Bloodsteel Hunter
Episode 3 – Hollow Eclipse, Hollow Crown
The chains of liquid steel coiled tighter around the Vampire Lord's body, ringing like a dozen cathedral bells as they locked tooth-to-socket and hardened. His aura bucked against the bindings—black wind, crimson heat, the stink of old graves—but my steel just climbed him like ivy with a grudge. Links webbed across his ribs, a collar bit his throat, and a bridal mask of razors sealed his mouth shut.
"Hold still," I said, voice flat. "You're supposed to be royalty. Try not to die like a clown."
He tore the collar open with a convulsive surge of blood magic and bellowed, the sound chewing the air. My restraints detonated outward. Shards of me pattered across the rubble like mercury rain; then they crawled back, drawn to my ankles, knitting me whole in a beat. A hunter's head—one of the randoms who'd tried to speak to me earlier—rolled past my boot. Level 19. He'd be back tomorrow. Lucky him.
The HUD bled across my vision, cold and clinical.
[Mission: Vampire Lord of Hollow Eclipse]
[Target Health: 62%]
[Your Status: Level 1 God — Permanent Traits: Infinite Stamina | Infinite Ammo]
[Rule Reminder: Only bounty kills grant levels.]
"Sixty-two," I muttered, lighting a cigarette from the hiss of my own blade. "You're dragging this out."
The Lord lunged. I let my sternum open like a curtain—steel rippling aside—so his claws punched through nothing and he stumbled. My answer came razor-quiet: a medium blade growing from my right wrist, quick and mean, stabbing under his jaw and out through the palate. Black blood misted the air.
He backhanded me hard enough to fold a tower. My body smeared across masonry, splashed, scattered—then gathered back in a silver blink. I stood, dust rolled from me in sheets, cigarette somehow still between my lips, and grinned with dead eyes.
"Keep hitting me," I told him. "I like the percussion."
His pupils narrowed to slits. "You were forged wrong, spawn."
"Complaining about workmanship to the weapon? Cute."
The sky cracked. A seam of darkness peeled open above the cathedral ruins, a wound between worlds, spilling the Lord's personal passage—the Umbral Corridor. He leapt for it, cloak flaring like a vulture's wing.
I didn't run. I poured—my lower body flattening into a silver tide that shot after him. Steel lines jetted from my shoulders, harpoons with barbed intelligence, and I let Infinite Ammo flex: a storm of micro-darts, each the size of a mosquito's tooth, whistled past the Lord. Most he dodged. Enough didn't. They sank and latched and whispered through the tether I'd left inside them.
Target marked. Direction fixed. Scent of blood written into metal.
Limitless chasing senses aren't poetry. They are numbers—vectors stitched across dimensions, the math of murder. I vaulted the world-wound after him.
We fell through three realities in a heartbeat.
First: a dead ocean of glass. Wind crawled like broken music across a surface cracked for light-years. The Lord skated, blurring; I skated faster, liquifying my feet into blades and letting every stride cut and reform. He hurled spears of frozen blood; I ate them, metal blooming, the projectiles swallowed and metabolized into a fan of steel petals that I vomited back as a rail of needles.
Second: a desert of bones. Towers of femurs, dunes of teeth. He dug shadows from marrow and made a whip of night; I made a loom of chain and braided his whip into my restraint. We crashed through a skull the size of a city and were dusted with powdered centuries.
Third: a tunnel of violet thunder. The corridor here was math and hate. He collapsed into a smear of bats and streaked past. I cheated: melted into a ribbon, slid along the vector of my own tracer-darts anchored in his meat, and came out of the umbra a breath behind him.
We burst back into his throne world—crimson moons, bleeding rivers, organ pipes of castle spires. The Lord landed on a causeway of black stone and spun, cloak slashing, eyes full of the smug religion of old monsters.
"Run, godling," he spat. "I am the eclipse that eats gods."
"Yeah?" I flicked ash. "Open wide."
I let my arms go langour liquid and then thin—hair-thin filaments of steel whispering out, an invisible web that spaced itself across twenty meters of air. My left hand turned into a reel; my right, a spool. He charged. I stepped aside, expression bored, and he cut his own charge to ribbons on a net he couldn't see. Not enough to kill—but enough to remind him he bled.
He howled. The moons dimmed. A wave of blood magic thundered down the causeway, flipping stone like playing cards. I braced in a sled of hardened steel and rode the shockwave. He was on me the next instant, both claws spearing for my skull. I allowed penetration; I am not flesh. His hands plunged into my head and came out the back with a fountain of silver. His grin was cathedral-wide for one glorious, idiot second.
Then the fountain snared him.
I shut like a beartrap, head knitting around his wrists, the steel locking. He tried to tear free. I set my jaw—literally—and my teeth grew into hooks that anchored into his forearms. A maw of thin razors flowered open inside my throat and started chewing. He screamed, the sound strangled.
"Swear you taste like cheap wine and old velvet," I said around his arms.
He pulsed a nuclear heartbeat of blood power that blew my skull apart. Fine. My steel rained down, pulled itself into a crouch, and reshaped my face with a bored sigh. "You always this dramatic, or just insecure?"
The HUD ticked.
[Target Health: 47%]
Finally.
He tried the corridor again. I had learned his rhythm. A spear of me shot into his back—no wider than a thread, no faster than light—the harpoon entering at the shoulder and exiting at the heart. He faltered, stumbling mid-leap, and that was the window.
"Come in," I hissed, and opened.
I don't mean I opened my arms. I opened the Foundry—the part of me that remembers the kiln, the machine-priests, the white room where I learned the difference between screaming and singing. My torso unfurled into a sphere of interlocking plates. Rings nested. Teeth lined those rings. At the center, a crucible spun up, magnetic and obscene.
I swallowed the Vampire Lord.
The sphere sealed. My legs rooted to the stone as braces. The Foundry sang—a subsonic dirge that turned spires to powder. Inside, razors rotated at relativistic pettiness, cutting and cutting. The Lord's aura crashed against the inner plates, burning them black, flaying them red; I shed and regrew metal like snakeskin, infinite ammo cannibalizing itself into fresh mill, fresh edge, fresh sin. His blood became heat. His heat became motive. Motion became more teeth.
"Don't worry," I said to nobody. "You resurrect in twenty-four. This is basically a spa."
He detonated. The Foundry ballooned, cracked, and vomited a hurricane of black gore. My braces shattered. I skidded back a hundred meters and caught myself on a coil extruded into the stone like a grappling line. The sphere folded, dented, but closed again. Not perfect, but uglier tools do uglier work.
[Target Health: 29%]
We were getting there. The problem with royalty is they die loudly. He learned—finally—that being inside me was worse than facing me. He tore free in a geyser of shadow and vaulted high, opening his mouth to eclipse the moons. Power flowed. The sky dimmed to the color of a bruise. His final litany rode the wind:
"Grave Eclipse."
A dome of night crashed down—the Lord's arena, all rules written in his alphabet. The air thickened to syrup. The stone softened to blood. My steel felt sluggish, like wading through a dream.
He appeared behind me without moving, claws already in my spine.
"Godling," he hissed into my neck. "You do not kill me in my night."
"I don't kill you in anything," I said, deadpan. "I kill you wherever I'm bored enough."
His claws scissored. I split—top to bottom, a zipper opening—and let him fall into me as if he'd stepped through a door. My body closed above him, turning us into a matryoshka of murder: Lord in the inner cage, my Foundry around him, my outer form standing casual on the causeway, cigarette between lips, hands in pockets.
He raged. He burned. He pried at plates and chewed teeth. I held.
"Little backstory while you thrash," I said, voice echoing in my own ribs. "I woke up in a lab they called the Kiln. The Archivists in their white coats poured me from a verse where gods are cheaper than bullets. They wrote rules into my blood. I ate the rules. Then I ate the Archivists. I like the taste of owners. You? You're dessert."
He made the mistake every ancient thing makes: he tried to outlast infinity. That's cute when the thing you're fighting doesn't have Infinite Stamina and a body that refuels off your tantrum. Every surge of his aura fed my crucible; every tantrum gave me sharper teeth.
When he finally tried to flee as smoke, I salted him with tracer-darts from the inside—millions of them, dust-fine—each one a tiny prayer to physics. The smoke couldn't coalesce without cutting itself to fog. He condensed anyway, screaming, and that gave me the shape I needed.
I made the blade simple.
Medium length. Narrow profile. The first thing I learned to be.
It grew through his heart and then closed into a fist the size of the moon, a knot of steel fingers squeezing a core of undead meat. I didn't swing. I didn't flourish. I crushed until the sound stopped.
Silence dropped out of the dome of night like a stone into a lake.
Outside, my body opened its ribs. Inside, the Foundry let go.
The Vampire Lord fell to his knees on the causeway, more hole than person. He tried to speak and produced a handful of bats that evaporated. He looked up at me with ancient hatred and newer fear.
"Tell me you'll curse me," I said, stepping close, "so I can promise to ignore it."
He lifted a trembling hand.
"Cute."
I took his head with the blade I was born for. One clean, bored line.
The world exhaled. The eclipse peeled back. The moons bled normally again. His body spasmed, tried to knit; the system didn't care.
[BOUNTY KILL CONFIRMED]
[+1 PERMANENT LEVEL]
[CURRENT LEVEL: 2]
[SPEED INCREASED]
[PAYMENT: Issued to Account — Exchange Available]
[NOTE: Target will resurrect in 24:00:00]
The number 2 burned under my feet, stark on black stone. The speed boost was immediate; the world ticked a fraction slower, every leaf of ash lazily twirling instead of falling.
I crouched by the severed head. The eyes still worked, because gods are petty that way. "You get another shot tomorrow," I told it. "Bring friends. I like shows."
I flicked ash onto his tongue and rose.
Portals opened across the causeway like a bouquet of gun barrels. Contracts flickered, wanting, needing, begging.
[New Random Contract: Warlock Queen of the Sable Choir — Level 102]
[New Solo Contract: Titan of the Data Deep — Level 140]
[New Crew Contract: The Dogeaters (5 Targets) — Levels 8–33]
[Modifier Option Unlocked (Level 2 Perk): Time Attack / Blind Run / Dimensional Gauntlet]
[Reminder: Kills outside missions do not grant levels.]
A handful of surviving hunters blinked in at the edge of the ruins, the system spitting them back to watch the aftermath. One of them—a woman with ash-grey skin and a neon halo tattoo—stared at the Lord's head and then at me.
"You did that at Level One?" she said, voice cracking.
"I also smoke at funerals," I said. "Want a light?"
She shook her head. "You're not a hero."
I smiled. "No shit."
The HUD pulsed a small, mercenary blue.
[Exchange: Redeem Materials — Black Hemoglobin Resin (S-Rare), Eclipse Bone (R), Choir Tithe (???)]
[Tip: Redeem equals gear. Gear equals flair. Flair equals faster kills.]
I strolled past the head, past the still-twitching body. I kicked the Lord's crown—a ring of fused bone and midnight metal—into the bleeding river. Royalty should learn to swim. Maybe he'd come back wearing something less embarrassing.
"Crew or solo?" the ash-grey hunter called after me.
"Whatever pays," I said. "Whatever bleeds."
I selected Dimensional Gauntlet without thinking. My fingers—steel again—tapped the contract that promised a choir of warlocks louder than a siren overdose. The portal irised wider, purplish-black like bruised fruit.
"Last words?" the hunter tried. Maybe she wanted wisdom. Maybe she wanted reassurance.
I looked at her, dead-eyed and calm. "Respect me or die. Either way, see you tomorrow."
I walked into the bruise.
Steel rippled over my shoulders like a cloak. The cigarette burned down to the filter, and I swallowed the ember for later. The portal closed behind me with a wet, satisfied sound.
Somewhere, a system clerk stamped a page. Somewhere else, a god woke up headless and angry, counting hours.
And under my feet, the 2 glowed like a smirk as the next world opened its throat.