The Hammer of War, Chapter 35

The [System] granted me fifteen thousand War Points for killing Helena Stolas, which left me with sixteen thousand.

I didn’t notice until much later. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. My hands still ached from what I’d done, though they were whole again. Flesh smooth. Bone reset. The ache wasn’t physical anymore. I checked the alert out of habit. The numbers blinked on the edge of my vision. Fifteen thousand. A bounty paid in blood.

I didn’t spend them. Not yet. My fingers hovered over the interface, and then withdrew. I’d learned better. It was too easy to waste good coin chasing vengeance, just like it was too easy to punch until your knuckles ground to dust. My parents always told me to sleep on big decisions. Wait a day. Wait two. Don’t act while the blood’s still hot in your veins.

And mine was still boiling.

I walked the long road east, away from the city proper. Not the glittering skyline but the rusted bones at the edge of town where motels sat beside abandoned gas stations and broken-down diners that had served their last stale coffee. The rain had stopped. The wind came in gusts. Trash stirred in the gutters like restless ghosts. I kept to the sidewalk. No one stopped me. A cop car passed once and didn’t slow down. Maybe they saw what I was. Maybe they didn’t want to know.

The motel sat crooked along the highway. Green neon buzzed overhead, one letter stuttering on and off. “TEL” blinked steady. The “MO” was long gone. No cars in the lot but one old Ford with duct tape on the window. A light flickered behind the front desk window. Inside, a man in a gray tank top handed me a key without asking questions. I gave him forty bucks. He gave me a room on the second floor, end of the hall. No ID. No paper trail.

The room smelled like dust and cheap soap. The curtains were thin. The mattress had a dip in the center but no stains I could see. No bugs either–or rats. I sat on the edge and didn’t lie back. I stared at the ceiling and tried to breathe slow. I took off my coat. I kept the [Las Pistol] nearby, resting on the nightstand like an old dog. It was far from my best weapon, but it was the smallest and least conspicuous. I didn’t need to take it out, but just having it around was comforting.

With Helena gone, I figured that was it. The threat to my parents was dead. Her skull shattered. Her body left behind in that gray ruin. I should’ve had peace. But peace didn’t come. I thought of Sebastian. Of that lounge filled with devils and vampires sipping blood and milk like old friends. Of the vow. Of the smirk on his face when I walked away. I’d be an idiot if I didn’t expect him to try and kill me again. And I’d be an even bigger idiot if I, at least, did not expect him to use my parents against me, just as Helena did.

He wanted me dead–tried to kill me by informing Helena that I was coming.

He knew what would happen. 

Or, at least, he thought he did. 

I don’t think he ever expected me to kill the bitch. Though, to be entirely fair, I didn’t expect it’d end that quickly either. 

I didn’t know who else had helped him. Didn’t matter. I’d find them all. I’d burn the whole nest out, root and bone. I’d kill every vampire in Portland and whatever thing they hid behind. If a god stood in the way, then I’d find a way to kill him too.

The wind rattled the windowpane. Somewhere outside, a truck roared past on the highway, engine screaming like it had a ghost in the pipes.

I stood and went back outside.

The vending machine sat beside the office door, humming with fluorescent light. Dust on the plastic buttons. Not a lot of options. I put in a few quarters. Got a cup of noodles and a candy bar. Filled the cup with hot water from the office spigot. Sat on the curb outside the room while steam rose from the cup in coils.

The noodles tasted like cardboard. What the hell? I brought the cup closer to my eyes and found… that the cover was too faded for me to even read what flavor the damn thing was. I ate them anyway.

As I did, I kept my eyes on the road, on the cars that passed by every so often. And my mind raced. Once this vampire business was dealt with, the best thing for me to do would be to leave Portland altogether and go somewhere southwest, probably New York. I was never particularly attached to the idea of becoming a doctor anyway; so, leaving behind Med School wouldn’t really hurt me. No, my chiefest concern was getting stronger.

The System didn’t care about morality or ethics. It gave me War Points for accomplishing quests, which often involved killing something or someone. It paid me for brutality. It rewarded me for slaughter. It did not distinguish justice from murder. It tallied the dead and made a note of it. That was all. And that would be my path. But, I was fine with that, honestly–as long as my victims were non-human pieces of filth, like vampires and devils, then it hardly mattered. 

I chewed slow and looked out across the empty lot. The fog was rolling in from the east. Low to the ground. Creeping.

I stared at my hands. Clean. Whole. Not a trace of Helena left on them. But I remembered the way her skull gave beneath my knuckles. I remembered the sound it made. Like a wet rock breaking. I shuddered at the thought. Something dark awakened within me back then. And it was here to stay.

I finished the noodles and tossed the cup in the bin. The candy bar stayed in my coat pocket, untouched.

Back in the room, I washed my face with lukewarm water from the tap. The mirror showed me someone I almost didn’t know. I stared a while. Watched myself blink. The face was mine, but the eyes were changed. My fingers traced the jawline, the cheekbone. Nothing hurt. I wished something did.

I sat on the bed with the [Las Pistol] back on my thigh. I didn’t sleep for a while. I thought of the vampire nest. I thought of Sebastian’s words. I thought of Helena’s blood in my mouth and how it didn’t taste like anything at all.

The motel clock ticked in the dark. Red numbers shifted from one minute to the next.

I didn’t touch the War Points. Not yet.

I’d wait.

But when I spent them, I’d spend them well.

I woke with sunlight in my eyes.

The curtains had shifted in the night, caught on a breeze or maybe the weight of their own neglect. Light leaked through in angled shafts. I blinked once. The motel room smelled faintly of dust and the lingering sharpness of soap. The blanket was bunched around my legs. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. No headache. No stiffness. Six hours of sleep, more than I’d had in weeks, and yet I rose clean. Mind clear. No ghosts in the corners. Not this morning.

I stood and stretched. My body responded like a machine recently oiled. No pain in the shoulders. No grind in the knees. I flexed my fingers and the tendons rolled smooth beneath skin. The bathroom light flickered once when I switched it on. I splashed water on my face. No shaving. No need.

I sat on the edge of the bed again and brought up the [System].

Sixteen thousand War Points.

Not much. Not little either. Enough to change the shape of a fight. Maybe the shape of a war, if I spent it right. The screen shimmered in the air before me. Cool blue-white lines etched in nothing. I blinked and scrolled. First thing I did was filter. Too much noise otherwise. I set the price cap. Toggled off anything above my means.

Weapons. Units. Gear. Traits. The usual tabs slid into view.

Then a new one.

[Blessings]

I paused. The tab pulsed faintly, as if waiting to be touched. Every item within was grayed out, prices listed in bright red. Far above my budget. I scrolled through a few out of idle curiosity. [Blessing of the Eternal Forge]. [Divine Favor – Minor]. [The Whisper of Chains]. All unattainable. But they hadn’t been there before. That was the strange part. The System had grown. Changed. Added new functions on its own.

Huh, that was interesting.

I closed the tab.

Back to what mattered.

Weapons? No. I had the [Tau Rail Rifle]. Its punch was clean, precise, and merciless. It cut through shields and barriers like truth through lies. Nothing I could afford would be better than that. Not yet. The [Las Pistol] still had value too, light and fast, good for clearing stragglers. I didn’t need more firepower.

I needed something that could take a hit and not explode. 

The [Exocrene] was powerful. Unquestionably so. But its shell was soft. I’d seen it bleed too easily. Too slow to dodge, too large to hide. It was artillery, not a frontline soldier. A siege engine. The kind you brought to erase buildings, not hold a line.

The [Cadian Shock Troopers] were solid, disciplined, well-armed. But they were still men. Tough men. But flesh all the same. The kind that died when something heavier came down on them. I witnessed this, firsthand, in the Slaaneshi Dungeon, when the Daemonettes very easily cut them apart as soon as they got within melee range. 

The [Ork Nobz] were wild. Brutal in close quarters. But they didn’t last long under sustained damage–though they’d last far longer than they should. They weren’t made for defense. They weren’t made for much of anything beyond violence and brutality.

The [Drukhari Incubi] were worse in that regard. Assassins. Blade dancers. Beautiful in motion and quick to die if caught flat-footed. Their role was to roam the backlines and pick off the weakest or most vulnerable among the enemy.

The [Carnifex] were actually very tanky, while also being capable of dishing out extreme amounts of damage. The problem with them was that their body shapes meant they weren’t very good at protecting things, no matter how large they might’ve been. 

What I needed was a wall.

Something that would stand between me and the things that hunted in the dark. Something I could throw into the breach and trust to hold it until the air ran dry. It didn’t even need to be particularly deadly. I only needed it to draw enemy aggression and live long. Luckily, the [System] had just about every filter I could think of and, soon enough, I found exactly what I needed. 

A [Squiggoth]...

[Squiggoth] – Amongst the largest of all Squigs, the Squiggoth is a massive quadrupedal beast  kept by Feral Orks. And, like all Ork Units, a Squiggoth is capable of growing in power through repeated exposure to violence and combat. Costs 10,000 War Points. 

It was already armored too. And, based on the stats, this thing was already massive. It wasn’t going to be very useful in enclosed or crowded spaces, but it sure as hell was going to be useful in everything else, like standing between me and some certain death. The image on the interface was crude. A hulking quadruped shaped like some bloated reptile and built like a siege engine. Its skin looked like green leather baked in the sun. Warts the size of skulls. Spines like rebar jutting from its back. Its head was too small for its body and its eyes too dumb to see fear. But its mouth had tusks, and its back was armored with crude plates hammered flat by Ork hands and riveted on with bolts the size of a man’s forearm.

Perfect.