The Dawn Knight floated forward, his black armor a beacon of absolute control in the dust-choked ruins of the upper floor. He crossed his massive arms, a gesture of casual dominance before the creature that was an apex predator to all others.
Chadnorma, the Primordial R-variant, was now nothing more than a defeated science experiment, standing amidst the rubble of the walls he had just pierced.
"What a magnificent display of self-healing," Zhou Yi acknowledged, his synthesized voice devoid of emotion, yet carrying the weight of judgment.
"You must be the most resilient biological entity I have ever seen. But I must know the limit of this miracle. How many times can you rebuild yourself? Because I refuse to believe this level of repair is without a devastating cost."
Chadnorma responded with a deep, guttural growl—a sound that was more mechanical distortion than biological threat. Despite his miraculous recovery, the sheer force of the Dawn Knight's punch had left a psychological scar. He recognized the futility of engaging. His only option was flight.
In a terrifying display of biological acceleration, Chadnorma turned and launched himself toward the farthest corridor exit. His silhouette was a blur, exceeding the visual persistence of the human eye. His speed was instantaneous, a desperate, final break for freedom.
But Zhou Yi, the Knight of Dawn, would not allow it.
There was a sudden, violent flicker of black light and shadow, followed by an explosive, concussive CRACK.
An invisible, high-pressure shockwave—the instantaneous displacement of air caused by an object moving faster than the speed of sound—erupted between the Dawn Knight and his target. It was the pressure wall created by the sonic boom. In this confined space of concrete and brittle plaster, the resulting force was catastrophic.
Chadnorma felt an invisible, colossal weight slam into his chest and back. He was a fly caught in a hydraulic press.
Unable to resist the raw, overwhelming force of the displaced atmosphere, his body was instantly crushed and pinned, slamming with sickening finality against the surviving main support wall. He wasn't merely stopped; he was smashed against the architecture of the building by a weapon that wasn't even the Dawn Knight's fist—it was the air itself.
Chadnorma, his grotesque features contorted in a bitter grimace of intellectual defeat, understood perfectly. The Dawn Knight's movement speed had not only exceeded the limits of perception but had turned the very environment against him. In the face of such physics-based dominance, the Primordial's brute strength was useless.
Zhou Yi floated forward, stopping mere inches from the pinned mutant. "You are quite cunning. You move like a ferocious warrior, yet you scheme and retreat like a shrewd businessman or a desperate politician," he observed, his voice dripping with surgical contempt.
"I find this paradox fascinating. I require answers, and you have just confirmed that you are the only one capable of providing them."
Zhou Yi extended an armored hand.
Without touching him, an invisible, crushing telekinetic force wrapped around Chadnorma's body, tearing him free from the wall and pulling him through the air toward the Dawn Knight.
Chadnorma's regenerative instinct screamed at him to fight, to tear free, but the strength gripping him was absolute, threatening to shatter him entirely. He knew that any resistance would only result in the loss of limbs, which, though they would regenerate, would buy him no time.
He conceded instantly.
In the face of the Dawn Knight's omnipotent control, Chadnorma bowed his head in a gesture of absolute, albeit sardonic, compromise.
"I am happy to provide all the answers you seek, oh mighty one," Chadnorma replied, his voice laced with forced respect that barely masked a deep, underlying venom and an intense disdain for the entire vampire race. "But I confess, I don't understand why a power such as yours would sully himself with the affairs of these filthy, dying vampires."
Zhou Yi's helmet gave no quarter. "The nature of my involvement is none of your concern. You will simply answer my questions, and you will do so immediately and truthfully."
He flexed his hand, a minute, devastating gesture. The telekinetic force surrounding Chadnorma's entire body intensified with crushing violence, momentarily squeezing his very core as if a giant hand were trying to pop a grape.
Chadnorma involuntarily choked, his lungs near collapse, experiencing the profound terror of an absolute power that could snuff out his life on a whim, regardless of his regeneration.
The pressure vanished as quickly as it came. Chadnorma gasped, sucking deep, ragged breaths into his reconstructed chest, the sensation like a drowning man suddenly breaching the surface. He nodded quickly, definitively.
"I understand. Completely and perfectly understood."
"Good. Then let us start with the first point of contention," Zhou Yi continued. "The Grand Duke Maginos claimed that a new, hyper-transmissible strain had emerged, and that you are the Primordial—the origin point. I want to know where you truly came from, and why a son of the purest bloodline is now this… aberration."
"A new strain? The old man called me that?" Chadnorma's face contorted in a bitter, profoundly unpleasant smile. "Where do I come from? I am not a random mutation. I am the truest, purest descendant of the Maginos bloodline itself."
"That is impossible!" Nisha's voice, hoarse with shock, broke the tension. She rushed forward from where she had sought refuge, her chest still heaving, her stunning figure barely concealed by her torn gown, revealing the profound turmoil in her heart.
"The purest lineage in this country belongs to the Maginos family, the heart of the Camarilla Council. I have never seen you, nor heard your name whispered in the hallowed halls of the Elders."
Nisha's faith was based on a fundamental hierarchy. Only the Elders hold the truly pure, ancient blood. The Maginos family, with their ancient lineage, held the single Elder seat in North America, and all others were merely lesser purebloods.
"You haven't seen me, little baby, because you are barely forty years old," Chadnorma sneered, his eyes glittering with corrosive mockery.
"I held you when you were born, but you were too young to remember. I am telling you, we share the same father. My name is Chadnorma Maginos. Your biological brother!"
"This is a lie! It cannot be true!" Nisha staggered back, her face pale with disbelief and revulsion. "You offer no proof of this monstrous claim!"
"The proof is on your finger, and now, ironically, on mine." Chadnorma raised his left hand, displaying the signet ring Zhou Yi had noticed earlier.
"This was a gift from our father on my eighteenth decade. It is the unquestionable symbol of the Maginos family's succession. Do you truly believe I found this on a corpse? No. The one who has truly been lying to you, child, is the very patriarch you call your father!"
Nisha, driven by a desperate need to cling to her shredded reality, rushed forward and tore the ring from Chadnorma's finger, comparing it to the identical signet ring she wore. The result was shattering.
The crests were flawless matches, their ancient lines identical. Her composure shattered completely. The question, "How could you become like this?" emerged, heavy with the realization that the answer would destroy every belief she held sacred.
Chadnorma, sensing the total victory of his truth, grinned—a horrific, unnatural widening of his mutated jaw.
"A truly excellent question, sister. Now, let me share the secret of our family's glorious empire. Tell me, Nisha, have you noticed our father's appearance? Does he not seem… older? More like a novel's monster than the handsome pureblood of courtly tales? Do you know his true age?"
Chadnorma paused, allowing the weight of the question to settle. "Our father, Damaginos, is well over a thousand years old. By all the sacred laws of the Camarilla, he should have entered the Elder's Sleep centuries ago."
He began to pace, his limbs twitching with suppressed energy, the true story of the Grand Duke Maginos spilling forth like poison.
"To avoid the power vacuum and loss of control inherent in the Sleep, our father committed the ultimate heresy: he killed his contemporary Elders. He murdered his own brother, who was also an Elder, and his first wife, my mother, to remove any legitimate claimant to his throne. He has sustained himself through endless, ritualistic bloodletting for a thousand years, always clinging to power, refusing to let it slip."
Chadnorma pointed a horrifying, clawed finger at the Dawn Knight. "But time is the only thing a vampire cannot cheat. He is growing old. Even the purest Blood Spring—our most sacred ritual—can no longer restore his lost vitality. He is aging out of existence."
"So, he turned to other methods. He didn't found his health and pharmaceutical company to help mankind, Nisha. It was a thinly veiled excuse. He wanted to revolutionize human genetics and find the key to an eternal, sun-proof life, regardless of the cost to anyone else. Over thirty years ago, he saw me—the son with the bloodline closest to his own—as the most viable test subject."
Chadnorma's voice lowered to a bitter imitation of the Grand Duke's benevolent baritone. "'Wait patiently, my son. This is a small, necessary trial. You will be the first of our kind to walk in the sun, impervious to silver, and through your breakthrough, I will be reborn.'"
"Do you know how I survived those years of testing, sister? They subjected me to endless surgeries, experimental serums, and viral injections. I would love to show you the scars, but as you see, I have become this—a creature that heals everything, leaving no mark of the torture. But I must also thank them for one thing: the viral weapon they finally developed. It didn't make me perfect, but it made me strong enough to flee and seek my only reward: revenge. I will destroy everything he created. I want him to watch his entire empire, every shred of his power, crumble beneath the hands of his own betrayed son."
Nisha, unable to reconcile this monstrous tale with the father she believed in, stumbled backward, her hand flying to her mouth in a gesture of profound shock. She shook her head violently, utterly defeated by the emotional reality of her family's betrayal. She spun and fled, disappearing into the dark, labyrinthine shadows of the club, presumably to confront the lie that was her father.
Zhou Yi did not stop her. The Grand Duke, a master manipulator, would not harm his daughter in a fit of rage; he would only use her in the most beneficial, calculated way. He had an actor in Chadnorma and a victim in Nisha, and the show was only just beginning.
Zhou Yi returned his attention to Chadnorma, his armored posture unwavering. "Your story is compelling, Chadnorma. It aligns with the anomalies I have observed. But tell me this: if your father's experiment resulted in this transformation—the terrifying regenerative power—was he successful? Do you represent the perfection he sought?"
Chadnorma pointed to his hideous, perpetually twitching mouth and his mutated, segmented tongue. "Do I look perfect? This sight makes even me sick! The regenerative capability is the success; it's the eternal life without the Elder's Sleep. But the cost is the failure."
He lowered his voice, the sound a ragged confession. "I suffer from an inner torment every single moment, Dawn Knight. The endless multiplication of cells, the constant, furious repair that you witnessed—it doesn't stop. It's an internal fire, an agonizing cellular expansion that even the purest blood cannot suppress. The pain is far worse than the mere thirst for blood. If the burning vengeance against my father were not my singular focus, I truly do not know if I could endure this agonizing, hideous unlife."
Zhou Yi absorbed the confession, a fresh wave of disgust and pity washing over him. The Grand Duke hadn't created an immortal; he had engineered a perpetual torture device. He released Chadnorma completely from the telekinetic grip.
Chadnorma, now free, remained stationary, wisely recognizing that the Dawn Knight was not a vampire protector. He was attempting to calculate an alliance—the Dawn Knight was a destroyer of monsters; Maginos was the ultimate monster.
"I know what you are thinking," Zhou Yi interrupted, his voice cutting through the mutant's calculation.
"But my path is my own. I only do what I believe is right, and my view is not altered by your family drama. The conflict between the vampire elite and the R-variants does not concern me now. Once you resolve your problems, if Maginos still draws breath, I will deal with him. However, you seem far more suited to be his gravedigger."
"It is a rather common tradition for the son of a powerful vampire to exact revenge on his father," Chadnorma replied, allowing a flash of grim satisfaction to cross his features, the acknowledgment of his heritage briefly eclipsing the pain.
"I have one final question. This answer will determine whether I eliminate you here and now, or allow you the opportunity to avenge your torment." Zhou Yi's words were spoken with the full authority of the Dawn Knight, confirming Chadnorma's status as a threat that could be eliminated without hesitation.
Chadnorma bowed deeply, a flash of genuine, courtly nobility momentarily piercing the monster's façade. "Ask, Dawn Knight. I will give you the most honest answer I possess. I want revenge, and I want to survive."