The sky over the borderlands of the Demon Realm didn't turn dark; it turned silver.
Alaric stood at the edge of his family's estate, his eyes narrowed at the horizon. At sixty years old, he was still considered a child by his peers, yet he possessed the refined instincts of the Vampire nobility. He felt the shift in the wind before he saw the cause. It was a sweet, cloying scent—like lilies left to rot in the sun.
"The humans," he whispered.
Beside him, a group of young Berserker demons from the neighboring valley were trading goods. Among them was a massive youth named Wrath, whose laughter was like the rumbling of a mountain. They were supposed to be rivals, separated by the ancient taboos of their races, but the border was a place where rules often blurred.
Then, the Zenith-Rank Relic was activated.
High above the clouds, a human air-ship—a vessel of brass and holy gears—deployed "The Breath of Silence." It was a massive Support Relic that didn't fire beams of light or shards of iron. It simply exhaled.
A thick, shimmering mist descended.
"My lungs..." Wrath gasped, clutching his throat. The Berserkers, famous for their iron constitutions, were the first to fall. Their legendary Purification Lungs began to glow a sickly green as they worked overtime to filter the divine toxin.
Alaric felt his own heart slow to a crawl. The mist wasn't just poison; it was an anti-magic suppressant. "Do not... breathe..." he tried to command, but his knees buckled.
Through his fading vision, he saw them. The humans didn't look like monsters; they looked like soldiers in gleaming white armor, descending from the sky on silken ropes. At their head was a man wearing the mantle of a Great Commandment, a golden relic shaped like a halo floating behind his head.
"Select the ones with the highest mana density," the Commandment's voice echoed, cold and distant. "The rest are to be culled."
Alaric tried to reach for his own blood, to harden it into a blade and strike, but the mist had turned his veins to lead. He felt a heavy boot press his face into the dirt.
"This one is a high-blood Vampire," a soldier remarked, poking Alaric with a Prime-Rank Spear. "He'll last a long time in the tanks."
"Capture him. Put the anti-magic chains on the Berserker too," the Commandment ordered.
"The Emperor needs fresh data on their regeneration. The 16-day cycle begins tomorrow."
As the darkness took Alaric, the last thing he saw was the sight of 100 demons—his kin, his neighbors—being dragged away like cattle. The "Breath of Silence" had worked perfectly. The strongest warriors of the border had been taken without a single drop of human blood being spilled.
16 Days Later...
Alaric woke to the sound of a metal rasp.
He was in a stone box, five feet wide and ten feet high. He was naked, his pale skin translucent from lack of sunlight. Thin glass tubes were inserted into the veins of his arms, slowly siphoning his life into glowing jars on a nearby table.
He looked across the glass partition of his cell. There, strapped to a vertical rack, was Wrath. The Berserker's horns had been sawn off, and his grey skin was covered in surgical markings.
"Still... breathing?" Alaric's voice was a ghost of itself.
Wrath's head lolled to the side. "Vampire... they took... my legs..."
Alaric looked down. He couldn't see Wrath's lower half, but he could see the heavy iron prosthetics being bolted onto the Berserker's hips by human alchemists in the next room. They weren't just experimenting; they were rebuilding them into weapons.
CLANG.
The door at the end of the hall opened. A low-level guard entered, carrying a tray of "sustenance"—a vial of foul-smelling animal blood.
Alaric closed his eyes, his mind sharpening through the haze of pain. His Pride was the only thing the humans couldn't drain. He counted the guard's footsteps. He memorized the frequency of the anti-magic field.
He had been in this cage for fifteen days.
Tomorrow is the sixteenth, Alaric thought, a cold, predatory fire igniting in his chest. And I have decided that tomorrow, I will taste human blood again.