"Mn… but… Teacher, you look…"
"I'm fine," Rimuru gasped out, his voice a strained rasp.
He practically shoved a bewildered Erol out into the hallway.
Slam.
The moment the heavy oak door clicked shut, Rimuru grabbed a solid ceramic mug from his desk and smashed it directly against his own forehead.
Crash.
Shards of ceramic rained onto the carpet. The sharp sting of pain cut through the fog in his mind for exactly one second, but it wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough.
He hadn't expected Svelten's curse to act this fast. Worse, he hadn't anticipated the sheer, horrifying mechanics of conceptual magecraft.
The curse hadn't just infected his physical body in Germany; it had latched onto his soul.
And because this clone shared that exact same soul, the curse had bridged the continental divide to infect him here in London.
Just a few seconds ago, looking at Erol's soft, pale neck… he had actually wanted to bite her.
That damn White Knight. Those damn Dead Apostles!
Rimuru slapped a hand over the lounge's security sigils, locking the room and throwing up a localized bounded field. If a student walked in right now, he couldn't guarantee their safety.
He stumbled into the attached private bathroom, gripping the edges of the porcelain sink until his knuckles turned white. He was hyperventilating.
His throat burned with a dry, jagged thirst that water couldn't quench. It felt exactly like a textbook description of heroin withdrawal, only a hundred times worse.
A sharp knock broke the silence. The door rattled as someone bypassed the outer wards.
May practically tore the lounge door off its hinges.
Sending Erol away hadn't been to fetch help; it was just to get the kid out of the blast radius. Rimuru had already sent a panicked telepathic SOS to May via a familiar before class even ended.
"Rimuru?!"
She found him collapsed on the bathroom tiles, his vision swimming, his fingers clawing desperately at his own collar. The room looked like a wild animal had been trapped inside.
"Oh god. Are you okay?!" She dropped to her knees beside him.
"Blood…" Rimuru choked out, his golden eyes blown wide, hazy with an unnatural, predatory hunger. "I told you… to bring blood…"
"I couldn't."
May bit her lower lip, shaking her head. "I'm the heir to the Archelot family. If I randomly raid a hospital blood bank, the Association will launch a full investigation before breakfast."
She took a deep breath, steeling herself. She rolled up the sleeve of her immaculate blouse and extended her bare arm toward his face.
"Just… drink mine."
"…"
Rimuru shook his head frantically, trying to refuse, but his body betrayed him. He looked at her arm. He looked at her eyes, which were terrified but absolutely resolute.
With a ragged sob, he grabbed her wrist and sank his teeth in.
…
Five minutes later.
"Even if it's just a 'Vampiric Impulse' and not a full biological conversion… if we can't find a way to break it, the Association will classify you as a Dead Apostle. The Sealing Designation Enforcers will hunt you down."
May sat on the edge of the sofa, applying a healing salve to her bandaged wrist. She watched Rimuru, who was now sitting against the wall, entirely lucid and suffocating under the weight of his own guilt.
"When you lose your rationality, your instinct is to attack humans," she said softly. "Rimuru, can you find a cure for this?"
"I was cursed by one of the Twenty-Seven Ancestors." Rimuru let out a hollow, bitter laugh. "If it were that easy to break, they wouldn't be Ancestors. Does the Archelot family have anything in the vault?"
"Just my family? Or even the Kuonji witches? No. It's not enough to break a curse of that magnitude."
May shook her head decisively. She fell silent for a long moment, staring at the floor. Then, she looked up, her gaze hardening into the cold, pragmatic stare of a magus.
"Rimuru. Do not expose yourself. I will supply you with blood on a strict schedule."
"You can't…"
"Listen to me!" she snapped, leaning forward. "At least until you secure your position as a Lord of the Clock Tower, you cannot let anyone know! Once you have true political power, we can leverage the Association's resources. Until then, you stay hidden."
Rimuru lowered his eyes. The metallic tang of her blood still lingered on his tongue.
"Thank you… May," he whispered. "I'll find a way to suppress the impulse. I promise."
"Mn." May turned her head away, forcing down the overwhelming worry threatening to crack her composure. "I trust you."
…
One week later. Italy.
The night sky draped like a heavy velvet curtain over a sparse, rural Italian town.
Unlike the bustling, heavily industrialized cities of Germany, this place felt trapped in a bygone era.
A thin fog clung to the cobblestone streets, a rarity in Southern Europe.
Even during the day, you were more likely to see a horse-drawn cart lazily rolling down the dirt roads than an automobile.
The town was essentially a hub for the surrounding mega-farms, peaceful and entirely detached from the modern world.
Tonight, however, that peace was broken by uninvited guests.
Several figures dressed in heavy black trench coats marched silently through the fog, their faces carved from stone, their eyes scanning the shadows with lethal intent. Executors.
From a second-story window, Rimuru slowly blinked his golden eyes. He watched the Church's hounds pass right beneath him, let out a silent sigh, and melted back into the shadows of the room.
He raised a finger to his lips. "Shh."
In front of him, a family of three, a father, a mother, and a young teenager, huddled together in the corner.
They were pale, trembling violently, and entirely paralyzed by fear. Guarding them were three sickly-green, semi-transparent ghosts, spectral sailors Rimuru had cannibalized from Svelten's powers.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Rimuru whispered in fluent, magically translated Italian. "But I need you to not get yourselves killed by screaming. Understand?"
A lot had happened in the past week.
Three days after the incident in Berlin, Altrouge Brunestud's negotiations with Trhvmn Ortenrosse, the White Wing Lord, completely broke down.
Furious over the loss of her beloved White Knight, the Black Princess threw a tantrum of apocalyptic proportions inside Ortenrosse's territory.
The two vampire factions waged open war for twenty-four hours straight. They leveled three German cities in the process.
The destruction was so massive that the Mage's Association and the Holy Church were forced to establish a temporary ceasefire just to form a joint suppression task force.
The situation only de-escalated when Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg himself stepped onto the battlefield.
The Wizard Marshal essentially told both Ancestors to give him face and knock it off.
That chaotic vampire war had given Rimuru the perfect smokescreen to escape Germany.
But his luck hadn't lasted.
Driven mad by the Vampiric Impulse and lacking May's scheduled feedings on the continent, Rimuru's ironclad willpower, forged over two lifetimes, had finally cracked.
During his flight south, he lost his mind. He attacked several innocent humans.
He didn't kill them, but the magical signature of a blood-drinking frenzy was impossible to hide.
Because he had fled to Southern Europe, the absolute, undisputed heartland of the Holy Church, the Burial Agency locked onto his scent almost instantly.
A massive manhunt ensued.
Since that night, Rimuru had lived in a state of profound, nauseating regret. He finally understood the terrifying reality of a Dead Apostle's curse.
It didn't care about his morals. It didn't care about his human soul. It was a conceptual mandate paid for by a vampire's life and eternal servitude.
Accepting reality, Rimuru changed his tactics. If he had to drink blood to prevent himself from going berserk and hurting innocents, he would hunt the guilty.
He scoured the criminal underworld, feeding on mafia thugs, murderers, and human traffickers to suppress the urge.
He had even considered seeking help from the Church. He had cornered a few local priests, hoping for a miracle exorcism.
Unfortunately, standard-issue holy men couldn't even dent a curse placed by the Twenty-Seventh Ancestors.
And as for the high-ranking Church officials who actually wielded that kind of miracle-class Magecraft? Rimuru didn't dare approach them.
His physical condition was deteriorating. The claw marks Svelten had left on him weren't just refusing to heal; they were festering. Standard purification spells only suppressed the necrosis temporarily.
Rimuru had to constantly, painstakingly apply holy healing arts to the wounds over and over again, day after day, just to slow the rot.
If he walked into a cathedral in this state, reeking of Dead Apostle curses and vampiric impulses, the Burial Agency's "experts" wouldn't offer him a cure.
They would offer him a stake through the heart, and call it salvation.
….
+20 chapters on my p@tr3on: Kazuma_trash
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