In all of human history, vampires had rarely ever been hunted, and never successfully. Knowing this made a man jittery, and knowing that things had changed didn't make a difference versus the learned instincts. Dan, like so much of the team, had suffered a maiming at the hands of the Eternal, Lords of the Night, the Kings of Dark, etc etc. They had many grandiose titles for themselves.

In controlled experiment conditions, they'd charted their abilities and compared them to observed vampires and knew that their capabilities were at least on par.

That didn't change the visceral reaction that came naturally to someone who these fuckers had ripped apart in a fit of pique.

They spent a week of watching, through drone surveillance and other means, watching Richard Mullen and his chosen prey, a pretty girl named Louisa Svensen. Mullen was an experienced Humbert, the type of vampire that liked to pick the girls up young. Once turned into a blood doll, he lost interest fast, and disposed of them quickly once the thrill of the hunt palled. Then he went back out to another town and another school. His coven had means, and this was part of their entertainment.

Mike Mullen was actually Carlo Rivaldi who was a rare breed among older vampires; he Americanized when they emigrated over from the old country, apparently sometime in the 1950's and learned to move and groove within suburban America while putting on the appearance of normalcy. Sometime in the 1920's, he made Richard, and in 1952, they'd taken one Anna Smith in Salt Lake City, but instead of simply discarding her like the others, they made her a vampire as well. The family was a tremendous camouflage, but much of their entertainment had to do with hunting swingers and others who stuck out in American suburbia; the inevitably desperate people that couldn't quite reconcile themselves with the conformity of the culture they found themselves in.

Turned out, it was a rich hunting ground. They all three were dangerous hunters, and all three were targets, but Richard was the important one.

That was an owed debt.

For Dan, listening to the surveillance, hearing him say things like, "I wanted to destroy those ogres right then and there," his voice throbbing with rage and driving fast, seemed like a very solid acting job -- he remembered Mullen personally, and knew that he was fully capable of doing it. Except they also had the sound and video of him paying off the men to mug the girl in the first place, to set her up for a staged rescue where he could swoop in. In the past, he sometimes killed them simply because he was looking for the thrill.

New Prague, Minnesota. It was just one of a succession of places with a blood trail attached to it, but the murders had never been too firmly linked together -- the FBI was discouraged from doing that and local law enforcement, if they ever got too close, were discouraged. It was the sort of place the Mullen family liked to use; old fashioned 1950's buildings and a very small town America outlook. In the 2120's, the facade hadn't changed even if the culture had, somewhat, changed. And yet Richard Mullen was good at finding the girls that represented a challenge for even his sort of charms, a way to while away the times.

Tonight was prom night, and Mullen was a bit of a traditionalist, or at least a creature of habit. He liked the pomp and circumstance of proms and homecomings for the 'special' feedings. The high school had Mystic Lake Casino's property rented out for this; lots of lawn, but also lots of woods. Lots of privacy, lots of camouflage. No doubt that Richard's parents had very graciously helped fundraise the donations for that -- they had a sense of humor about getting parents to help pay for their execution of their own daughters. Anna particularly seemed to find that corruption amusing. She was the one that decided to write the novels, to pass the time and soften up the prey a bit with notions of romantic rescue by blood-thirsty fiends. She'd found it oh-so-excruciatingly hilarious when the series, written as as a sick joke, took off to bestseller status and movies. It was a feat that made them celebrities among vampires. If there'd been a vampire of the year award, she would have won it for helping domesticate the cattle even further.

Mullen had thralls, or it was safe to say that his 'mother' Anna fed some men blood and turned them into thralls, and they were around to loosely stop interruptions of the entire affair. What they expected were other kids and people to turn away, because Richard hated having people interrupt his little romantic play. He was giving Louisa a speech about his love and devotion, which was uncommon and so different from the other boys. His HUD outlined these sentries easily even in the darkness, despite their attempts to hide. Thralls were the first thing they'd tested themselves against, because they were human but faster and more dangerous, less inhibited, because of the blood they imbibed and were addicted to. They were the willing servants of the vampires, their daytime bagmen and otherwise servants.

Sometimes, they were 'promoted' and that was why so many were happy servants. Even if they weren't, they were high and benefited in all sorts of ways.

It was knifework. They didn't want to chase Mullen down. Kozlov's training came in handy, in that his knife sheared right through what little resistance there was, through a suit jacket and dress shirt and into the man's heart. He was lowered carefully and silently to the ground, never the wiser. Others were doing the same as they made the approach.

Mullen, Svensen, a flower-garlanded wooden gazebo with moonlight in a Minnesota May; it was all a little too perfectly planned, but that was his modus; he liked to overwhelm the girls and break down their resistance. The system flushed a small dose of calm drugs into his system to counteract the anxiety effect of seeing Mullen, even at a distance in nightvision and at magnification on HUD as he moved silently over the manicured grass of the country club lawn. He was remembering Rebecca at this moment, how she'd had her entire life ahead of her and so much to give, and was snuffed out, along with the rest of his family, because this particular coven wanted to show off their total superiority and immunity, to let slip the mask a bit to reveal a big, sneering grin at society and its laws and humanity at large.

He was just wrapping up his little act with, "I wanted it to be perfect, my darling..."

"...but sometimes the unexpected happens."

That produced a snarl on that 'perfect ivory' face that looked like a boyish Greek God a moment ago; the Eternal did not like being interrupted, and Mullens particularly did not like being interrupted when he put on his little stage production.

5'10, slender and wearing a tuxedo way too comfortably for a seventeen to eighteen year old, Richard Mullens was a beautiful boy, indeed, with the ivory mask and the obnoxiously wavy bronze hair and the beautiful, soulful eyes and the pouting lips. He came off as a poetry writing tragic romantic with that oh-so-irresistable dark side.

"Who are YOU!" he hissed, suddenly showing more of that dark side than he wanted; Louisa started to back away, suddenly horrified at a display of more than a little of that danger.

Dan was impassive; he probably looked a little too creepy himself, the dark, leatherlike predator coat that the Vigil issued its agents -- the camouflage worked pretty well, because they'd made that approach all too easily, and Mullens was now focusing his senses on something besides the prey and seemed to realize that Dan wasn't the only one here. Dan wasn't recognizable anymore; it had been years and his face was still his face, but older. The body? Well, they'd tried to approximate the limbs to fit proportionally to his torso, along with all the other refits, but he never had the chance to know what he would have been like when puberty was over. Even his eyes were new models, and they gleamed subtly in the night -- he hadn't bothered with the glasses.

The circuitry reflected back the soft light.

"Oh ho, so the prey wants to play once again? How many times has this happened?"

"Plenty," Albert replied, "But you made a mistake."

"Really? I'm not sure you understand how this works, mortal. You're the ones that make the mistake every time you raise a hand against us. I will..."

"Tear me apart limb from limb, pluck out my eyes, remove my tongue so that all I can do is moan without a voice, like the animal I am. You will take away everything from me and condemn me to an agonizing eternal existence of reliving my failures over and over in my mind. My life was over as soon as you decided it was," Dan repeated in a monotone, taking the script away from Richard.

That produced shocked silence. The reason why he'd done even that, instead of just killing Mullen right there was simple; he wanted Mullen to minutely slip his hand into the tuxedo and send off the alarm signal. That'd bring the other two vampires into the trap. That's what his associates were for. Keep Louisa in place, for her own safety, neutralize Richard and use him as the bait.

And then Mullen flew at him. He let Mullen get in a punch, which was stopped by the armor and the bone lacing -- it should have shattered things, but instead merely left a bruise, like the punch of a kid in a high school lockerroom fight. When Dan stomped on Richard's foot, quickly and in response, a blade shot out of it, pinning the vampire to the ground. A palm-heel to the gut seemed harmless, but then the shotgun blast tore through his gut, and it was like popping a blister. So much blood came out -- because that's where they kept their reserves -- that it soaked the entire gazebo in a display that reminded him vaguely of Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionist painting. That was a vampire that'd been starving himself so he could gorge on his favorite vintage of teenage girl. He'd been at about half a tank there.

The girl was screaming, but Dan ignored it, even as Mullen lashed out with another fist, this punch bouncing off the shoulder. He'd never trained intensively in hand-to-hand combat, and against something that had a similar ability to absorb damage and dish it, he didn't have that much of a punch. The response was to grab him and throw him down, hard, against the wood floor of the gazebo; hard, thick oak splintered like plywood and a ripped-to-shreds vampire was on the ground in the middle.

"You..." he gasped, "...will pay."

Ignoring the vampire's many threats, the cries of the girl, who was mostly terrified for her own safety at this point, Albert grabbed a stake out of his jacket and was on Mullen in a flash, pounding the thing into the concrete beneath and strapping him into the wires, which started to run their current through the vampire, keeping him disabled with the artificially induced convulsions -- the technology was designed to capture vampires, but in this case, keeping Richard alive served another purpose.

"Stick around, you fuck," Albert told him, standing above him, as he unslung his sniper rifle. "Now you get to watch your family die."

Bait.

He texted the others.



They knew the message went off as well as he did, so he didn't mention it -- their tech was monitoring the signal, the computers in their brains that was. He'd kept silent commo through this little confrontation, but his end was done.

That's how revenge worked.

When he received the message, Blake’s face immediately lit into a grin. The mission had only just gone into action, and already one of the bloodsuckers was cooking. The Vigil’s little ‘proof of concept’ was set to succeed with flying colors.

With a whoop, he launched a cybernetic kick into the prone form of the thrall he’d just choked out a moment before. “Hear that, you wannabe son of a bitch? We got lover boy! Guess you picked the wrong team after all!”
Evidently the unconscious man had not heard, for he reacted neither to the taunt nor the blow. Blake’s interest had already left him, however; he straightened his back, rolled out the kinks in his neck (feeling the servos of his augments whir as he did so), and mentally tabbed back into his data stream.

Information whizzed by, faster than any normal human could possibly comprehend – to him, though, it was scarcely a challenge. First, he checked the progress of the brute force attack he’d launched a half hour earlier on the town’s transportation network and found that the basic security system was buckling under the weight of his software. In a few more minutes, he’d have access to every traffic camera in the vicinity – if mommy and daddy vampire arrived to save their progeny by car, he would see them coming.

Then, he tabbed into the controls for the bug he’d planted in the casino’s computer systems earlier that day. With a few lines of code and a brief battle with the firewall (which, to its credit, put up more of a fight than Blake had expected), the casino’s lockdown alarm was tripped.

Finally, he opened the sides of his jacket, and four orbs whizzed out into the night sky. He set the video feeds from their monitoring equipment to play in the corner of his vision and mentally directed them to take up positions at the corners of the killbox the team had drawn.

All that done, he sat down on a nearby log and produced his standard issue Vigil Bullpup from his jacket, the heft of which still felt uncomfortable in his hands. He had never been much of a fighter, but if he could get his teammates alone with the bloodsuckers, that was what he would do.

This was the message he sent to his teammates: I’ve got the traffic cameras hooked up to facial recognition – if they as much as get near a stoplight, I’ll know about it. The musketeers are out and monitoring from each corner, so they’ll see it when the bastards enter the box. Finally, casino’s locked down, so no lovestruck teenagers are gonna wander into the killzone. Soon as I pick up anything, I'll give you tough guys a direction, an ETA, and a slap on the ass. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Blake, you’re just the best. I appreciate how hard you work for us,’ but save it for after we win.

Oh, I also texted Mullen a smiley face from a hidden number. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

Mullens is taken care of. The message pinged somewhere in Mysaren's head, a concept she hadn't quite gotten used to yet. She shook her head and kicked the body in front of her aside, one of the hands that was wrapped tightly around her gun twitching. Vendettas weren't good things to have, she knew this, but the thought of anyone else getting hurt because of her was inexcusable.

This was hard for Mysaren, and she was well aware of this. The thought of a vampire being even close to her disgusted her, after she saw what vampires considered cargo. She had the upper hand, though, and those days, however traumatic, were long behind her. Her dark blue eyes still scanned the perimeter warily, any sound making her tense up. This wasn't going to work.

I’ve got the traffic cameras hooked up to facial recognition – if they as much as get near a stoplight, I’ll know about it... Shit, more of Blake's rambling, apparently. Her eyes rolled as she read the message, a glimmer of annoyance on her face. Oh well. At least he did something useful. She sent a message back, quickly, that said,

Thanks, chief. Nice work. Also, please refrain from doing stupid shit and taunting the vampires. Last thing we need is those fuckers to get their feelings hurt.

Short and to the point, Mysaren's favorite kind of message, really. No point in whatever self congratulatory nonsense the other guys did. A loud bang, and Mysaren whatever the hell they put inside of her trying desperately to calm her down. Her gun aimed at the source of the noise, her finger on the trigger. Another thrall, probably.

Whatever or whoever the hell it was, it flew at her in a flurry of movement and sounds, and her cochlear implants made everything seem much louder than it was. She'd have to ask those science guys to turn those down a little at some point. A bang, and there was a dull thump as the body hit the ground. Thrall, apparently. She kicked it idly, and took one of the stakes from her leg compartment, sticking it right into the thrall's heart.

Better safe than sorry. She removed the stake and wiped it on her shirt, scoffing. They did always have a flair for the dramatic, those vampires. At least, when they weren't knocking over trash cans and revealing themselves.

The ironic truth was that instead of a vampire hunter, Jay Bee far more closely resembled a bat. For one thing, he was dressed all in black with a billowing trench coat that gave the impression of wings. For a second, he wasn’t breathing – well, not manually. Breathing made noise, and so it was often prudent to switch to his implanted artificial respiratory system. The real dead ringer, though, was that he was standing, silently and quite comfortably, on the ceiling, hat perched on his head, flagrantly disobeying the laws of gravity. Just like ancient civilisations built their castles on hills, it was far easier to defend with gravity on one’s side than not. Vampires couldn’t bite what they couldn’t reach, after all.

The cellar was dusty and cluttered. Though the main banquet suite was probably magnificent-looking, with balloons and cakes and party games or whatever it was American teenage girls liked (being a twenty year-old male Brit, Jay Bee wasn’t certain), the cellar was holed up with the whole manor’s supply of alcohol, lest the little darlings get their hands on them. Obviously, it wasn’t getting drunk that was the big threat to the kids, though.

He gently narrowed his eyes and focussed. Staring hard at the crates and bottles both in his mind and body’s eyes. Inside his head, he became aware of beta waves leaping across synapses and a pulsing in his lobes and, curiously, inside his hat itself. The bottles in one corner of the room began to jingle, shuddering against one another, while the crates began to creak and groan. Noise. But not enough. The sensation was nearly indescribable, but it was just like stretching and contracting awkward muscles, like wiggling one’s ears – the objects in the room were an extension of his body, connected through invisible nerves, and with one great impulse, he heaved the whole load into the air and crashed it back down. Bottles exploded. Wine and spirits wept forth over the cellar floor. After a moment, a new wave of largely intact bottles spilled from the crates, which were themselves largely cracked.

That would get their attention.

“The fuck?”

He heard a clattering of hurried footsteps thunder toward the cellar and down the narrow staircase. These were the thralls. This was the moment of truth. They were fast and freakish, like humans but not. Their movements were shuddering and unnatural. He was reminded of crack dens, with their shambling, pained denizens, but, in this case, in super-fast forward. They were well-dressed, or, once well-dressed, faces and white shirts from their bouncer disguises smeared in red (with no prizes for guessing what).

“The fuck happened here?”

There were two of them, and they hadn’t seen him. They were jumpy: did they have an instinctive hunch as to what was happening or was it just their new-found bloodlust? What didn’t help was the cellar door slamming shut behind them.

They shrieked. Loudly. And then they saw him. His blood ran cold as their eyes locked into his, dull disbelief crossing their slightly vacant faces. Their superhuman vision matched his Vigil-augmented pupils and the almost total blackness of the cellar was no disguise for any of them.

He had barely a moment to react as they threw themselves at him. Even with the advantage of the higher ground, their monstrous leaps and the low ceiling made it a close call – quite what they would do if they grabbed him, he didn’t know. His brain reacted instinctively to his cold sweat, releasing artificial hormones to prevent shock or panic as well as an absurd amount of adrenaline. This was the speed of battle nowadays: it took just one and a half seconds for them to cross the room and attempt the first strike, recover, and for him to react accordingly.

The thralls landed on practically the other side of the long cellar, and spun wildly for a second swipe. They didn’t attack. Their eyes instead focussed on thousands upon thousands of shards of glass followed by splintered planks and even the intact crates and bottles floating in the air before them. Only one of them was fast enough. The other was barraged at first with a thousand tiny cuts, cutting his body to ribbons, until the weightier objects audibly crunched his bones.

One down. One to go.

The survivor wheeled around at him and lunged again. This time, it was to be a direct hit.

One moment. One impulse.

With an instinctive mental flare, Jay Bee threw the thrall down onto the floor with a satisfying thump. The thrall squirmed, but found his body held in place by forces he couldn’t see. What he did see was the barrel of a gun pointing square between his eyes by the man standing on the ceiling. If you were to die unexpectedly, Jay Bee figured, this was about as unexpected as it could get. With his arm raised above his head, aiming at the figure on the floor like a starter’s gun in a Dali painting, he fired.

To make sure, the other one received a bullet in the brain, too. Whether his gentle twitching as the blood gushed out from the cuts between his mangled bones was a would-be second wind or just the last throes of his enhanced nervous system, neither of them would ever know.

Just as he was exiting the bunker through the tiny porthole window that led outside (through which he’d originally come), the others clocked in.



Good news from Dan.



And from Blake. He couldn’t help but gently grin as he sprinted across the lawns to Dan’s location, following his inbuilt GPS like a migrating bird follows the Earth’s magnetic field.



Probably sensible. It was time to check in himself.

"Wh-what are you doing? What is this?" That was Louisa Svensen, trembling.

"Louisa, I want you to head toward the Casino's main building and find a good place to hide. Keep your head down. Please, we aren't here to harm you." He tried to sound kind, but dead eyes and a robotic stillness, to say nothing of the rifle, did little to reassure.

She picked up her skirts, a mess because of the way Richard Mullen had taken shotgun flechettes to the gut, and ran for her life.

Dan continued grimly, even as he tracked a thrall moving to intercept Louisa; recoil from the rifle, at a kneel, rifle braced on the gazebo, would have been intense, but the same technology that created artificial muscle that his own implants used also cushioned the recoil of the rifle; a very powerful round disintegrated the thrall.

"You know what is happening, right, Richard? You've got mail." He asked as he took the cell phone out of the vampire's pocket, showed him the mocking smiley, and then crushed it. "Sorry, didn't want your parents listening in. I suppose you Eternal don't fear, but I don't want them to know what they're being sucked into."

He got a hateful look, and Dan shrugged, knowing that he couldn't actually reply, not with the constant convulsions. He was speaking as he sighted his rifle, even as the traffic cams integrated with the HUD and created an overlay; the subroutines Blake introduced into the systems even identified the hostiles, moving quickly, recognized by the facial recognition software and then tracked carefully. The net was widening and threats were being identified very quickly; Anna put out the notice for the thralls to go active, to eliminate 'all' threats. Meanwhile, the Vigil agents were already working on them.

"What is happening is that you killed my sister. She was a tough girl; she wanted to be a federal agent like our father. You killed him too. Anyway, when you tried your little wooo-eeeee-wooo 1950's romance bullshit on her, she caught a creep vibe and cut it off. You became enraged, stormed the house, killed the whole family, except me because I tried to stake you. Guess I'd been watching too many vampire movies -- I loved that shit. Can't watch it anymore."

Conversational tone, a bit too calm, eerily.

"My sister was a strong, lively, intelligent girl. You just saw her beauty, and appreciated her as prey, but she would have gone on to college and then a career. Perhaps she would have found a man, a real one I mean, and had some children. You snuffed her out before she could contribute her talents to society. But you Eternal," he sneered at the word, "are like all tyrants."

"You know how that works, Ricky?" Dan asked, glancing over at him with cold, chromed eyes.

"Rhetorical question, Rick. Tyrants tend to make their own enemies, and you unwittingly made the worst possible enemy you could find. No, not me," he told Richard, "but my grandfather. You're probably still racking your brain to remember my family's names, that's fine. My grandfather is a guy you never met, but he's a brilliant researcher and a renowned surgeon. You know what he did, Richard?"

He flexed his hand, removing the glove in the process to reveal the metal and polymer, "That's what he did. Replacement and enhancement. You left me a husk, you piteous motherfucker, but you sowed death and now you are reaping the whirlwind. You're squirming there on camera while my cell kills your thralls, and you're wondering how this happened, where we came from. We came from you, Richard. My mother's father ran the Manhattan Project of cybernetic enhancement. The goal was to put humanity at least on par with the likes of you, but the team my grandfather assembled? Well, they're very good. There aren't as many of us, we cost a lot more to make, but we're not a bunch of blood thirsting hedonists looking for a thrill. Everyone out there killing your slaves is one of your kinds' victims. Scores to settle. Lots of focus and motivation."

He turned to him again, eyes off the scope.



"Why am I telling you this, Richard? Because this is being recorded. That's the deal. They rebuilt me so I could kill you. It was the contract, and you're the blood it's written in. Also, this is a test run. We're seeing how the gear works and you're a good field test," cold smile to match the chrome eyes, "How's it feel to be the victim and the test subject, by the way?"

Watch out for Anna; Carlo's older, but Anna's the brains here, guys. She's the adaptable bitch that wrote those books and runs the thralls. She ought to be the priority.

Yuri frowned. He hadn't been able to get in the thick of the action, his biggest regret in this test run. He had to hurry. After all, it would be unfortunate if he didn't get to tear apart one of those monsters himself. Standing still, he closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. A readout of various chemicals and various ration filled his vision, resolving itself into a mess of colors, each mapped to some color that gave him an idea of what he was was looking for.

The dingy yellow of background smog was ever-present, but nowhere near as stifling as it was in, say, Moscow. He breezed past the orange of cooking meat, the beige of human scent and the green of ambient decaying organisms, and looked frantically for the one thing he was seeking: the brilliant red signifying the subtle difference in body chemistry between thralls and regular human beings. Vampires, unfortunately, didn't have a glowing scent trail leading to them, but their conspicuous lack of it was as good an indication as any. Still... you find the workers, and the queen bee isn't too far behind.

The trail was faint, but he could smell it in the air, and pick out the general direction of where it may be.

This is Yuri. Chasing a trail. Will post updates as they come. Hopefully, I'll find a friend on my trip who will be quite talkative, and perhaps I will get to Anna's in time for tea.

With that, he picked up the pace, quickly cutting through a side street, and dodging into an alley. The scent was picking up. He was nearly salivating now. What would he try for today's friendly chat? That was a hard question. Breaking bones was always an option, but he also had an electric baton which, at maximum amperage, had enough power to kill someone and set their corpse on fire within seconds, and a few other implements he could try out. And if threats didn't work, well... there seemed to be plenty of thralls to go around. At least one of them had to have something to say.

And speaking of plenty of thralls, the latest turn through the alley seemed to produce three of the least friendly-looking thralls he had ever seen, one armed with a chain, two armed with clubs. And all three were looking straight towards Yuri, with the kind of look that said they weren't going to invite him to dinner. Perhaps this impasse could be smoothed over with words.

Yuri took a step back, grinning idiotically and giving his best "Simple Ivan" voice.

"I simply immigrant being new to country. No trouble is meant."

Perhaps he had laid it on a bit thick, but the "Simple Ivan" routine seemed not to have worked on the thralls, who were most likely paranoid due to this latest disruption.

Good, Yuri thought as they approached with their weapons held high and their faces twisted with aggression. As he fingered the voltage modifier on his baton, he had truly begun to worry that he wouldn't have his fun.

The one with the chain struck first, and Yuri pulled up his forearm to block the blow. He felt his forearm stiffen as the armor below his coat hardened on impact, and with a wave of his free hand, struck the baton across the chain, causing the thrall to spasm, drop the chain, and fall over. Another rushed forward around the same time, presumably thinking the chain had trapped Yuri and not reacting quite quickly enough to catch their mistake. With a step, Yuri narrowly avoided the reach of the club, tapping the baton on the thrall's neck.

"And then there was one," said Yuri, as he stepped around the two twitching thralls in front of him.

The thrall, no longer confident without the elements of surprise or numbers, turned tail. Unfortunate, since Yuri didn't have the time or really the will to give chase. He needed to have a quick and dirty tea party. Yuri looked down at the two thralls, each of them semi-conscious from having twice the voltage of a commercial high yield taser running through their bodies. He didn't feel like being jumped while he was chatting with one of them, so he flicked the amperage meter up. This important decision called for the same arcane and unfathomable problem solving methods that he used for all important decisions: go with the one that's closer.

With a playful tap that was accompanied by an audible surge and crack and the smell of burning flesh and hair, Yuri nonchalantly put down one of the thralls on the pavement, before resetting his baton and squatting down by the one whose insides weren't rendered extra crispy. Flipping the thrall over, Yuri noted said thrall was a young man, probably late teens by the look of it, and beginning to stir from the shocking. He figured he'd wake the man up and keep him from running in one swift motion, namely by swiftly stepping down on the thrall's femur. A resounding crack was followed by a choked, warbling shout. Yuri knelt down, placing a finger at his lips and slipping his baton back into his coat, swapping it for the small pistol.

"You know exactly what I'm here for, and exactly why I din't have the time to waste being pleasant. So please, if you want to make this difficult, do know I have no trouble with making you scream a little."

Yuri smiled as the thrall's eyes widened, the kind of proud smile a father would have seeing his newborn walk for the first time. ANd with that, he decided to send a message to the rest of the team.

Found a friend. Commencing friendly chat. It will likely be short.

Blake's head twitched slightly as he sat on the log, his cybernetic hands clenching and unclenching. "Don't taunt the vampires, Blake, myeh-myeh-myeh," he said to himself in a mocking tone as he continued sifting through the data.

The facial recognition in the traffic cameras had picked out three teams of hostiles fast approaching from all different directions. The two vampires were separated, which was good - that would make it easier for the fighters on the team to take them down.

Watch out for Anna; Carlo's older, but Anna's the brains here, guys. She's the adaptable bitch that wrote those books and runs the thralls. She ought to be the priority.

The team led by the female bloodsucker had entered the box and was in sight of one of the Musketeers. With half of his brain, Blake directed the drone (Aramis) after them, so that he could track their progress towards the bait directly. The other half of his brain, he bent towards the bloodsucker's comms network.

It was a standard setup - every thrall and vampire had an earpiece. The network had two layers of security, private wi-fi style. The bloodsuckers were ready for some punk with a PDA, but they weren't ready for Blake. Not in the slightest.

A few mental keystrokes and an assault by ten varieties of trojan software later and Blake was in. Now he had a choice - listen in on the vampires and try to glean some useful intel, or cut them off from each other.

He chose the second - he'd already set up his web of surveillance to see and hear the vampires, and if they were isolated, the teams could be dealt with one at a time. Now, he could brute force the network down, swamp it with programs and viruses and requests until it broke and the vampire's and thrall's earbuds just went silent. Alternatively, he could try something a little more... elegant.

That's how every earpiece hooked up to the network started blaring K-pop simultaneously, totally drowning out any attempt to communicate along it.

Found a friend. Commencing friendly chat. It will likely be short.

Blake shuddered at that. Few people were able to really scare him since his first run-in with vampires, but his Russian teammate managed it, especially with the enthusiasm he displayed towards 'friendly chats'. He sent out a message to the team:

Whatever you're going to do, Chernobyl, do it fast. We've got three thrall teams approaching the bait, two led by vampires and all of them armed. Closest one is led by Anna, ETA four minutes. I'm broadcasting you their current coordinates, and I'll update you periodically: They can't communicate between teams anymore (Thanks, Blake), so get in there and start scoring for our side.

Also, the team with Carlo is fast approaching my position, so I'm going to be running away. Help would be appreciated.

With that, Blake took off sprinting into the woods.

Finished here. Heading to your position now. Will intercept.

Like a shadow in the night, Kentaro moved silently and invisibly through the back of the woods, sword strapped meaningfully on his back. This was not his preferred approach, nor his area of expertise, but the level of technology available to them made the whole ordeal almost laughably easy.

---

Upon arrival at the scene, Ken had immediately honed in on a group of thralls near the perimeter of the mission area, far from the center of the action.

He dropped down upon them, and almost absentmindedly destroyed the group's largest man's skull with a sharp drop of his elbow. Of the three remaining thralls, two of them noticed that their leader had been killed, and began to formulate their "counterattack".

It might have been called that, if they had ever gotten a chance to put it into action. As it ended up being, they had only just begun to flail helplessly when they found themselves almost simultaneously bisected by a single, smooth swing of the Vigil Agent's sword.

They were not overwhelmed by the man's technique, or simply by the fact that he had gotten the jump on them. It was because he had moved quicker, and reacted faster than they could have possibly imagined. Up until now, they had only ever fought among themselves or against ordinary humans. Never had they thought that they would have to compete against this, something which could almost be said to be on the level of their eternal masters.

The last thrall, who had been oblivious to his first comrade's demise, quickly realized what was going on when his friend's upper body flew past his head from behind. He turned, with no idea about what he would turn to see, and laid his eyes on that man for the first time.

Azai Kentaro.

Flicking his sword forcefully to the side to dislodge blood from its blade, Ken eyes the last remaining thrall with an air of intimidation. For just an instant, the two of them seemed frozen, eyeing eachother carefully, trying to figure out what the best course of action was.

Spurred on by his growing madness, the thrall made the first move. It was not a good one. He charged, blinded by a combination of fear and lunacy, attempting to claw at the Vigil Agent's body and get a hold of his flesh.

Ken wouldn't allow it. Stepping simply to the side and raising his sword, he slams the solid hilt against the side of the thrall's head, sending enough force through the poor young thing's skull to immediately fracture it and rupture the precious grey matter stored within.

It was all over, in a single instant.

---

And, it was from then that Azai first contacted Blake. He heard the gist of what everybody had to say, through the messaging system that the lot of them shared, and was just finishing up cleaning his treasured sword when Blake's final message was received. Moving with deliberate slowness, Kentaro begins walking towards Blake's current location, headed for the area that his next opponent would soon be arriving at.

What preparations he made were in his head, as he considered his mental map of the area, and how he could possibly use the terrain to his advantage. Experimentally, he flexes his fingers, a habit that had persisted from his earlier days as a street brawler.

This feeling was... Anticipation.

Anticipation for a fight.

Mysaren looked at all the messages rather impatiently, sighing. More thralls, something something, blah blah. She reloaded her pistol and headed towards Blake, chewing absently on her lip as she thought.

Her body was tense as she got prepared for the battle, mentally and physically. The chemicals pumping through her helped slightly, but she was still ready to kill. She had the urge to crack her knuckles, but, sadly, the replacements didn't allow for things like that, so she cracked her neck instead. Little things like that that kept her human.

Well, at least, they made her feel human. She wasn't human anymore, she accepted that as soon as she woke up with half of her damn body replaced with metal and wires. Cold, calculating, things that humans shouldn't be.

She shook her head, starting to take deep breaths. She wasn't going to have another existential crisis, not now. Mysaren couldn't afford to panic, couldn't afford to let her guard down. Lives were on the line, and being human was a disadvantage as far as she was concerned. They didn't treat humans like humans half of the time, so why should she act like one?

She sent a quick message.

On my way. It's showtime.

"I don't like this, something is wrong," Anna said; she was no fool, even among the Eternal. She was not the strongest among their coven, the two other vampires in it were older and more experienced hunters, but she was the adaptable one, and the one who saw opportunities, so she led.

Carlo, on the other hand, was older, stronger but more inflexible and seemed to relish the idea of a hunt and a feeding, "It happens once in a while, my love. Some mortal finds out the secret and becomes a nuisance to us, a fly that has to be swatted. These days, it's so much easier to simply have the would-be hunters arrested before they even pose a threat. I am sure Richard is fine. Besides," he added casually, "it's entertaining to have them come around once every couple decades or so."

Anna, blonde, beautiful, wholesome looking, which perhaps was inevitable given her Salt Lake City pedigree, looked skeptical -- whoever was involved had the phones hacked and were demonstrating a degree of sophistication. But if these mortals were being technically savvy, it wasn't a problem once they closed the gap and got in close to tear them apart. That was always the last line of defense, and one she did not personally relish so much because it was a sign of a degree of failure to use pawns to simply extinguish the problem, but at least it seemed to give Carlo the opportunity to gorge himself.

"Of course, my love," she cooed, a hand tracing his jawline, "but perhaps it is best to call the local police, since we count Chief Jackson among our thralls, and perhaps scare these mortals off from their ill-advised hunt entirely."

"But not all of his men are thralls."

"True, but they will follow his orders. We can wait and see how they react to the police."

--

The sirens came all over town; Anna Smith had pull and used it. Chief Jackson yelled 'terrorism!' and none of his staff or deputies bothered to say, "here? In Minnesota?" but strapped on tactical equipment eagerly.

First warning of that police response hit the network fast and they all got notice. And then there was the two moving groups of thralls; one much smaller around Carlo in front and the larger one with Anna behind them, apparently feeling that it was better to let the thralls take any incoming.

Both were coming for the casino, though they were moving more deliberately now, to see if the incoming deputies, in the city's armored vehicle and patrol cruisers, would perhaps scare the Vigil agents off with the sirens.