Loopshard

After a bit of looking around, they had found a shaded garden behind a fancy bathhouse where they could talk about their strategy for dealing with the Blue Pavilion. Fortunately, everyone was on the same page about a head-on attack being a terrible idea, which meant subterfuge would likely be the best way to take out the strongest bloodfiends before they had a chance to mount a counter-offensive.

Given that third- and second-generation bloodfiends possessed unique powers that they couldn’t just figure out by looking at them, it meant they would either need to lie in wait and spy on them for a while, or simply kill them before they had a chance to bring those powers to bear.

As with the previous encounters, Adam was in favour of the latter, while Luo seemed to think that it was better if they took their time gathering intel.

Although there wasn’t any clear-cut way to find the lair, both Beck and Emelia had suggested that there would be some kind of trail to follow, once they found powerful bloodfiends blending in amongst the citizenry.

So far, they’d only fought solitary vampires, with none of them seeming to offer any hints about such a trail, but the Blue Pavilion was different. For starters, it had several third-generation bloodfiends inside, as well as a second-generation in the penthouse-like office on the top floor in the middle of the crescent-shaped building.

Adam was certain the second-generation bloodfiend was running the show, and given how many lesser fiends and ghouls were shoved into the place, there had to be some direct link to the lair of the Patriarch, with Adam betting on it being found within the penthouse.

After about ten minutes of talking it over, their plan had taken shape, though it relied almost entirely on Adam and Kat, with Sofia and Luo providing support once the leadership had been eliminated.

Adam finished sculpting the flesh he’d harvested from the bloodfiends earlier and hidden under his clothes and Relics, and he gave it to Kat who put it on without any fuss. It was like a hooded poncho made of pale vampire skin, which would obscure most of her features. Adam also gave her the Noble’s Mask to hide her face, taking her Chimaera Helmet into his backpack for now, and she shifted her dark-grey hair forward to cover the rest of her face within the hood. With her Bloodfiend Claws, the poncho, and mask, she could easily pass as a poorly-disguised vampire at a glance, but there was one thing missing. Everyone looked at Adam in dismay as he spread his collected blood all over the inside of her poncho, turning it a pinkish-red in the process.

“All we need is to get past the security at the door and be led up to the penthouse,” he said as he made his ears longer and changed the shape of his hands to more resemble Kat’s weapons.