Legendary Vampire in the Apocalypse
Chapter 9: Young Man in the Apocalypse

Chapter 9: Young Man in the Apocalypse

It had been a very long time since Dion had his last dream. He couldn’t remember when the last one had been.

Months, or years ago? He did not know.

Whenever he slept, he often only registered the fact that he had slept. It was like a long blink, from darkness to the light of waking up, and he was fine with that.

Dreams were overrated anyway.

It was always better to sleep like a corpse.

This night, however, he hadn’t slept as dead as he would have liked.

It had begun at first only with him walking through and living for a time tending to a mystical garden.

There were strange creatures that he had never seen in person, from phoenixes to mermaids, and demons and dragons, amongst the greatest of them, in those that he could recognise.

Many others of the creatures, the smaller ones and those more numerous, he could not name.

However, it was not a problem. What need was there for him to know what they were called when they seemed so fond of him?

That comfort of belonging far outclasses anything like names, and thus, he had never considered asking.

At some point, and this shift had not been something that he noticed; however, the garden was torn from the ground, and he was no longer upon it.

Civilisations grew wildly around him, the time of whatever age he had been in flew backwards, and he gradually seemed to lose himself to it.

He felt himself live through, actively, a great, ancient warring age, rising through the ranks by the sufferings of blood and war, the invasions of monsters and darker kingdoms, of nations beyond wherever it was that he had been.

Dion had been so lost in this dream that for a long time, it did not feel simply as if a dream.

The experience felt like a possession, especially once a strange phenomenon occurred in the world.

From the blood-laden battlefields, swathes of nature began to emerge wildly, growing lush, vibrant fruits and trees that grew to heights that he had never seen before.

This emergence ignited great wars once more, and all of the growth burned.

The second time it had happened, where a paradise grew from death, the earth tore itself out of the ground, and it soared high, away from the reach of those below, beyond the clouds and into the stars, and perhaps even further beyond that.

Still, wars ensued thereupon, for there had been records and fables about what had happened in times long gone, about what might potentially be grown from death.

And once he had been possessed by wearing a crown to war, he had been slain.

Dion’s body, throughout this dream, lay over the bed within his room.

He rolled and groaned, his expression shifting wildly between pain and ease through the time of his sleep.

There was never a time when there was not some kind of change to him, his veins bulging, and the sound of his heart thundering so hard within his ribcage that the sound filled the room with its galloping.

Eventually, his eyes suddenly tore open, his torso snapping upwards as he grabbed for breath as if having been drowning until his absolute limits and only now come up for air.

A hand had risen to his chest, feeling it naked and throbbing wildly at his heart rate.

’What kind of dream?!’

He hurriedly shook his head, and his legs dragged themselves off of the sheets.

Then, his alarm began ringing, overtaking all of the urgency that had been given to what he had been through.

His face grimaced as he reached for his bedside desk and he smacked the top of it, grumbling.

Then he rose, his torso feeling quite cold being naked. His room never should have normally felt so chilly. The heater in these glorious apartments never failed him before.

Nevertheless, he shook it off. He only needed to inform the student manager living with them in the apartment building.

’It’s Saturday... I’ve got work soon.’

He thought to himself silently, hoping that a shower would be able to relieve him of the cold and very strange feeling throughout his body as well as the wildness running through his mind and his heart.

’I seriously felt like I had died in there...’

Honestly, if this was how intense his dreams were when they did happen, they could really be damned.

He did not want to see any more. His hand opened the bathroom door, and he walked in, his head spinning as he raised a hand to brush through his hair.

Then he suddenly stopped.

His attention looked through his bathroom and his brows furrowed deeply.

The place smelled like it had been used recently, within the past few hours, with his very special bubble bath.

’My Saturday alarm only rings at 9... and last night I had bathed early to...!’

Dion felt his heart that had begun to ease stutter. His brain worked through the fog to retrieve his memories of last night.

The first things that came to him were the flashing lights in Club Utopia, the drinking, and then the woman.

Then.... and then he remembered the errors, and the trembling, and that voice booming through his head.

Dion’s foot stamped forwards, his eyes quivering madly, his gut churning, at the visceral sensation of crushing Todo Shijo’s skull under the impacts, the sensation of his blood spraying onto him and his final words.

The lid of the toilet smashed open, shattering against its back with the force that he used, and he hurled out bile and lingering chunks of food.

For some time, he had puked, and yet he hadn’t removed himself from the seat immediately.

But then abruptly, in the tormenting flashes of memories that had been playing through his mind, he was torn off the toilet seat by the memory of the gnoll stabbing through his chest.

Dion’s feet swiftly carried him across the cold floor, bringing him before his mirror, and he was stunned at the sight.

He still stood just shy of 5’11, at 178 cm tall. His skin remained a rich shade of caramel, and his hair was the same black, medium-height length, let down to flow freely in its ever-so-slight curls, and those two beauty marks that sat right under his right eye were still there.

But his eyes had gone red, and he watched as his pupils teetered between sharpening into predatory slits or remaining rounded.

Then, there was his body.

Dion had never been one to work out much; he had left that behind a long time ago.

Now, he simply had not had the time. Moreover, there was the consolation that working part-time jobs like being a bartender and delivery guy were workouts on their own.

Thus, while his figure had always been lean and neat, he never had any significant definition to him.

And yet his body had become fuller, and degrees more fit, as if patient time had been taken to sculpt him into a magnificent figure.

There, with those thoughts, his attention fell down to the centre of his chest. His hand raised to touch where some hair had grown.

There should have been a giant impaling stab wound through there, and yet there was not the slightest scar.

’What... the fuck happened to me? Are these the effects of my awakening? But how did I even get here?’

There, he remembered the sight of the white-haired woman, of Anastasia.

Then, beneath all of that, as if murky, dark waters had been stirred, his mind had distantly drawn back to the rest of the night gone. But there was something missing, a few things actually, from after he should have died.

He could not pull for the memory of what he had said to her, and in that moment, he did not think any deeper. All that he knew was that he had lost consciousness..

Dion’s attention immediately abandoned thoughts about her.

His eyes pried wide, and he bolted out of the room.

He burst through the door of his bathroom, then of his room and into the main apartment, where he immediately ran for the landline.

He had remembered that his phone had long died, so he hadn’t even bothered.

The landline clattered up into his hands; he pleaded for breath, and his hands moved faster than should have been normal to dial a number.

Then, all that came back were the beeps of a dead line.

The landline fell from his grasp, shattering over the floor, and his wide eyes stared blankly at the image of his family framed above it, from his mother to his father, and finally to his little sister, hardly seven years old by now, whom he had piggybacked with a smile.

And streams of tears fell.