Disclaimer, Copyright and Warning: By continuing to read the story excerpt below, you agree that all characters are fictional (except for the ones I say are based on people), and any likeness or similarities are coincidences, and that nearly everything here is original.
Be aware, that the following story excerpt contains adult themes and scenes, and is not suitable for the young. It may contain offensive religious material, intimate scenes, severe cursing and vulgarities, and intense violence and bloodshed.
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Finally! Junhao thrilled with exhilaration as he shoved Brandr's leg aside. As with most vampires, the detective was capable of concealing his true form. This was done through biologically withdrawing his vampiric qualities, similar to how a lion sheathed its claws. This presented a more human image to the public, one that was capable of being integrated within human society.
The black-clad man quickly regained his balance, and Junhao swung at him. Staying in human form meant that he could stay in the sunlight without too many adverse effects, but it also meant losing every advantage a vampire might possess over an ordinary human. That, most prominently, included increased speed and preternatural strength.
Junhao's fists cleaved forward, but all of his swings went wide, as Brandr simply swayed around them, his eyes watching out intently for the vampire's strikes. The younger man simply stepped and swept backwards, leaving Junhao ten feet away from Brandr, swiping the thin air.
“Having fun?” Brandr asked with a raised eyebrow, and Junhao's ire rose.
The vampire snarled bestially. “You're pissing me off, boy. Don't make me turn you into a red stain on the pavement.” His fingers, now more like claws, clenched into tight fists with enough strength that Brandr could hear the cracking of his knuckles.
A smirk. “You can try.”
Bursting forward, the furious vampire sprung at his opponent, preternaturally enhanced leg muscles launching him five feet into the air. As he came close to Brandr, Junhao raised his right fist, and hurled a punch with all of his might. Brandr raised his right leg slightly above the ground, but then decided against a counter attack, instead kicking off the pavement, sending him back against the alley wall.
Junhao's fist thus plunged into the ground with explosive force, and a loud crack resounded, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer the size of a car and smashed it against a wall. The vampire detective grunted once, and removed his fist from the floor. It left a manhole-sized depression, ringed by several cracks in the pavement.
Junhao charged him again, this time moving far quicker than he had before. Knowing that his opponent was now pressed against the wall, he swiped at Brandr with the claw-like fingers on his right hand. They tore into solid brick instead, and Junhao realised that the taller man had somehow narrowly avoided his attack, and was no longer in his line of sight. The vampire followed through with his movement as he spun around, and ripped across the brick wall like it was made of styrofoam, leaving thick gouges in his trail.
The corporal made an about-face; only to find Brandr's right leg flashing upwards in a swift roundhouse kick, with enough force to break a normal man's lower left floating ribs. Junhao winced once, and Brandr, without letting his foot touch the floor, pulled his attacking leg backwards slightly, then kicked again, this time higher, in a perfectly executed taekwondo combination. Had Brandr been successful in finishing the manoeuvre, it would have culminated with a final roundhouse kick that would have smashed his shin into Junhao's left temple again,
But a vampire's resilience, in addition to its unnatural strength, was legendary. While the first kick had hurt a little, Junhao knew there wouldn't even be any visible mark on his body from that blow. So when the second one came, Junhao was more than ready.
It hammered into his ribs again, striking a few inches higher than the one before. Junhao swiftly caught the offending leg in the crook of his left elbow, gripping with enough strength to immobilise an Olympic weightlifter. Junhao grinned dangerously when he saw a familiar expression on Brandr's face; one that he had seen on every criminal he had apprehended so far. That expression was a mix of many different emotions and thoughts; sometimes it was shock, horror, fear, surprise and even resignation. As complex as it was however, all of it could be summed up easily with just two words:
Oh, shit.
His right hand snapped forward, and wrapped around his neck in a breath-stopping chokehold. With a loud bellow of rage, Junhao turned, and with all the strength he had, flung Brandr deeper into the alley. Such was the force behind his throw, that Brandr was sent flying three stories in the air. His body travelled more than sixty metres away, before finally ending his flight with a loud thud on a large heap of old newspapers; which had probably been left there for collection.
A smirk slowly crept on Junhao's face, and he began walking towards his fallen opponent. The newspapers should have prevented a relatively athletic man like Brandr from a fatal impact, and in all likelihood, broken a few ribs if he was unlucky.
He had only taken his fifth step towards Brandr, when the supposedly incapacitated man suddenly sat up. Brandr winced a few times as he felt his upper body for injuries, and after stretching his arms once, pushed himself off the massive heap of waste paper.
In the eyes of any onlooker, he seemed unharmed.
“That was a pretty good throw.” Brandr commented blandly.
His lips quirked upwards once.
“But not good enough.”
Corpse grey eyes flecked with red streaks glared at the impudent younger man before him. Brandr had his hands tucked in his pockets, and held the vampire with an almost nonchalant regard. As an enforcer of the law, Junhao did not resort to killing as the first solution often. The more dead people there were, the more reports he had to file, and he hated paperwork.
But his dislike of Brandr now progressed beyond his dislike of red tape, and there was nothing he wanted to do more than to just kill him. Junhao turned to his right, and noticed that one of the cars parked in that alley was just a few steps away from him.
Perfect.
In an instant, Junhao had moved to the front bumper of the vehicle; an odd three-wheeled blue car that seemed to be older than he was. His hands reached out with unnatural strength, and with a crunch, dug his fingers into the car fender, giving him a solid grip onto the vehicle.
Brandr's hands slipped out of his pockets, and his eyes widened.
“Rrrrraaah!” For the second time that day in that alley, something flew high up in the air and soared towards the dead end of the alley. But this time, it wasn't a slim human body, and newspapers were no longer what waited to receive it at the other end.
Instead, more than a ton of solid metal, glass and various materials, all consolidated in one car, travelled through the air, and Junhao's throw had been good. Brandr would be crushed beneath its incredible weight. Not even a vampire like Junhao could come out of that unscathed.
As the car's shadow covered more and more of Brandr, Junhao squinted eagerly to see the look of surprise and disbelief on his face. However, the sudden change of emotions on Brandr's expression did not go from mild bemusement to fearful resignation. Instead, cold bloodlust radiated from his visage, and almost by accident, his gaze caught Brandr's.
Brandr's eyes flashed, and beneath the growing shadow of the falling car, onyx black irises glowed a diabolical blue; a shade of azure so striking that Junhao felt his breath catch in his throat. It was only for a fraction of a second, and he would've missed it had it not been for the enhanced sight of a vampire.
Even so, an uncomfortable feeling had crept in at the sight. It was only many days later, that Junhao realised a sudden spike of pure, barely-restrained killing intent had caused it.
A couple of feet before the car could graze Brandr's head, two shining silver arcs suddenly appeared in and across the car, criss-crossing each other in the shape of an 'x'. Instantly, the Reliant Robin X split into four sections, and each piece fell around him harmlessly. In that moment, Junhao caught a glimpse of an ordinary knife in Brandr’s right hand, before the young man smoothly kept it out of sight again.
If it hadn’t been for his vampiric nature enhancing his eyesight, Junhao would’ve never seen it. Had it been in the hands of any other delinquent or street gangster, he would’ve dismissed it. But this ‘Brandr’ was able to keep up with his increased speed as well as strength, and had survived a throw that would’ve broken the bones of any ordinary athlete. More importantly, the younger man had somehow, cleanly sliced a small car into scrap metal as it travelled through the air.
His mind raced backwards, flipping through memories like he did with old case files. He remembered when a series of serial murders began a few years ago. The murders all shared a few common points: they were all attractive females, ranging from age fourteen to twenty-five. Nearly all of them were scantily clad prostitutes, and they all died alone. The cause of death was always due to loss of blood through wounds inflicted by a sharp weapon. Forensics however, could never come to a conclusion on what sort of weapon was used however; some wounds seemed like cuts from a fruit knife, while others looked like an axe was used.
Modus operandi however, dictated that it was the same person. Patrols were carried out more often, while the members of the underworld increased protection of their assets as well. While the killing slowed, they didn’t stop, and soon the media was all over it, especially once they realised women were dying at a rate of two per week.
The Police Commissioner back then, pressured by both his own superiors and powerful members of society, personally led an undercover strike team to arrest and take down the serial killer. An opportunistic gang leader approached the police, and offered their assistance, claiming that it would be good for both sides to work together to take this murderer down. The police would have their lawbreaker, and the streetwalkers could ply their wares safely again.
The Commissioner agreed, and soon both set up a trap, involving all thirty-two men from the police strike force, including the Commissioner, as well as fifty gangsters under the leadership of the gang leader. The plan was for a female undercover cop, in the guise of an underage and illegal prostitute, to get the killer’s attention.
Once done, the undercover agent would escape towards an underground car park, where a kill-zone was set-up. The car park had only one exit, and once it had been sealed shut by a massive, automatic steel sliding gate, the killer would be trapped inside with eighty four heavily-armed policemen and gangsters, with orders to shoot him on sight. There would be no immediate reinforcements in the area however, so as to keep the suspicions of the murderer at bay.
The undercover cop was an old partner of his, a girl with mixed ancestry named Shuen Le. She was nearly two decades younger than he was, and he became her mentor and first partner when she’d graduated from the academy. His years of experience gave him some sort of seniority, though he was never promoted due to his regular arguments with his superiors.
She did well, and was soon promoted and shifted into another department. When he found out she’d volunteered for the mission, he’d managed to get into private conversation with her. The first thing he asked, of course, was whether she was trying to sign her death warrant.
The dark skinned girl had laughed, and chided him for being silly. She assured him that the entire route had already been planned out, and that there was no way for the suspect to kill her except when she was already in the car park. “I’ll have eighty three men, each armed to the teeth, ready to cover me and out for the killer’s blood. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine!” She smiled at him, and walked away.
A couple of days later, the trap was laid, and she began walking the streets alone, along the route made out for her. A week passed, and nothing happened. The police began to wonder if it was going to work, but the Commissioner made the order for them to carry on with the plan.
Two days later, the trap was sprung. Junhao had been at the operations centre, keeping a lookout for his undercover friend. The plan had progressed smoothly, and he breathed a sigh of relief as she made it to the car park safely. The murderer had followed her in, and the automatic sealed was sealed behind him, while the police and gang members got ready at their positions.
Then everything had gone horribly wrong. Somehow the transmission for the visual feed cut out, and they were left with only the audio feed from the state-of-the-art equipment they had installed barely more than a week ago.
Loud bursts of gunfire could be heard over the speakers in the operations room, and shouted orders could be heard beneath it. Suddenly, screams began to replace the sound of gunfire, and every person in the ops room felt chills going down their spines as more and more cries of dying men sounded and faded away. It took fifteen minutes for the screaming and erratic bursts of gunfire to die down to an eerie silence, and the supporting officer of the operation, Assistant Commissioner at the time, yelled into their communication sets for a status report for what seemed like the hundredth time that night.
Junhao would never forget what he’d heard in the next few minutes.
A hoarse voice had come on; a man whom he didn’t recognise. He sobbed more than he spoke, and his words were soaked with unadulterated terror. The Assistant Commissioner repeated his query, but the man didn’t seem to hear him at all.
“...We thought he was just a man, but he wasn’t!” Junhao had turned to look around the room, and he saw hard-bitten cops who’d been in the game for years look like they were five years old, watching a horror movie again. “No man could do what he did. He was so fast...! We had guns, so many guns, and all he had was a...a knife! Javier, Dickson and the rest were covered in full tactical armour, and he just...sliced them apart with that blade!”
“Stay calm, officer! You are the law! He is only one man, and no man is above you!” The Assistant Commissioner ordered in an authoritative voice.
“A man?” Came the reply, and the man started to laugh, the bitter, hopeless laugh of a man who knows he’s about to die. “He’s no man. He’s a demon, that’s what he is, a demon-” His sentence ended in a wet gurgling sound, as if he was suddenly made to choke and drown in his own blood.
The call for additional reinforcements had already been sent out, and Junhao went with them. When they finally reached the car park, they found that a large hole had been cut into the automatic gate, enough for a man to go through. The police had disengaged the sealing mechanism, and even though the hole indicated that the murderer had left, every man entered the underground car park with their weapons extended and safeties turned off.
They had expected the worst, and gone in expecting a grisly murder scene. What they found was a slaughterhouse. Nearly every man who had been sealed inside with the killer had been dismembered, as if they had been chopped into pieces by an enormous sword or axe. Most had their heads removed from their bodies, and the nauseating stench of blood and faeces filled the already stale air. The Commissioner and the gang-leader in particular, had died in close proximity to each other. Or at least, their heads had somehow rolled to meet each other’s. Their bodies were nowhere close by.
Junhao, ignoring the effects caused by the immense amount of blood spilled upon his vampire nature, searched the body parts with frantic resolve, his eyes scanning left and right and hoping that Shuen Le was not anywhere in that carnage.
She was. In fact, she stood out almost immediately, in the bloodbath of the car park. Her body was the only one that was still intact; all of her limbs were still joined to her body, and her head was still attached to the torso. Instead, she seemed to have been sliced open by a scalpel. A deep, clean cut stretched from between her small breasts to the end of her crotch. Forensic personnel would later make the analysis that she had been sliced from bottom up, where her genitals were.
While the operation was supposed to be classified, as all matters of that sort were, details of the fiasco were somehow leaked to the press. The Assistant Commissioner, now Acting Commissioner of the Singapore Armed Police Forces, moved quickly to deal with the situation, and issued a press statement that the murderer had been terminated only due to the sacrifice of the police strike team, and that their efforts should be honoured.
It was almost too late. The LWL Media Corporation didn’t possess knowledge of every exact detail, but photos of the carnage in the car park were constantly flashed in news reports, and they even possessed a recording of the fateful final words of what they suspected was the last man standing. The opportunistic bastards even came up with an epithet for the butchering slayer: ‘Demonblade’ became his name, and not even the media eventually backing up the Acting Commissioner’s statement could stop the whispers of the people.
Every time news of a murder involving an attractive girl went out to the public, rumours of the being that became Singapore’s most dangerous killer would come alive.
And now, the very same person who had made a mockery of the law, and had slaughtered its enforcers in the process, stood before him. The same person who had cut open the one girl whom he’d treated like a younger sister, an apprentice of sorts, now stood before.
The Demonblade was now face-to-face with him, and Junhao felt his molten-hot anger, long ago buried under a crust of gruff professionalism, begin to emerge again from within him. His fury, his hate that he had marshalled deep within his soul, now spread upwards and outwards, eroding whatever control he had over his vampiric nature.
Preternatural strength exploded throughout his body, and he felt both wild excitement and burning pain rip through his being as his body shed more of its humanity. Vampires were naturally allergic to the sun’s light, and he could feel his skin begin to peel even more beneath the obscured sunlight.
But it didn’t matter. Pain was an old friend, and he gladly embraced it. All that mattered to him right now was power; power enough to tear this murdering lawbreaker into little bits and pieces.
His skin began to flake and tear off, as if going through some unnaturally increased rate of decomposition. His muscles swelled and pulsed with every beat of his heart, and he could feel the blood thirst descend upon him.
Just as well. He would make the Demonblade pay, blood for blood, with every drop he could wring out of the son of a bitch.
“You’re finished, Demonblade.” Junhao snarled, his words hissing through thick yellow incisors, now almost three-quarters shifted into his true preternatural self.
His taller nemesis merely tilted his head mockingly, his lips stretched upwards in a lop-sided smirk, as if recognising the threat presented by the vampire policeman standing before him. The Demonblade said nothing, but shifted his body into a classic knife-fighter’s stance that hid his right hand from his opponent, yet allowed his left freedom of movement against an opponent.
Just as Junhao was about to burst forward in a violent surge of movement, a woman’s voice crept across the tense silence.
“No, officer. You’re both finished.”
Bright blasts of crimson-hued lasers suddenly poured down from above, a red rain of death that bombarded the earth where the two men stood, and tore it apart like it was made of wet cardboard. The destruction of the blasting ground continued without respite for nearly five minutes, creating a cloud of dust and debris that obscured the killing zone from unenhanced vision.
“Enough.” The Prophet’s evangelist raised a hand, and the storm of laser blasts stopped. As the debris cloud began to settle, thirty figures descended slowly from the sky, as if they were nonchalantly ignoring the law of gravity.
They were all dressed in thick, white robes that seemed far suited to arid desert land than the tropical climate of Singapore, yet all thirty wore expressionless faces beneath their white turbans. It was as if they were more machine than man.
Yet their eyes burned with the flames of insanity, and their hands twitched every few seconds, as if seeking to unleash more of their destructive blasts on everything that they could see. The Chinese woman inspected each of them with a critical eye, and nodded once after a few moments.
“Good work, Obliviates.” The evangelist grinned, a gesture that seemed more like she was baring her teeth than smiling. “You have served Master Usharma well. Know that Pucno(most powerful is he) has been greatly pleased with your actions, and he shall reward you with-”
“Deaths so swift you won’t even know your lives have ended.” An icy voice from above cut her off in mid-sentence, and twenty-nine followers of Usharma turned as towards the direction from which the voice came.
The remaining two Obliviates that didn’t react collapsed onto the ground, one with his throat sliced open and the other with a massive hole in his chest where his heart was supposed to be. Behind them, Junhao and Damien stood side-by-side, their right hands both clutching something that dripped with blood. The Demonblade gleamed wickedly, even through the thick stains of red, while Junhao pressed the still beating heart of the Obliviate to his lips, and slurped down the fresh blood pumping out from it.
The vampire trembled with satisfaction, and bared his fangs in a macabre parody of a smile.
“Our turn.”
******
After more than half a year. That's got to be the worst sort of hiatus ever.
Many thanks to Tim, for helping me with the 7 Habits book review that I owed. Though if I had known it was only a few questions, I would've finished it way before everyone else did.
Nothing particularly witty to say, except that this entire section was written in a state of extreme exhaustion, so the quality of this particular chapter is lacking quite a bit.
But this entire series is meant to be high-production with low-quality anyway. One should expect nothing less of a World Without Christ.
Thank you for reading. Leave a comment.
