
The Sunlight Spear formed in Leon's hand, swiftly reinforced and reshaped. Now holding a proper spear with a smooth handle and a long, double-edged spearhead, he struck.
0.40 seconds.
Leon slashed twice and slammed the spear's shaft into the ground. An omnidirectional wave of scorching flames formed.
1 second.
The heads of the four nearest werewolves split into two, cauterized. The wave of flames caught the other eight mid-leap. It ate through fur, then hide, then muscle. Their howls spiked, cracked, and cut out one by one. Eight blackened husks dropped out of the fire in loose crouches, frozen in the shapes of their final lunges as smoke curled off them like incense.
Dracula had gone very quiet on his throne.
"Impressive," the vampire said at last. His voice kept its smooth cadence, but the relaxed smile from earlier had thinned. "But regardless of the tricks you carry, you will tire. You will slow. And I have nothing but time as an immortal."
"See, that's what I don't get. You already think you know everything about me. I think you need to get knocked down a peg." Leon rolled his shoulders.
"Do you still not understand how dangerous of a trap you have stepped into?"
"I stepped into a trap?" Leon tilted his head. "Who decided that?"
Widening his stance, Leon stomped and grasped the earth.
All four walls of the throne room began to glow, dull red bleeding into furious orange as Leon phase-changed them a foot deep. Candle sconces slid loose and drowned. Molten rock wept from the seams and pooled, and the temperature climbed so fast the candle flames bent sideways from the convection.
"I'm not the one who's trapped. You are," Leon declared, his blank mask painted orange by the warm glow of lava. "Every exit is now a couple thousand degrees of hot. It's just you, me, and your pet magician."
For the first time, Dracula rose from the throne. He was massive, closer to seven feet than six, and the pressure rolling off him made the hair on Leon's arms rise even through the lightning cloak.
"Insolent child." The word came out with fangs in it. "I have broken armies. I have outlived empires. I was drinking kings dry when your ancestors were still afraid of thunder, and you believe a lit fireplace will hold me?"
"Nope." Leon leveled the Sunlight Spear at him. The golden light washed over the throne, and he watched Dracula's pupils shrink to pinpricks. "I believe this will."
He fed more energy into the spear. Its radiance deepened from gold to white, and warmth spread through the room that had nothing to do with the lava. The light was noon in a meadow. It was July on bare skin.
Dracula stepped back.
He caught himself almost instantly, spine straightening and chin lifting. But Leon had seen it, and more importantly, Dracula knew he'd seen it. A bead of sweat, red-tinged, traced the vampire's temple. The skin along his cheekbones had gone tight and dry.
"So it's true," Leon said, looking down at the spear. "This thing really does have the power of the sun."
Though it wouldn't have been this powerful if he hadn't reinforced it.
"Victor." Dracula's eyes never left the spear. "Kill-!"
Leon moved first.
To his own perception, the world started moving in thick syrup. Voltaic Reinforcement and Flow Method ran in tandem, energy circulating in patterns that bolstered his body, and the distance between him and the throne was crossed in a blink. Dracula was no doubt fast. Probably faster than anything Leon had fought, and it still took the vampire until the second step to register that his opponent was already inside his guard.
Claws raked for Leon's throat. He sketched the arc before it happened and changed his plan of attack, drop-kicking Dracula's sternum instead. The Lord of Vampires left his own throne room floor and flew into the lava wall.
The scream that came out of him was music to Leon's ears.
Dracula tore free in a spray of molten rock, his cape ablaze, half his back charred to the muscle. Horror bloomed across his aristocratic face as flesh knitted back in a heartbeat.
Leon waved his free hand. The iron sconces he'd caught in the walls came sizzling out of the lava, and metalbending stretched them mid-flight into a dozen glowing javelins that hovered around Leon in a slow orbit.
"Let's play a game," Leon said. "It's called 'Shish kebab'. You're it."
The javelins hissed across the room. Dracula became a black-and-crimson blur, weaving between them with blinding speed. Everywhere he went, Leon followed.
A spear haft cracked across the vampire's jaw. An iron javelin pinned his cape to the floor and cost him a tenth of a second he couldn't spare. A fist wrapped in lightning met his ribs and Leon felt them give. Felt centuries-old bone flex like wood.
Dracula rolled with the blow, came up in a crouch, and lunged. Leon met him with the dumbest weapon in his arsenal.
The crowbar caught Dracula across the temple, sounding like a wrecking ball hitting a cathedral bell. The vampire's knees buckled and his eyes crossed together.
"That," Leon said, giving Gordon's crowbar an appreciative little twirl, "is for every good peasant and civilian you ever killed."
Dracula spat blood, and something ancient and cold slid into his gaze. His irises ignited, red swallowing white, and the whole weight of his will crashed down through Leon's eyes and into his skull.
"KNEEL."
The command rolled through Leon's mind like a wave hitting a seawall. It was enormous. It was also, thanks to a bunch of Tibetan monks from a reality this bloodsucker would never see, not a problem.
The wave broke. The seawall didn't.
Leon tilted his head. "Huh. Tingly."
Dracula's composure, or what remained of it, seemed to crack straight down the middle. He stared at Leon in terror, and when he spoke, the smoothness was gone, leaving something hoarse underneath.
"Centuries," he whispered. "For centuries, no mortal mind has ever... What are you?"
"I'm very special. My grandma always said so." Leon lifted the Sunlight Spear again and started walking. "Now, about those people you took."
OOO
Victor Umberstone had been in pain for seventy-six years, and he had spent every one of them watching powerful men discover they were not.
He watched it now from the shadow of the throne, half-forgotten, as the boy in the white mask drove the Lord of Vampires backward across his own throne room, patient and unhurried, herding him toward the lava.
Dracula was afraid. Victor had served him for around twenty years and had never once entertained the possibility that those two words could share a sentence.
The Umberstones had always paid for power in pain. It was the family ledger, signed in his great-grandfather's blood. Alaric Umberstone had dazzled the world beside Houdini himself, and the world never learned that every miracle cost him agony, that the shadow-thing he'd bargained with had woven its price into the bloodline itself.
Alaric burned out chasing a cure and left his descendants the bill. Victor's father died of it, in the quiet of his room, the way failed magicians die. His mother endured it. And Victor, gifted Victor, prodigy Victor, inherited the full measure.
Magic that could reshape the world, and a body that shrieked with every syllable of it.
Dracula found him in 2002, when the pain had grown teeth and Victor had run out of reasons to keep feeding himself to it. The vampire's offer had been simple. Drown one city in eternal night, a cradle for the army he meant to breed away from the sun's reach, and in exchange, Victor would be remade. Freed.
He would become stronger than the curse that owned him.
The spell killed him, exactly as he'd suspected it would. Dracula kept his word anyway, which was more than any Umberstone bargain had ever delivered. The revival left the pain intact but survivable, turning it into background noise instead of a scream. For twenty years, Victor had told himself that was close enough to freedom, and that a creature old enough to remember true magic's golden age might one day remember a cure for his condition.
Now the creature in question was being beaten across his own hall with a crowbar.
If he dies, the cure dies with him.
Victor raised his hands and began to whisper.
He had cast nothing above a cantrip since the city fell dark, hoarding his strength the way misers hoard coins, and he spent all of it now. Every syllable was a hook sunk into his own marrow. The old agony surged up gladly, delighted to be needed. Victor fed it seventy-six years of bitterness and shaped the whole screaming mass into a single word of unmaking, the masterwork of a cursed bloodline, aimed at an unguarded back.
The word left him.
It struck the boy between the shoulder blades, and Victor watched the lightning cloak gutter out like a candle in a gale. Black veins erupted across the white mask's edges, crawling down the man's neck, and the curse sank its roots toward his heart exactly as designed, commanding the body it touched to simply stop.
The man dropped to one knee. Blood ran from under the mask in a thin dark line.
Yes.
Victor drew breath for the second verse, the one that would finish it.
The man's head turned.
Grey light was already spidering through the black veins, seemingly eating his curse from the inside, and despite the mask showing nothing, Victor felt a murderous gaze pierce him.
The floor shivered. Enormous pressure bloomed directly beneath his feet, and he had time to think, absurdly, of Alaric vanishing from a locked theater and leaving only an empty cloak.
Three greatswords' worth of metal erupted from the bedrock.
There was no pain.
For the first time since the day he was born, there was no pain at all, and Victor Umberstone fell in two clean halves, grateful.
OOO
Every curse in the room died with its maker.
Leon felt the trap on his body and on the doorway unraveling alongside the black rot in his chest dissolving into the grey light of Curse Breaker. The giant blade he'd raised through the Midnight Magician stood gleaming in the firelight, and on either side of it, what was left of the man slid quietly to the floor with dark blood pooled around them.
He stayed on one knee a moment longer, Healing Light flooding his own chest while White Mage made every drop of it count. His heart had stuttered. It actually stuttered mid-beat. And if the curse had needed one more second to finish taking root, the Guardians would have found his corpse in this room.
Note to self. Never, ever toy with the main boss while the support caster's still up. Need to do better next time.
Movement drew his attention.
Dracula was dragging himself toward the doorway, his regal attire reduced to scorched rags. He made it four feet before a wall of crackling, unmodified Sunlight Spears stopped him cold. Leon walked over, main spear in hand, and the radiance alone pinned the vampire in place, skin blistering wherever the glow touched.
"Wait!" Dracula's voice cracked. "Wait! Boy, let me tell you something! Listen to me! I have hoards of treasure across three continents. I possess knowledge no living creature remembers. I can give you centuries. I can give you immortality. Everything I have, everything I am, name it and it is yours."
Leon crouched so they were eye to eye.
"Six hundred people," he said, mind flashing with images of the captives, both dead and living.
How many more had suffered?
"You didn't even count them, did you?"
Dracula's mouth opened. "N-no! I-"
Leon thrust the Sunlight Spear through his heart.
Dracula looked down at the shaft of condensed daylight in his chest almost thoughtfully before he turned to ash. It started at his fingertips and the edges of his face, skin flaking away into grey. The flesh beneath followed, layer by layer, muscle and sinew crumbling in an accelerating cascade until only a skeleton hung on the spear, and then the bones themselves fell apart and poured to the floor.
Centuries of appetite made an ash pile that wouldn't fill a bucket.
Dracula's medallion dropped on top of it with a soft clink.
Show log. Sort by reward from highest to lowest.
[Slain Dracula, Lord of the Vampires! Reward: 4,600 GP]
[Feat Achieved! Destroyed the leadership and elite forces of a hidden supernatural army in a single battle. Reward: 2,000 GP]
[Slain Victor Umberstone, the Midnight Magician! Reward: 1,800 GP]
[Feat Achieved! Ended a two-decade predation upon the people of Midnight City. Reward: 1,500 GP]
[Slain 12 Werewolf Thralls! Reward: 1,200 GP]
[Feat Achieved! Survived a lethal curse woven by a master curse-weaver. Reward: 500 GP]
[Feat Achieved! Resisted the hypnosis of the most ancient vampire lord. Reward: 300 GP]
[Total Gacha Points: 20,357]
Fuck yeah...
Leon read the notifications thrice, savoring each line.
A sound escaped him that he would deny to his grave, somewhere between a giggle and the noise a kettle makes. Diamond Ticket money. Four or three Diamond Tickets, with change left over for a proper gacha spree.
He scooped up the medallion, swept the scattered pieces of anything valuable-looking into the Bag of Holding, and let the four walls cool from molten orange to glassy black stone with a long and happy exhale.
Leon was sprawled sideways across the bone throne with a fresh strawberry milkshake when the far wall exploded.
Immortal came through first with fists raised. War Woman was on his flank with her mace drawn back. Green Ghost phased up through the floor while Martian Man poured in as a wall of shifting mass. Darkwing swept in behind them with an entire GDA strike team, thirty rifles fanning across the room and laser sights dancing over charred werewolves, a bisected magician, cooling obsidian, and one perfectly healthy seventeen-year-old drinking a milkshake on Dracula's throne.
Nobody moved.
Leon pulled the straw out of his mouth.
"So," he said into the silence, "before anyone asks. Yes, that pile of ash is Dracula. Yes, the actual Dracula. And no, before Cecil says anything, I did not loot the body." He paused. "I looted the pile. Legally distinct, wouldn't you say?"
War Woman slowly lowered her mace. "You were alone in here.... for eleven minutes."
"And you guys are eleven minutes late, which is why the rewards are all mine. I don't make the rules." Leon snapped his fingers, and a second milkshake popped into his hand. He held it out to the nearest slack-jawed strike team member. "Strawberry?"
The soldier looked at Darkwing. Darkwing pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Take the damn milkshake," Darkwing said, his voice weary.
The soldier took the milkshake.