I shifted as I barreled towards the ghostly shapes in the darkness.

  “Columna Fumi!”

  Before I reached my proper form, I sent a cloud of smoke and ash out ahead of me. I didn’t know if vampires breathed, but I was fairly confident they needed to see. I followed it up with a blast of my breath attack before slamming bodily into the first vamps, who promptly ignored me.

  The bastards changed into rats, bats and other small animals and slipped past me. I stomped a few of the unlucky ones in passing, but then faced a significant problem. I couldn’t turn around in the narrow confines of the corridor. The gold from the kills was ok, but not significant in comparison to my hoard. Was I becoming jaded about acquiring more shinies?

  Tiny, batty coughs were still coming from ahead of me. I wasn’t sure how many of them there would be down here, but Bulldo had given me the impression of hundreds, if not thousands. Mostly the lesser ghouls, but still a sizable population of high-level vampires to be confronted. It seemed they at least needed to pretend to breathe.

  More fire roared out from my nostrils as I bashed myself against the walls. Concluding that I was too large to spin around, I shifted back into my mammal suit. Something latched onto the side of my leg, and I glared down at a stoat sucking greedily at my blood.

  Another weapon I looted from Bulb’s storeroom appeared in my hand, and I smacked the stoat-pire away with the gleaming head of an oversized mace. When the silvery metal connected to the hairy skull, a shower of sparks poured out that burned into the fur and flesh like hot embers. The force also caused the teeth to be ripped sideways, pulling away a chunk of skin that made me yowl in pain.

  “Bastards!” More sparks exploded around me as Wrath resumed his Arch-Demon form from the lowest pits of Hell in my mind. Wherever they touched the undead, the monsters hissed and withdrew. Blasts of magic and spikes of blood slammed into me, pushing me back towards my allies. Then, more attacks started hitting me from behind, shoving me back towards the enemies ahead of me.

  “Stay human, Bob!” called Tim.

  “It fucking hurts, Tim!” I snapped back.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw that three of the regular bunnyborgs were down, torn and shredded. Shards of metal and globules of the former pilots were scattered about like nightmare confetti. But all the vamps that had slipped past me as a dragon had spun and were attacking me instead of my friends.

  Tim was dual-wielding a pair of sci-fi-looking pistols that fired beams of ultraviolet light. The vampires melted whenever he landed a shot, holes spreading through them like they were being eaten by acid. I couldn’t see Kat… no, there she was.

  A whipcrack took out the eye of a particularly bulky vampire, his shoulders heaving as he lobbed spiky axes of ice in my direction. Kat immediately phased back out of existence as a clawed hand passed through where she had been.

  New Synteticus acquired!

  Telum Glacies

  I raised my mace over my head and triggered the enchantment. Beams of light shot out like the thing was a disco ball of death, slicing into the vampires.

  They all shifted into their animal forms to become harder to hit, granting me a reprieve from the magical assault. I was feeling particularly vulnerable and would never understand the ancient traditions of going into battle naked. Armoured loincloths would be the minimum acceptable level of protection for any sane creature.

  I shoved the mace back into my storage space as soon as it ran out of charge and pulled out another of Bulb’s gifts. The Hofstedter Spear of Piercing Illumination, slender, graceful and intended for taking down city walls. I spun it casually in my hands and grinned.

  “Take cover!” I called, then followed up with a stroke of genius. “Venerunt Vespertiliones!” Clever dragon.

  Turned out that spell didn’t just summon wild bats. It also worked on vamps that had shapeshifted into their batty forms. The bats charged towards me, forming a blob of fluttering victims.

  Behind them, Tim had hit the dirt, and the BB-109s had shoved themselves back against the sides of the walls. The bunnyborgs had dropped low but continued to try to create still-life sculptures from the undead. Kat was nowhere to be seen, so she should be intangible.

  “Say hello to my little friend!” I yelled.

  Arguably, in hindsight, this had been a mistake. Not the atrocious quip, but the selection of a weapon intended to level city walls. It bucked in my hands as a beam of light six feet wide scythed through the flock of bats flapping towards me.

  Vampire (various ages) level (various) slain x 53

  Gold coins earned!

  Fifty-five thousand. Two hundred and one gold added to the Hoard.

  Bloody cheapskate vampires giving bugger all gold for the kill. But quantity has a quality all of its own, so I was pleased by the total. Unfortunately, the beam from the spear was difficult to control, trying to raise itself upward with the recoil.

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  It sliced into the ceiling, carving a tunnel that reached up and up until I cut the weapon off and blinked at the afterimage in my eyes. Was that daylight up there? How far had the damn thing reached?

  The sudden introduction of daylight into an underground battle against creatures who suffered a worse reaction to it than kids who can’t eat peanuts should have been a good thing. I grinned, shifting back into my dragon form.

  No-Butt-Stuff turned my eight long tails into lunging spears behind me as I blasted the non-bat form vamps ahead with another breath attack, clearing out the ones between my friends and me. Then I stomped forward, trying to swat at the survivors with my wings, hoping what Agatha had said about angel feathers would be true.

  It was.

  “Tim! Pluck me!”

  “Now is not the time, Bob. I’m flattered but—”

  “Pluck!”

  “I’ve got it,” Kat said happily, appearing at my shoulder. I glared back at her.

  “You’re going to enjoy it too mu—OUCH! Individually, for gods' sake! Don’t rip them out in handfuls,” I growled.

  “What are we supposed to do? Tickle them to death?” she asked happily, continuing to denude my beautiful wings in places. Vanity was screaming and crying in my mind. Kat only had tiny hands, so it shouldn’t affect my ability to fly, but I was going to look threadbare by the end of this.

  “Yes! Tickle the bastards if they get close,” I snarled, shaking to throw her off me.

  An intangible pixie, armed with angel feathers, who can pass through solid matter and ignore attacks when she wants, is absolutely terrifying if a quick tickle will kill you. I shifted back to human form and pulled another blessed weapon of Bulb from my inventory.

  The vampires swarmed at me as I slipped the ring onto my finger and began blasting lasers at the vamps. I was starting to regret my casual dismissal of the laser-focused items that had been on offer back in Baginton. Dammit. I needed to get back there and stave off the Comte and his army. Most of the weapons were back with my hoard, but I had a few more to use if I needed them.

  Bits of rock began to fall from above. I charged forward, snatching up my allies in claws or tails as I went. The blast from the spear had loosened the stone above us. As the air filled with choking dust, I craned my neck back to see that the passage behind was completely clogged. I’d missed one of the bunnyborgs, but the Big Bunnies and Tim had both made it through.

  “You should have been careful where you aimed that thing,” Tim grumbled as he struggled to escape one of my tails. I let him drop, and he checked his pistols, nodding in satisfaction at what he found. “Not much farther,” he continued, waving his wrist scanner at me.

  “It kicked more than I thought it would.”

  “Well, we’re all clear behind,” Kat said cheerfully as she emerged from the pile of rubble.

  I opened my mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again.

  “The centre of the enchantment grid is ahead of us, but I’m not detecting any forces between here and there. We should be clear. As soon as we can destroy it—”

  “Spoilers!” I snarled, glancing around nervously. “Let’s go.”

  I doubted the real powerhouses down here had joined the swarm attack. In fact, I was banking on it. The runes or wards or whatever the fuck they were that protected this place from invasion needed to be taken out, but much like the shields in the bunnyborgs, they were built into the structure of the place.

  But everything had a weak point. In this case, Tim and Kat had convinced me that it would be the power source, which Tim had tuned to his wrist-scanner trinket while Kat was scouting the immediate area when we first arrived.

  We charged forward. The bunnyborgs let out the occasional angry boop at having pulled away from creating more scenes that reminded me of Tool’s music videos. They slurped at their carrot paste furiously.

  The BB-109s were chill, or so it seemed. They plodded along quietly, cannons tracking on any corridors that intersected with our path.

  “Tim, how are the machines doing?” I asked.

  “All within acceptable operational parameters.”

  “And our one-two punch?”

  “Good to go. Honestly, this is fascinating. The readings are off the charts. Whatever is powering this place is like, well, it’s like a nuclear reactor or something.”

  I sighed, taking the moment to shift into my human body and resolving never to do that again. Sighing and shapeshifting at the same time produced a noise that turned heads. “And we can’t teleport out until after we destroy this ball of radiation? That sounds like an issue.”

  “It’s not a nuke reactor, Bob. It will be magical in nature. Likely some harnessing of diametrically opposed principles. Possibly something as simple as fire and ice in perpetual conflict,” he replied, holding his wristpad out in front of him as we ran.

  The side crypts were empty. All the sarcophagi were lidless, and in most cases, the doorways were clogged by undisturbed spiderwebs. This place had been unoccupied for weeks at least. I began to have a bad feeling about our plan.

  After a series of twists and turns as the corridor wound its way through the bedrock, we burst out into a huge open space. I immediately shifted back into my real body, glad to no longer feel so naked and be subject to jokes about my insecurity from Kat as she fluttered along beside me.

  Flickering torches lit the far walls and were mounted on the pillars that ran down the centre of the room. The air tasted stale, and even the faint dusty vampire smell was faint here. I glanced around, eyes squinting at the shadows.

  “Are we there yet?” I asked, immediately regretting the way I phrased the question.

  “Another ten minutes–” Tim began.

  “You have arrived at your doom!” Bassy and sonorous, the voice silenced the orlic. “Prepare to face your end. You have disturbed the lair of the greatest vampire to have ever strode the earth.”

  A ghostly form, humanoid, clad in a dark cloak, shimmered into existence ahead of us. My tongue darted out nervously. Glowing red eyes shimmered in the shadows of the hood, and a pair of vertical flashes of ivory appeared below as the thing smiled.

  “Now?” Tim asked.

  “No,” I growled. “Who are you?” I demanded of the apparition.

  “I am Grablax the—”

  “Gourmand? Groper? Gundam?” I interrupted.

  “The Gobbler,” Grablax finished in an annoyed voice. “Beware my wrath, pathetic mortals, you know not what you have awakened from millennia of slumber.”

  I glanced at Kat, shrugged and waved a wing vaguely towards the left. That was where the scent was coming from.

  “I can see the bed hair,” I replied. The floating terror raised a pale hand and slid it under his hood.

  “I am perfectly coiffured, you filthy animal!” he snarled. I am the embodiment of the curse of Kael, the first vampire and bitterest vegetable!”

  “You’re a fucking vegetable,” I muttered. I really wished there was some way for me to level up my bantering with a villain skill, but I doubted it was the kind of evolution the bloody IMPS would ever see fit to grant me.

  “I am the terror of the ages!” The shadowy figure swelled, growing to nearly four metres tall and glaring down at us with crimson eyes. “I am the endless thirst, the sneakiest sucker, the— what the fuck are you doing here?”

  There was a flash of light from off to the left. Kat returned, flying slightly drunkenly, her hand now devoid of tickling feathers.

  “You’re going to have tan lines,” I said sagely, looking at the places where her leather straps had shifted to reveal still pale skin beneath. She flipped me the bird, which I chose to ignore. “Ok, Tim, go turn off the nuclear reactor.”

  “Yes, comrade, that always works out well,” he laughed, following the pips on his wristpad deeper into the cavern.