I leapt first, cutting outwards with a vicious slice that on a mortal or lesser being would've left them scooping up their intestines. Instead, with terrifying ease Volmyr simply leant backwards as though shying away from an unwanted kiss, not even concerned at my feeble attempt at ending the fight before it could begin.
Ducking aside from another strike he threw the scabbard aside, the skin of his face tightening perceptibly before roaring with hatred borne of centuries of corruption. I quailed under his overwhelming rage, even as he cut downwards with a strike meant to hew me from forehead to groin.
Without thinking I flicked Sunchild upwards, blocking the strike with a clash of metal that briefly left sparks floating in the air before the soul-consuming blackness of the blade drained them dry. The impact of the blades ran through my arm as the light consuming edge of the Nightkiss slid down the full length of Sunchild's downward facing blade. Suddenly thrown off guard, Volmyr grunted in surprise as his sword suddenly fell away from where he had aimed it, sinking three quarters of its length into the marble floor as though the stone was made of nothing more than heat softened wax.
For a moment we stared in shock; I at the impossible cutting power of the weapon that could cut through a metre of solid rock, and he at the sword in my hands that seemed capable of withstanding such an edge.
"A child of the dawn?" He murmured, gripping the deadly night-black blade with both hands and heaving it out of the floor. "You are just full of surprises... Aren't you whelp?"
I didn't answer, suddenly realising that this was a fight unlike anything that I had ever encountered and trying desperately to ignore the fact that my body had gone prickly with cold sweat. With a chilling roar that was almost consumed by even worse laughter he finished ripping the sword from the floor before hurling himself at me with inhuman speed.
The Nightkiss sung as it was swiped through the air, the whip-cracks of the deadly blade feeling like hammer blows to my gut as I struggled to hold my own against the creature. Months of practicing against the incredible skill of Belisarius and Viconia's Drowish reflexes had turned me from a middling swordsman to one capable of holding his own in nearly any tournament in the Empire, but in the nightmarish depths of the corrupted ruin I found myself little more than an insect. Volmyr had lived for so long, and had grown in power with every feeding that even men such as Belisarius would have been nothing more than a mewling babe. Only through unleashing my control on my vampiric side and receiving its enhanced reflexes and speed was I capable of keeping such a foe at bay.
I was strong enough to wrestle a juvenile minotaur and tear off limbs, but Volmyr was stronger by a considerable margin. I was fast enough to cross a hundred meters in seconds, and yet he was able to leap behind me in the space of a blink and within a dozen blows I was convinced he was merely taunting and toying with me. I was saved by one strike by the unnatural substance of the daedroth scales that resisted the haunting edge of the Nigthkiss just long enough for me to instinctively swipe it away and deliver a riposte that hit nothing but air.
The whole time the vampire ancient taunted me, his laugher ringing mockingly in my ears as he ducked and weaved around my strikes made pathetic by his nature.
Roaring with the full strength of my vampiric and daedric nature my face split in a series of sickening cracks that only just registered as pain to my tortured mind. For a moment he stopped, once more surprised as my mask was pushed down by my shifting features to reveal a face of a daedra staring into his blackened soul. My following attack was even faster than before, forcing him to stagger backwards and flip backwards with an impossible swiftness unmatched by anything short than a falling star.
"Impossible." He grunted from his position on top of a desecrated statue, jutting forward like a hideous gargoyle of blood and depravity. By now his words were so animalistic that I could barely understand them, his speech little more than a collection of strung together hisses and snarls.
"You wanted to know what it is like." I snarled, every tooth in my lengthening maw sliding further out and sharpening before his eyes. "Let me show you."
"Daedra blood or not, you are no match for me!"
We hurled ourselves at each other once more, our forms becoming little more than blurs as we slammed together and crossed blades. Leaping from the top of the statue he swung the corrupted Light of Dawn in another arc that left one of the statues to quiver as half a finger width of stone was sliced into nothingness. The blade was incredible, and had been fashioned in such a way that despite its ninety centimetre blade, it was capable of being wielded with one or both hands. Sunchild, while peerless and capable of withstanding the corrupted sword was significantly shorter and left me with a considerable disadvantage in reach. This was something that Volmyr used to its full potential, swinging wildly and leaving more than one statue to teeter precariously before sliding into destruction after being entirely cut through.
As I danced and parried with Sunchild, somehow my dagger had found its way into my other hand as I relied more and more on the burgeoning strength of the daedra infused corruption of my body to keep his superior strength and blows at bay. More and more I found myself stepping closer to him to enter inside the incredible reach of his tainted blade, slowly forcing him to give ground through superior footwork from several hours of training with Viconia and the blades.
The daedra in my vampiric soul turned my heart and mind into ice, consuming and banishing my fears until I was an empty core, void of all emotions. Volmyr however was becoming more and more bestial with every blow that I parried or that narrowly missed me; his building rage creating tiny chinks in his defences that I was slowly able to take advantage of.
For the first time in months I was tiring, even as his attacks became more and more identifiable with his building rage. While I was finding it easier to dodge, parry and counter his every blow, the power and speed that he put into every single one was another story entirely. Soon my arms and body were burning with exertion while he seemed to be as fresh as he was when we started.
Within minutes we had traded blows and strikes that would've taken half an hour to conduct. Every strike could and did shatter marble with their power, moved faster than the eye could see and without my enhanced reflexes I wouldn't have had a hope against such a being. I understood how an experienced, well equipped vampire hunter like Threnodir could have been captured and killed by such a foe. He was stronger than a minotaur, faster than lightning and had the stamina of a mountain.
Volmyr finally managed to pin me in place, forcing our swords together and pushing hard that my boots skidded through the muck and gore on the floor. Growling and forcing my weakening muscles to lock tight, our blades were crossed, snarling visages less than a hands breadth apart until he slammed my back into the wall. With nothing more than our swords between us I could feel his rank, rotten breath on my face and feel the spray of saliva as he snapped and bit at me. Splattering across my armoured breastplate, the strands of drool from his blackened jaws soaked everything above my sternum as he attempted to sink his fangs into the flesh of my skull. I tried to lever him off, pressing upwards with all my strength but it was all to no avail, it was almost like he weighed more than a minotaur titan. Grimacing with sheer effort I only just kept the light-consuming edge of his blade from the flesh of my shoulder, feeling the pressure of the blade as it came to rest against my armour.
With the maniacal gleam in his eye, and still snapping and biting Lord Volmyr pressed down harder and I found myself crying out as I slid down the wall. My armour was creaking and groaning under the strain, the pressure of Nightkiss making itself felt as it began to slide through my steel pauldron with all the resistance of a knife through butter. There was a sensation of weight against my shoulder as it cut through the steel plate and found the unnatural protection of the daedroth scales, but there was less than a second before the light consuming blade defeated the scales protection to find the meat underneath.
For a second I locked eyes with Volmyr, realising with a start that if I remained within this position I was dead, and realising that I still had more than one trick left up my sleeve. With a savage headbutt right into his snarling mouth, I felt his front two teeth shatter and a fang punch into the skin of my forehead. There was satisfaction from the impact, which was almost enough to drown out the flare of pain from the blow and the hint of a headache that would follow. Despite the brief, short lived respite, it gave me enough time to concentrate and shape-change my form to escape.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Tingling with the customary wave of nausea and pins and needles I faded into mist that broke and flowed around him, the pressure of the sword at my shoulder fading into nothingness. Shrieking with rage and surprise Volmyr suddenly lurched forward, smashing face first into the wall with a sickening crack of breaking bone. I floated around him, condensing back into my human form even before he had impacted into the solid marble, cutting out with Sunchild into his now undefended back.
Yet again I underestimated his speed and strength, my blade somehow parried millimetres from his spine even as he twisted around and roared with a face even more gruesome with his nose now smeared across his face. Nightkiss once more flickered up through the space between us, batting Sunchild away with the clash of metal and the sound of tearing silk. Short lived and momentary, the surprise at my other ability faded away as he launched himself into another blistering series of slicing and cutting blows.
Using everything I had I twisted and turned, relying on my recent training and ability with a sword to fend him off, and becoming mist every few seconds to effortlessly bypass blows that should have bisected me where I stood. The surprise was wearing off, but the transformations allowed me to take advantage of his overreaching blows and increasing rage to come to grips with me. The infinitely sharp blade of the Nightkiss had left me bleeding from several wounds up my arms and down my legs outside of the protection of the daedroth scales but now Volmyr too was suffering. With every gash on my person I had repaid him with a worse one.
Where a slice had been carved into the side of my jaw, barely enough to register I had managed to cleave away a great hunk of his cheek that left him bereft of an ear and revealing the darkened hole of his mouth. Where he had gashed my arm just below the elbow, I had hacked down on his own, buckling the elven armour and opening a smile in his forearm had severed some of the minor tendons. He was missing a finger from a strike that had only narrowly missed disarming him, and part of his thigh jetted corrupted ichor down his armoured leg.
The Nightkiss was incredible, and several of the minor injuries I had sustained had remained closed for several seconds after being suffered, the keenness of the edge not making itself felt until I moved or twisted a certain way that would open the wounds in slivers of agony. Continuing to push through the pain of dozens of close calls I could feel my confidence build as I looked into his ruined face.
Blood streamed from his mashed nose, front teeth between his incisors nothing more than broken pegs and his whole face was slowly blooming into a terrible bruise from the impact into the marble wall. At some point during the fight after I managed a lucky slash he had cast off a damaged sleeve of his armour from the bicep down, leaving his heavily muscled arm open to the air. The slash had cut deeply into his rerebrace, slicing through skin, muscle and scouring bone. Wet meat glistened in the faint light of the overhead welkynd stones stuck in the ceiling and I could see the whiteness of bone through the opened gash in his arm. Despite suffering a wound that would've debilitated a lesser being, he continued like it was nothing more than an insect bite, forcing his ruined arm to obey his commands with nothing more than ferocious will.
My blood was pounding in my ears, my breaths ragged and short as I struggled to quell the burning in my limbs. Pain flared in almost every part of my flesh as the dozens of minor cuts and wounds mixed together until my body was screaming at me in its torment. My dagger skittered across the congealed bodily fluids, Sunchild was knocked aside with a sweeping blow as I futilely slashed at his wounded arm once more, and as time slowed down he twisted like a fencer, wielding the enormous curved blade like a rapier as he punched it through my armour, my shoulder and pinned me to the wall like a fly.
Erupting into flames of agony, my left shoulder first burned with cold fire, before numbness flooded the limb and most of my torso. I roared with my anger, feeling the vampire lord twist the peerless blade in my arm with utter contempt before ripping it out of the wall and me and leaving me to slump to the floor utterly spent. A fresh layer of gore sprayed across the mass on the floors surface, my own lifeforce being added to the layers and the history of torture and death that had stained every surface of the hall.
"I haven't had a fight like that in centuries." He gasped, standing over me and finally showing weakness as I knelt defeated before him. My shoulder throbbed with a dull agony and I swore and cursed at how he had stabbed me in the same place where the crossbow bolt had imbedded itself. The ruined mess of scar tissue hurt even more than if he had stabbed me in a healthy portion of my arm.
Sorrow and defeat clawed at my mind and I couldn't help but think of Viconia as the vampire lord stood gloating over me. The realisation of how I wasn't going to be coming back to her hurt more than the fresh hole in my arm or the gashes across my body, and a mixture of anger and sadness tore my guts apart.
"But you manage to hurt me." The stinging blow across my face loosened teeth in my jaws and I spat blood, looking up at him through a face that was all daedra. "That was annoying."
I struggled to rise but he simply swapped the Nightkiss over to his bared right arm, pushing his boot into my chest and forcing me against the wall. "You ruined my armour, killed my coven and actually managed to draw my blood. For that I'm going to make this slow and painful."
A wad of blood struck him in the eyes and I grinned with a mouthful of fangs at his rising anger. Swiping out the Nightkiss to flick my blood clear of its blade he held it up to me, almost pressing the edge of it across my face.
"I think you can keep your eyes. To begin with at least. Once I'm finished with the rest of you I'll stuff them down your throat."
With the darkened void of the blade so close to my eyes I couldn't help but stare at it as he moved it closer to take my nose away. There was still some blood coating the gleaming blackness, but not much of it was my own. There was corrupted gore streaking the blade from where he had flicked it to his side, the gaping wound in his bicep having covered his arm and hand with streamers of his foul blood. Where it touched the midnight coloured metal there was swirls like oil on a pond, shifting and moving in the blackness and I found myself staring as flickers of light began to dance within the corrupted metal.
The grin that I revealed to him stopped him for a moment with puzzlement, the look of triumph glazing over into confusion as he followed my gaze to the blades edge.
"Oh no." he whispered, looking at the swirling lights as they spread and began eating away at the foul blackness of the sword.
"I'm guessing that you bound the sword with your blood." I hissed, laughing through another welling mouthful of blood even as he stepped away from me with the look of utmost horror on his face.
There was a glow in the blade now, like the first stars of an evening as the sun fell below the horizon, or fireflies in a predawn mist. Sparkling and dancing they crept up the blade, leaving silvery trails as they gnawed their way through the droplets of Volmyr's blood like worms consuming a rotten tree.
"No..." The fear coursing through him matched the glow as it continued to build and reveal his sunken, crushed and gashed features. "No. No. No! No! NO!"
He began shrieking with pure terror, and I watched as he began to panickily attempt to wipe the blood off the glowing blade. Wiping such a keen edge with little more than his bare flesh didn't succeed in doing anything more than gashing him palm open in a glistening smile and smearing even more of his tainted blood on the enchanted blade. Screaming, pleading, chanting foul necromantic incantations over and over the light continued to build almost in spite of his every action. The darkness of the Nightkiss drank heavily of his blood as it replaced more and more of itself with a burning, intense light. Every drop of his blood on the blade's surface stripped away the layers of corrupting spells and enchantments that he had spent so long and so many lives in corrupting the Light of Dawn. Bound to him in blood through the foulest abilities and spells necromancy had to offer it was his blood that broke the shackles on a weapon intended to slay our kind.
Bursting from the swords edge at random, the dazing beams of light baked the blood on the floor into dust, and wherever it touched his skin it left him screaming and horribly burned. Flesh peeling and blistered red raw he dropped the sword with a clatter before it sunk several centimetres into the marble, coming to a rest and hiding its edge from view for a second. The ancient vampire was screaming and clutching at his face, an eye had been burned from his skull and left little more than a blackened strip of skin and bone that matched the other side where I had cut half his face away. Burning fragments of his flesh trickled from between his fingers as the disconnected strips ignited, showering his hand and arm in blood and ash as he tried to cover the agonising burn.
While powerful, the beams of light had no effect on me. Just like the sun shining outside of the desecrated ruins the light from within the corrupted blade did nothing to me except allow me to use my real eyes to see for a few moments. Distracted with the pain flooding his face and arm from the light's sting Volmyr failed to stop me as I dived forward, grasped the exquisite hilt of the Nightkiss and jammed it deep into his body through his groin.
Shrieking with the intrusion his hands dropped from his sliced and scalded face, grasping my hands in a crushing grip that crumpled my demi-gauntlets. Roaring, ignoring the protests of my wounded shoulder I heaved on the blade with all my strength, lifting him from the floor until the hilt was left pressing against the inside of his thighs and the tip of the blade was trapped somewhere in his chest. The ninety-centimetre blade sliced through his insides without any resistance, leaving the ancient vampire lord staring at me through his remaining eye, dribbling gore from his shattered mouth and screaming as the burning light of the sword began to flense him from the inside.
