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Chapter 88: I Am Talking About Dudes Shreeding Your Holes
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Adam didn't even look back. He looked down at Dracula's ruined face. The hellfire in the vampire's eyes was guttering out, but the hatred remained, an eternal ember.
"Tell me, Vlad," Adam muttered, "How long has it been since you've enjoyed sunrise?"
The thrusters on the four arms blazed to life at maximum power.
With a deafening roar, they ripped Adam; and the Dracula held firmly in his clutches; upward from the crater, tearing through the lingering, dissipating gloom of the artificial night, ascending rapidly into the cold, starless sky.
Blade skidded to a halt at the edge of the crater, staring upward, his sword hanging uselessly at his side.
He could only watch as the light of the thrusters diminished, carrying the hunter and his lethal prize into the unknown darkness.
[I knew it!]
[Dude, Adam is really committed to the just in case bit, motherrfucka has a plan for everything!]
[Adam would become a Nightmare if he became a cruel tyrant vampire like Dracula.]
[I have a feeling Dracula won't enjoy the sunrise.]
[Don't u say.]
[This cliffhanger is EVIL.]
The world became a roar of wind and a plummeting thermometer.
Adam ascended through the bruised, Dracula-made night, the thrusters on his mechanical arms screaming as they fought gravity and the biting cold of the upper atmosphere.
The temperature dropped with every hundred feet, the moisture on his suit freezing into a fine, crackling rime.
Inside the helmet, his own breath fogged the display, which flashed with altitude warnings and external temperature readings diving far below zero.
He held Dracula firmly. The vampire lord was a limp, blackened weight in the claws of two arms.
A third arm had plunged a specialized needle-tip deep into Dracula's chest, attached to a flexible, internal reservoir that ran the length of the mechanical limb.
With a soft, sinister buzz, it was siphoning the ancient, potent blood, draining the well of his power drop by precious drop.
Dracula seemed barely conscious, his body a ruin of UV burns and internal toxic catastrophe.
His breaths were shallow, rattling things, more like the death throes of a machine than a living being.
"Bite the device, Vlad," Adam's voice came through the external speakers, calm and instructional over the howling wind.
He extended a fourth mechanical arm. At its end was not a tool or weapon, but a small, articulated clamp.
Held within it was a strange apparatus: a biting plate covered in a synthetic, flesh-like membrane, connected to a clear, complex internal filter leading to a sealed collection vial.
"Inject your transformative enzymes into it. Do it cleanly."
There was no response. Dracula's head lolled, his eyes closed, the hellfire within them guttered to embers.
Adam sighed, a sound of genuine impatience. He brought his helmeted face closer to Dracula's burnt ear, his voice dropping to a conversational, yet utterly chilling tone.
"Listen to me very carefully, you moldy relic. I am running out of altitude, patience, and warmth."
"If you do not comply under your own power, I will make your final moments an epic of humiliation that will be whispered in every hell for eons."
He paused, letting the wind scream for him. "You know the world has changed. There are… enthusiasts. People with very specific, very intense tastes. The vampire aesthetic is eternally popular."
"Some of these fans are… extreme. And you, Dracula, the original model, the big bad… you'd be the ultimate collectible. I know guys who would pay a kingdom for the chance to defile the Dracula."
"And I'm not talking about a dignified staking. I'm talking about shredding your every hole apart. And to be perfectly, crystal clear," Adam's voice became lethally soft, "I Am Talking About Dudes Shreeding Your Holes."
[WTF? That's a fate worse than death.]
[By Hydra! What the helli?]
[By Mephisto! The heck!?]
["I'm talking about dudes." I AM DECEASED. Like, PAUSE!]
[He knows just what to fucking say, unhinged.]
[Goddaman, my man, have u not defiled Dracula enough? Holy fuck, u ran a train through him, and u still going. Chill.]
The effect was instantaneous. Dracula's eyes snapped open. Not with their former fiery glory, but with a spark of pure, unadulterated ugliness that cut through the pain and exhaustion.
His expression twisted through a spectrum of fury, disgust, and finally, a cold, assessing stupefaction.
He stared at Adam as if seeing him for the first time; not as a hunter or a madman, but as a creature of a new, utterly soulless age capable of horrors he had never conceived.
The confusion that followed was almost comical. He coughed, black ichor speckling his chin.
"You… you wish to become one of us? Then why… why this war? Why not come in peace? I would have… granted you the Dark Gift gladly."
Adam chuckled, the sound muffled by the helmet and wind. "Oh, Vlad. I do want it. But on my terms. By my design. Allowing you to turn me would be surrendering my will to yours. That's suicide. And besides…"
Adam's helmet tilted. "…Mephisto wouldn't have allowed a clean transaction, would he? He wanted a death match. Or my subservience."
"He'd have made a deal with you; one you, in your pride or your needs, couldn't refuse. Turn me, and I become your servant, which makes me his by proxy."
"Now, we can't have the great me bowing to a hell-lord, now can we? Too tacky. If anything, you should blame Hydra and Mephisto; it's their fault. Both led us to this lovely romantic meeting."
Recognition flickered in Dracula's pained eyes. Adam's understanding of the hell-lord's Byzantine schemes was unnervingly accurate.
He was learning slowly to ignore Adam's bullshit and nonsense that could drive the sanest person into the realms of brainrot.
The vampire's reactions, however, were still slow, clouded by rage and poison.
He was intelligent, centuries sharp, but he was emotionally compromised, his reason suppressed.
Ah, Adam thought, observing the data stream from Information Vision. The curses are doing too good a job.
With a thought, he pulled back. The mental pressure of Stupefy and Slow dissipated, liberated from Dracula's mind.
It was like watching ice melt from a statue. The wild, pain-glazed fury in Dracula's eyes receded, replaced by a rapid, calculating coldness.
The lines of agony on his face didn't vanish, but they were incorporated into a new expression; one of grim, exhausted understanding.
He looked from Adam to the biting device, to the arm siphoning his blood, and back to Adam.
He understood the entire, grotesque play.
Without another word, without a snarl or a curse, Dracula leaned forward. He opened his mouth, his cracked lips pulling back from his fangs, and bit down on the synthetic flesh of the device with a decisive click.
He injected the secret, alchemical cocktail of his vampiric essence; the enzymes, the curse, the mystical catalyst of the turning; directly into the apparatus.
The clear fluid in the collection vial swirled, turning a deep, pulsating crimson shot through with threads of liquid shadow.
Dracula released the device. He leaned back, his body supported by Adam's mechanical claws, a strange, almost serene calm settling over his ravaged features.
He met Adam's visored gaze. "You are a… fascinating creature," He rasped, a faint, grim smile touching his ruined lips.
"You have won this round. I find myself… curiously anticipatory. Of how you will fare against that insect in hell."
Adam let out a short, bright laugh, exhilarated by the success and the sheer audacity of it all. "Look forward to it, old king. It'll be a massacre like no other."
A chime sounded in his ear. "Analysis complete," Alice's voice reported. "Enzymatic sample matches known vampiric transformative biomarkers at 99.7% purity. No detectable contaminants. Sample is verified."
Perfect.
"Our business is concluded," Adam said.
He commanded the thrusters. The mechanical arms pivoted smoothly in mid-air, executing a precise, rotating maneuver.
In a moment, their positions were reversed. Now, Adam's back was to the east. And Dracula, held firmly in the claws, was facing the horizon.
The artificial night, bereft of its master's will, was fraying at the edges. Like a rotten curtain being torn down, the bruised purple clouds began to thin and shred.
And through the dissolving gloom, a sliver of blinding, glorious, golden light pierced the darkness.
The first ray of true sunrise touched the Carpathian mountains.
[Even in death, he remains majestic, if a little defiled.]
[That's chilling. How he just accepted it.]
[Damn, Dracula gives no fuck for Mephisto.]
[The Sunrise! HE'S POSITIONING HIM FOR THE FINAL ACT!]
The light hit Dracula full in the face.
There was no scream this time. No grand curse. The vampire king, Son of the Dragon, Lord of the Night, did not flinch or try to turn away.
He kept his eyes open, staring into the cleansing fury of the sun he had denied for centuries.
A look of deep, weary acceptance settled over his features, mixed with a final flicker of that ancient, unconquerable pride.
He spread his arms as best he could within the mechanical grips, a king accepting his eclipse.
The sunlight washed over him. His already charred skin began to glow, then incandesce.
It was not a violent combustion, but a swift, inexorable unraveling.
He dissolved from the edges inward, turning to fine, grey ash that was immediately snatched and scattered by the high-altitude winds.
The hair, the flesh, the bone; all of it atomized into nothingness, leaving only a fleeting silhouette against the dawn before it, too, was gone.
The mechanical claws closed on empty air.
Adam hung there for a long moment, suspended between the earth and the sky, watching the last particles of Vlad Dracula drift away on the wind of a new day.
Then, he felt it, pain, clearer than ever.
It was a tidal wave, held back by adrenaline, focus, and sheer will. Now, with the immediate threat gone, his body presented the invoice.
But it wasn't the pain that deterred him; it was everything else. The cause of the pain came with a lot more issues.
His vision swam, blurred. A pounding, world-ending headache drilled behind his eyes.
Every breath sent lances of fire through his ribs; definitely cracked, maybe broken.
His sealed shoulder stump was a universe of throbbing, white-hot agony. He was a collection of catastrophic system failures held together by a polymer undersuit and a prayer.
He smiled. Then he laughed; a bare, ragged, maniacal sound that echoed throughout. "So… much… Fucking FUN!" He gasped between bursts of pained laughter.
"What a rush! What a unique, spectacular experience!" The joy was genuine, euphoric.
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