The world did not fade to black. It dissolved into fire and ice.
Akira's consciousness did not so much slip away as it was violently rewired. The last coherent human thought—I'm dying—was incinerated in a supernova of sensation. The cold that had been seeping into his bones was now a glacial torrent, freezing him from the inside out, crystallizing his blood, turning his sinews to brittle glass. And then, just as suddenly, it was replaced by an inferno. It felt as if his veins had been injected with molten lead, scorching a path through his frozen core, melting the ice only to replace it with an agony so profound it defied description.
He was no longer in the alley. He was nowhere and everywhere, a pinprick of awareness adrift in a sea of pure, undiluted torment.
He felt his bones break and reform, not with the sickening cracks of the beating, but with a sound like grinding diamonds, reshaping themselves into something stronger, denser. His muscles tore and re-knit, each fiber screaming as it was remade. His skin felt like it was being flayed from his body, over and over, each new layer more sensitive than the last.
And the thirst.
It awoke in him not as a desire, but as a new, fundamental organ. A black hole where his stomach used to be, howling, screaming, devouring him from within. It was a need more primal than breath, more demanding than any pain. It was a desiccation of the soul, a parching of every cell. In the maelstrom of his transformation, this thirst was the only constant, the hungry star around which all other agonies orbited.
Visions, fragmented and surreal, stabbed through the pain.
A towering castle of black stone, silhouetted against a blood-red moon. The scent of cold flowers, overwhelming.
Elara, dressed not in a school uniform, but in a gown of liquid shadow, seated on a throne of obsidian, her eyes ancient and sad.
A battlefield of impossible scale, where creatures of nightmare clashed under a starless sky. The gaunt man was there, a mere foot soldier in an army of horrors.
The feeling of fangs sinking into his neck again, but the memory was now one of ecstasy, not pain—the source of the fire, the origin of the ice.
He heard voices, layered over each other, echoes from a thousand years.
"The blood is strong in him… untamed…" — Elara's voice, but laced with a strain he'd never heard.
"A reckless choice, Von Carstein. To turn a human in the open… the Council will have your head for this."— A new voice, smoky and feminine, laced with amusement.
"He is mine to make, and mine to break, Lilith. The Council can rot."— Elara, cold and absolute.
Lilith. The name meant nothing, yet it felt important, a key to a lock he didn't possess.
Time lost all meaning. It could have been seconds, or centuries. He was a ship torn apart in a storm, and the only anchor was the memory of her face, leaning over him, her crimson eyes the last beacon in the dying light of his humanity.
Live.
The command was a brand on his soul.
---
The first sensation to return was smell.
It was not the gentle awakening of a sleeper. It was an assault. A tidal wave of information so violent it felt like his skull would split open.
The stale scent of his own room—dust motes dancing in the moonlight, the faint, greasy residue of yesterday's instant noodles, the synthetic lavender of his laundry detergent. He could smell the ink in the pen on his desk, the dying chlorophyll in a potted plant his mother had left behind, the individual fibers of his bedsheets. And beneath it all, the coppery, intoxicating tang of blood. His own, dried on his skin and clothes. It smelled like… food. Delicious. His mouth watered, and the thirst, which had been a dull roar, flared into a screaming inferno.
He gasped, and his eyes snapped open.
He was in his own bed. The digital clock on his bedside table glowed 4:17 AM. The room was dark, but to his new eyes, it was as bright as day. He could see every splinter in the wooden floor, every individual thread in the curtain fabric, the microscopic cracks in the ceiling plaster. The world was rendered in hyper-realistic, impossible detail.
He sat up, and the movement was too fast, too fluid. He was a puppet with its strings cut and restrung by a god. He looked down at his hands. They were his hands, yet they weren't. The scabs and bruises from the beating were gone. The skin was smooth, pale, almost luminous in the dim light. He flexed his fingers, and he could feel the air resistance against each one, could sense the potential for immense, terrifying strength coiled within them.
The thirst growled, a living thing in his gut.
He stumbled out of bed, his body feeling both alien and intimately familiar. He needed water. He needed to douse this fire.
He lurched into the kitchen and turned on the tap, cupping his hands under the stream. He brought the water to his lips.
It was… nothing. Worse than nothing. It was like drinking dust. It had no taste, no substance. It did nothing to quench the devouring need inside him. He spat it out, disgusted. The thirst roared its disapproval, making him dizzy.
His enhanced senses zeroed in on the source of the coppery scent. His own clothes, discarded on the floor. The dried blood. His stomach clenched with a hunger so violent it was painful. A part of him, the human part, recoiled in horror. The larger, newer, vampiric part saw only sustenance.
"No," he whispered, his voice a raw, unfamiliar croak. It was deeper, smoother. He backed away from the stained uniform, stumbling into the living room.
He caught his reflection in the dark screen of the television.
He froze.
The boy staring back was him, but… refined. All the imperfections—the slight awkwardness in his jawline, the softness in his cheeks—were gone, carved away by a master sculptor. His face was sharper, more defined, almost ethereally handsome. His skin was pale, flawless. But it was his eyes that held him captive. They were no longer their familiar, soft brown. They were a brilliant, burning crimson, glowing with an inner hellfire in the dark room.
He looked like a monster. A beautiful, deadly monster.
A sob caught in his throat. This wasn't saving him. This was damning him. She hadn't given him his life back; she had taken it and replaced it with this… this thing.
The thirst chose that moment to intensify, a sharp, stabbing pain in his gut that doubled him over. He needed blood. Real blood. The thought was abhorrent. And yet, his body screamed for it. His new instincts, hardwired and primal, began to override his human morality.
He could hear things now, too. The hum of the refrigerator was a deafening roar. The ticking of the wall clock was a series of gunshots. And from outside… he could hear the city breathing. The rustle of a newspaper pages away. The murmured conversation of a couple in an apartment across the street. The scurrying of a rat in the alley below.
And then he heard it. The sound that made the thirst become a singular, all-consuming purpose.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
A heartbeat. Slow, steady, and strong. Coming from the apartment next door. Old Mr. Yamaguchi, who always left for his morning walk at 5 AM.
The sound was a siren's call. It was the most beautiful, most terrible music he had ever heard. Each pulse was a promise of relief, of power, of life. His mouth flooded with saliva. His fangs, which he hadn't even been aware of, extended with a sharp, painful click, pressing against his lower lip.
No. No, I can't.
He clutched his head, trying to block out the sound. But he couldn't. It was inside him, a drumbeat beckoning him. He took a step towards the door. His body was moving on its own, a predator drawn to prey.
I'm not a monster. I'm not a monster.
But the evidence was in the reflection, in the thirst, in the fangs. He was.
He was at the door, his hand on the knob. He could smell Mr. Yamaguchi now, through the wall. The scent of an old man, of tea and liniment, and beneath it, the rich, intoxicating scent of his blood.
He was going to do it. He was going to break down the door and sink his teeth into the neck of a kindly old man who had once given him a box of strawberries.
"Stop."
The voice was like a bucket of ice water. Elara's voice.
He whirled around. She was standing in the middle of his living room, having appeared without a sound. She was dressed in simple, dark clothes, her silver hair tied back. Her eyes were their usual amethyst, but they held a hard, warning glint.
"The first thirst is the most difficult to master," she said, her tone clinical, as if she were a doctor discussing a symptom. "But if you give in to it now, if you kill a human in your own building, you will be lost. The Hunters would find you before sunrise, and I did not go through the trouble of Turning you just to see you purified in a week."
Akira stared at her, a maelstrom of emotions warring within him—rage, terror, gratitude, hatred. "Trouble?" he snarled, his new voice making the word sound dangerously low. "You did this to me! You turned me into this… this thing! I was dying, and you made me a monster!"
Elara didn't flinch. "You were dead, Akira. Their boot had crushed your spleen. You had minutes, at best. I gave you eternity. A different kind of life, yes. But life nonetheless."
"Eternity as a predator? A murderer?" He gestured wildly towards the door, towards the sound of the heartbeat. "I was about to kill my neighbor! Don't you understand? This is a curse!"
"It is a gift!" she snapped, her eyes flashing crimson for a split second before cooling back to violet. "It is power. It is a place in the true order of the world. Your human life was a fleeting, insignificant dream. You were a ghost. Now, you are a power. You just have to learn to control it."
"The thirst…" he gasped, clutching his stomach again as another wave of need washed over him.
"I know," she said, her voice softening marginally. She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small, crystalline vial filled with a dark, viscous red liquid. "That is why I am here. For your first feeding."
She held out the vial.
Akira stared at it, mesmerized and repulsed. The scent coming from it was a thousand times more potent than the dried blood on his clothes. It was life itself, bottled. His body trembled with need.
"What… what is it?"
"Blood," she said simply. "Donated, not taken. A… renewable resource, you could say. It will sustain you without forcing you to hunt. For now."
Hesitantly, his hand shaking, he reached out and took the vial. The glass was cool against his skin. The scent was overwhelming, making his head spin with desire.
"Drink," Elara commanded.
It was the final surrender. To drink this was to accept what he had become. To fully embrace the monster.
He looked at his crimson-eyed reflection in the dark TV screen. He looked at Elara, his creator, his damnation, his only guide in this new hell.
The thirst gave one final, excruciating twist.
He uncorked the vial, brought it to his lips, and drank.
The effect was instantaneous and explosive. It was not like drinking a liquid. It was like mainlining lightning. Power, raw and ecstatic, flooded his system. The gnawing, desperate thirst vanished, replaced by a feeling of invincible strength. His senses, already heightened, sharpened further. He could feel the individual cells in his body singing. The world snapped into even more perfect focus. The memory of the pain, the fear, the weakness—it all seemed distant, trivial.
This was power. True, undeniable power.
He lowered the vial, licking his lips clean, a low, involuntary groan of pleasure escaping him. He felt… amazing. Better than he had ever felt in his entire human life.
He looked at Elara, and for the first time, he saw something other than fear or anger in her eyes. It was satisfaction.
"The Turn is complete," she said. "You are no longer human, Akira. You are Kindred. You are Vampire."
The words, which should have been a death knell, now felt like a coronation. The blood had quieted his human conscience, allowing the predator to rise.
"But the sun will rise soon," she continued, her voice all business again. "And you are vulnerable. Your first lesson: stay out of the light."
She pointed to his window, where the blackout curtains were drawn. "Direct sunlight will not just burn you. It will incinerate you. You are a creature of the night now. Your life is a reverse of what it was. You sleep by day, and by night… you learn to rule the shadows."
Akira looked at the vial in his hand, now empty. He looked at his powerful, pale hands. The revulsion was still there, buried under a layer of intoxicating power and sated thirst. But it was there.
He had survived. He had traded his invisible, painful human life for a powerful, monstrous existence.
Elara walked to the window, peering through a crack in the curtains. "The facade begins now. You must still go to school. You must still act the part of the clumsy, invisible Akira Tanaka. But now, it is a performance. Behind the mask, you are something more. Something feared."
She turned back to him, her expression unreadable. "Get some rest. The first day is always the hardest. I will return tomorrow night with your next feeding. And your second lesson."
With that, she seemed to dissolve into the shadows near the door, leaving as silently as she had arrived.
Akira was alone again. But the silence was different. The apartment wasn't a shield anymore; it was a cage. The world outside wasn't a threat; it was a hunting ground.
He walked back to his bedroom and looked at himself in the mirror again. The crimson eyes still glowed, but now they held a new light. A dark, understanding light.
The background character was dead. He had been promoted to a player in a game he didn't understand, with a dangerous, beautiful queen as his only ally.
He was Akira Tanaka, Vampire. And his story was just beginning.
---
The dawn was a tangible threat.
Even through the blackout curtains, Akira could feel it—a pressure building in the air, a silent, cosmic alarm clock warning all creatures of the night to find shelter. A deep, primal lethargy began to seep into his bones, a biological imperative that was impossible to ignore. The incredible strength he'd felt after feeding began to wane, replaced by a heavy, inescapable drowsiness.
He stumbled into his bed, his body feeling like it was being filled with lead. The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was the faint, menacing orange glow that had begun to outline the edges of his curtains. The sun. His mortal enemy.
His sleep was not restful. It was a state of suspended animation, dark and dreamless. He was aware of the passage of time only as a gradual lessening of the pressure, a slow retreat of the sun's lethal influence.
He was jolted awake by the blaring of his alarm clock. The sound was a physical assault on his sensitive ears, a shrieking invasion that made him snarl. He swatted at it, his hand moving with a blur of speed, and the plastic device shattered against the wall, falling silent.
Silence returned.
He lay there for a moment, disoriented. The lethargy was gone, replaced by the same vibrant, powerful alertness he'd felt the night before. The thirst was a low, manageable hum in the background. He sat up, and his senses immediately expanded, taking in the room. It was dark, but he could see perfectly. 5:30 PM. He had slept the entire day away.
The performance was about to begin.
He looked at his school uniform, cleaned and neatly folded on a chair—Elara's work, he assumed. He dressed slowly, the fabric feeling rough and cheap against his supernaturally sensitive skin. He looked in the mirror. The ethereal handsomeness was still there, the pale perfection. His eyes, thankfully, had reverted to their normal brown. He concentrated, trying to feel the power within him, to feel the monster. It was there, a coiled serpent in his gut, but on the surface, he looked… like himself. A slightly better-looking, more defined version of himself, but it was a change subtle enough to be attributed to a growth spurt or finally getting a good night's sleep.
This was the facade. He had to be Akira the Ghost. Clumsy, invisible, unassuming.
He practiced in front of the mirror. He forced his shoulders to hunch. He made his eyes lose their sharp, focused intensity, letting them go slightly unfocused, dull. He practiced tripping over his own feet. It felt absurd, like a tiger trying to pretend it was a house cat.
He left his apartment, the setting sun a warning glare on the horizon. The walk to school was once again an ordeal of sensory overload, but this time, he was prepared. He focused on dampening his senses, on blending in. He made sure to walk at a human pace, to keep his gaze downcast.
He arrived at Yamazaki High. The familiar sounds and smells were there, but they no longer intimidated him. They were the background noise of the cattle pen. He felt a distant, predatory amusement watching the students mill about, so fragile, so unaware.
He saw Kenji and Ryo near the gate. They saw him, and their eyes widened with a mixture of fear and confusion. They whispered to each other. Akira kept his head down, shuffling past them as if he were afraid. The act was easier than he thought. The memory of being their victim was still fresh, a useful tool for his performance.
He slid into his seat in Class 2-B. The air was thick with the usual gossip, but he filtered it out, focusing on the one presence that mattered.
She arrived just before the bell. Elara. The scent of cold flowers preceded her, a perfume that now smelled like home, like power, like destiny. She didn't look at him as she took her seat in front of him. She was the perfect ice queen, untouchable and remote.
But he could feel her now. He could sense the immense, dormant power radiating from her, a silent ocean of potential. He was connected to it, a tiny stream fed by her source. The bond was real, a thrumming wire of energy that stretched between them.
The homeroom teacher began roll call. "Tanaka, Akira."
"Here," Akira said, making his voice slightly too high, a little shaky.
He saw Elara's shoulders relax almost imperceptibly. She had been watching, assessing his performance. And she was satisfied.
The day was a long, tedious exercise in restraint. In literature class, he knew the answer to a complex question about The Tale of Genji instantly, his mind making connections with supernatural speed. He forced himself to stay silent, to let another student fumble through a mediocre answer. In PE, he had to consciously slow his movements, fumble the basketball, pretend to be out of breath after a single lap. It was maddening.
During lunch, he went to the rooftop, as was his habit. But the solitude felt different now. He wasn't hiding; he was observing. He looked down at the schoolyard, at the hundreds of students below. He could hear their individual conversations, pick out their heartbeats. They were like a herd of slow, noisy animals. And he was the wolf in their midst.
A shadow fell over him. He didn't need to turn around. He could smell her.
"Your control is adequate," Elara said, coming to stand beside him at the railing. She wasn't looking at him; her gaze was on the horizon. "For a first day."
"It's harder than I thought," Akira admitted, his voice low. "Pretending to be weak when you feel… this." He gestured vaguely at his own body.
"Strength is not in the display of power, but in the choice to conceal it," she replied, her tone philosophical. "Any brute can revel in their might. It takes true strength to wear a mask."
"Why?" The question burst from him. "Why me, Elara? You keep saying I was dead. You saved me. But you could have just left me. You could have let me die. Why turn me? Why choose a 'ghost'?"
She was silent for a long time, the wind tugging at her silver hair. The school sounds below seemed to fade away.
"The night is not a democracy, Akira," she said finally, her voice dropping so only he could hear. "It is a monarchy of the strong. I am S-Class. My blood is old, my power is vast. But that power makes me a target. There are factions, both within our kind and without, that would see me destroyed or… controlled."
She turned her head, and her amethyst eyes pinned him with their intensity. "I needed someone unaligned. Someone unexpected. Someone whose very existence would be a question mark to my enemies. A ghost, as you say, who could move unseen until the moment he must strike. A wild card. Your very insignificance was your greatest qualification."
The truth was as cold as her touch. He wasn't a chosen one. He was a strategic asset. A pawn.
"The bond we share now is more than just creator and progeny," she continued. "It is a tether. Through it, I can shield you to a degree, and you… you can become my eyes and ears in places I cannot go. You are my investment, Akira Tanaka. My secret weapon."
A pawn, but a valuable one. The thought should have been insulting, but the predator in him understood it. It was a position. A purpose.
"And the others?" he asked. "The gaunt man. The voice I heard… Lilith."
Elara's lips tightened. "Lilith runs a club called The Gilded Lotus. She is a Succubus, and a useful, if treacherous, ally. The gaunt man was a Ghoul, a low-level demon scum. His kind are scavengers. But his presence proved that my enemies are already sniffing around. They sensed my interest in you. Now that you are Turned, the scent is stronger. The game has begun."
She pushed herself off the railing. "Meet me at the south gate tonight after sunset. Do not be late. Your real education begins now."
She left him alone on the rooftop with the chilling wind and the echoes of her words.
My secret weapon.
Akira looked at his hands, no longer pretending they were clumsy. He flexed them, feeling the power thrumming just beneath the skin. The confusion and self-pity were burning away, replaced by a cold, sharp focus.
He was a pawn, yes. But even a pawn could checkmate a king if it was played correctly.
The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. The background noise of the school swelled again.
Akira Tanaka, the ghost, hunched his shoulders, let his eyes go dull, and shuffled back towards the classroom. But inside, the vampire smiled. The hunt was on.