Vampire's Blood Ascension-Chapter 36: A Nightmare

[You have slain a Latent demon: Dawn Antlion.]

After reaping the lives of a few more dawn antlions and morning mantis while ignoring the others, Rudy climbed the raised dune and reached the giant bone.

Turning his head to the back, his gaze fell on other giant insect dreadborns that he had wisely ignored, and he mumbled, "I need essence shards, and for that I must kill the deviants."

He looked at the giant bone a few steps away from him and frowned. "It doesn’t have groves."

"I can just use the cracks," he concluded as he stored his sword, slid his hand and foot within the cracks spreading across the giant bone, and began to climb it.

"Ugh!" He groaned. The cracks were way more slippery and uneven than the grooves, so he had to use all of his grip strength. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

His muscles screamed as he ascended the bone. He placed his hand within the cracks, pushed himself up, and slid his feet into another crack before repeating it all over again.

A few minutes later, his foot slid out of the crack.

"Damm—" he slammed into the bone, but his hand didn’t let go.

He hung by the side of the giant wall, his right arm groaning as he gritted his teeth and pushed himself upwards.

He once again placed his feet into the cracks and took a few deep breaths before he looked down at the dark desert and mumbled, "It could’ve gone bad."

Rudy rested there for a few minutes before he once again began his climb.

Half an hour later, he reached the top of the bone and fell to his knees with ragged breathing.

His arms and legs were sore from the laborious climb, and as he wasn’t on the sand, his eyes were heavy with fatigue.

Even then, he forced himself to stand and scanned the desert from the edge of the giant bone.

Far in the distance, at the edge of his vision, he saw a flickering light.

"Is that fire...?" he questioned and narrowed his eyes. "Are they irregulars or is it another ploy of this wretched realm?"

Rudy didn’t know what it was, but for now, he couldn’t keep guessing.

He walked to the center of the giant bone, sat down, and retrieved a pack of energy bars and a half-filled water bottle.

He drank some water, tore the edge of the pack, and took out a hard, rubbery brown bar and chewed on it.

The taste of the bar spread; his expression turned revolted, and he spat while giving a nasty glare at the bar. "It tastes like shit."

"Not that I would know what shit tastes like, but still..." Rudy added as he unexpectedly put away his grievances with the bar and ate two.

He then drank some water to ease himself of the foul taste, stored the pack of energy bars and the bottle in his spatial ring, and lay down on his back.

The sharp, cold air hit him like sharp needles.

He ignored the stings as he gazed at the moonlit sky and murmured with an unusually sunny smile, "I wonder what you are doing... Aveline. Are you still trying to find me? Or have you already given up? Two years yet, I still can’t predict your thoughts... Hah."

His eyes turned heavy, and he fell dazed off to sleep.

Humane cries and stifled explosion sounds drifted into Rudy’s ears.

’What’s going on...?’

Hearing the noises, he opened his eyes and found himself trapped in a glass tube filled with a strange liquid, bubbles spewing from a dark metallic mask, a pipe connected to the white metallic ceiling of the tube.

The mask was covering his mouth, his black eyes were bloodshot with agony visible in them, and his body under the neck stayed motionless — beyond his control.

Red, sickening veins bulged across his neck, chest, and left leg, and seeing the familiar place he was at, his face went dark, his mind contorted, and he stammered, horrified,

"W-What? Why am I here again?! WHY? Was all of that just a hallucination? Did I never become an irregular?!"

His heart began to beat loudly, and the sound of crisp steps reached him.

He tore his gaze to the left, and a familiar muscular man with short blonde hair and golden eyes, with various white mystic symbols floating within them, wearing a white-and-blue tactical yet aristocratic outfit, approached the glass tube and spoke coldly, "It seems you are still alive, 105."

He stepped closer, placed his hand on the glass tube, and whispered with a wide, sadistic grin, "Do not worry... I’d make sure your agony never ends."

Rudy couldn’t hear him, but upon seeing that man, Rudy’s anger flared without means, and he wailed from within his being,

"YOU BASTA—"

Rudy sat up in his dream, breathing heavily.

Sweat drenched his body from head to toe, and the blinding sunlight dug into his body.

He ignored all of that and stared at his empty palms in a daze before he clenched his fists and whispered in a hopeful voice, "It wasn’t a lie. My strength wasn’t a lie... That was just a dream, a wicked one but a dream nonetheless."

His jaw tightened as he finally remembered why most of the regulars didn’t dare to enter the old realm.

"Those who stay in this realm are haunted by their past," he mumbled the words that Aveline had told him when he had decided to become a semi-regular — Regulars that entered the raid gates and gained the blessing of essence without attributes and skills.

He slowly rose to his feet and turned towards the direction of the light he had seen during the night.

"I can’t reach there within a day... it would require at least two."

His gaze shifted to the next giant bone protruding from the pale sand, and he mumbled, "I should go there first."

He walked to the edge, looked down, and mumbled, "I can do this."

An hour later, he set foot onto the pale sand, covered his head with the dark hood, and made his way towards the next bone.