With a lightning fast punch from Ernst, Helena is sent flying through the air. She manages to adjust her position midair and land on her two feet many meters away. Meanwhile, some villagers who happened to be nearby watch the duel between the two vampires intently.

  "It will take more than that to beat me, butler!" Helena shouts raising one of her arms. In an instant, Ernst appears behind her and, as she turns around to look at him, the arm she had just raised falls to the ground, severed from her body.

  "What?!" She stares at her arm on the ground in shock. By the cleanliness of the cut, one might suspect that a perfectly sharp blade was used to make it, but in reality, all that Ernst used was one of his hands.

  "Heal..." Ernst casts with a whisper and Helena's arm starts to grow back. Some of the villagers watching gasp in awe, believing Helena to have been the one to heal herself.

  "What's going on...? Is this my own power?" She incorrect concludes that it must have been some sort of healing factor she unknowingly possessed, possibly from her vampirism. Although her idea isn't too far-fetched, considering she had never lost a limb before and no one would expected their enemy to heal them.

  Either way, she doesn't spend much time thinking about it, going immediately back into the offensive. She launches attack after attack, but none of them hits.

  "Agility is your highest stat, I imagine your fighting technique must be based on overwhelming your opponent with your speed. However, that doesn't work when your enemy has a higher agility than you," Ernst keeps dodging her attacks effortlessly.

  "You know what, I shall give you a little aid, Boost: Speed. There, we should be evenly matched now," he speaks loudly enough for her to hear, but quiet enough as so the villagers don't hear.

  He didn't lie, when he cast the spell he thought of making her match his speed, and now she's moving at almost the exact same velocity as him, possibly even slightly faster. Still, Ernst is able to avoid and to block her attacks effortlessly, it's clear he has more experience fighting people his own speed, being able to read her moves before she even makes them.

  "You don't know what you are talking about!" She shouts, at the same she manages to finally hit a punch, straight into his face.

  "Huh..." Ernst grabs and holds in place the arm of the hand that just hit him before she can retract it. "I believe that was enough, Remove Boost."

  "Wha- That's not fair!" She protests, throwing a punch with her free arm, but he easily grabs this arm as well.

  "Were you seriously expecting me to actually help you win despite being your enemy? It was obvious I would take it away if you actually managed to land a hit on me," he answers, but then continues in his mind: "Now that she played her role, looking at least somewhat strong for the villagers, it's now my time to show that I outclass her completely."

  Ernst let's go of Helena's hands and throws her in the air with a knee kick, before quickly moving to where she was going to land and hitting her again throwing her back to the place where he first kicked her. Then he just keeps kicking her back and forth, as if he were playing ping pong with himself, using her as the ball.

  At some point, he feels he did enough of that and Helena struggles to stand up. "There's no reason for this duel to go on, it's clear that I'm not enough to beat you..." She says, raising her arms as if surrendering. However, a smirk appears on her face, right before attempting to cast a spell: "Messa-"

  In the blink of an eye, Ernst appears right in front of Helena, his arm going through her chest, piercing through her heart. Even for a vampire, such damage means death.

  "Sorry, I have no idea how strongs your friends may be, I cannot risk you calling them..."

  "No... I must live... For both of us..."

  A door opens and a red-haired woman with blood-red eyes enters the room, she wears robes befitting of a mage. "Sister!" Shouts a physically identical woman rushing to greet her with a hug, wearing an old worn down dress.

  "Helena, I have only been out for a few hours..." The mage mutters, but still reciprocates the hug anyways.

  "Since the vampire hunts started I haven't been going out, we both agreed that I'm not strong enough... And when you are not here, my dear sister Elise, I have nothing to do! It's just me and this stupid tower we live in!"

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "Alright, alright, it's my fault for making you lonely," Elise pats Helena on the head, as she moves out of the hug.

  "We are the same age, there's no reason for you to treat me like a child..."

  "If you dislike me giving you headpats, I could stop doing it..."

  "I... I didn't say I disliked them..."

  "So, you like them?"

  "That doesn't matter! Anyways, how did your errands go?"

  Elise smiles and walks to the table in the middle of the room. "Drop," Two dead rabbits appear on top of it. "I bought these from some hunters at the village."

  They both sit at the table, facing each other. Helena grabs a rabbit and brings it to her mouth, biting its neck to suck out its blood. Elise looks at her food, seemingly tense, before speaking: "I think... I was noticed. Some people recognized me as the 'blood red hair vampire', we should probably be moving soon..."

  Helena removes her fangs from the rabbit's neck and let's out a long sigh. "Alright... I'll start packing."

  "No need to hurry, you can enjoy you ra-" In an instant, Elise's eyes go wide. "Just now, the magical item I left at the entrance, it has detected unknown people entering! There's a lot of them... It could only be the hunters."

  "Goddess dammit! Why do they keep hunting us?! We only drink animal blood! We haven't hurt any person! So, why..."

  "There is a way actually, for them to stop hunting you..."

  "What do you mean? What is it that I can do to end this?"

  "It's not you that has to do it, it's me. I have actually been thinking of this for a while... Sister, they don't know we are two different people. If they get me, they won't go looking for you, they will believe the 'blood red hair vampire' is dead."

  "Wha- They will kill you! You can't do that!" Helena shouts, standing from her chair.

  Elise rises up from her chair and strides towards Helena, stopping right beside her and looking her in the eye. "You'll have to live for the both of us."

  "Sister, what are you saying?!"

  "Promise me that you will."

  "What?"

  "Promise me!"

  "I... I promise that, if at some point only I remain, then I shall live for both of us..."

  "Thank you..."

  "But I won't allow you to die! Let me fight by your side!" Helena grabs her sister by the shoulders.

  "Helena, I know I don't say this enough, but I love you," Elisa pulls Helena into a hug. "You were the best sister I could have ever asked for... I'm so sorry... Warp Ally."

  Helena is transported to a forest she doesn't recognize, all by herself. "Sister..." She can't help but start sobbing. Much time passes, before she finally regains her composure and starts to look around, immediately she notices something right by her feet.

  A notebook, instantly recognizable as one her sister had, she picks it up, opens it on the first page and starts reading it out loud. "'Helena, I'm sorry for what I did, but they wouldn't stop hunting us until they got one of us. I couldn't bear the thought of you dying, so I made a selfish choice and made it so it was me that died.' She... already knew this was going to happen...? She premeditated it...?"

  Helena holds the urge to start crying again and continues to read. "'I have included instructions on how to cast an illusion spell in this notebook, there's an unused cabin near where I sent you, live there until you can master it and hide you blood-red eyes.' Why didn't you just use the spell yourself, sister?!" She can't help, but begin to cry again.

  If Elise were here to answer the question, she would have said that while the 'blood red hair vampire' was believed to be alive, it wouldn't be enough to hide suspicions. However, even though she isn't here to say it, Helena can tell that if there were a path that would allow them both to live, then her sister would have almost certainly chosen it.

  Years pass, maybe decades, with Helena living in the cabin while trying to learn and master the illusion spell. Although she ends up increasing her Agility way more than her Magic, with all the hunting she's been doing to feed herself. One night, Helena hears someone knocking on the front doors as she awakes.

  Her first assumption is that the hunters might have found her, but she feels a certain aura coming from the person outside, a vampiric aura. For a moment, she has a glimpse of hope that her sister might have somehow survived and come back, but then she hears a masculine voice coming from outside. "I understand if you don't want to speak since, whoever you are, chose this solitary spot. However, as a fellow survivor..."

  Helena's eyes open. The last thing she remembers is Ernst piercing her chest with his arm during their fight at the village. However, the environment she finds herself now is completely different.

  Lying on top of a wooden table, she looks around. She's inside a room with windowless stone brick walls, it seems this place might be underground, like a basement. One wooden door appears to be the only connection to the outside.

  The table she's on top of is one of many around the room. There's a few empty ones, but most are covered with what look like research documents. In a corner, lies a cabinet with glass doors, filled with jars containing what look like different body parts.

  A skeleton, wearing robes befit of a scholar, approaches her. "I see you have awoken, you really took your time," he says. She concludes that he's most likely some sort of lich.

  "How long have I been asleep for?"

  "A day has passed, you died the previous night."

  "Died?!"

  "Are you deaf? Yeah, died, passed, expired, perished, whatever you wanna call it!"

  "So... If this is underground... Then I'm in the underworld?"

  "No, you are in the regular world, thanks to me I must add."

  "You saved me?!"

  "That's what I said, I didn't do it because I wanted, those were orders from above," he points up. "My lady, Kristina, has personally requested that you be brought back to life."

  "Kristina, wasn't that the name of that other man's lady...?"

  The door opens gently and a white-haired lady enters the room. Oh, nice, she's finally awake.

  "I heard you were looking for me?" Kristina, the white-haired lady, asks with a smirk on her face, looking at the now grimacing Helena.