“When I get out of here, I’m never going anywhere without a MULE again.” I muttered darkly.

  A MULE, or Multi-Function Utility, Logistics and Equipment vehicle was a large, but short and sturdy vehicle with a flat top and while it might look like a glorified box on wheels to the uneducated, just one of the rugged machines could’ve taken care of the logistics situation for our entire team in the short-term. They were loaded with two-thousand kilos of munitions, food, water and if not for the lack of an FTL-equipped starship and an internet connection, they’d be the answer to just about all my prayers right now.

  I sat in the gate room, having just witnessed the arrival of my two companions. Larsen was as hale as ever, but Eric looked like someone had given him stage four cancer or thrown him through a wall. He shuffled into the room, looking frail and decidedly not magical and mysterious.

  “I don’t see any wounds, but you’re not acting. What’s wrong with you?”

  Eric gave me a pained smile. “It turns out that having your power siphoned is neither healthy, or pleasant. Fortunately, I doubt any permanent damage was done, but I can’t say when I will be back to normal.”

  “Siphoned? What are you, a battery?” Larsen asked.

  “My magic was forcibly pulled from my body. It is invariably a taxing experience.” He grimaced.

  I wasn’t devoid of sympathy for the mage but I had more pressing matters on my mind unfortunately.

  “Do you know how we can get out of this place? It sounds like the gate’s not an option. I’d like an exit plan.”

  “I concur, the gate here is inaccessible to us, but there could be tunnels up to the surface.” Eric said, clutching his ribs and gasping suddenly.

  “Alright, we’ll check for that.” I frowned. I ran a bioscan and as there was a moderate amount of stress on his body, but a lack of any external injuries. There was a fair amount of internal bleeding and ruptured blood vessels throughout his body though. That was strange, seeing as how he hadn’t received any blunt-force trauma recently, but the source of his injury was magical, so I’d expected strangeness.

  The scans I’d run of the place didn’t give me much of immediate use. If there was something up above us, it was a fair distance away. All I could see was more of the facility, more rooms and areas yet to be explored.

  I turned to Larsen. “You given him a shot yet?”

  “Yeah.” She responded.

  “Make it two. We need him back in the fight as soon as possible.” I ordered.

  Larsen’s hand strayed to a small tube on her waist and she uncapped it with a flick of her thumb. A small needle was revealed as she let the cap fall to the floor.

  “What is this… instrument?” Eric eyed it dubiously.

  “You didn’t seem to care much before.” Larsen commented.

  I swept my eyes over our surroundings. The room looked pretty much the same, just empty. The shield wasn’t there and I stayed well clear of the centre where I remembered it had appeared. I didn’t want to get stuck inside again.

  “Some form of healing?” Eric asked.

  She nodded. “Of a sort. The simple explanation is that it’s a syringe, a sharp tube to puncture the skin, which I’m using to inject a collection of incredibly tiny swarms of intelligent metal dust, with instructions to repair your body. We made these swarms to treat traumatic and serious injuries in battle. I don’t know what they’ll do for you given your current condition, but they should help.”

  “Intriguing.”

  “Hopefully they do more than intrigue. You’re in no danger of dying from what I can see and I can’t find any actual injuries, so I suspect they’ll do fine, should speed your recovery up. Don’t get used to it though, we only have a handful of them and I don’t know if we’ll be able to make more yet.”

  Eric nodded.

  I shifted my attention back to the gate room itself, rather than the conversation between the two.

  “You ready to get out of here?” I asked Eric.

  “More than ready.” He assured me.

  “What’s the plan? The mission’s scrubbed, right?” Larsen asked.

  “Can you fight?” I directed my question at Eric.

  “Not a chance. Not unless you let me sleep for a few days.”

  “Then yeah, mission’s scrubbed. We’ll have to let Davian go.”

  “Shit. They’re not going to be happy. This isn’t exactly holding up our end of the bargain.” Larsen commented.

  I looked at Eric’s injuries, well, what passed for them. There really wasn’t anything visible but he looked completely drained. I took him at his word that he wasn’t going to be doing any magic and with how tired he looked I doubted he would be doing any fighting with a sword either.

  “Not really, no.” I agreed with Larsen.

  “Watch out!”

  A red flash to my left had me throwing myself to the right.

  “Get behind me!” Larsen yelled.

  I rolled up onto my feet, watching as the same vampire from before came at me with a vicious look in his eyes.

  Larsen was up against the wall, with Eric leaning against it, meanwhile I was over by the room’s entrance.

  “You don’t turn your back on me unless you know I’m dead!”

  He leaped at me from across the room, streaking through the air like a bullet.

  I parried a stab of his claws as they reached for my heart, well, really I parried his whole body and he went flying past me. He twisted to land on his feet, bouncing off the wall before settling onto the floor. The impact on my arms from parrying an entire person shook me, but not as much as it might have. I’d braced myself at the last minute.

  Naturally, I wasn’t planning on standing around for him to beat on me. I stood still, but not idle, tracking the vampire’s movements like a hawk.

  “You’re not even human, why side with these people?” I asked, keeping my attention on the vampire’s every move. I trusted Larsen to take care of herself, and Eric.

  “Because they offer me something I’ve long desired; immortality.”

  “You’re a fucking vampire, you’re already immortal.”

  The thing—I was beginning to stop thinking of it as a man—laughed.

  “So you do know something of my kind! Then you should also know that we are not truly immortal. We do not age, but we can die. I aim to change that.”

  “Oh, really? You can die? Great to hear. Want to demonstrate?” I advanced on him in a grounded, practiced manner.

  A quick thrust of my knife was batted away by my forearm, but I advanced undeterred, slashing at his neck. I closed the gap until I was in his face, using the momentum of my previous strike to twist and kick at his shins. It had depressingly little effect without the benefit of leverage.

  A guttural hiss was all the warning I got before his own leg lashed out and smashed into my left leg. Fortunately, my armour saved me from injury, but as my other leg was taken out from under me all I could think to do was curl up and protect my groin.

  I hit the ground hard, arms and legs moving into place to shield my vulnerable body. Being on the ground in a fight, any kind of fight was a bad place to be, but especially when things were up close and personal. It didn’t take a genius to know that, of course, but the knowledge felt weightier somehow.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  In the blink of an eye, the damned thing was on top of me raining down blows that would’ve cracked concrete, if not worse. There wasn’t a lot of give in the stone beneath me, but there was in my body. I had nasty bruises forming beneath my armour, even a few sore ribs, but nothing vital was broken yet.

  I tried to keep my arms and my knife’s blade between me and the vampire’s strikes, but I was beginning to feel the impacts, even through the armour. The minute detour his fist took around my blade did little if anything to soften his attacks.

  A distinctly human roar sounded out, not from the space around me, but from my comms system.

  A flicker of motion and a solid thunk sounded out as a standard-issue knife appeared in the thing’s forehead. Everything seemed to stop at once.

  It reached up and grasped it, pulling it out of its head with a slow motion. It looked over the slick, bloodied blade with curiosity, and perhaps appreciation.

  Larsen tackled the bastard before dancing away out of range of its stolen weapon.

  “What’d you do that for?” I scowled and got to my feet.

  “To keep you from getting killed!” She yelled, feinting into a lunge and another strike.

  I adjusted my grip on my knife briefly as I watched the two battled. He was good, very good, probably better than me honestly, but so was Larsen. She had a green belt

  Of course, only one of them had a proper weapon and it wasn’t my friend. That did more than tip the scales, regardless of their relative skill difference, however large or small it was. I doubted augmented strength and skill would be enough for this enemy, unfortunately. We needed an edge, something that could shrug off a knife in the head like it was a regular Tuesday was clearly no simple foe.

  I wasn’t sure who’d win in a fair one-on-one fight, but I was very sure who’d win in an unfair fight, and I had an inkling of how we could put this thing down for good.

  “Proc, bioscan.” I ordered. I’d neglected to do it before, but considering the trouble we were having, I felt it necessary. It wasn’t usually, but I was beginning to think that I should run one on everyone or thing I fought, just as a rule.

  A map of his internals flashed into being. Beneath the translucent grey representation of his skin his bones were rendered in a flat white texture and his organs in a dull red.

  Bioscan Anomaly: Reproductive organs not found, appendix not found, spleen not found…

  It went on like that for a bit, listing more than a few organs I knew regular humans couldn’t live without, as well as some minor differences in bone structure. One thing I latched on to was the spine, not that it was missing, but that it seemed so damned tough. I was surprised that my earlier attacks hadn’t done anything to it, considering I'd been using a monomolecular blade. In the end I figured it was worth another shot, though. If at first you don't succeed in destroying a vampire's spinal cord, try, try and try again until it stays dead. That's what I always say.

  “We don’t fight fair, we fight to win.” I murmured. I don’t remember where that thought came from exactly, but it stuck in my mind like a caltrops. Fighting fair was a luxury, a needless risk. Marines didn't try to fight fair when lives were on the line, that was stupidity refined.

  “This thing’ll go down after that, right?” She grunted, stepping around an overhead strike and blocking it.

  “No idea, let’s hope.” I responded, having circled around behind the vampire. It was hard to think of it as a man, not when it turned, hissing as it switched its target to me.

  “You’re a stubborn one, aren’t you?” He sneered.

  “Do you always talk this much?” I said.

  The creature—because I was hesitant to call him a man—walked slowly back and forth on his side of the room as he watched us with an air of casual disregard. It was as though he was merely playing with us, or watching a particularly amusing pet run around. Given his obvious strength that put him at a parity with me I was somewhat okay with that condescension, but part of me was almost offended too. I wasn’t some third-rate militia recruit and I wanted more recognition than that.

  “You fight well for pathetic mortals, but it is time for you to go away now.” He smirked, tossing his stolen blade to the wayside. Larsen’s knife skittered across the stone floor with a soft rasp.

  There was no fancy footwork, no flying across the room and there was assuredly nothing playful about his next action.

  The vampire assumed a stance remarkably similar to the one taught in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program and I quirked an eyebrow up for a moment. Between one blink of the eye and the next, he came at me with a mean look in his eyes, his measured strides eating up the ground between us.

  With a few steps between us, I reached out and put a probing strike into his face. He batted my fist away with a casual motion and a palm strike to my chest lifted my feet from the floor. My body went limp as it flew backwards into a stone wall. Picking myself up off the floor, I slammed my fist into the thing’s chest as it rushed to meet me, producing a similar result as before. This time, though, I wasn’t the one sent flying.

  His body was flung against the wall opposite me. We each had unbelievable strength and resilience, so hitting the bastard was like throwing a spear against a brick wall; he moved, but he also recovered unnaturally fast, just like me. Without the benefit of the mass of a brick wall he wasn’t impossible to move, but he was dangerously fast.

  We were two giants fighting toe-to-toe. It picked itself out of the wall and snarled at the knife in its hand, tossing it at me as it rushed in close. Deflecting it off to the side with the edge of my blade saved me from having a knife-shaped hole in my chest, but the thing tackled me off my feet despite that.

  I let myself fall backwards as he eschewed words for incoherent screeching and animalistic noises.

  Definitely pissed.

  He pushed me against the stone, pinning me with his knees planted by my hips and his claws trying to find entrance somewhere along my armoured breastplate. Thankfully, I was saved having to dismount him when he snarled, head snapping from me to somewhere over his shoulder. It wasn’t a casual thing, but an impulsive, enraged reaction.

  As the vampire made to rise and face Larsen, my armoured foot shot out and hooked his legs while they were still in motion. A sharp kick and in one fluid motion he tumbled to the floor.

  After a split-second I saw why he’d gone down with only one kick.

  The gaping wound in his calf was deep, spilling a dark, crimson fluid out onto the floor as he clawed at me from outside striking distance. Larsen’s blade had sliced a deep valley at the top of his calf and the limb was barely intact, holding on by a shred of flesh and some unnatural vitality.

  It knitted before my eyes, slowly, but it did. Unnatural didn’t begin to cover it, in my eyes.

  “Don’t let up the pressure!” Larsen yelled, charging towards the prone but far from idle form.

  I threw myself on top of him before he could stand on his undamaged limb. A practiced set of movements had my limbs wrapped around his in a perfected technique, one of his arms out of play and the other left to flail uselessly as I began applying pressure to his carotid arteries with my legs. I was gratified to find that while his organs were different, his joints and basic body structure were human enough. His strength meant nothing without any leverage to use it.

  I held him by his arm and pressed his cheek into the stone. It was then that I vaguely registered motion besides me and he screamed. Blood spurted and gushed from a now-dismembered limb behind me as I forced his arm to bend in ways it was not designed to.

  “Cursed blade!” He growled, voice morphing into a scream soon after.

  I glared at him, “Talk, you piece of shit. Where is Davian? Is he gone?”

  A weak chuckle was my only answer. “You really have—“

  “Answer the man.” Larsen said from behind me.

  I was paying more attention this time and I could see her carving the flesh from his stump. I ignored the grisly sight. This thing would eat me given the chance. I had very little sympathy for him.

  “WHERE?” I growled, applying more pressure as I twisted his arm further.

  I couldn’t feel it through my armour, but I was sure his shoulder was going to pop any second.

  He hissed, like a damned cat, trying to buck my hold on him, but with two of us there he didn’t have a chance.

  I kept my eyes and sensors alert. One of the benefits of armour was the wealth of information and situational awareness provided. That was why when I heard the sound of running and traced it back to one of the halls nearby I decide to expedite things.

  “If you don’t talk, I will kill you. You have three seconds.”

  I gave him three seconds, and he remained silent, right up until I put power to my suit’s musculature and pushed his arm all the way forward, pulling his shoulder apart.

  “ARCHIVES! HE’S IN THE ARCHIVES!” He screamed.

  I didn’t bother replying. I just held my hand out behind me. As expected, Larsen placed the knife’s handle into my grip. As soon as the vampire realised what I was about to do he thrashed wildly.

  “STOP! I’ll give you immortality, I’ll teach you the secrets of our magic, don’t—“

  A quick slice with my body weight exerting a downward pressure severed his spine. It was disgusting, but I made sure to finish the job, slicing all the way around to sever his head. Disgusting, but he’d already gotten up once from what would be fatal injuries if he were human. I seriously doubted he could get up from a decapitation though.

  “Where the fuck are the archives?” I asked.

  Larsen gave me a look I knew well, though through armour it was more posture and body language than any facial expression.

  “What? He had it coming.” I defended.

  “Yeah, I don’t blame you, but now we have to go snag some poor bastard out there instead of just having the bloodsucker show us.”

  I sighed. “Go grab Davian, I’ll stay with Eric. If you need me, just say the word.”

  I preferred not to split up, but I didn’t want to leave Eric alone and defenseless and we couldn’t search the place dragging him along with us. We needed trustworthy men to delegate security. I was beginning to see we couldn’t be everywhere at once and that a two-man team wasn’t ideal.

  “Did that seem almost too easy to you? He’s not going to get up again, right?” I asked Larsen.

  “Do you make it a point to taunt Murphy because it’s funny? Or are you just into willing the universe to make our lives harder?” She scowled.

  I walked over and sat with Eric who was leaning against the wall. I looked him over carefully. I’d kept my attention on the fight, and diagnosing Eric’s condition, or whether he would recover was outside my area of expertise. That and I had a fundamental gap in my knowledge when it came to magical wounds.

  “You going to be alright?” I asked.

  “I hope so.” He grimaced, fidgeting somewhat as he shifted his weight.

  “Hang in there.” I reached out to pat his shoulder reassuringly.

  “No touching.” He said quickly, “My skin feels like it’s going to crack and burn.”

  I sat next to him, making a point to keep my rifle aimed at the room’s only exit.

  “Moving out now. Any ideas?” Larsen asked over our suit to suit net.

  “Eric, any idea where this archives room is, or what it might look like?”

  He thought for a moment. “It’ll probably be a large room full of silver cubes, it may also have a high level of security, guards and such. I’m not sure what kind of precautions these people would have taken, but few libraries are without knowledge cubes.”

  “Knowledge cubes?”

  “They’re magical objects that project information into the air. Similar to ancient books, but with more storage capacity. They aren’t easy to make, but they are store information much more compactly than in a more traditional format.”

  “Huh. We have devices that serve similar functions. One moment.” I looked away from him, off to the side, less out of any real need and more just to signal that I was talking to Larsen.

  “According to Eric it should be some kind of large room full of silver cubes. It may also have visible security and guards. Keep watch for any kind of magic traps or something, remember to run your thermals.”

  “Got it. Thanks.”