The first thought that ran through Valen’s mind once he realised he was falling down a giant staircase was ‘Oh, crap.’

His second thought was ‘Oh, shit!’, followed by ‘Shit that hurts!’, ‘I think my spleen is bleeding,’ and ‘Holy mother of fuck how long does this bloody staircase go?!’

The answer to that last thought turned out to be somewhere between a shitload and fucktonne, so a pretty damn long time to be falling.

He wasn’t suffering alone, though. The high elf refused to or maybe forgot to let go of his collar in his surprise and held onto it even as they tumbled down the stairs.

The two of them took turns getting their arse kicked by the stairs that left a new cut or bruise with every step they tumbled down. 

About two seconds in, the high elf started punching Valen. He couldn’t really feel them, or rather, he couldn’t differentiate it from the far more painful hits the stairs were giving him. Still, he returned the punches out of principle, not really sure where he was hitting as the world spun around him but fairly certain that he was causing at least some extra damage.

Their tussling did little to halt the momentum of their tumble down the staircase. If anything it only made things worse, the struggle causing them to bounce from side to side of the thin wooden railings like living pinballs. Valen could almost imagine the two of them merged into a comical dust cloud of flailing limbs and flying onomatopoeia straight out of an old cartoon.

During one of the many times they slammed into the railing, both of them heard something crack. It wasn’t the sound of bone breaking. Valen knew what that sounded like to know this wasn’t it. It was something much, much worse.

The railing gave way, the wooden columns snapping at their thrown combined weight like dried twigs. If the Silver Star Society was as ancient as Johan said, then the structure must’ve been hundreds of thousands of years old with some definitely out of date safety regulations.

Valen and the high elf flew off the staircase, still clutching the lapel of each other’s clothes. Time slowed to a halt in his head the moment they no longer touched the staircase. He felt the cool sensation of wind rushing in between his hair that was quickly overshadowed by a whirlwind of racing thoughts.

Soon both he and the pissed off high elf trying to strangle him were going to hit the floor, but not before falling gods know how many feet first.

In that split moment, he weighed his options. His instincts told him to position the high elf’s body towards the ground in order to cushion his own fall. But in the end, both of them were on the same side. And if he was going to join this secret society, then crippling one of its members with a potentially debilitating spinal injury was probably not going to earn him any favours.

He could try positioning himself in a way that would have him cushioning the high elf’s fall. A well-fed vampire could regenerate from almost anything so long as their head and heart remained intact, so he was reasonably sure that he could regenerate from whatever injury he might sustain if landed on his back to keep his neck from snapping.

It would still hurt like a bitch, though, and he had no guarantee that this high elf wouldn’t continue wailing on him the moment he was incapacitated on the ground healing from a broken back.

But while he was overthinking everything, the high elf released his grip on his overcoat.

“SHIIIIIT!!!” screamed the high elf as he hurriedly attempted to stabilise his fall.

Valen did the same, minus the screaming.

He shot his legs towards the ground hoping to land on his feet. The long tail of his overcoat billowed in the air like the desperately fluttering wings of an injured insect while the body that wore it plummeted straight down like a bowling ball thrown off a bridge.

For some reason, Valen’s mind went to one of the comic book superheroes he used to read about as a kid. Night Fang, a half-human vampire billionaire playboy by day and gritty masked vigilante by night. The world’s greatest detective who solves crime with high tech gadgets, one of the most iconic being a cape that allowed him to glide in the air from one high rise building to another.

Valen always thought it was cool as all hell whenever he saw it put to film but knew better than to try something like that even as a naive child. But since he was falling anyway and his long overcoat was sort of like a cape…

Valen grabbed the edges of his overcoat and spread them out on either side of him like he saw Night Fang do so many times in so many movies.

A blast of cold crashing wind got caught against the outstretched cloth of his overcoat. It generated a little bit of extra drag to slow his fall. Or, at least, he thought it did. In the end it didn’t even matter.

The world may be full of magic that tore at the fabric of reality but the laws of physics were still mostly obeyed whenever possible, and the laws of physics dictated that Night Fang should’ve died the first time he jumped off a building.

Valen hit the ground feet-first. Whatever drag his little overcoat trick generated did little to slow his fall. Actually, now that he had the excruciating pain of at least one broken bone to provide clarity, he was pretty sure it did all of jack shit. It was still kinda cool to pretend to be Night Fang for that one second, though.

The high elf he’d been fighting landed on his left side with a loud thud that hid the soft crack of breaking bone.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” The high elf forced himself to stand up and leaned against a wall, his right hand gripping his dislocated and most likely broken left shoulder.

“Miscalculated.” Valen slowly stood up. He could already feel his healing factor knit the broken bones in his ankles back together. It felt like being dissected in reverse, but he put on a poker face to hide the excruciating pain while his nerves screamed in agony. “How’s your shoulder?”

Valen meant to sound friendly. He even intended to help the high elf fix his dislocation if he would allow it. But the effort of maintaining a poker face to hide his own pain made his words come out monotonous and stilted.

The high elf evidently took his genuine concern as sarcastic mocking, giving a low grunt back in response. He gripped his left shoulder and it let out a nasty-sounding crunch when he yanked it back into position.

“Not as bad as you’re about to be,” he said, storming towards Valen.

Loud, frantic footsteps shuffled down the stairs high above them.

“Wait, Chris!” shouted Johan’s voice, his panicked words hardly audible from how far up he was. “Stop fighting, I can explain!”

Valen steadied himself with a wobbly step back.

“I believe there’s been a misunderstanding,” said Valen to the pissed off high elf he now assumed was named Chris. “Your name’s Chris, yes? How about we-”

A chill at the back of his head warned him of an upcoming danger and a twitch in Chris’ right arm showed him where it would come from.

Valen swayed his upper body to the right, keeping his legs still while his ankles healed. Chris’ right fist missed him by an inch, shooting straight through the air where he’d once stood.

So much for resolving things with words. Time for Plan B.

Valen ducked under Chris’ armpit and hooked his right arm around his neck. Then, he threw himself forward to make him fall to the ground with him.

Chris’ own lingering vertigo made him easily topple onto the ground, crashing on his back with Valen’s full weight on top of him.

With no time to waste, Valen locked the right arm he had encircled around Chris’ neck with his left and squeezed them tight with every ounce of strength he had, trapping him in a triangle chokehold.

Even through the cloth of his overcoat and dress shirt, he could still feel, hear, and almost smell the blood flowing inside Chris’ neck come to an abrupt halt as his blood vessels were squeezed shut between Valen’s arms. With the blood flow in his carotid arteries restricted, his brain would soon be deprived of the vital oxygen it needed to remain conscious.

He was in the perfect position. Now all he had to do was maintain it, tolerating the ineffective punches Chris threw into his side in his desperation. Since he was forced to punch with his left arm, the one still in recovery after breaking his fall, he wasn’t able to do as much damage as he might’ve been able to with his right.

It still hurt quite a bit, but Valen sucked it up with the confidence that victory was assured.

Valen knew from prior experience that it took around ten seconds give or take to render a normal person unconscious in a chokehold. He’d just have to hold out until then. 

Or so he thought. Because unfortunately for him, Chris was not a normal person.

Alarm bells blared inside his head when he felt both him and Chris rise off the floor.

In a remarkable feat of strength, adrenaline, and sheer rage, Chris had managed to push himself back up on his feet with Valen still hanging from his neck trying to choke him out.

Thinking quickly, Valen proceeded to wrap his legs around Chris’ torso and threw his weight to one side hoping to imbalance him enough to make him fall again.

No luck this time.

Chris staggered for only a moment. He steadied himself, planting both feet firm on the carpeted floor before suddenly sprinting forward with Valen still hanging off his neck. 

Valen felt the wind against his back, then something much harder when Chris slammed him into the nearest wall. When that failed to make him loosen his chokehold, he swung him into a piece of furniture that reverberated with a loud metallic clang. Whatever it was, it had sharp bits which Valen felt bite into his back alarmingly close to his spine.

He let go of Chris in a panic, falling onto the ground as he did so. A heavy metallic object hit the top of his head and bounced off onto the floor. Valen glanced behind him to see a silver knight’s armour display minus a helmet, which now lay on the ground beside him. It held a spiked mace in one hand, which he guessed must’ve been the thing that stabbed into his back.

The chill at the back of Valen’s skull returned. He turned back to Chris just in time to see him raising a longsword high above head for a downwards swing. The blade of the longsword fell towards the ground, a sliver of cold steel lightning that Valen managed to dodge and roll away from without a second to spare. It buried its tip into the spot where he’d been sat, hacking straight past the black carpet and into the wooden planks beneath.

“Where did you even get that?!” said Valen, scrambling to his feet.

“The weapons of our predecessors decorate these halls.” Chris pulled the longsword out of the floor and held it to one side like a cricket bat. “I’ll use them to cleanse them of its vermin.”

The look in Chris’ green eyes, brimming with cold anger, told Valen that he was intent on killing or at the very least grievously injuring him. That sort of resolve wasn’t something to take lightly. He responded in kind, pulling out the butterfly swords that were sheathed on the small of his back and holding one in each hand.

Chris scoffed upon seeing his choice of weapons with blades shorter than even his own forearms.

“Lacking, are we?” he asked.

“On the contrary.” Valen held his butterfly swords the same way he would arnis sticks, one butterfly sword high and outstretched in preparation to attack while the other hovered low and close to his body to block any attack to his vitals-a practised stance made for fluid transitions between defence and offence. “I have nothing to compensate for.”

Chris’s eye twitched and he swung the longsword, screaming bloody murder as he did. Valen jumped back, allowing the blade to fly past inches away from his chest. The tip of the blade pointed at the floor, the momentum of its missed swing causing it to plummet the way of gravity.

In the split second that Chris was busy wrenching control of his sword back from the laws of physics, Valen trapped the blade on the hooked handguard of his right butterfly sword then twisted his wrist so that both blades were parallel to one another. They were locked in a stalemate with Chris trying to wrench it free and Valen trying to make him drop it, neither being strong enough to overwhelm the other.

The opening couldn’t be any more obvious. Valen had Chris’ sword, his only weapon, trapped by one of his swords while his other one was still free to attack at his leisure.

This would be an excellent opportunity to kill him. Stab him in the heart or slit his throat. He’ll probably thrash around a bit first, being the tough bastard he was, but the end would be inevitable.

But Valen didn’t want to kill him. 

Whether Chris realised it or not, they were on the same side. Because the threat Valen intended to fight alongside his order was one that would have both them and the entire world destroyed if nothing was done to stop it.

On a more practical note, it would also just be a bad look for him to ask the Silver Star Society for help right after killing one of their members.

Valen pressed the sharp edge of his free butterfly sword against Chris’ face, right above his eyes, and dragged it across his forehead in a deep drawcut that stopped just shy of his skull.

“Ack!” Chris kicked Valen in the stomach, forcing him to finally release the sword lock and stumble back catching his breath.

Chris wiped the blood from his face, his green eyes now tinted by the red droplets that had spilled into them. Somehow, he looked even more pissed off than before.

“You missed my neck, leech!” he roared in self-satisfied triumph.

“I wasn’t aiming for your neck,” said Valen, his voice calm as he waited for his moment.

Not a second later, more blood trickled down the deep cut Valen made on Chris’ forehead and into his eyes. His left hand stopped gripping his longsword for a moment so that he could wipe the blood from his eyes.

Valen made his move. He leapt at Chris while his vision was obstructed by his own blood and slashed at his right hand. His butterfly sword made a long gash across the back of his hand below his thumb.

The longsword dropped to the ground and a long stream of red blood spilled onto its blade. Valen had aimed for his extensor tendons, the muscles that gave his fingers their dexterity. With them damaged he could neither bend nor straighten his fingers. And since his left arm and shoulder took the brunt of impact when they fell from the stairs, he wouldn’t be able to hold a sword as well with it even if he was ambidextrous. 

Not that Valen had any intention of letting him pick it back up, of course.

Valen flicked both butterfly swords into an inverse grip. He charged into Chris’ chest, wrapping both arms around his body and throwing them both onto the ground. Once Chris had his back to the floor Valen stepped on his left hand to keep him from raising it in defence with one foot while pressing the knee of his other leg down on his right shoulder, just in case.

It was time to put his groundwork to use, but there would be no clean chokeholds this time.

The D-shaped guards of Valen’s butterfly swords slammed into Chris’ face over and over again. They left bruises and cuts in the shape of straight lines that all melded together into a messy grid of mottled red and blue flesh on Chris’ face.

“Will you please just calm the bloody hell down now?!” Valen shouted, letting out all the exasperation and pent up emotions of the very rough past few nights.

The irony of him telling Chris to calm down while he was turning his face into a hamburger patty was not lost on him but he couldn’t really be arsed to care at that point.

Valen flicked his right butterfly sword back into a forward grip. He intended to hammer Chris’ face with the butt of the handle when he stopped mid-strike.

Chris’ eyes were closed. At least, Valen thought they were. It was getting kind of hard to make out any of his face under all the blood and bruises covering it.

“Finally,” Valen muttered under his breath.

A long, cathartic sigh rose from the bottom of his lungs and into the cold air. He didn’t know what to expect when he took Johan up on his offer to come, but it sure as hell wasn’t this.

Whatever. Chris is unconscious. The fight was over. Now he just had to walk all the way up those bloody stairs again to finally meet the one who’s supposed to interview him. Whoever or whatever his interviewer is, Valen hoped they wouldn’t mind his hair being a tad bit messy on account of the arsewhooping he’d been on both the giving and receiving end of.

“Well that’s enough of that.” Valen slid his butterfly swords back into its sheath strapped to the small of his back. “Uuuugh.”

Valen rose to his feet. His legs buckled under his own weight and he steadied himself on a nearby wall, waiting for his body to finish up regenerating the rest of its cuts and bruises-both internal and external. His healing factor had managed to heal his shattered ankles in time for him to scrap with Chris but it wasn’t without repercussion.

Most races followed a more or less human body plan, but vampires had an extra addition in the form of a sponge-like vital organ protruding from their hearts. Known by the apt albeit slightly uncreative name of “The Blood Gland”, it stored every drop of blood a vampire drank during a feeding and distributed its nutrients across the body over the course of several days, allowing them to go without normal food should they wish and even strengthening their bodies enough to not burn up in sunlight.

If the vampire doesn’t drink blood, the blood gland will attempt to overfill itself with the vampire’s own blood until they eventually waste away from blood loss without bleeding a single drop. 

When a vampire is wounded, their body draws power from the consumed blood stored in their blood gland, converting it into magical energy to heal bodily injuries. Whatever it was about real blood that allowed vampires to heal themselves with it, blood substitutes lacked it. 

Blood substitutes merely tricked the blood into thinking that it had real blood inside it to keep it from destroying its own body, and while it did produce some nutrients to live off, it was barely enough to keep the vampire from starving. Vampires who chose to live solely off substitutes lived in a constant state of hunger without a healing factor to rely on if they were ever in danger, which they often were.

Valen had given his own blood gland little thought over the years. He didn’t think he’d ever even entertain the thought of feeding it actual blood until recent events quickly made him reconsider. Medical texts on vampires were already sparse to begin with. The go-to method for treating vampires’ injuries according to his studies was to just feed them blood bags until their healing factor kicked in, then charge them an exorbitant amount for it.

Now, standing calm but sore in places he didn’t know he had, he could almost feel his blood gland pulsating inside his chest like a second heart as it used some of the blood he drank from Enid to heal his injuries.

Valen looked up at the spiralling staircase, dreading having to climb it again. He squinted at the highest point of the staircase trying to see if his friends were on their way down.

“Johan?” he called out. “Louise? Enid? I’m coming up now but you might want to get a doctor down here for this guy!”

Valen only took a single up the staircase when he felt his body froze. All at once, the sharp pinpricks of magic engulfed his entire body. It wasn’t any regular magic either. Enid was already powerful by mage standards but the presence of this magical static made hers feel like a cosy blanket. It didn’t just crawl on his skin, it swarmed throughout his entire body, the sharp pin pricks piercing through his skin and all the way into his bones.

A voice that Valen never heard before responded to him from up the stairs and sent chills down his spine.

“I’m sure we can have that arranged.”

The voice was male, with an odd, almost old-timey version of the Dragonite accent Valen had only ever heard in period pieces set during the Age of Gods. 

His modern ears should’ve found the accent funny, but something about its tone horrified him on a primal level he couldn’t quite explain.

Despite being ostensibly that of a younger man, every word felt like it carried the weight of years far more ancient than the tongue that spoke them.

The figure of a slender man clad in an all black suit descended into sight on the stairs. His side parted hair was a greying silver despite his dark face looking no older than thirty. Saggy bags of bluish skin hung from his eyes, both of which were sealed shut. One of his hands slid down the top of the stairs railing while the other held the handle of a cane that he used to feel each step as he descended them.

No matter how you looked at it, he seemed weak. A blind man with the build of a beanpole that would topple over at a strong enough breeze. But his physicality wasn’t what made him dangerous.

The man in black was far above him on the stairs yet his magical power was so strong that Valen could still feel it overwhelming him. Either the man was about to cast the mother of all spells at him or, far more terrifyingly, this magical aura around him might just be how he was by default. A mage possessing magic so great that it constantly leaked out of him like a river spilling past the cracks in an old dam.

Valen gulped down his fear. His instincts warned him under no uncertain terms that, if he were to fight this man in black, he would surely die. No prolonged brawl. No clever strategies he could employ. No one to bail him out. The man would simply think of his death and his magic would make it reality.

“I don’t believe we’ve met, sir.” Valen tried his best to remain calm. “I came here by Johan’s invitation.”

“I know,” said the man in black. “Johan’s told me all about you, Mister Vasilis.”

Valen glanced back at Chris’ unconscious body, splayed out on the floor with a face that resembled an extra rare hamburger patty.

“I believe I’ve been part of a great misunderstanding, sir.”

“Then please, enlighten me.” The man in black paused his descent several feet above Valen. He turned his bony face towards Valen and opened his eyes, revealing nothing inside the sockets but hollow pits of pure blackness. The gaze of darkness itself, threatening to consume any soul that dared peer into it. “What did you do to my son?”