Mutation and adaptation — the only forces that allowed life to endure beyond the Great Cataclysm of Atheris.Life was stubborn. Even at the edge of annihilation, it refused to yield. The reaction between the world's scattered souls and the vast currents of Ura forged a will to persevere, carrying existence through the furnace of extreme heat and the abyss of absolute cold.
From the remnants who survived the Fall of the World, humanity clawed its way back from extinction. In that long, brutal recovery, people adapted, diverged, and reshaped themselves. Uratsu itself branched into countless expressions, giving rise to specialized augments.
But among them, one lineage stands apart. A lineage born from hunger, survival, and symbiosis — a class that wears its host like a mask.
The Parasitic Class.
It did not begin as the grand predatory dominion history now recalls. The earliest strains of the parasitic condition were humble — almost ignorable — presenting as a mild affliction of the lifeforce pathways, a subtle inefficiency in sustaining one's own vitality. Those burdened with it found instinctive compensation in the absorption of living essence from other organisms, at first for negligible benefit: a fraction more strength, a flicker more clarity, wounds closing a touch faster than they should. Yet in the legends of Old Earth, such traits resonated with familiar archetypes, and the afflicted began to resemble the nocturnal revenants of ancient human fear. Their skin, regardless of native complexion, grew pale and lustrous as moonlight; their ears refined to tapering points; teeth lengthened into predatory crescents; their forms became unnaturally poised, their gaze piercing, their movements too precise to be entirely human. In rare cases, their lifeforce manipulation warped their flesh into other shapes entirely — a mimicry of the shapeshifting myths from which their notoriety drew.
Over centuries, as the adaptation refined through selective inheritance and calculated breeding, the parasitic class grew to surpass the common Unveli in every metric that mattered: physical capability, cognitive acuity, longevity, and regenerative capacity. In the nascent years of the New World, this superiority translated swiftly into dominance. Pale-faced dynasties arose, weaving their bloodlines into vast hierarchical networks of nobility, consolidating wealth, war power, and political leverage until their authority became indistinguishable from the law itself. Their spires — towering citadels of glass-boned stone — pierced the skies in regions abandoned to the darker biomes, where the cycles of day were fractured and night lingered in a perpetual eclipse beneath the four cold moons of Atheris, the Quad-Lua. From these heights they ruled with elegance and predation in equal measure, their subjects reduced to chattel, drained at intervals like resources to be tallied and replenished.
To the common eye, their presence was a paradox of beauty and dread. The parasitic class did not merely appear lighter of skin; rather, their complexion seemed refined, like a reflection of the moon upon still water — muted in saturation yet imbued with a vitality that no sunborn tone could replicate. Even among those of naturally deep hue, the condition bleached the pigment into something otherworldly: supple, cold to the touch, and almost luminescent beneath the night's veil. This divergence marked them unmistakably, an eternal reminder that they were not as other men, for they were bound by both hunger and inheritance to a station beyond the reach of ordinary blood.
Yet dynasties, no matter how exalted, are mortal in the face of memory's vengeance. Like blood spilled on stone, the record of their cruelties could not be washed away; it seeped deep, staining generations until retribution became inevitable. The pale-faced nobility, once untouchable in their spire-thrones, found the air around them thickening with resentment. Their feasts of lifeforce, their slow bleeding of the masses, became the rallying cry of a thousand uprisings. The people had grown tired of the god-forsaken scourge.
It was in this era that the Unveli as a whole began to awaken to new thresholds of power. The art of augmentation had entered a renaissance, evolving beyond the narrow pathways of the past into diversified, energy-based systems that elevated even the common citizen. Energy-path augmentation reshaped the baseline: enhancements no longer lay solely in the grasp of hereditary bloodlines but could be grafted, cultivated, or engineered. Large-scale output augments — kinetic, elemental, gravitational, and more — became the birthright of the stronger among the other populations, leveling the field that had for centuries been skewed in the parasites' favor.
What followed was not revolt but purge. The great hunts began — the Exterminus — a sanctioned eradication of the parasitic genotype. Entire bloodlines, centuries old, were broken overnight. Their castles became pyres; their sigils, ash. In the eyes of the hunters, it was not murder but surgery, the cutting away of a rot too deep to heal. They crushed the pale aristocracy as one might grind out the last embers of a fire, ensuring the cancer could not regrow. And though a few fragments of that cursed heritage survived — scattered, hidden, diluted — the age of the parasitic reign ended in screams and smoke beneath the light of the Quad-Lua.
The world seemed to burn alight in that moment of history — cities choked with smoke, the four moons glaring down on the ruin as though bearing witness. Among the chaos walked one who did not fit cleanly into either camp. A young man, neither wholly predator nor wholly prey. His skin carried the warm tone of sunlit lands, his hair was dark as spilt ink, and his eyes lacked the predatory slits that betrayed the parasitic strain. At a glance, he could have been mistaken for human.
This was Dracul — a child forged from violence. His mother, an unsuspecting merchant's daughter, had been caught in the path of an unruly vampire whose hunger was matched only by his cruelty. The bloodsucker took his fill, left her for dead upon the stone, her lifeforce bled thin. Yet fate, or perhaps spite, had woven something different for her. She possessed a regeneration-based augment — strong, stubborn — one that refused to yield even to mortal wounds. She survived the night, unconscious but breathing, and when she awoke she carried more than just scars. Months later, without complication, she bore the child.
For years, Dracul's life was almost ordinary, save for the quiet disturbances that betrayed what ran in his veins. A hunger that was not hunger. Moments when his blood seemed to stir of its own accord, the faint pulse of haemomancy in his fingertips. His inheritance was muted, diluted enough that he could subsist on animal blood, the craving easily sated — at first. But appetite has a way of growing alongside curiosity, and his yearning for understanding was a slow-burning thing.
It was during a hunt that his path shifted. The quarry: an augmented basilisk, a nightmare of scales and venom. When the beast fell beneath his spear, something in him refused to let the kill go to waste. He tore free a section of its still-warm flesh, consuming it raw. The moment was more than brutality — it was alchemy. His blood accepted the foreign essence, dismantled it, rewrote itself. From that day, the sun no longer burned him; his skin grew more supple, almost impervious to heat.
He had discovered it then — the dormant mechanism of his hybrid nature. Dracul could break down the blood of his prey and integrate the genetic advantages buried within. It was not the indiscriminate hunger of his father's kind, but a calculated evolution, each kill a transaction in the currency of survival. And though the Exterminus raged across the land, he walked it like a shadow in neither army, quietly becoming something more than either side had ever seen.
He did not remain a shadow forever. Once Dracul refined his gift — his internal codex of enhancements — he stepped into the fire of the Blood Hunts not merely as a predator, but as a cornerstone of their war machine. The codex was not written in ink or carved in stone; it was etched into his flesh, each page a new sequence unlocked by the blood of his foes and allies alike.
His role began deceptively small. After completing his martial and field training, he accepted placement as a battlefield medic — a position few would have suspected to be one of the most dangerous vantage points in the war. From there, his proximity to the strongest augment users was guaranteed. They returned from raids bleeding, broken, desperate for someone to keep them from joining the dead. Dracul gave them that — tending wounds, stabilizing vitals — but each patient left behind a drop of themselves in his hands. A drop he never wasted.
Over months, then years, he drank carefully, never enough to draw suspicion. Each taste was catalogued in his living codex: the kinetic surges of speed-specialists, the searing output of pyrokinetic augments, the unnatural stillness of stealth-types. By the time his work was legend in the camps, Dracul carried within him fragments of dozens of bloodlines. He had begun to replicate traits once thought exclusive to the energy path class augments — without ever undergoing their formal augmentations.
It was this versatility that made him indispensable. His own blood, altered and endlessly adaptive, became the closest thing the Hunts had to a universal donor. With only a minor exertion of his shapeshifting faculty, he could shift his blood type to match any wounded comrade, restoring life where others could only delay death. In the chaos of the Exterminus, he was more than a medic; he was an arsenal disguised as a healer, a living archive of the strongest warriors the Hunts had ever produced.
by the next century these parasitic vampire class was driven to near extinction with Dracul at the helm of the violence but from within the shadows he was using thralls as mere figure heads people he had transfused blood with became subliminally influenced in there day to day actions.
Dracul stood before the sprawling mass grave, the earth cracked and darkened by centuries of rot. His face bore the faint creases of time, but his frame still radiated the strength of a man in his prime. In his palm rested a black half-mask — a limiter — now removed. He was two hundred and four years old, and the air around him seemed to bend under the weight of that age.
Before him hung the vampire who had drained his mother and slaughtered their caravan, its corpse slowly rotting. A jagged, black-iron spike jutted from Dracul's forearm, grown like a living weapon, now fused into a post that held the creature aloft. Around them, the other bloodsuckers he had hunted lay in heaps beneath the soil — this graveyard was theirs, a testament to his long, unyielding war.
At one hundred and three, he faked his death, vanishing from his family to pursue the final steps of his objective. His hair was already greying when he forged a false body, masking his absence. He had avenged his mother.
After his wife's death, he suspected his son had inherited none of his vampiric traits. That knowledge made the choice easier.
On a storm-lashed mountain peak, he drove his blade through his own heart. His body collapsed, fading into nothing as his purpose was fulfilled.
The hardened half-mask he wore—the cold, black steel that had weathered countless battles—reacted in that instant. It cracked under the force of his implosion, releasing a red flash of light and a wave of kinetic force that tore through the storm, parting the clouds.
Dawn broke, clear and unbroken, over the mountain.
By the 2830s, the black half-mask still existed — a relic whose purpose had long since bled into myth.
It was then that a squad of B-class Neohuman Knights descended into chaos. Their quarry: a feral child, no more than thirteen, who had lost control of his augment after being caught in the collapse of a volatile biome. Blood-tendrils, glowing with an alien vitality, lashed out from his body like the arms of some ancient predator. The boy had already brought down the beast that triggered the incident — a thirteen-foot bison that had torn through a public park during a school field trip. He had crippled it, wounded it, and finally drained it dry. In the process, his own body had been shattered — legs crushed, part of his torso obliterated — only for the missing flesh to regenerate before the knights' eyes.
The chase led them into the valley beneath a mountain peak, its slopes tangled in shattered foliage, toppled trees, and soil churned into deep wounds. The boy stood amid the wreckage, tendrils weaving a shifting barrier around him. One of the knights, blood dripping from a wound in his hand, clenched a chunk of hardened earth and felt his augment surge. Sparks flickered along the stone's edges as he rushed forward, wind augment boosting his speed to lethal precision. His eyes, blue and sharp with resolve, locked on the opening.
The earth cracked in his grip — revealing a warped slab of black steel. It pulsed faintly, like something alive. In the same motion, he struck. The impact landed square against the boy's face, knocking him back. The steel warped further, fusing into place over his left eye.
Red circuitry flared across its surface, the glow threading into the steel like veins filling with blood. The boy's body went slack, his breath steadying, the tendrils receding into nothing.
The squad exhaled as the threat passed. They emerged from the valley with the unconscious child in tow. The blonde knight, Javier, and the boy — Alucard Haemo — returned to the park, where emergency crews worked among the wreckage. Medics tended to the wounded, while the strange, half-forgotten relic rested upon the face of the boy who had nearly torn the valley apart.