Damaginos was a product of the darkest era of vampire history, a survivor forged in centuries of ceaseless partisan warfare and courtly intrigue. He had witnessed too many oaths broken, too many allies consumed, and too many bloodlines betrayed.
From that crucible, he had emerged with one governing philosophy: power was secured and maintained only through relentless deception. Like a poisonous spider, he spun a grand web of conspiracy, consuming not only his rivals but his own family, believing that intimacy was the ultimate weakness.
Intrigue was his lifeblood; trust was an obsolete relic. He was a creature of profound suspicion, capable of viewing every soul—friend, foe, and hero alike—as a pawn or a potential threat.
Therefore, when the Dawn Knight compromised, offering a verbal agreement for his freedom, Damaginos rejected it instantly, the rejection born of deep-seated, justifiable paranoia. A promise from a moralistic hero was, to him, the most transient and worthless form of currency.
"Your word is a meaningless sound, Dawn Knight. It holds no value here," Damaginos declared, his face rigid with contempt. He needed a guarantee carved in stone, not air.
Zhou Yi, holding the fragile, unresisting form of Nisha in his left arm, attempted one final, desperate maneuver, leaning his helmeted head close to the Grand Duke.
"Your daughter is unsecured in my hands, Damaginos. She carries no device, no bomb. Are you truly prepared to gamble her life to secure a temporary flight?"
Damaginos merely offered a cold, predatory smile. "Do it. I encourage you to execute her, if it will give you some measure of satisfaction." His eyes, devoid of all paternal warmth, swept over Nisha's drooping, resigned posture.
"My daughter returned damaged, Knight. And for our kind, how can weak, compromised blood ties compare to the sublime sweetness of absolute power?"
The monstrous, transactional coldness of the Grand Duke's statement scraped against the fundamental ethical framework that held Zhou Yi together. He was not disgusted by the vampire, but by the utter, complete absence of anything resembling humanity.
Zhou Yi released Nisha, dropping her unceremoniously to the polished floor. Her eyes were dull, registering the final, definitive betrayal.
Zhou Yi did not spare the Grand Duke another look. Instead, the Dawn Knight's voice resonated through the corridor—a cold, mechanical prophecy intended only for the tyrant's ears.
"Believe this: your survival is merely a momentary delay. You will not live to see the dawn, Grand Duke. If I had the choice, I would ensure you evaporate completely into the first light of morning, and I will make that choice happen."
"A beautiful sentiment, hero, but an empty threat," Makinos chuckled, his confidence in his cunning absolute. "That day will never dawn for me."
Zhou Yi soared vertically, ignoring the rotting creature and the discarded daughter. He shot up the elevator shaft he had just crippled, the immediate chaos in the factory now irrelevant.
Damaginos's plot had successfully dragged the Dawn Knight onto an entirely separate stage—the global theater. He was now forced to pursue a new, high-altitude target before the mechanism of the bomb could initiate.
His immediate, urgent directive was simple: intercept the plane, neutralize the servant, and secure the device before sunrise, severing the last, poisonous tentacle of the Grand Duke's elaborate defense.
"Medusa, calculate all current and departed flight routes from New York to London. Identify any aircraft containing a known vampire signature—specifically the servant, Assa."
Locating a single vampire onboard a specific commercial airliner, already hours into its flight path across the vast, chaotic expanse of the Atlantic, was an impossible task by human standards.
Fortunately, Zhou Yi relied on the Medusa AI, a hyper-intelligent entity that moved through digital space with the same blinding speed the Dawn Knight moved through the air.
Security protocols, firewalls, and data encryption across major American air traffic control systems dissolved instantly before Medusa's intrusion.
Soon, the necessary flight manifests, real-time telemetry, and passenger lists appeared in Zhou Yi's internal display.
The news was a terrifying combination of good fortune and terrible timing. Good news: a massive storm system over the North Atlantic had reduced all transatlantic routes to a single flight path today.
Bad news: the target flight, a gigantic Airbus A380 (The Regulus Express), had already been airborne for nearly eight hours. The vampire servant, Assa, had clearly used the pre-flight daylight hours to board, minimizing his exposure before nightfall.
Zhou Yi made no attempt to analyze the irony of a vampire risking the sun for the sake of his master's survival. He had to close the distance.
His armor systems went into full acceleration, pushing his body to the limit of what the suit's inertial dampeners could handle.
Mach 25.
This was the hypersonic threshold, a speed that translated to over 30,000 kilometers per hour, or more than 8,000 meters every second. This level of velocity approached the First Cosmic Speed—the rate necessary for low Earth orbit. For a being to move within the atmosphere at such a pace was to defy nature itself.
The passage was not a flight; it was a physical, atmospheric rupture. The air screamed against the Dawn Armor, turning the friction layer into an incandescent plasma that briefly wreathed the figure in celestial fire.
The noise generated—a continuous, rolling thunder that trailed him like a divine signature—was terrifying. He became a force of nature, one that was capable of altering the very structure of the sky.
Rain clouds, caught in the devastating pressure wave generated by his passage, were instantly ripped apart, dispersed into fine mist.
If he maintained this velocity at lower altitudes, the resultant air currents would violently twist and accelerate, manifesting on the ground as indiscriminate, destructive hurricanes.
He was a being equal to a god in his ability to command the elements, to split the sea of clouds, and to ride the thunderous roar of his own passage. And as a god, he was bound by a singular, non-negotiable duty: to save the ignorant and the confused people below.
The distance between New York and London dissolved into a blur. Medusa provided the precise update: less than ten minutes until interception.
The Airbus A380, a monumental achievement of human engineering with its 73-meter length and capacity for over 500 souls, appeared on his radar screen, dwarfed by the immense ocean beneath it.
This pinnacle of aviation technology had now become the perfect, silent hostage—a devastating tool for a malicious tyrant.
Zhou Yi slowed his approach, carefully positioning himself directly above the enormous fuselage. He activated his visual supervision suite, scanning every inch of the massive passenger plane for the payload. He saw the steward, but no conventional bomb, no obvious explosive device.
Damaginos had been too cunning for that. The risk was too high to have been a bluff; therefore, the deadly substance must be highly concealed, microscopic, or perhaps even chemical—a fast-acting, lethal aerosol placed near the air recycling vents.
The entire threat focused on Assa, the loyal servant. Only by confronting the vampire butler could Zhou Yi understand the true nature of the ticking clock and the mechanism of the plane's destruction.
Zhou Yi descended gently, landing on the roof of the aircraft above the upper deck. He could not risk a traditional, violent entry; the integrity of the pressurized cabin was paramount. A sudden loss of pressure at this altitude would instantly kill hundreds.
He chose the riskiest, yet safest, route: Telekinesis. Focusing the full power of his will, he reached out through the thick, pressurized metallic skin of the fuselage and found the intricate mechanisms of the main upper-deck cabin door latch.
With surgical precision, he manipulated the internal handle, the massive door clicking audibly against the frame.
As the seal broke, a sudden, violent surge of sub-zero air rushed out. Zhou Yi simultaneously slipped through the narrow gap and snapped the door shut using external magnetic seals, all in the space of a single second.
The Airbus A380 only shuddered momentarily, a brief, anomalous gust of cold air causing the passengers to glance nervously around them.
The Knight's arrival was utterly undetected by the passengers. But not by the crew.
A young flight attendant, witnessing the impossible materialization of a metallic giant from behind a sealed door, stared in wide-eyed, disbelieving shock.
"Don't worry," Zhou Yi said, his voice a low, mechanical whisper to avoid alarming the passengers behind the curtain. "I'll cover the cost of the ticket."
The flight attendant, a devotee of the Dawn Knight, immediately dismissed the absurd financial concern. Her eyes burned with a fervent, almost fanatical light.
"Dawn Knight!" she gasped, her composure instantly replaced by dizzying excitement. "I'm your biggest fan! Could I please get your signature? Perhaps on the bulkhead—or wait, I have a marker for my shift chart!"
Zhou Yi arrested her enthusiastic momentum with a firm, silent gesture. "There is an extreme, imminent threat aboard this aircraft. I require your immediate, absolute obedience to secure this plane. I need you to contact the rest of the crew and initiate a specific passenger evacuation."
For a superhero fan, the opportunity to assist in a mission of global importance was an intoxicating reward far greater than an autograph. Her eyes shone with newfound, serious determination.
"Yes, Knight. What do you require?"
Assa was not seated in the luxury of First Class, as his rank and status would dictate. He was deliberately placed in the crowded Economy cabin—a single, vulnerable man surrounded by the maximum number of potential human casualties.
He was wrapped in a heavy, antiquated coat, his face pale and drawn, his movements strained and anxious, the clear picture of a man recovering from a near-fatal injury.
In the past two centuries, Assa had never been separated from the Grand Duke for such a long, perilous span.
The sheer vulnerability of his master filled him with dread, a psychological strain that caused him to constantly consult the watch he wore—the large, crude device that housed the heart-rate monitor. Every steady tick of the second hand was a confirmation: Damaginos lived. Every tick was a sigh of relief.
He was so deeply focused on his morbid timekeeping that he barely noticed the subtle, orchestrated movements around him.
A flight attendant, accompanied by a handsome, bewildered young couple, approached his row.
"Pardon me, sir. We've had a severe atmospheric disturbance due to the storm," she explained, her voice professional but laced with feigned concern.
"It seems your immediate compartment may have been affected, potentially compromising any electronic equipment. If you wouldn't mind, we are asking the passengers in this row to check their carry-on luggage for a quick inspection."
The couple, nonplussed but compliant, stood and followed the flight attendant away. Assa's own finely tuned instincts screamed, but he couldn't isolate the anomaly. Since when did international flights start checking carry-ons mid-flight? And why only this area?
He flinched, instinctively looking up and around. A chilling realization struck him. In the space of less than three minutes, the entire section around him—three full rows of passengers—had been silently, professionally evacuated.
The flight attendants, acting with perfect, swift coordination, had removed every single innocent life within arm's reach under the pretense of turbulence checks and misplaced luggage.
The only other person visible in his immediate vicinity was a massive, dark figure now sitting silently in the seat directly behind him, back fully turned, a phantom in the low, blue cabin light.
"Dawn Knight," Assa whispered, the name a realization of fate itself. A profound, deep unease settled in his chest, yet the steady pulse of the monitor watch offered its grim reassurance: Damaginos was still alive.
Assa slowly, calmly rose to his feet, turning to face the armored menace.
"I confess, your methods were unexpected, hero," the vampire butler stated, his voice regaining its ancient, iron calm. His face held no surprise, only the weary acceptance of a sentinel who has watched the horizon for centuries. "I have been waiting a very long time for your arrival."