Legendary Vampire in the Apocalypse
Chapter 25: Unlawful

Chapter 25: Unlawful

✧✧ ~ ⚜ ~ ✧ φ ✧ ~ ⚜ ~ ✧✧

The young man with the glasses had stood there a while, stunned once he had caught the keys. Dion had in those moments, from initially thinking that he might perhaps stay within the building, decided something else.

He would leave entirely. Thus, he turned slightly, and rather than heading deeper into the building or back upstairs, he walked towards the rupture through the wall.

’There should be other apartments I can stay in for a little while that have less zombies. All I want is a bath before I leave for the gas station.’

The building had been the source of too much commotion. Zombies would likely soon arrive on this floor and perhaps even start to fill the other floors where other people sat locked in their apartments. Initially it had been alright to stay because he would have been with other people, but now....

Dion sighed faintly as he came to stand over the edge, the wind brushing against him slightly, tousling his blood-wet hair.

Then I can find other people to find information from. Especially about that broadcast...

Then he closed his eyes. He had to focus for both his repentance and this.

The city, from the breakthrough in the wall, had expanded far and wide. This residential area was one that was rather cluttered with tall apartment buildings after all. Although, while that was in some sense advantageous in this kind of world now, it also had its disadvantages.

Nevertheless, Dion concentrated, and he tried to expand his senses as far as they could go. He regulated his breathing, taking a breath that he soon released through his mouth. Abruptly, the sounds of the world sharpened in his ears.

When he devoted his focus so singularly, it seemed he was able to draw much more detail from his enhanced senses, just as he had hoped. The hammer of the young man’s heart, and the flow of his blood, had been amongst the first things that he had noticed.

Dion took a deeper breath, swallowing down the itch in his throat. Then he drew his senses beyond the walls of this building, firstly to the nearest one to them, and he immediately heard the grunts of zombies as well as the throbbing of people’s hearts through the wall.

’No... too many.’

Dion’s senses then went on to expand at least up to twenty buildings away from them in their circumference. It had taken him over ten minutes to work up to expanding them to that range; however, eventually, his eyes finally gradually opened, revealing the slit sharpness that they had returned to. Then he breathed out through his nose, and he began to calm himself and rein in his senses.

’You should be clear enough...’

The thought had come to him with much relief, because he was at least now sure that there were no other gnolls within his vicinity.

The young man had long returned to his apartment, and although he had heard the door open another time after he had returned and heard the sound of a different heartbeat peaking out from it, there was now no one but him alive out here.

Dion raised his hand a little to look at the wristbands of blood attached to them.

’I should familiarise myself more with you.’ He thought to himself with some reluctance.

In the first place, he hadn’t been keen on testing out the ability so that he could conserve the mana that he had regained earlier in his waiting for night time where it would have really been useful. And even now he was somewhat reluctant to do so because of the same reason. Just because he had found an apartment building far from here and that sounded relatively clear of zombies, that did not mean there would not be any threats that would force him into using the ability.

Dion dragged one of his feet forward, crunching stone. He had made the decision more so because there was already mana stored within the blood bands that he could use first before he had to supplement anything.

There, he allowed himself to fall. Dion’s arm raised high, and the blood began to shimmer, wrapped around that raised hand.

Suddenly, two of the rings expanded, meshing together rapidly into a ball over his raised palm. He fell with his feet first, and within moments of going over the edge, before he had even half disappeared through the break in the wall, the blood suddenly wrapped strings around his wrist, and then the rest of it expanded into a wide, air-catching parachute.

As his descent rapidly slowed down, Dion silently thought to himself, ’Seems the blood’s adjustments to the air are what drain the most mana rather than its transformations themselves. Moreover, so long as I have a mental image of what I want it to do... it can execute it on its own to some degree, so long as it has enough mana.

The makeshift parachute that he had created was by no means good. The thing was unstable, and although the blood had transformed into the shape of it, the distribution of its quantities wasn’t right, but, be that as it may, it was good enough to cushion his landing, and that was more than enough.

From landing in the alleyway between the apartment building and the next one over, Dion ensured that he took the clearest routes through the buildings to reach the one he had found for himself.

Naturally, it was not as if he could have gone without running into a single zombie, but whenever he did, so long as he could and they didn’t find him before he did them, he moved himself around, or killed right through them with his bat or fireplace poker.

Then, once Dion arrived, and he stood within the alleyway beneath the windows of the rooms, he didn’t go towards the front. He closed his eyes again, focusing, and he listened into the rooms on his side of the apartment building for an empty one.

His eyes snapped open once he had found one, and the blood around his wrist transformed once more. This time it stretched into a long rope, and at its tip, a four-partitioned hook took shape. Dion looked up and towards the left, on the fifth floor, and he adjusted himself, then threw it.

The hook shattered through the glass, and after he had secured it against the wall, he began to climb.

Had it been days ago, he wouldn’t have had the accuracy or the physical strength to do this in only a single try in the manner that he was, and yet here he was now, breaking and entering.

And once he landed in the room, his shoes crunching over shattered glass, he was met with the sight of a family that had transformed into zombies, and their heads had bullet holes through them.