The small and unusual group strode into the grand foyer of the city hall silently, only having conversations with each other via a potent mental link that allowed the three of them to swap ideas, thoughts, observations, and more with ease. As they did that, their master was busy doing things within the depths of his mind.
As a newly ascended, and sometimes immoral, sanguinarch, Antonio Lopez had a number of choices to make. These choices were not the ones that often plagued young, newly ascended sanguinarchs as Antonio was not a mundane member of that infamous sort of ultra-being. Antonio did not need to think about things like what powers to forfeit, or what drawbacks he'd need if he sought to have ultimate power. No, Antonio's choices were not for things that were so boring.
Antonio's mind was swimming with choices. In the depths of his mind, he was designing dozens of different, new, breeds of vampires. To a mundane sanguinarch, this process would have involved the usage of potent stores of personal power and essence, but for Antonio, this process was not one that involved any sort of personal depletion of resources or energies. Instead of costing him any real, limited resource, the only thing it cost the living god to create new breeds of vampires was the time it took him to mentally compile the traits that each breed would possess.
In the depths of his mind, he was able to see a vast number of charts. These charts listed out different vampiric traits, many of which are straight enhancements to the existing physiologies and abilities of the creatures being transformed into vampires. For example, there was a chart that discussed "Vampiric Intelligence" which referred to how being turned into a vampire would alter a target's intelligence. If Antonio wanted, he could make it so that being transformed into a vampire significantly boosted a person or creature's intelligence, or he could opt to do the opposite and make someone entirely feral if he turned them into a vampire.
This was one of the more important traits for him to decide whenever he opted to invent a new kind of vampire. With this choice, he could create breeds of vampires that existed to be biological weapons for him to unleash against his enemies since he could turn even a genius into a bloodthirsty, rampaging, vicious beast, or by devising another breed of vampires he could give mythical beasts human-level sapience. Alternatively, Antonio could grant a dimwitted follower of his a boost to their intelligence that put them on par with mankind's greatest leaders, inventors, and philosophers, and if his follower weren't initially dimwitted the boosts would be even more dramatic.
Beyond straight intelligence, Antonio also had to make a number of other important decisions. He had to decide how each of the dozens of vampiric species that he was designing was affected, on a superficial and charisma-based level, by the transformation they'd undergo.
He could bestow incredible beauty upon his vampiric servitors or make them look like hideous, horrifying monsters, and he was smart enough to know that either option had its advantages and disadvantages. He also had to choose how much of a boost to one's physique would one receive when they became his vampiric servants, and he was fond of bestowing enormous, world-altering boosts to the physiologies of those he transformed.
Antonio swiftly designed hundreds of different breeds of vampires, each of which had a purpose. Some of his first creations were ultra vampires, breeds of vampires that exemplified what it meant to be a vampire.
While strictly theoretical, for now, these were the sort of vampiric spawn where even a single one of them could swiftly take control of a country, and who sought to zealously serve their creator for all of eternity. These vampires possessed ultra-human level strength, durability, supersonic flight, and a litany of vampiric abilities from the ability to shapeshift to the power to turn into mist, and even the power to command fierce, wild animals. Antonio designed these creatures intending to turn potent servitors into them, to ensure that places he conquered remained parts of his territory and under his control forever.
Now that I had some measure of power I was quickly realizing something. I was not nice. I was not some saintly hero, and while I was far from a marauding villain I was also far from being some sort of self-sacrificing mythic archetype.
Between thoroughly dominating a group of criminals and turning them into my sycophantic servants, and immediately beginning to decide how to use my powers to turn mortals and gods into vampires so that I could create and wield bioweapons, I was clearly a pragmatic sort. I had designed breeds of vampires that were entirely focused on offensive and monstrous things and that lost all of their intelligence the moment they became vampires, as readily as I designed vampires who were ultra-beings possessing inhuman and god-like levels of charisma, charm, and influence.
I was now armed with the sort of power that allowed me to do things like curing everyone in a hospital of their illnesses, no matter what plagued them, with a thought. Alternatively, I could also infect someone with any virulent disease I wanted just as easily. Though, the most important aspect of this was that, at will, I could now turn anyone on Earth into one of my vampires.
So long as I had awareness of someone and knew their location I could transform them into my servants with ease. That combined with the incredible potency of my technological assistant, the Siren AI, could easily allow me to locate virtually anyone I wanted to know the location of and turn them into my vampiric spawn, after which I could make them as aware of me as I wanted them to be and eager to serve me in quite honestly any way that I asked of them.
The inside of the city hall was a surprisingly large place and as my companions and I made our way into it we found ourselves walking around seemingly aimlessly. The truth was that I knew where I was heading, and no one would be standing in my way, so my companions wordlessly, but not quietly, followed me.
"This place smells..." Titania complained, her words traveling from her mind to mine with ease due to the telepathic web Imani, Titania, and I were all a part of. With the web tethering our minds together we could transmit any of our thoughts based on intent alone, making this a very simple usage of a more complex psychic ability I possessed that allowed me to link together minds and create complex and potent psionic constructs made from mind-matter.
I ignored her complaint, aside from smiling slightly at it, and we continued to walk deeper into the city hall building. Once we stepped past the grand foyer which served as the building's entrance, we found ourselves standing in a long hallway that was lined with various doors. Behind each of the doors was an elected official or one of their staff members who was dutifully at work.
A small part of me was tempted to use my powers mischievously, not in so overt a way as to convert everyone in the building into my servants but rather to have fun and transform only a single person into one of my vampiric creations while giving it a subtle mission to do something such as converting its coworkers so that eventually I acquired influence over the building while still hiding in the shadows.
Truthfully, yet another facet of my personality that I was finding quite intriguing was how much I loathed being in the spotlight. Since the time of my ascension, it's been clear that I was supposed to become more of a protagonist but that was something I was still not used to. I was the sort of person who enjoyed being a shadowy force in the background, doing things with patience and with style rather than brute force. While being dramatic and direct could be enjoyable, depending on the circumstances, I was the sort who'd reliably pick less direct choices.
While I mused on that my servants and I made our way down the long hallway that separated us from the first of our chief objectives for the day. At the end of the hallway stood a closed, ornate door that separated us from the mayor of the city. The door was made of treated wood, and it was expertly designed by the same person who had designed the building itself. It took the three of us only a few moments to make it to the point where we stood right in front of the vast, eight feet tall door.
The very instant that we brought ourselves to the front of the door I mentally reached out and focused on the two women who had served me. As a means of rewarding the two of them, I opted to perform what I knew they'd only ever see as an act of kindness; I touched with my eldritch power and transformed the pair into the very first members of my ultra-vampire race.
The attosecond that the mighty divinity touched the two women who had worshiped and served him even before he existed, they eagerly and from the bottom of their hearts and souls accepted their master's gift. The two beauties joyously felt the potent ecstasy of their lord's touch and when power began to pour into them they both let out gentle sighs.
The dark being they worshiped was a creature of raw, often transformative power, and his self-granted lordship over vampires and other undead beings were among his most transformative powers. By touching the two women with the intent to transform them, to make them into creatures who had a minuscule, atomic-in-scale really, fragment of his power, the two women began to experience an unbelievably potent transformation.
Titania, a titan-born demi-goddess, was overflowing with power in the wake of her lord's corruptive touch. It filled every atom in her body with truly incredible, eldritch might, and an incomprehensible amount of both pious light and corrupt darkness.
Before she was a vampire, she was the child of a titaness of light, she was even the aunt of a goddess of the moon and a god of the sun, and that incredible font of power was an indelible part of her soul. Nevertheless, the living gods were creatures of unstoppable wills and their thoughts dictated reality itself so Antonio's powers were able to make Titania capable of wielding the powers of both light and darkness with ease despite their contradictory nature.
Imani, a potent priestess and loyal devotee of the eldritch divinity, was herself a potent being. She was a creature of faith and miracles, a creature who was born to do the impossible. For her, the eldritch powers of one of Antonio's ultra-vampires were easy to make sense of and slot into her soul. Her body gleefully, greedily took the powers that her master was offering her, and the look of sheer, almost sexual pleasure on her face as she began to transform into her new form was one that aroused the attention and desires of her master.
Both of the women, already supernatural beauties, became even more beautiful as their lord's will suffused them and turned them into even greater instruments of his will. Their faces became softer and more feminine, while their bodies grew more womanly and softer to the touch than they had been. They also grew taller, and their hair grew longer, but they grew even more dangerous all the same. Their enhanced looks, due to the supernatural beauty all of Antonio's ultra-vampires possessed, served as little more than a dangerous, alluring trap with which they could trick their victims.
The two women began to feel an array of desires grip their hearts, even as they felt their minds flood with truly vast amounts of information. Their senses were supercharged and causing their brains to flood with an astounding amount of knowledge about their surroundings, even as they felt their loyalty and devotion to their "Creator", or more aptly, their "Sire" skyrocket.
Their senses were now strong enough to see the face of their god subtly shifting with every passing attosecond due to one of his greatest abilities; "Eternal Ascension". Their noses were keen enough to pick up the subtle and yet unbelievably powerful scent of his pheromones. Even their ears were now sharp enough that when he next spoke they'd hear the tiny fluctuations in his voice as it evolved with every passing instant and inched closer and closer to a perfected state, a state where to even hear it would be enough to drain the wills from those who heard it.
Their creator, already perfect in their eyes, had now given them the gift of being able to further understand and appreciate his own divine perfection. To the two of them, one of whom was already a member of his harem, this was the ultimate gift they could be given. For the two slavishly loyal women Antonio had not performed an act of selfishness, but one of generosity and incredible selflessness.
My eyes were sensitive enough that I could make sense of every subtle shift the women who served me had just undergone. And as I glanced at them, keenly aware of every single supernatural alteration my powers had caused, I silently stepped forward and opened the door into the mayor's office. Though I did not step into the mayor's office.
The mayor, a middle-aged man in his early forties, was in the middle of attending to paperwork and so he did not look up at first. Instead, he kept studying and signing an array of paperwork situated in front of him, oblivious to the fact that he had visitors. He was a studious, diligent sort, and as I looked at him I felt eager to turn him into the newest person to worship me.
That said, while I possessed patience one of my servants, Titania, did not. She almost immediately began to try getting the man's attention, at first by clearing her throat. The sound was loud enough to be noticed, but the hard-working mayor did not register it. So Titania swiftly changed her approach.
"Good morning Mr. Mayor!" She said, cheerily, in an accent that would have been impossible for mundane mortal ears to place. She spoke English with the gentle affectations of someone who spoke the sort of ancient Greek spoken by the old gods of Greece, the titans. This time her remarks were registered by the mayor who finished signing the piece of paper on the desk in front of him and glanced upwards, his wary eyes leaving the desk and pausing when they reached the three of us. I smiled, genuinely happy to see the mayor, and stepped into the office.
