Blood Shaper

The lone vampyr making it’s way in the general direction of Avalon’s border was unmistakably an “it”. Dehumanizing the enemy was an old tactic to make it easier for your soldiers to be able to kill other people, it’s not “murder” it’s “putting down dangerous animals” and such. Kay hadn’t been huge on real life military history and tactics back on Earth, he’d mostly focused on fictional military history and tactics, but he was pretty sure he remembered it being generally discouraged, and it had been heavily discouraged by Eleniah and other teachers of specific topics that had been brought in to help him become a well rounded King. In was somewhat useful in the short term, but in the long run it encouraged your military to underestimate the enemy, which was always a terrible idea. It also gave your enemy a driving reason to fight to the death without surrender. Treating people like animals meant you had no reason to stand by treaties or hold back from war crimes, so why would they surrender or stop fighting and why wouldn’t they escalate to atrocities of their own, maybe even before you could?

Vampyr as a whole lacked the intelligence to make that kind of logical leap and once the infection reached a certain point a vast majority of vampyr descended into something less than true sapience, their bodies and minds twisted into a state so feral they really did stop being people. The purpose of dehumanizing them was also to make it easier to kill them, although for a different reason. The person that had been warped into the monster was dead, even with the ones that still looked like the same person, and putting down the vampyr they’d become was a mercy, not murder.

This particular vampyr didn’t need any extra dehumanizing, it’d already become something so monstrous that there was barely anything left of the person it had been. It was still vaguely humanoid, with four limbs, a head, and a torso in roughly the right configuration, but the legs had shriveled and partially melted together into a small tail that dragged behind the body, two ignored feet bouncing off of the rocks and roots the vampyr dragged itself over. It’s upper arms had pulled back and solidified into wider shoulders, and the forearms had stretched out in jagged growths that made them both longer and covered in thorns of bone. It’s hands Were covered in smaller bone spikes and it had more growing from the tips of it’s fingers like claws. The head was the most unsettling part. The neck had shrunk back and pulled the head back into the torso. It was flat, like a lizard’s head, with the eyes where the poor person that had been killed and turned into this thing’s temples would have been. The two empty eye sockets in between where the eyes now sat quivered like nostrils as it swung its head back and forth, questing for the trail it had been following.

“That is the most warped vampyr I’ve seen that hasn’t actively seemed to dive into its corruption to try and kill me.” Kay muttered quietly, resisting the persistent urge to go over to the creature and stamp it out.

“Inspecting it doesn’t say too much,” Lauren told him from where she was crouched next to him. “But it is interesting and mildly informative.”

Kay looked for himself.

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Twisted Vampyr Spawn

Tier ? Equivalent Monster