Episode 28 - The Robe of Sanguine Dark

Eighty gold.
A sum approaching the annual budget of a minor fiefdom.

The kind of bounty ordinarily reserved for internationally wanted criminal kingpins — and it had been placed on a young man whose origins no one could even pin down.

Within a week, mercenaries were tearing through the streets looking for him. Some of them causing scenes in broad daylight.
The subject of that bounty poster — rendered in a rather flattering likeness — was not in the city.

He had left the Maritime Kingdom behind and was climbing a wild hillside somewhere along the border with the Mage Kingdom.

He had left even Conquere in Whispermere's care for this.

The terrain alone was reason enough — but more than that, even though he had taken responsibility for her, she wasn't close enough to him yet for him to bring her here.

Halfway up the hill.
A narrow gap in a rugged ravine, thick with creeping vines.
That was where he was headed.

He picked his way carefully until he found it — a gap almost entirely hidden behind hanging vines. He pushed them aside and slipped through sideways.

"Hff..."

What opened up on the other side was deeply strange.
A vast underground passage appeared — built in a style found in no historical record, unmistakably ancient beyond reckoning.

The ruins of a civilization from the age sometimes called the Dark Prior Era: an underground city carved directly into the bedrock of the mountain, on an enormous scale.

The building Kaftin's master Vesren had discovered in his later years and lived in for nearly a decade stood at the center of that city — a large structure rising above the rest.

He walked the dust-covered main avenue — familiar now — and made his way to the mansion.

When he arrived, he didn't go inside. Instead, he circled around to the back, where a wide stretch of soil spread out — something that must have served as farmland in the ancient era.

Whether the hole in the summit rock above had been deliberately bored or had always been there, he couldn't say — but pale sunlight filtered down through it and fell directly onto the earth below.

He walked through it, following the light, until a mound appeared in a warm, sun-touched spot.
A grave marker, set according to the will left before death — a stone taken from the ravine below the city — bore only a single name.
Vesren.

"Master..."

Kaftin dropped to the ground in front of the mound and sat in silence for a while, eyes on the earth.

Two years of memory flashed through him all at once — and at the end, his vision went red, and the faintest outline of that last day surfaced. His expression tightened.

He slowly raised his hand and looked at his palm. No bloodstains. Of course there weren't.

The hand that had run him through.
On the final day, Vesren had taken his stance as always when the sparring hour came.

He had said strange things that day — more than usual — and Kaftin had felt uneasy enough to consider skipping the session. But his master had insisted, and he had given in.

And then —

That had been the last of him.
Mid-bout, past the point where he should have stopped, Vesren had turned genuine killing intent on Kaftin — pressed forward — and died with his abdomen run through by his student's hand.

Kaftin turned the words of his master's final confession over in his mind — spoken through tears as he lay dying — and shook his head.

His master had said he was satisfied. That it was enough.
But what it had left behind for Kaftin was a weight he could never put down.

The guilt of having killed someone he never wanted to kill. Someone he should never have killed.

For a man who had made it a principle never to leave regret or guilt anywhere in his life — it was a stain he could not bear.

He had searched for a way to resolve it, and eventually found the answer in something his master had told him long ago.

Revenge against the Four Gang Lords — against the organization that called itself the God Hand — the shadow power that had ruined his master's life.

If he dismembered their bodies and arranged them around the grave, surely the guilt would lift. That was what he believed.

He had come today with the first piece of that arrangement.

"Look, Master... Veilslayer's head."

From the bag on his back, he drew it carefully — Veilslayer's masked head, wrenched away from the torso along with the spine.

He had scraped the flesh away as best he could using the tentacle teeth, but the bone had resisted cutting, so he had simply torn it free by force.

"I got him. I heard he was the one who sprayed poison into your eyes."

He took the iron spike he had brought and set it carefully beside the grave, then drove Veilslayer's head down onto it through the throat.

"And... that artifact you told me not to touch, Master. I've decided to take it. I intend to use every tool available to me. It may make useful bait for Athunga..."

He reported to the grave that he would be collecting the item his master had kept wrapped in paper and locked in the hidden compartment of the bedroom upstairs — then rose to his feet.

Killing Veilslayer had been harder than expected.
Gabelth, the Night Fist Lord, and Bizeth, the Phantom Fang Lord — both certainly at a higher level — would be harder still.
He intended to bring every available resource to bear.

"Well then... I should get moving. Things are going to get busy. Next time I come, I'll try to bring two heads."

He rose, poured a little from a bottle of spirits over the mound on each side in a slow arc, and put it away.

He went inside the mansion and climbed to the third-floor bedroom — a neat, orderly room that must once have belonged to someone of considerable standing in this ancient city.

Inside a wardrobe built so that an entire wall swung open, something hung wrapped in layers of absorbent paper, covered in talisman after talisman.
A peculiar garment.

According to his master, dark mages of a former age had defeated a vampire, flayed it, and made this from its hide. It grew stronger by drinking blood, and possessed a will of its own — one that altered the garment's form and functions in response to the user's soul and fighting style.

The caveat was that anyone without sufficient strength of will who put it on risked having both body and blood claimed entirely by the vampire dwelling within.

Originally the garment had belonged to Athunga. Vesren had slipped into Athunga's bedroom and stolen it in the days just before the confrontation with the Four Gang Lords.

Vesren himself had known better than to try wearing it — he had always been clear-eyed about being an ordinary torture practitioner, nothing more.

"Heh... still alive in there, I wonder."

He tore the seals off without ceremony and looked inside.
A jet-black robe, exactly the sort a dark mage might favor, lay revealed.

He reached out and touched the edge.
The outer material had a strange, leathery feel.
The inner lining was another matter — the sensation of touching it was deeply unpleasant, like pressing fingers into the raw flesh of something still alive.

"...Athunga actually wore this around..."

The thought that he was about to do the same made him snort.
He pulled off his clothes and shrugged the robe on.

"Alright. Wake up. You damned vampire rag."
"......"

He settled it on his shoulders, patted it, shook himself side to side. Nothing.
The lining's texture was too wrong for this to be a fake.
Perhaps something needed to trigger it.

Even if it did wake, he had no idea whether he could actually use it.
His body carried markings that rejected every form of magic outright.

"Come to think of it... wasn't I told never to get blood on it."

Being a vampire's hide, perhaps it simply wouldn't respond without blood to soak into it.
Kaftin shrugged and began tidying up with the robe still on.

One way or another, it would be drenched in someone's blood soon enough.
No need to force it.

More importantly — what mattered to him was wearing it in front of Athunga, as a provocation.

"Heheheh... I wonder if he'll appreciate it, Athunga..."

The Night Fist Lord and the Phantom Fang Lord were naturally difficult matchups for him — but Athunga was different.
A dark mage of at minimum fifth-circle caliber, by all accounts.

Against a body that magic couldn't touch, all Kaftin needed to do was walk up and beat him to death. The easiest opponent of the lot.

That was why he wanted to bait Athunga into coming out personally.
And why he had put this on.

The robe was something beyond precious to the man. The moment he appeared wearing it, Athunga's eyes would roll back in his head — Kaftin could picture it clearly.

"Heheheheh... hfhahahahaha... just imagining it puts me in a good mood..."

Last, he packed a few of the books his master had used to teach him to read and write, along with several others, and stepped back out into the world.

Four fingers left.
One by one... he would crush and tear them away.
In Vesren's name.

The Robe of Sanguine Dark.
That was the name the world knew it by — the garment with the soul of a vampire.
At this particular moment, it was in a state of considerable agitation.

Under normal circumstances, the instant Kaftin put it on, its inner lining should have extended its needles, drawn a little of his blood, and used that to awaken itself.

But the needles could not pierce Kaftin's skin.
They touched it — but could not break through.
Something was blocking them completely, leaving the robe utterly stranded.

The needles served a second, critical purpose beyond drinking the user's blood: they were the channel through which the vampire's consciousness — Seakloy — entered the user's mind.

In other words, for the robe to communicate with its wearer, blood had to be offered first.
That essential process had been shut out entirely by the magic-rejection that ran through every inch of Kaftin's body — and the perfect opportunity to awaken had slipped away.

'W-what IS this person?! Like this I'm no better than a regular piece of clothing! Hey! Blood! Give me your blood!'

Screaming from inside — but without the connection established, none of it was reaching him.

It had finally broken free from its long confinement and made it back into the world, and now the new host it had been given was this monstrous anomaly.

Seakloy found itself feeling a sudden pang of nostalgia for the days spent with Athunga.

'Waaaaaah — please, please, just a little blood — I'm HUNGRY! Being sealed away I was asleep so it was fine, but now that I'm awake I'm absolutely starving—!'
"I really am looking forward to seeing Athunga's face when he gets a look at this... I do hope we get to go one on one..."
'Athunga?! Did he say Athunga?! This person — he's going up against Athunga—?!'

What luck.
Athunga was among the most formidable dark mages in human history.

He would surely obliterate this unknown upstart with his undead forces and put the robe back on — and then everything would return to how it was.
Nothing Seakloy could want more.

'O-okay...! This is it! This is my chance! I absolutely will not respond to this person — I just have to wait—!'

And so began a singular arrangement of crossed purposes — one person, one garment — each dreaming a very different dream.
What Seakloy did not yet know, in that moment, was that this particular plan would be broken — before long, and not in any form it would have chosen.
Nor what awaited it at the end of that.

For now, it simply hummed a song that no one could hear, and waited — full of anticipation for the return to the master it missed so dearly.

—To be continued—