Brandon didn't fight like a person anymore.
He fought like weather.
Vampires who came within twenty feet of him simply stopped existing in whatever shape they'd been a moment before, sometimes ash, sometimes something wetter and worse, the red lightning indifferent to which. He didn't call out techniques.
Didn't posture. Just moved through the vampire ranks with the mechanical, hollow efficiency of someone whose body had taken over so the rest of him didn't have to be present for what it was doing.
His crimson eyes had gone nearly black at the center, the color bleeding outward only at the edges. Ash streaked his face where tears had cut through it and then dried, and more ash settled over his shoulders with each new death, like grey snow that never quite melted off him.
He carved a corridor through three full ranks of vampire infantry before anyone organized enough to actually oppose him.
