Blood Shaper

The number of vampyr approaching Avalon increased as time passed and singletons and small packs became less and less common as larger swarms and groups with almost military precision began making their way into Avalon’s territory. No one knew if they were distractions, probing attacks, genuine attempts to take out Avalon, random wanderings, or some other plan made by maddened minds, but they couldn’t be allowed to survive, for multiple reasons. Most importantly was the threat to anyone nearby, but the longer term issue was having the planned incursion against the vampyr being slowed down. The agents and infiltrators doing their best to stall the vampyr building the ritual circles could only slow things down so much and the eventual push into what used to be Nelam couldn’t afford any delays. Smaller groups of vampyr that needed to be crushed would just waste an armies time, so it was up to more mobile fighters to deal with them.

Which is why Cindy ended up taking her trail of heavily armed ducklings out to kill some vampyr. That was what she was calling her personal guard, in her head at least. They were all so cute the way they trailed after her like they were her duck babies and she was the duck mama. It totally wasn’t a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that she had people poking their noses into every second of her life at all times, not at all. Outside the sanctity of her head, her personal ducal troops still didn’t have a formal name, although she was happy to report that ‘Arquebusiers’ had finally gotten shot down with her fervent support.

As much as she rocked between annoyed that she was constantly surrounded by people and aggravated that they wouldn’t leave her be, which weren’t the same thing no matter how much Colen said they were, her miniature army was a very useful group of people. Having minions to aid her in testing her new weapon prototypes saved all kinds of time!

“How’re the grenades looking?” She asked without turning away from the swarm of vampyr that had gotten stuck in a small ravine. At some point the idiotic things had started fighting each other and the loosely collected group of vampyr had gone from a potential threat to the countryside to an internally aimed orgy of violence that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. A perfect target!

“Troops are saying everything’s fine,” The stout dwarf next to her reported. “Took some getting used to but the weight’s not terrible for any of ‘em, and the special ones are holdin’ together.”

Cindy glanced down at Gundar, the overall commander of her personal troops. At some point the gruff-spoken dwarf had just shown up, ready to go and already armed with some decent firearms. Some quick asking around had told her that the people she’d recruited for the first weapons project to develop guns for Avalon had known of him, he’d been one of the few people from the other side of the continent that liked to experiment with guns and traded letters back in forth with the rest, and he’d gone looking for whoever had gotten the Class Line Progenitor title for guns as soon as he’d found out that Cindy existed. As soon as he’d met her he’d literally bent the knee and sworn fealty to her, and somewhere along the way he’d ended up as her right hand man, with Colen as her left. She couldn’t make fun of Kay anymore for somehow gathering an eclectic cast of characters around him like the protagonist of a shounen anime anymore, not without being a hypocrite. The worst part of it to her was that her tweaks to her precognitive Class had made it so she’d had no idea either of them were coming!

“Right, have whoever’s our best throw to get one of the special ones right in the middle of them, then follow up with a volley of regular ones.” Cindy ordered.

“On it.” Gundar grunted. He stalked off to the waiting line of troops, all standing in a row with their weapons ready and making Cindy constantly nervous about how vulnerable firing lines were to guerrilla attacks. Reassuring herself that her people weren’t forming firing lines and they had sentries in place to keep an eye out for ambushes helped a little bit.

One figure stepped forward holding a red sphere about the size of a baseball, with a metal mechanism sticking out one side. They twisted a tab protruding out of the mechanism until it had completed a full rotation, then chucked it into the seething mass of fighting vampyr. It landed right on one’s head, temporarily confusing it for long enough that one of it’s rivals in the melee managed to get a good bite into it. A second later, the timed fuse that had been lit in the experimental grenade finished burning it’s way into the powder charge. A dull thumping noise that Cindy had long gotten used to at this point accompanied a wave of carnage as a hardened sphere of Kay’s blood shattered and turned into shrapnel, ripping through the vampyr. Those that didn’t die instantly started shrieking and writhing with pain and there were a few that had skin sizzling where the shrapnel had cut through them.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Right!” Cindy shouted back, “Finish off the stragglers, then we’re moving on to the next group we know of!”

“Yes, your grace!”

Cindy rolled her eyes at the reminder, which was part of Colen’s plan to remind her that she was a duchess now. She, a true blooded American, was a duchess. The world was weird.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

While her troops bogged themselves down in the charnelhouse the ravine had become to cut down any surviving vampyr, Cindy took a look at her status. Nothing had changed from this tiny battle, which was to be expected since she hadn’t done anything, but she couldn’t help staring at it. There were only a few more levels left on the last Skill she needed to bring up to the edge of tier four before she would finally get the tier five Class she wanted, and she was getting impatient. She pulled up the description of the Class that was lagging in a separate window from the rest of her status and stared at it angrily.

[————————————————————]

Class: Dreaming Seer

- Seeing the future, knowing the flow of fate, and learning to avoid the pitfalls of what will be, those are the dreams of many. Some have visions telling them of what’s to come, others spout prophecy while remembering none of the details, and some dream of what might happen, learning the mysteries of the future in the shifting and evanescent realm of sleep. This Class is one that grants the power of the later kind of seer, where what could be and what may be in conveyed to a sleeping dreamer, who must do their best to interpret their hazily remembered dreams in order to stave off disaster and call fortune to themselves and those around them.

[————————————————————]

[————————————————————]

Skill: The Future in Dreams (Level 37)

- Dream of what is to come and know that it can change in a moment.

[————————————————————]

The Class description actually said something about the Class, but the Skill description was pointless. The only good thing about it was the lovely little number at the top, telling her she was only three more levels from being done with it. She didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea, the Dreaming Seer Class had led to her to what she was pretty sure was the best possible outcome for herself and the other people she’d picked up on her way to Avalon, but she was tired of it! The Class had made her a target for the greedy, the unscrupulous, and the power hungry the minute she’d accidentally let it slip that she was a seer, and she didn’t want to deal with people constantly coming to her, desperate to know their future. Like she actually knew the future of some random person who’d thrown themselves at her feet, all of her dreams were about her or things that would affect her, not some rich merchant who wanted to know how to handicap his rivals.

She was incredibly grateful that Kay and the other leaders of Avalon hadn’t tried to turn her into the state seer or anything like that, they’d let her do her own thing and warn them of what she knew might happen when anything came up. Overall Cindy was finding the Class less useful and not what she wanted though, so she was working on changing it. She’d studied with Ahthia and gone to Eleniah for help and had gotten a few techniques and ideas from them to shift the Class into something different. Through meditation and effort she’d worked to make her visions of the future happen less with dreams while she slept and more with daydreams. She’d also focused on significantly narrowing the distance forward she saw from potentially years out to only a few moments. Cindy wanted to turn herself into a precognitive gunslinger who could see where people would be aiming in a few seconds, or which bullets would hit and which wouldn’t, instead of a seer able to do foretellings. She wasn’t completely certain it was possible, but the vague feelings she got from her Class Line Progenitor title told her it could work.

She’d spoken with Kay and a few others about it, and they all accepted what she wanted to do, even if there were a few hints of unease at losing the advantage her dreams could give Avalon. Not that her dreams were actually that useful, although she wouldn’t be sharing that around before or after she lost access to them. Her first set of dreams telling her that it was a good idea to flee east away from the people trying to exploit her had been a jumbled bunch of nonsense. Some had shown her as queen of Avalon, although it didn’t have that name in those dreams, some showed Kay there as king but with a bunch of different Classes and no Class Line Progenitor title, some had Amanda at the helm of a very interesting young nation, and a sparse few even had a horde of dragons descending from the sky to burn Nelam to ashes, leading to a very different set of futures. In the end, a variant of all of those ended up being what happened and the exact circumstances of what she ended up discovering had never been part of any of her dreams.

The fact that none of her dreams were guaranteed to come true was a relief given what some of the recent ones had been like. She had hope that her plans were coming to fruition with the Class, she had more and more visions close to what she wanted to and less and less dreams of what might be, but the ones she was still having were dire. The worse part was how the obviously eldritch bits in all of them were tampering with how well she could remember them and warn people of what might happen. Her mind trying to protect itself from things it couldn’t handle left her with a confused jumble of impressions and flashes of images that didn’t mean much of anything. The vast majority of the feelings she got were of fear and despair though, and the bits of pictures she could remember added some terrifying spice to those feelings.

Something about the dreams was making her really uncomfortable around eels recently, which was both strange and annoying since she’d finally gotten a chef in Avalon to recreate her favorite eel sushi from back home, and still didn’t provide her any hints that she could give out to stem off something horrifying from happening. What was she supposed to say, “What out for eels!”? She’d sound like an idiot.

Also, why was she thinking so fondly of tortoises recently? She hadn’t even seen a tortoise in years, even before she’d been yanked into a fantasy world it’d been years, so why did she keep imagining-

“Your grace, we’re ready to move!” Gundar called out to her as he dragged himself out of the ravine.

Cindy shook off her weird train of thought and started over to him, taking a quick look over her people as she did to make sure none of them had been injured. There would be time for woolgathering and trying to decipher the bits of her frustrating dreams she remembered later. She had vampyr to test new weapons ideas on, and vampyr were the best kind of test subjects. It wasn’t a war crime if the thing you were testing on was an eldritch abomination made of a dead person mixed with mutated vampire virus that had to be destroyed to keep people safe, after all!