As the sun went down, I woke up earlier than usual. Quickly putting my shirt and pants on, I shook Diach awake to help with my tie and jacket. He groggily tied my bowtie and helped with the buttons on my jacket.
"I have to show you how to do this on your own so I do not have to be woken up every morning." Diach said annoyed and rubbing his eyes. The instant he finished, I took off towards the arsenal at almost full speed. It was early and all the caverns and corridors were empty. Upon entering the arsenal, Odesza was polishing the weapons like he had before but he seemed less angry tonight. He yelled over to me without turning his head again tonight as well.
"It seems you are ready for tonight, huh?" The old man said. Without skipping a beat, I jumped over to him and stood waiting patiently. When he was finished polishing the sword in his hand, he put all the weapons back on the racks and turned to me. The prince was my main driving force behind this training as well as Motoro and his crew. I would not let myself be embarassed like that ever again.
"First, we will teach you how to properly use your strength and speed. Your power when you fully transform should be your power at all times. Then you could be even stronger when you let the rage take over. Come over to this machine and punch as hard as you can without transforming first and then transform and do it again." Odesza said pointing to a large punching machine. It looked like a punching bag except it seemed harder and had a number at the top. When I punched in my human form, a small number in the lower thousands came up. I looked at Odesza proud of the number as I had never seen anything above 999 when I went to the arcade machines as a human.
"Change and punch again." Odesza said not paying attention to the number at the top. As it changed back to zero, a voice echoed out across the cavern.
"3479." The voice boomed. It was deafening and made me fall to the ground clutching my ears. The old man looked down at me with a smirk.
"Can you not handle the noise?" He said tauntingly. It did not seem to phase him like it did me.
"Aren't you supposed to have better hearing than everyone else since you are blind?" I said back standing back up. The unanticipated noise made everything around me a little hazy. What he said next shocked me.
"I do not hear like everyone else does. My hearing works through vibrations made by sound and with this large cavern, if the voice was quiet and I was somewhere else, I would not be able to hear it. Surely, you have noticed how high the ceiling is? I have to be able to hear what it says from up there while I am all the way down here. Come on, step up and punch again." Odesza said without thinking anything of it. The machine's number dropped back down to 0 as I reset and got ready to go again. This time my claws and fangs were grown and I was half transformed. This was the most I could do on my own. After changing stances and punching, the number went quite a bit higher. This time I was ready for the voice as it echoed.
"5890." It said. I was beaming at this number as I did not think anyone could beat that. Odesza looked at me shamefully before saying something as I put my hands on my hip.
"Are you proud of that number? That number is quite low. For a fresh vampire, it is phenomenal but for all of vampire-kind, quite pathetic." He said judgementally. He stood up and gave it a quick tap and the number shot up.
"16500" The voice boomed. My jaw dropped seeing that number. He did not even seem to put any effort into it. What would it read it he really tried? The possibility was terrifying. This man was 3x as strong as I was even in his human form. He was a pretty lean man so I did not think he was that muscular but his technique was flawless. He beat me entirely on technique but now I see he could have beaten me on strength alone if he chose.
"We will get you much higher than this. I have a feeling you will do big things in your life now that you have joined our ranks." Odesza said pushing the machine away to the weapon racks. We started with my base fighting form and trained how to put more strength into my punches and kicks. He was telling me to flex the muscles in my arm and relax the instant I started to move before flexing right on impact again. It seemed like an easy enough exercise but in actuality it was pretty hard. It took pinpoint precision and timing to do 3 things in the time a punch came out.
The first flex and relax was easy enough to accomplish but I always misjudged the final flex timing and either flexed to early or too late. My number went up a tad bit upon the first two parts but not enough to even mention. As we continued with this, after an hour I finally started to get the timing down. With perfect synch I punched and released and the number shot up. It went from just over three thousand to nearly forty-five hundred. I could feel myself punching harder as I mastered the reflex. It was not instant yet and I had to consciously think to get it to work but it was working nonetheless.
After another hour of punching nonstop to force myself to do it on reflex, Odesza suggested something.
"How about instead of trying to force it down, you just think about breathing. Start your breath on the opening of the punch and begin your breath out on impact. That should make it easier to do." The old man said watching me. I had not thought about it but I was concentrating so much that I had not been breathing naturally and I was nearly gassed by that point. As I remembered what he said and focused on breathing, my punches came out nearly instinctively with what he told me. This was a much better way.
Another hour passed but within fifteen minutes, I was punching better and harder. My kicks had the same problem but now they came out much faster and stronger. I went from a common thug to a world champion in fifteen minutes practically. When the number hit seven-thousand, we moved on to the next spot.
"Now show me your boulder crusher punch." Odesza said looking towards me. I shifted my arms and legs around to get the maximum velocity from a punch. As I whipped my arm back and then forward the number on the scale sounded out.
"6450." It boomed. I was impressed with this but I knew Odesza would make it much higher, at least ten-thousand I was hoping. He looked on holding his chin trying to get a feel for what I was doing.
After contemplating for a few moments he said, "That was good. Try lashing your arm straight out without the wind up." When I tried, the number dropped to 5500. This was the opposite effect I was hoping but there must be a method to his madness so I just listened to what he said.
"It seems like you are getting all the power from your initial wind up. If that is, in fact, the case I want you to shift your shoulder back and then pivot your hips forward when the punch comes out. It should increase your momentum with the punch as well as making the actual impact have more of a punch, no pun intended." Odesza said mimicing what he was saying to show me. I understood partially but it still did not click fully so I just gave it a shot to test it. The number went back up to six-thousand but it still was not where it was originally which made me pensive about it.
"The number is not quite as high now but there is more room to improve with this technique so your number will go higher as we work on it. I am not a fan of the human fighting styles at all but it is what you have always trained in so we will work to make it the best it can be before we try and change you." Odesza said listening to my attacks. The more I worked and perfected what he mentioned the more the number went up. By the time I finished, the number was hovering around eight-thousand.
"You are done for the day. The number will go up more tomorrow when you are rested. You cannot put your all into it because of fatigue so take the night off and rest up a bit before coming back tomorrow." Odesza said turning to go back to the weapons. I looked in awe at the rack. There was everything on it from swords and shields to axes, spears, javelins, everything. Diach always had a small dagger on his waist but he had never used it thus far. It was my assumption I would eventually get a weapon too but not before I was satisfactory with hand-to-hand combat.
I left to go get some food and lie down to relax. When I went into the feeding chambers, a man stopped me at the entryway.
"How can I help you?" The man said looking down at the podium he was in front of. He was checking for something but being that noone knew my name, he could not have been checking for me.
"I am here to eat. Do I need permission or something?" I asked half serious. The man looked up at me with a subtle disgusted expression on his face.
"You must be the new guy. We like to have order around here so I will take your name down and call for you when it is your turn. We only have a maximum of twenty humans at any given time so not everyone can eat at once. You are forty-second on the list. About two hours from now and you will be called so do try to be timely when it is your turn." The man said looking back down at the podium with a judgemental tone. I had never been told about this so it gave me a small shock hearing I would have to wait to eat. As I turned to leave, someone came running out from the back area. It was Ally.
"He can have my spot. I am done." The woman said to the man at the podium. She wiped the blood from around her mouth and straightened her dress back before looking at me.
"Hello Skytel, how are you tonight?" She politely asked. She still seemed a bit hungry judging on how slow she moved but I could not force her to eat so I let it go.
"I am fine. I just got done training with Odesza. I really wish Diach had told me about the feeding arrangements you all have here. I would have come hours ago had I known." I said looking at the podium man just as disgusted as he had looked at me moments before. He looked at me and gave me a slight hmph before looking back down. We were not going to get on and I could just tell.
"He really should have. I guess it slipped his mind since you are his first making. Most of us have been here for some time and the new recruits are always with the same generals so he must have never thought about having to tell someone." Ally said looking at me emotionless. She turned to leave after that and I was shown the back. There were ten rooms along a hallway but they were all on the same side. The sixth room was mine and upon entering there were 2 women waiting. Neither one of them had clothes on except a bra and panties.
"Whoa, what is this?" I asked seriously not wanting to ruin what I already had. The women looked at me after I said this and walked over to me.
"Relax, this is how it is done. We only are permitted to wear this because some vampires prefer blood from the neck while others prefer it from the legs or wherever the case may be. You have your choice from both of our bodies." One of the women said rubbing her finger along my chest. It made sense but I was still apprehensive about the whole situation. Before continuing, I had a question for the two of them.
"Why do you not have any bite marks on you? My friend, Ally, was just here." I asked looking them both up and down to make sure I did not just miss it.
"They change out who is in here between each vampire. Whoever she had has already been dumped." The same woman said. She reached over to grab my thigh but I grabbed her hand and stopped her.
"What do you mean 'dumped'?" I asked seriously. That was a foreboding sentence. It was giving me a very bad feeling.
"I mean just what I said. Come on and sit down and have some blood." The other woman said pushing me onto the couch. They were very forward but I needed to know what was happening before I felt comfortable feeding from anyone.
"Explain now!" I said frighteningly. They backed off to tell me what they meant.
"Well, humans do not survive once we come here. The vampires take care of our families for a tradeoff so the ones who do get picked to come here are fed from and killed in the process. Most of us do not have a choice in the matter as they tend to only pick people up from some pretty bad areas." One of the girls said. That did not sit right with me killing humans to feed. Especially with the number they must be killing in order to feed this entire clan. There were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of vampires in the base, let alone who was off doing whatever.
"And what about you two? You are both rather attractive females and I cannot imagine you were in a bad spot. You could literally get paid to do anything I am sure." I said looking at them both. They were relatively thin but some guys like that sort of thing. They had dark circles under their eyes but it did not bother me that much so I am sure it did not bother other men.
"Well they promised us some blow if we came but then they said we were not getting any. Without it, we may as well die." One of the girls said. I would not let them die, though, and started coming up with a plan.
"I do not know the odds and inns of this place yet but do not worry. I will not let you die in vain. I am going to feed from you but do not worry, I will not kill you. You have to act dead when they come in and collect your bodies to dump you. Then you can go back to your families or wherever you want to go. I will support you both. I am not sure how but I will." I said looking them both in their eyes. After exchanging looks, the first of the two told me where they both lived and luckily it was not that far from the base. I was almost sure this was not even half the vampires in total so I would have to figure out where the others went first before I made any concrete plans.
I fed without issue but stopped just after they lost consciousness before they died. After closing their wounds with some of my blood, I left the room to go back to my room. Two vampires came in to collect the bodies seconds after I left. Unless they extensively checked the bodies, they would never know they were not actually dead since I made sure to rub blood around both of their necks to fool them. The men went somewhere further back in the hall as I walked towards the front. I never saw them again that night. If I was going to be successful in this escapade, I was going to need help.
Diach was the first person I happened to find in the bar as suspected. Ally and Kristine were not there but I figured they would be able to help me as well so Diach came with me to find them. After searching the base for half an hour, we found them. They came back to the bar with us and we all sat at a back table away from the other patrons so I could tell them what my initial plan was.