BS6 C19

This is Thursday's chapter.

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Even facing against a horde of nightmarish monsters most likely led by an incredibly powerful, if mad, antagonist, Kay’s job was not “go and pick fights with the enemy”. One single person capable of overwhelming power wasn’t going to be able to wipe out several cities worth of vampyr, not all at once at least, and Kay throwing himself into that kind of battle would be foolhardy, especially since they had no knowledge of what the enemy’s elites were like. Kay had singlehandedly shifted the Shatterplate War because he’d been able to counter several key part’s of the slapped together army’s threats and because he’d only faced limited numbers of peer strength enemies at once. WIth a seemingly unlimited number of Classes out there for the taking, there was always a chance that he could be countered or at least severely disadvantaged against an enemy.

That meant the first step was information gathering, which in turn meant that Kay didn’t have anything useful to contribute for a while, at least not immediately or directly. He had no way to back up or help the scouts, infiltrators, spies, and other intelligence gatherers under Isla’s command, because even if they didn’t know it Isla was pulling the strings of everyone that had a good chance of grabbing information for Avalon, so he did his best to focus on preparation. With competent subordinates handling the what they were best at and their subordinates taking care of the details and particulars that left Kay with only a handful of objectives to handle.

One of those was being there for the newly turned vampires, a group that was slowly but steadily growing as more tests were done followed by Zeia leading an undertaking to cure everyone facing the horrendous transformation into a vampyr that she could get a hold of. Zeia had discovered that the change the System had made to vampires had made it so that the venom of all vampires fought back against the corrupted version that made vampyr, and she theorized that the transformation into a vampire could eliminate or at least reduce other eldritch taints as well. Once she’d proven that to her satisfaction, she’d gone from just using Kay to save people to using any vampire she could get her hands on. Kay and Lauren both volunteered a lot of their time in the beginning, along with a few of the people from the village in Tumbling Rapids’ territory that had been saved from vampyr and changed the original way with Kay’s Skills. They’d been eager to pass along the kindness of being saved from a gruesome fate, and so were almost all of the people that were rescued via vampire venom.

Zeia took ruthless advantage of those feelings and new vampires that had been given adequate time to recover from their ordeal were then almost press-ganged into helping the next people down the line that were doing their best to resist the eldritch plague inside of them. Dozens of people were transformed into vampires and that then ballooned into hundreds as fighters and civilians that had fled the collapse of Nelam and the wave of vampyr attacks just far enough ahead to stay alive but not enough to stay untouched all had that daunting sword of Damocles removed from over their heads.

With there always being more than enough volunteers available to help Zeia with venom production and bites, Kay and Lauren were able to go back to their regular duties. Kay made sure that there was someone he trusted to be impartial watching everything, though. The full truth of what it was to be a vampire was still unknown, but there definitely was some kind of connection between “sire” and “child” vampires. Anyone that was definitely untrustworthy was cut from helping others, but where there was power over someone else there was always temptation, and people weak enough to give in to that temptation. Until they knew whether or not that connection between a new vampire and the one who changed them could be exploited or misused there would be someone, or many someones, checking in to make sure that it wasn’t. Zeia was too focused on saving everyone she could to pay attention to anything else, so some of the sneakier Blood Guard were tasked to blend in and keep an eye out.

Even after moving on to other projects, Kay still took time to regularly stop by and check in on the new vampires. Besides being the king of the nation they were taking refuge in, Kay was also the first of the new species they’d all become and something of an automatic leader. The entirety of the slowly growing web of connections between the vampires was open to him, whether that stemmed from him being the first vampire on Torotia and the connected title or because he was the progenitor of their vampiric bloodline, he could sense all of them in a distant and unexplainable way. All of that came with a sense of responsibility and he did his best to help everyone get back on their feet and recover.

Some of the new vampires saw him as a threat, especially those who had been from Nelam, others saw him as some superior being that they needed to respect, while others were fairly normal. He couldn’t personally help everyone, but he appreciated every time someone would stop him or ask for him in order to talk about what he’d learned about being a vampire, or just to talk about it. Being able to help someone, even if it was just one person sometimes, was uplifting for Kay and helped him get through the daunting proposition of what was to come.

The other major task Kay was involved in was one he hadn’t expected.

“Sorry, what?”

Cindy turned and gestured once more at the rows and rows of barrels behind her, all collected in one of the secret underground warehouses that had supported Avalon’s gunsmithing project before it had been moved out of Avalon City. “We need you to fill these up with your blood, and we’ll get more of them as you fill these up. We need as much as possible, and it needs to be your blood, not just blood you have. Blood actually from your body.”

Kay looked over her shoulder at several hundred barrels. “What do you need this much blood for?”

“Not just blood,” She replied, “Your blood. And I’m still in charge of Avalon’s military R&D aren’t I? It’s for weapons and munitions development.”

“Are you still in charge of that? Don’t we have people working directly for our military handling that now?”

“The publicly known stuff is being handled that way, sure, but I’ve still been running the secret side of things.” She shot him a small frown, “Did you not know that? Do you want me to stop?”

“Uh… You know I’d bet that I was told and them forgot about it with all of the other shit going on. Isla can probably pull up the exact date and time she told me, too.”

They both paused to see if Isla would say anything, but if she was hanging around them invisibly she didn’t reveal herself.

“And no,” Kay continued, “I’m not asking you to stop, I just wasn’t thinking about it. What kind of weapons are you going to make using my blood though?”

“Anti-vampyr ones,” She replied, the “Duh” clear in her tone. “You’re the best source of guaranteed anti-vampyr material we have and you make more of it constantly and at a high rate. Even if we just make bullets that do a lot of damage to them and spread them out among my gunners we’ll do a lot more damage than we would have without them. And I have much higher hopes than just situationally better bullets.” She told him with a big grin.

“… Do I want to know?” Kay asked tentatively, not entirely liking the excitement behind Cindy’s eyes.

“Definitely not yet. You don’t need to know the details on what are basically just a bunch of theories, and we still don’t have a hard limit on where exactly the System is limiting outside technology. I’ve got people plugging away at it, but I wasn’t a scientist and I don’t remember everything I learned in school so it’s not going that fast. Add that to the fact that different sciences or paths to technology seem to have different limits makes it really hard to say if something will work before we actually try.”

“But you aren’t going to do anything crazy?”

“Some of my ideas might end up needing some in depth conversations about when they should and shouldn’t be used, if they end up working at all, but nothing that we absolutely can’t ever use for fear of what they might do. They’ll be like nukes. Actually, they’ll be way less dangerous than nukes, but you get my point.”

“Uh… most everyone I know would consider nukes something we can never use for fear of the consequences.”

“Really, how did you deal with the Red Plague?”

“The what?”

“Oh, right.” Cindy reached up and mimed smacking herself on the head. “Different history and timelines of our worlds and all that. Not really important now, it was a thing that happened back on my Earth that you’ll never get to visit but the only thing that could permanently end the threat was a small nuke. Guess you never had any events like that.”

“No, no we didn’t.”

“Well kudos to that Earth. But yeah, the ideas I have aren’t actually like nukes, they won’t have anywhere near the damage potential or long term consequences. They’ll be closer to I don’t know, traditional ICBMs then? With high explosive warheads and not nuclear ones. Really dangerous and you have to make sure you’re limiting their use to the right situations, but no actually nuking people.”

“I… You know what? Sure. Bring me a proof of concept that actually works for something and then I’ll get growly about “what the hell have you made!?”, there’s no point yelling at you about a thought that hasn’t been tested.”

“I appreciate that. Now fill all of these barrels with your blood.”

Kay paused before willing some of his blood out of his arm and into the nearest barrel. “Ever think about how weird your life has gotten after ending up getting isekai’d?”

“All the time!” Cindy cheered, “Isn’t it great?”