After Frederick had left the alley, he explored the entirety of the city and discovered that in a way it was divided into three districts.
The slums, where he and the nobles had arrived, were the most populated of the districts. This place in particular was littered with gifteds whose gifts were worthless to society. In this world a powerful gift meant everything and if one wasn't born with one then their only luck was to be born into a noble family.
After the slums was the middle district, poorly built structures with people that struggled daily with the fear of falling into the slums at the back of their minds. They weren't well off but could manage themselves.
And finally the upper district, only a single mansion occupied it. Placed on a small hill it was like a sovereign deity watching the lives of peasants, peasants it had doomed to slavish lives.
Frederick retracted his gaze from the hill, he was done with everything he had to do and he had to admit the information he had gained was quite intriguing. The knowledge he had gained about the humans made countless years of human documentation useless, they weren't even called humans anymore.
He straightened up his cloak, since he was done it was time to head back to the mountain.
Passing by the alley way where he had encountered those men a pleasant scent overwhelmed his senses. Instinctively he stopped in his tracks, bright crimson burning beneath within his eyes.
This was the scent of blood.
What had happened? He didn't kill them and only one of them had an injury that drew blood from his body. For all he knew the others should have woken up and taken their injured friend for treatment but, the amount of blood he could smell only hinted at one thing, a massacre.
He rushed in fast, faster than he had moved in a while, the urgency of the matter required it. He stopped a few feet from the dead end and saw them, the people that had attacked him were sprawled dead on the ground, bones bent in disturbing angles and flesh ripped out from their skin.
"Why were they all dead?" Frederick asked himself, he didn't kill them, so who did?
He stared at the gruesome sight, eyes searching for a clue, something that could point him in the right direction and after a while he finally saw it. All the corpses had a similarity, two puncture holes by the side of their necks or rather what was left of it.
Fredrick gritted his teeth, his blood boiled.
A curse was here, a vampire to be precise. His thin blade rattled in its scabbard, eager to be released.
Frederick drew the blade and in an instant a sinister and eerie aura began to emit from its being. It pulsed like a heartbeat, its rhythm slow, precise and obviously built to kill.
"Show me" Frederick's cold voice whispered in the silence, his grip on the blade loosening till he no longer held it.
The thin sword spun midair and stabbed itself to the ground, its eerie dark red aura spreading like living shadows towards the dead. The dark aura swallowed up the bodies, blood, bone and flesh. It left nothing in its wake and when it was done it began to retract back to the weapon.
After all the dark aura had been retracted it began to pulse out of the weapon slowly, this time the pulse covered a wider range nearly reaching the entrance to the alley.
Slowly but clearly faint figures began to appear in the weapon's artificial domain. Aildris saw them, the men who had attacked him. They were carrying their supposed leader who was badly injured but when they got to the entrance of the alleyway a figure blocked their pass, small framed and dark clothed.
Without warning the figure lunged at them, he broke and clawed at them like a rabid beast till they were torn apart and unmoving. Frederick couldn't hear their screams but their fading expressions told tales that anyone could understand, pain that could make someone wish for death.
After its massacre the figure slowly knelt by each of them one by one, sinking unseen fangs into their neck and when he was done, they were all dead, not a sliver of life left.
The reach of the dark pulse began to lessen till it was restricted back to just the weapon.
"The brutality felt familiar but this is less precise, untamed instincts, a rogue vampire " Frederick said to himself internally.
He brought his right hand to his head and massaged his temples, it hadn't been up to day and he had a rogue curse on his hand.
He turns around, his cloak sweeping the ground in an arc as he proceeds to walk out. A sadistic smile on his face, he muttered to himself.
" Run, little vampire—and pray to whatever higher curse you serve that I don't find you".
****
Gasp.
A young boy with dark brown eyes and short dark curly hair shot up from the bed, his forehead creased with cold sweat and lungs that burned from sharp uneven breaths.
It was Aildris. But how did he get here?
The last thing he remembered was drowning in the river, strong currents bashing against his frail body like raging bulls. He glanced at his arm, the one he had used to parry the strike.
It wasn't disjointed, his shoulder was completely fine. All this didn't sit right with him, was he dreaming?.
No!, it couldn't have been a dream. The pain felt so real and the feeling of powerlessness was etched boldly in his mind.
But this wasn't the root of his doubts. He remembered the fear, the bone chilling dread he felt when faced against those predatory crimson eyes.
Even reminiscing on them brought back the feeling, but somehow he had survived.
But how?, he couldn't recall. Whoever had saved him had enough information to bring him back to the house and had possibly even fed him a recovery pill.
For a moment his face grew dark.
Someone had been watching him, whether a friend or a foe he had no idea. But the thought of it made him slight wary as no one would find pleasure when faced against the unknown.