Warsinger James Baldwin (read this if TXT) 📖

hard, pinched face and four days of stubble - snarled the word at her like a curse, teleporting across the room.

Karalti flipped to her feet and equipped her armor. I did the same thing as the Spear vanished from the floor and reappeared in my clenched fist. The Assassin seemed unfazed: he made a gesture with his hands, and I smelled mana as time dilated in a rush around us.

[Assassin casts Slow!]

He moved at normal speed, but Karalti and I no longer could. I watched in agonizing stillness as he turned and ran at her in stop-motion, the sword raised. Karalti's eyes were no longer silver - they were wide and violet and terrified.

I cast Dancing Fly, boosting my speed, and did the only thing I could: I dashed forward, half the speed of the assassin about to strike, and threw myself between her and the descending sword blade.

The Assassin didn't flinch, didn't pull back. He plunged the weapon right into the meat of my shoulder, face contorting viciously as he twisted it in.

[Heartstrike deals 2163???? drrr-aaaaaaahhh- damage!]

[You are immune to Corruption!]

The blow should have knocked me on my ass, but for some reason, I didn't feel a thing as it sunk effortlessly through my armor, and everything but a sliver of my HP evaporated: just an intense burst of cold that turned my blood to ice. The assassin's golden eyes, so much like Suri's, widened in shock as I slammed the heel of my other palm up under his nose. Blood blossomed in slow-motion, then rained down at normal speed as the spell effect snapped and I suddenly found myself wrestling the man on the floor. His weapon hadn't killed me, but it had taken me down to 22 HP and I could feel every muscle in my torso trying to seize and freeze around the almost-mortal injury. Karalti ran to the door, shouting for help as we rolled across the ground. The man was smaller than me, but he was just as strong and still had most of his hit points. I clawed at his face as he struggled to bring the sword down a second time, his smokey breath billowing against my cheeks. Inch by inch, he gained... my fingers slipped in his blood and sweat.

It was the smell of the blood that reminded me.

I was a motherfucking vampire.

“Look sharp!” Like needles from a blow gun, my dark-tipped fingers distended into long points and shot forward - right into the Assassin's eyes.

The man dropped his sword with a screech, hands flying up to my wrist as his eyeball burst like a broken egg cracked across my knuckles. I rammed my fingers deeper, and before I could stop it, the hypodermic nails began to draw his blood into my veins in a dizzying, pleasurable rush. Gasping, I fumbled over for his sword... and just as the Assassin came to his senses and pulled his head back, I plunged the weapon into his chest. The sword went through his armor just as easily as it had mine - and as it penetrated, he let out a blood-curdling wail.

“Fuck!” I pushed away as the Assassin thrashed back and forth, his spine bending in ways no human back should ever bend. He screamed incessantly, piteously, contorting around the blade as it seemed to suck him in toward it like a black hole. His bones popped with wet smacking sounds; I watched on in horror as everything in him twisted, smattered with the same television snow effect the blade had. When it finally ended, all that was left was a contorted mass of flesh, glitching pixels, and leather armor. The screams grew muffled, but they hadn’t stopped.

“WHAT'S HAPPEN- oh my God.” Suri, dressed in her armor and clutching an axe, mantled protectively in front of Karalti by the door. There was shouting in the hallway. A young castle guard burst into the room from the apartment's hallway on the other side, and when he saw the mewling thing on the floor, he turned his head and barfed right there on the rug.

“Kill it! Before it spreads!” Karalti shouted telepathically to the room.

Spreads? I called the Spear with a thought, and when I saw what Karalti meant, my stomach knotted. The small visual glitches where the sword had entered were expanding, affecting more and more of the assassin's body as the seconds ticked by. The carpet around him was starting to do the same thing.

My mind was a humming blank as I raised my weapon over the assassin's exposed, mutated heart, and plunged it down with Shattering Darkness. Black icicles burst out from the writhing mass of flesh, which cracked and squeaked as it froze solid and then collapsed into bloodless chunks that scattered and bounced across the floor.

[You have killed Assassin!]

[You gain 1598 EXP!]

[You gain a new badge: Attempted assassination is the highest form of flattery.]

I gasped, sinking to one knee, and threw the sword away from me. I went to my hands as I ransacked my Inventory for healing potions and came up short. I’d used them all to defeat the motherfucking poop golem. “Fuck.”

Karalti's entire body suffused with light, and the marbled seams of color under her pale skin bloomed over her body. When they passed, they left her slightly taller, more toned, and subtly more regal as she ran over to me and skidded to her knees on the floor.

“Hector!” Karalti looked back to the others in the hall. “Suri, help me take him to Masha! He got hit by that sword!”

She still smelled like sex on legs, but the drug-like quality had diminished... not enough that I didn't notice it, but enough that it didn't compel me to jump her bones on top of the Stranged, frozen corpse of our would-be assassin in front of God and everyone. Drooling blood, I gently pushed her aside and wobbled back up to sit. “I’m okay. I’m okay, Tidbit.”

“Come on, my lord. She’s right. We have to get you to the