We reached the top of the grand marble staircase that plummeted toward the first-floor entrance of the Town Hall.
I paused on the landing, holding up my left hand to signal a full halt. I quickly reshuffled our tactical formation.
"Chris, you're on reserve. Fall back behind Hugh, Hugh, stay up front near Chris and watch our rear flanks. Protect James and Aisha. You've got plenty of energy left, so put it to work."
Hugh sneered, rolling his shoulders, but held his notched arming sword steady.
I turned my attention to the bound, thrashing form of Lukreia. Reaching down with my left hand, I dragged her up by the elbow to haul her along with us. Even wrapped in my crimson blood-crystals, mop handles, and heavy rope, her body radiated an intense, feverish heat.
Taking the point position with the Death Chant shotgun braced under my left arm, I led the group down the sticky, crimson-stained steps onto the first floor.
What was once the pristine, grand administrative hub of Lulu City was now an absolute slaughterhouse. Torn tapestries, shattered glass, spilled ink, and mutilated bodies covered the floorboards in a sickening mosaic. Hugh pulled another face, looking around with unvarnished disgust, while Aisha… still trembling from the adrenaline high… clung tightly to James's arm. James looked intensely uncomfortable with the unearned physical affection from an academy girl, but he didn't dare push her off while we were in hostile territory.
We crept silently toward the main corridor that led straight to the heavy double doors of the front entrance.
I held up a hand and flattened myself against a thick stone pillar. Peering around the edge, my blood ran cold.
The main hall was choked with dozens of mutated, bone-armored thralls. They were pacing aimlessly, snapping their jaws, and feeding on the remains of guards. The numbers were absolute; even with our enchanted submachine guns, a direct firefight in this narrow bottleneck would swallow us whole.
"Get down! Hide behind that heavy mahogany desk!" I hissed to the team.
We ducked behind the overturned wooden desk, holding our breath as the mindless horde shuffled just fifty paces ahead.
RUMBLE-RUMBLE-RUMBLE!
Suddenly, the ground beneath our boots began to vibrate violently. The frantic, thunderous sound of iron-shod hooves and wooden wheels echoed from the cobblestone avenue outside the main gates.
I raised my head an inch over the mahogany frame to peep through the high archway.
Streaking down the main street toward the Town Hall was a horse-drawn carriage completely engulfed in roaring, violent flames. Two mutated carriage horses, their ribcages violently rupturing through their hide into jagged calcified spikes, were sprinting at breakneck speeds, entirely blind to pain and driven by the virus's signature uncontrollable, hyper-aggressive rage.
Is the damn driver insane?!
CRASH-BOOM!
The burning carriage smashed directly into the heavy double doors of the Town Hall like a siege engine. The kinetic impact completely obliterated the entrance, shattering the stone archway and tearing a gaping, smoking breach straight through the front wall.
The driver… a middle-aged merchant in burning clothes… was thrown from the wreckage, tumbling across the stone tiles before coughing up a thick, gushing wave of black, infected blood onto the floor.
"Check the breach!" I barked, vaulting over the desk.
We rushed over to the dying driver. A dark, ragged bite mark was torn into his neck, and his eyes were already clouding over with the dark, bloodshot haze of the virus.
"R-Run… The... the cargo... it's about to..."
My eyes widened as I caught sight of the burning wooden crates tumbling out of the carriage bed. Printed clearly on the scorched wood was a red hazard symbol: DYNAMITE.
He must have been a commercial blasting supplier trying to flee the district when he lost control of his infected horses.
"IT'S A DYNAMITE CARRIAGE! MOVE!" I screamed.
There wasn't enough time to run. There wasn't even enough time to bite my wrist to draw fresh blood.
Driven by pure survival instinct, I brought my fangs down hard onto the flesh of my own stumped right arm, ripping open the healed tissue at the shoulder socket with a brutal, agonizing bite.
RIIIIP!
A torrent of pressurized vampire blood erupted from my shoulder, expanding into a sphere around our group. Because I had barely two seconds to react, I couldn't condense it into my usual impenetrable, crystal-hardened barrier… I could only form a thin, liquid bubble of force around Chris, Hugh, James, Aisha, Lukreia, and myself.
A fraction of a second later, the fire reached the blasting caps.
BOOOOOOOOOOM!
The world detonated in a blinding flash of white heat and violent kinetic force.
THUM-BOOM!
The thin, rushed blood shield I had formed shattered like cheap glass under the raw pressure wave of the exploding dynamite. Flaming wood splinters, jagged iron shrapnel, and shattered stone rained down upon us like a hail of lethal shrapnel. I threw my body over the team, taking the brunt of the blast directly across my back and torso.
SPLASH-CRUNCH!
Multiple heavy iron splinters and wooden shards buried themselves deep into my chest, shoulders, and ribs. Pain spiked through my nervous system… sharp, hot, and overwhelming. Simultaneously, the sheer atmospheric shockwave ruptured my eardrums. A high-pitched, muted ringing echoed inside my skull, instantly plunging my world into dead, suffocating silence.
I couldn't hear a single thing.
I looked down through my blurred vision. Chris, Hugh, James, Aisha, and Lukreia were crouching beneath me, their mouths open wide, their faces twisted in frantic, silent screams as the world crumbled around them.
I need more blood. Right now.
Using the dozens of fresh, bleeding shrapnel holes torn straight into my chest, I triggered Pain Manipulation to numb the agony, converting the gushing arterial flow into a massive, desperate wave of blood manipulation.
A thick, dark crimson wave erupted from my chest wounds. I swept my left hand upward, weaving the blood over our heads in rapid, overlapping layers… thin at first, then thicker, and thicker, until a massive dome of dense vampire blood encased our entire party.
The crimson dome hardened into a brilliant, solid shell of blood-crystal just as the ceiling of the first floor gave way.
Even without my hearing, I felt the terrifying, deep vibrations rattling through my teeth and bones. The structural pillars of the Town Hall buckled under the blast. Tons of heavy stone arches, marble flooring, and masonry came cascading down like an avalanche, burying my crystallized dome beneath a mountain of debris.
Inside the dark, translucent crimson shell, the violent vibrations slowly shuddered to a complete halt.
A small, trembling hand gripped my left sleeve.
I turned my head. It was Aisha. Tears were streaming down her soot-stained cheeks, and her mouth was moving rapidly as she stared up at me in absolute panic. Because my ears were completely ruined from the shockwave, her frantic words were total silence to me. I had never learned how to read lips, so I could only stare back at her with my crimson eye, offering a flat, unreadable gaze beneath my hood.
I looked around the dark interior of the blood sphere. Through the faint, ethereal red glow of the crystal walls, I could see Chris checking on the bound Lukreia, Hugh holding his sword at the ready, and James gasping for air. They were bruised and covered in dust, but they were alive.
I turned my attention outward, pressing my palm against the inner wall of my blood-crystal dome.
Through the translucent, hardened blood, there was no sunlight. No firelight. No open air. Only dense, black, unbroken shadow pressing tightly against every inch of the shell.
The realization hit me with cold clarity.
The blast hadn't just destroyed the entrance. The entire weight of the Town Hall had collapsed inward, caving in the foundation and burying us deep beneath a mountain of pulverized stone and rubble.
We were trapped underground. Alive, but buried.
The pitch-black interior of the crystal dome was absolute, but my vision instantly adapted, switching to raw heat signatures to assess the damage.
My eye swept over the party. Chris was gritting his teeth, a nasty piece of iron shrapnel embedded deep into his calf. Aisha was miraculously uninjured… she had spent the entire blast tucked beneath my side, clinging to me for dear life. Lukreia was unharmed as well, though the thermal glow of her body was spiking dangerously; my blood-binds were beginning to crack under her feverish, mutated thrashing. Hugh's face was badly scorched, the skin blistering along his scarred cheek, while James was clutching a deep, jagged laceration across his wrist that was pooling blood onto the stone.
Deprived of light, Aisha instinctively reacted. She raised her small, trembling hand, channeling a tiny spark of her low-grade magic. A soft, floating orb of gentle orange flame ignited above her palm, casting a warm glow across the cramped, translucent red walls of our subterranean prison.
As soon as the light filled the dome, everyone started speaking at once.
Their lips moved frantically, their faces twisted in worry, confusion, and fear. Chris pointed to his leg, James motioned toward his bleeding wrist, and Hugh gestured wildly toward the ceiling of crushed stone above us.
To me, it was a completely silent pantomime. The ringing in my skull had faded into a dull, hollow emptiness. My eardrums were completely destroyed, and without any infected nearby to strike with my Death Chant shotgun or bayonet, my passive Lifesteal wasn't triggering to repair the auditory damage. I was completely, totally deaf.
They all turned their eyes toward me, waiting for orders, their mouths moving in a flurry of silent questions.
I looked at their anxious faces, raised my left hand, and tapped my ear, shaking my head flatly.
"Guys, I'm deaf. I can't hear a single word you're saying."