++There are stories of sewer patrols disappearing, snatched away to never be heard from again. Are they true? Patrols definitely go missing, but as for the idea of any mystery about it…I’m not so sure. There’s a lot of ways to die in Engyr.++

  Chapter 44

  Reggie stared at the cockroach, more out of caution than any significant fear. He wasn’t worried it would leap out at him, nothing could’ve survived that, he just wanted to double-check that it was dead.

  The cockroach was still breathing, it had fucking survived. That brought a new problem to drop down on Reggie’s lap and he took his time in chewing through it. He had plenty of time to take, after all, what with his missing leg only having regrown a few inches so far.

  By the time he’d finished working his next course of action out, about half of his thigh had grown back and he was feeling famished. Fortunately Reggie decided on something that would fix that hunger.

  It was more than a little bit terrifying to try and drain something several times his size and at least a dozen times his strength, but the thought of not having even better superpowers than he did already was actually more terrifying still. Reggie risked it. He crawled over to sit atop the biggest piece of stone—increasing its total weight by probably less than half a percentage point— and lowered his face down to a nice and cracked section of the cockroach’s armour plating.

  Even with vampire fangs being their sharpest weapons, even with the chitin already broken up, it took some doing to punch through into the meat below. From there, Reggie drank.

  It wasn’t easy. The cockroach was badly hurt, and Reggie could smell that much of its blood—if this odd, yellowish stuff was really blood—had already been squeezed out to clot in the dust lying everywhere. The creature’s heart beat weakly, barely sending any pulses of vitae into his mouth at all. It was also intensely magical. Resistant thanks to Toughness higher by tens than Reggie’s own, and that meant that his Blood Magic was working uphill to magically compel more of the stuff into him.

  Reggie kept at it though. He knew there must’ve been people aboveground who noticed the collapse, knew that it was big enough that it would definitely be investigated. For now there was enough dust in the air that the sunlight wasn’t really getting through, and any human eyes would fail to penetrate that. He didn’t know how long it would last.

  And he didn’t have a choice but to stay here and keep drinking, because Reggie was staring down a Tier 4 prize now and he’d be damned if he let it slip from his fingers over a little something like getting burned at the stake.

  Come on, come on. Stop holding back on me you big bitch and give me your fucking blood. It was like trying to wring water out of a slightly damp cloth. So much effort for just a tiny drop or two, and even as Reggie stretched himself and applied that effort across the whole of his target’s circulatory system it was slow going. Maybe he was managing to drag out an ounce or two every second. Something this big probably had half a thousand in total, if he was looking to drink half its total reserves after all the impact wounds…

  He could do this. Just a minute or two. People wouldn’t be on it that fast, right? They’d be stunned and staring just for a minute or two, let alone responding. They’d see the big, jagged hole in the ground and smell the miasma and want to steer clear.

  Right?

  Lorwick surprised him. About ninety seconds was all Reggie got before his enhanced ears picked up the sound of human life above him. More than one, more than ten. Lots of people. Walking fast and hard, gathering in numbers that would be a threat to him if they were all guards.

  Reggie ignored them and kept drinking, he was so close. Nine tenths there, maybe more. Nineteen twentieths.

  People were starting to scream above him now. Had they seen him? Was Reggie known as a vampire? He couldn’t go back to the Lady if that was the case, she’d probably just make a show of putting him down to earn some good will and deflect suspicion from her own people. He—

  —he finished draining the cockroach.

  Reggie shuddered as the strength ran through him. His veins became volcanic rivers, hot and threatening to burst out. There was so much power coming so suddenly that it felt certain his frail body would erupt at the effort of holding it.

  He glanced down, saw his leg. It’d regrown only another few inches and still stopped just shy of the knee. He wouldn’t be going anywhere fast on it and now humans were threatening to see him. He didn’t care, it was all worth it.

  As far as heroic escapes went, flight by hopping wasn’t the most dignified Reggie had made. That he was drenched from head to toe in shit didn’t help things either. Fortunately, raw Speed meant he was still moving faster than his Classless self could have jogged, and he disappeared down the winding tunnels just before people started dropping into the ruined section the cockroach had left.

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  Hobbling like no man had hobbled before, Reggie only stopped once he was a good quarter-mile down the tunnels. Another few inches poked out at the bottom of his leg, by then, and he was starting to feel the system shock of stolen strength fade into his consciousness following the feeding. Finally, with a reprieve, he consulted Sycily.

  Tier 4 creature devoured, bonus Attributes gained.

  +2 Strength

  +2 Toughness

  +2 Speed

  +2 Celerity

  +2 Charisma

  Secret Challenge completed; “Undying”. Reward: Regeneration improved. Regeneration II unlocked.

  Progress to next tier, 49/50.

  Name: Reginald Smith

  Age: 21

  Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]

  Class: None

  Attributes:

  (S)Strength 37(+12)

  (P)Speed 37(+12)

  (P)Celerity 36(+12)

  (S)Toughness 37(+12)

  (P)Charisma 13(-12)

  Abilities:

  Blood Magic I

  Form of the Beast II

  Royal Presence I

  Traits:

  Enhanced Senses I

  Regeneration II

  Addictive Ichor

  Reggie felt a lot of things at that moment, but the big change to him was a supposed improvement to his Regeneration. He looked down at his stump and…it was still a stump.

  “Sycily what the hell?”

  Regeneration II is not a flat improvement to recovery speed, it simply allows you to concentrate your healing powers for greater effect.

  Well that sounded interesting. “How do I do that?”

  It should come instinctively to—

  —”Nevermind, I figured it out.” It turned out Reggie had to imagine his leg growing back really hard. Truly, he was one of the minds of all time to have discovered that with only the hint he had. The downside to this was it actually hurt a shit ton, even with his deadened nerves. On the other hand, he was now regrowing meat fast enough to actually feel it happening.

  Reggie studied his limb and sharpened his focus more. Thought about what he actually needed from it. Bone, firstly. That was the big thing. He wouldn’t be going anywhere without that, so he ignored everything else and watched as the skeletal parts he still missed started to erupt and extend downwards from nowhere.

  It took only seconds before Reggie had all the bone exactly as it needed to be. He started to work on the meat after that, and again found it fascinating to watch as muscle and ligaments regrew, wrapping themselves around the pale bone like vines growing about a tree. Slower than he wanted, though.

  He didn’t take long to find out why. There were a hundred other small injuries still closing themselves elsewhere in Reggie’s body. Cracks in bone that didn’t quite reduce its structural integrity enough to limit mobility, torn flesh and sinews, other wounds that irritated but didn’t impede him. Experimentally, he concentrated on shutting off the healing for all of them.

  Within a single instant, his leg’s regeneration seemed to double, even triple. Ten thousand, he had to be pushing the scores of thousands for his ratio compared to human recovery now.

  Everything else still hurt though, hurt exactly as much as it had before he focused on the leg. Good reminder. Reggie wasn’t healing faster, just more efficiently. Maybe the total time was reduced somewhat, he imagined there were a lot of corners his body could cut with all that power sent into the same place, but for the most part he was just moving his Regeneration around. Exactly as Sycily had said.

  Nothing else was of a huge concern to Reggie right now, so he just let his body heal as it naturally wanted to. It could’ve taken an hour and he’d still have been in a good mood, even drenched in shit as he was. A week in Lorwick and he’d started to get lost again, gotten down. Nothing like a quick shot of power to bring your spirits back up.

  The footsteps approaching from behind him rearranged his focus and had him jogging off to get away from any potentially inconvenient questions. The ability to jog, though, was just another reminder of his lucky break, and so Reggie fled from the scene of his fight with perhaps the stupidest grin of his life.

  It took another day and a half before he finally emerged from the sewers. Reggie could’ve left sooner, but he wanted to be sure at least most of the heat had died down and figured he actually had better odds of avoiding human sight in the linear tunnels underground with how much better his vision was. Their reliance on torches for light meant he saw patrols coming literally half a mile away under the right circumstances. Could hear them from about three-quarters as far regardless. Tunnels. Reggie was really starting to like tunnels. Horrible, scary places. Full of corners and angled to let all the nasties in the dark know exactly where you were.

  Great for him, though, given that he was one of those nasties now.

  Reggie didn’t have a lot in the way of entertainment, save for the constant knowledge that there were probably more cockroaches in the sewers. That was a really good incentive to practice his stealth skills, already honed through a childhood of regular gang beatings and attempted murders. By the time he was ready to leave, Reggie fancied he’d shaken off all the rust from his lull in using such abilities.

  The biggest concern was still his skin. Unfortunately, his Regeneration II was just as affected by the sun as its inferior version. Restoring that damage would be slow and annoying. Not as much as before though. Focusing his Regeneration like he had earlier, Reggie felt it speed up exponentially. Maybe he was healing two or three hundred times faster than normal. What did that turn a few weeks into?

  Hours. That turned out to be an optimistic estimate, but by the end of the first day Reggie no longer had any obvious burn scars. He figured the marks he’d gotten from his stint of sunbathing would go away fully in another day or two, and that was all he needed for the time being. He wasted no more time in heading out of the sewer, finding another route up and quickly shoving his way up through the stone slab covering the ladder’s top.

  Moonlight greeted Reggie instead of sunlight, just as he’d hoped, and the air above-ground was so fresh that it almost stunned him for a moment. That would’ve been disastrous, he couldn’t afford to start dawdling now of all times. He hastened to scramble down the streets, though had the poor luck of coming up somewhere he didn’t recognise.

  It didn’t change much though, because Reggie’s first destination wasn’t actually his own apartment now. It was the river.

  He really needed something to swim in that hadn’t squirted out of a person’s anus.