Becoming the Dark Lord

“Sorry I’m late, my lord,” Angie called from the sky.

At the same moment, the black spheres streaked toward him, but a dome shielded him, and the ground beneath him flared green, forming a circle. Luke felt his wounds closing, the broken bones, everything.

Her healing magic.

“Angie... is that really you?” he had to ask again when he saw her flying overhead.

The lich had raised a magical shield to block the lightning Angie hurled at him.

She hovered above Luke. “You should not have attacked the man I serve.”

“Angelica?!” Jonathan said, stunned.

“And you should not have gotten in my way, you idiot,” the lich snapped, still irritated by the lightning strike.

“Wait, don’t attack her...” Jonathan started, but his words were cut off as the black spheres shot toward Angie at blinding speed. At the same time, the Rhiannon exhaled a blast of icy dragon-breath in her direction.

She dodged through it and dove with her spear raised, driving straight at both enemies. The ice breath chased after her while the lich thrust out a hand and unleashed black flames. Angie landed beside the three of them with a violent impact, lightning bursting outward and throwing them back. Jonathan went flying, skidding across the ground.

“Well, at least you’ve got courage,” Lucien said.

The lich rose into the air, hovering a few feet above the ground. “Very few people have hurt me like that and lived.”

“I don’t care who you people were playing war games with,” she said. “No one gets to hurt the man I serve.”

It would be Luke and Angie against the three of them. Before the fight could resume, another figure came sliding down from the highest part of the hill. Curtis Rhiannon.

“Go ahead, Curtis,” Lucien said without turning.

Automatically, Luke checked on Charlie by focusing his mind on [Soul Infiltration]. Looking through her eyes, he saw that she was alright. She looked up at the dark sky. Night had fallen. Now Charlie was operating at full strength.

She turned in his direction, but through her enhanced hearing, Luke picked up more than that. Snow shifting. Wind moving from every direction within a five-kilometer radius. Eleanor, Evangeline, and Anne still fighting the newly thawed vampires. And one more sound. Footsteps. Hundreds of them, all running. Charlie filtered out everything else and focused only on that.

“We’ve got a small problem,” Curtis said, and Luke’s attention snapped back to the present.

“What?”

“A vampire army is coming.”

Lucien looked at Tobias. “Are they with you?”

“No. I told no one I was coming here.”

“Maybe the explosions drew the wrong kind of attention.”

Luke stayed silent while he watched Charlie running toward him.

“A-Angelica, is that really you?” Jonathan said, backing away as he stared at Angie in the air.

“Stay behind me, Jonathan,” Tobias warned.

“Maybe this is his doing,” Lucien said, meaning Luke. “He has an undead companion.”

“If I want to kill someone, I prefer doing it with my own hands,” Luke replied.

At the same time, a vampire army came spilling out of the forest at the base of the hill. They all looked up at them. And smiled.

What the hell is happening here?

The sun was gone. Night had fully fallen, and every vampire on the field was at their peak. One of them stepped forward from the army. He wore black and crimson with a long cape.

“So we really found him. The only vampire from the rival faction,” the caped vampire said with a laugh.

“A count,” Tobias said, glancing at Jonathan. “Stay behind me and do not move a single muscle unless I tell you to.”

A vampire count.

“Tonight, children, tonight the Blood Banquet begins. Gorge yourselves on every last one of them,” the count shouted.

He dissolved into a mass of mist, and the vampires surged forward, eyes burning red as they screamed. Hundreds of arrows arced into the sky, some glowing with power. Luke, however, stayed focused on the three enemies in front of him.

“Damian, you bastard,” the lich snarled. “It had to be him.”

The creature began hurling spells into the advancing army. The Rhiannons readied themselves to strike. A barrier formed around Luke.

“My lord, stay close to me. I’m still healing you,” Angie said.

The green glow of the healing circle still burned beneath him. Charlie was coming down the hill. The vampires were closing in. There were too many of them. One of them laughed as he kept teleporting forward in bursts. Around the lich, skeletal beast remains rose from the ground. Curtis Rhiannon kept firing arrows. When the vampires reached them, they began spreading out to surround them. Several broke toward Luke and Angie.

“Stay with your barons. Don’t lose them,” one of the vampires shouted.

Barons?

He had fought a baron recently. He knew exactly how dangerous one could be. And there were several here. Luke struck one vampire as he teleported, then threw a spinning kukri into his face, and a second later he was fully surrounded.

“A lone human standing here. So what’ll it be? Death, or life as a blood slave?” one of the barons said. He wore the same kind of clothing as the one Luke had fought earlier.

“And does he even have much blood? He’s skinny,” another baron said.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Luke found himself boxed in by four barons and the vampires with them. More kept coming. A yellow sphere blazed into existence above them, like a miniature sun. The vampires recoiled all at once, snarling in pain as smoke rose from their burning skin. Angie dropped from the air.

“You filthy bitch.”

“I’m going to make you swallow those words for saying that to him,” she said.

“There are four barons here, you winged idiot,” another snapped.

Angie tightened her grip on her spear.

“Angie, I’ll take the two melee fighters, you take the—”

She was already gone. Angie burst forward in a streak of motion, lightning trailing behind her, and drove the spear straight through one of the barons.

The vampire screamed. “Damn it. She’s fast.”

Angie’s body crackled with electricity, sending it surging through the impaled baron. When another baron came at her with a dagger, she dodged and punched him with her free hand. Then she triggered berserker mode and spun, hurling the skewered vampire aside.

The third baron raised his bow and began firing as Angie sprinted at him with the spear. Her wings folded in front of her like a shield, taking the shots. Then they snapped open, and she hurled the lightning-wreathed spear at him. The impact hit him in the stomach so hard it launched him backward.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” the fourth baron said, raising a hammer to strike her.

Angie dodged and pointed a hand. A yellow circle flared beneath him and unleashed a vertical column of light. The vampire baron screamed as the light burned through him until he teleported out of it. His body was scorched, much of his hair gone.

“You bitch.”

“She’s got guts.”

“I’m going to kill that whore. First her hands, then her eyes.”

“Try,” Angie said.

And something appeared beside her. Blue lightning gathered, took shape, and solidified. A second Angie appeared, made entirely of crackling blue mana.

A clone?

Luke stared, genuinely impressed. All four barons turned toward her and attacked. The electrified Angie-clone moved first. In a single burst, she snatched one of the barons out of the air like a hawk taking prey and carried him upward. Angie gripped her spear, hurled it, and struck him midair with enough force to kill him instantly. Only three vampire barons remained.

One of them lunged at her while she was momentarily without her spear. Angie slipped past him, then shot forward with her wings drawn tight. The hit slammed into the baron and knocked him backward. The blue clone dropped behind him and started hammering his back, each punch flooding his body with electricity.

Angie struck him from the front with a punch of her own, then launched upward. The vampire was tossed into the air. The clone hit him again and knocked him back toward Angie, who kept punching him through the air.

She caught the baron and threw him straight into the one wielding a pair of daggers. At the same time, the archer baron kept firing arrows. Angie twisted through them in the air. The blue clone grabbed her from behind and charged her body with electricity like a lightning rod. She raised both hands toward the archer, and a massive bolt tore out of her.

Luke had been just about to make his move on that vampire, but stopped cold when he saw the lightning. The blast lit up the entire area, and the smell hit a second later. The archer baron was left with half his body blackened and carbonized, the other half burned raw. He staggered forward two steps, and then a spear slammed into him and finished the job.

That left only two barons, both still dragging themselves up from the impact of being thrown down. Angie landed on one of them with brutal speed, driving all her weight down and spearing him through. The third baron was dead. The fourth pushed himself up and pointed a finger. A blood bullet fired.

Angie dodged. He fired another. This time she blocked with her wings, and in the next instant the blue clone seized him by the hair and electrocuted him. The clone forced the vampire down to his knees.

“I told you that you’d choke on your own words,” Angie said as she walked toward him with the spear.

“Wait. We can tal—”

The spear went through his head before he could finish. In less than two minutes, all four vampire barons were dead. Luke, still fighting off the other vampires, watched the whole thing in stunned silence.

“Who’s next?” Angie asked, hovering above them beside her blue clone.

The vampires bared their teeth and gripped their weapons, but none of them moved. Some kept glancing at the dead barons.

“We just need to be smart and—”

The vampire never finished. Angie’s spear punched through him before he got the words out, and in the next second it was already flying back into her hand.

“That one didn’t even last a full second,” a voice said.

But the voice had come from...

Did her spear just talk?

Angie’s Spirit Tool had spoken. Not in some private way only she could hear, either. It had spoken out loud.

She’s mastered her weapon that deeply?

Angie tossed the spear to her electric clone, then landed beside Luke, her wings fading away.

“I’ll finish healing you, my lord. Properly this time,” Angie said, raising both hands.

“Angie, I can’t believe I found you again. And here of all places.”

“Just know that I never stopped looking for you. I was only... a little busy.”

A moment later Charlie arrived, cutting her way through the vampires.

“Angie, is it really you?”

“It is.”

Charlie looked all right. A little hurt from the fight with Curtis, but all right. Her helmet was gone now.

“Angélica!” Jonathan shouted as he hacked his way through the vampires with his axe. “Luke, you bastard, stay away from her!”

The lich rose above the swarm, floating as cannonballs slammed into the vampires below, and Jonathan was yanked backward.

“What are you doing, Tobias?”

“Shut up and stay at my side.”

“No. I have to get to her.”

By then Luke had already moved off with Angie and Charlie, heading toward Eleanor, Evangeline, and Anne a short distance away.

“I have no idea what the hell is happening,” Luke said as he advanced, killing vampires as he went. “But at least we found each other again.”

Two barons leaped toward them. One kept flashing forward through shadow-like teleports. The group split apart. Luke took one of them. He was larger than the others, wielded twin scimitars, and his teeth were metallic.

“I’m not letting anyone leave this hill alive. Everyone dies here,” the baron said with a grin.

Luke slipped past the attacks. Charlie drove a punch into the other baron. In the middle of the exchange, Luke cut the vampire’s arm clean off. Blood spilled.

“That would’ve hurt a lot more if I were like you,” the baron said.

Still laughing, he kept fighting one-armed. Then the blood recoiled, and the severed arm, sword and all, snapped back into place.

“That’s my superiority as a vampire,” he said, and came at Luke again.

Luke shifted his grip on the kukris and moved fast. He slipped past the crossing scimitars, spun, and cut in a single flowing motion. The baron’s head came off. As it tried to retract back toward the body, Luke’s kukri struck it.

[You have slain a Vampire - Lvl 91…] *48,784,041 EP earned*

“And in the end, you still died.”

Above them, Angie was flying overhead, firing [Light Balls] into the vampires below. Her blue clone came back and threw her spear. Angie caught it in midair and dropped into the fight again.

“What is that thing?” Charlie asked her.

“My Lightning Clone.”

Mist rolled in. It surrounded them all at once. The sound of the battlefield vanished. The clash of weapons, the screaming, even the wind. Everything was gone, swallowed by silence and fog.

“Master Luke.”

“I’m here. I can’t hear anything.”

Luke conjured a knife and gripped it, mana gathering into the blade.

Angie appeared, beating her wings hard to drive the mist back. “It’s not working.”

Footsteps echoed through the fog.

“I finally found you. The only vampire of that bloodline in this universe,” said a voice.

Charlie froze with her sword in hand.

They know Charlie is a Vespertilio? How?