Chapter 37: Local Druid Gutted a Wooden Vampire for Spite! (featuring Alice the Perverted Hero)
Lady Adil, walking along the hallway, felt a sudden chill run down her spine. Her sharp senses honed through dragonsong wars were prickled, the intensity of mana was unmistakable. She knew that touch, that coldness that was so potent it froze the entire Northlands. Yet...why is there a tint of guilt as it pulled away like an embarrassed tendril?
Lady Adil glanced at a certain direction, blinked, realised the 'mana tendril' retreated from the room her old friend was assigned to, and narrowed her eyes.
"...like father, like daughter, no flairs."
The old druid groaned, the holy scripture in her hand has a tint of frost as the divinity inside the book protested like a child denied to enter a bath with her parents, literally. Her territory has already invited a vampire in, and now her mansion has been invaded by a daughter too curious about her father's new body, as weirdly specific as that sounds.
...enough of that pervert child-parent annoyance. Adil sighed as she continued down her journey. The capture of Manasseh must be hastened. With Alice's mana reaching Rouen, Manasseh with her Alice-mana silk naturally would detect her presence. And she knows all too well that when a hero's mana is used to track a prey, how the prey will lash out in fear. She needs answers, now, should the town of Rouen not suffer the consequences of her...personal squabbles.
The plump woman soon found herself outside and stumbled through the garden, before descending the stairs that led to the basement. The scent of earth and dust thick in her nose, as the candles that lined the walls flickered, retelling of a weeping presence that would soon descend. Adil prays she was wrong.
Arriving before a wooden door, she opened it like many times a prosecutor before her, revealing the stone chamber where that scarred vampire was held, his wrists and ankles bound by the ancient dragon runes, the bars before him made of the very bones of his kin.
"Hmm." The experiment has been well, but it seems short compared to the runes she carved. Adril frowned, as she glanced at the scarred vampire, or what used to be the 'scarred vampire'.
Rotten skins peeled away from the vampire's body, revealing woods as the bones, and leaves as the flesh, his eyes that once devoured like blackholes, could only twitch with branches and leaves fluttering. The creature was a mere 'throw-away expreriment', its strings pulled by Adil's runes carved into its wooden form, a grotesque parody of what already was a near-extinct species.
Adil, using the scared language of druids, here in the sacred mansion of one of the most sacred lands, now spoke as if to an old friend. The chant carried a sound not through air, but through the rooted heart of the vampire that would receive like blood, as the bile of Druidic enchantment coursed through his throat, impeding his speech, his mind, his sanity.