Legendary Vampire in the Apocalypse

The voice had come from who he had felt had been nearer to the front of the group, along with another man.

With that said, Dion did as they said, and he didn’t move.

Although this had been mostly for his own sake, because he had felt the shift in his own eyes the moment they broke through, and he needed a few seconds to pull them back.

The unexpected breakthrough had brought them back to their alertness after all.

So, he kept his gaze low and let the change pass, but at the same time, there was something very strange.

The air coming in from the outside smelled very different from when he had first entered the shop.

’It smells like... rain?’ he thought as his brows furrowed a little.

That was not his immediate priority so he held back any further thoughts about it.

With his back to them, he heard another two come in behind the ones leading their group.

He immediately guessed that in the silence that lingered, all four of them were looking around the shop as they walked in over the broken glass.

"There’s nothing left in here," a feminine voice said as she looked across the empty racks and bare walls and broken display cases. "Someone’s already cleaned the whole place out."

"You’re the one that cleaned this place out, aren’t you?" the one that had immediately demanded that he not move said, his attention back on Dion.

And there, finally, he turned back to look at them, raising his hands a little and giving a bit of a shrug.

"My uncle owned this place," Dion said, keeping his voice even, and his voice had immediately fallen on the "So what exactly are you accusing me of? Taking back property that belongs to my family?"

At first, Dion’s attention had gone to the person that had spoken to him, someone looking perhaps a little older than him, in his mid-twenties, with blonde hair and light brown eyes.

This younger man let out a short breath through his nose, something caught between a laugh and a scoff. "Right. Because ownership means so much now."

The leader, whose eyes Dion had then met—a head of sandy brown hair and blue eyes to him—had been quiet through this, his eyes moving across the empty racks and the gutted display cases. He stepped further in and then turned back toward Dion.

"You’re telling me you moved all of this yourself? There should have been dozens of weapons in a shop this size, and looking at the way everything’s been cleared out, it would have needed more than one person to do it this fast."

Dion saw the opening in that, smiling gratefully to himself internally, and took it.

"I didn’t take anything. I found it like this when I came through the back. The whole place had already been ransacked, and the back door was broken in when I got here." He said as one of his thumbs gestured down the hall, to where the back door that he had entered in through had been.

The leader looked toward the corridor that led to the stockroom, then back at Dion as if considering whether to believe him.

Feeling the attention on him, Dion’s eyes had then gone towards the only other man amongst them. He was an older man with greying hair to his sides, perhaps just about the same height as the blonde.

"’Well... he certainly doesn’t believe me.’" Dion immediately thought, looking at the way that he had been looking at him.

’Maybe he thinks that while I might be telling the truth, even other people wouldn’t have been able to take as many guns as should have been in here and I’ve taken some of them myself...’

His eyes relieved him of looking at the man, going over to the younger woman. She had shorter dark hair; perhaps it had grown just past her shoulders, but she now had it tied back into a ponytail, like he had his own hair. Her brown eyes immediately bounced away from lingering over his eyes within moments of them meeting gazes.

The older man had been standing off to the side through all of this, watching quietly. But he spoke up now, his voice lower and more measured than the others.

"If he’s family to the owner, then he might know other places like this one, other shops or storage locations." He looked at Dion directly. "Would you want to come with us?"

Dion opened his mouth to answer, but before anything came out, a sound cut through from outside.

A guttural and rumbling howl, followed almost immediately by a second one from a different direction, split through the air.

The woman’s face changed, and she took a step back from the open shutter, her hands snapping up to clasp close to her chest.

"Those... are gnolls..."

Every head in the room turned toward the open shutter.

And in that same moment, Dion’s footfalls echoed through the building, running.

He turned on his heel and burst back down through the shop toward the corridor before any of them could stop him.

The younger blonde-haired male had snapped his head back first, and he had only barely caught the blur of Dion’s figure going behind into the passage.

"The fucker ran and left us for dead!"

’You expect me to stay and fight two of them with all of you who could easily try to kill me when you see my eyes change from the strain the fighting will cause me?!’

Dion’s expression became slightly exasperated at what he had heard, slamming through the back door that led back into the now empty storage room.

The sight of the large corpse that he had left, blood pooling over the ground along with the destruction, all immediately filling his vision.

’Not to mention the mana it would use. I have an important life depending on me keeping my mana high enough to maintain Anastasia’s summoning, and her damn mana is low because of what she did!’

Dion rushed out of the back door into the alleyway that he had entered from, and he very quickly slowed himself down.

The furrow in his brows deepened a lot more now that he was directly outside. HIs eyes that had calmed down quickly sharpened, this time at his demand, and he immediately raised his head a little, smelling the air.

"This... it’s seriously going to rain..."

The commotion from the back of him jolted through the building, slightly rumbling down into his feet, and his jaw tensed briefly.

’And it doesn’t feel like it’ll be anything small.’

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