*BOOM!*
The recording device in Vladimir’s hand shattered into a million pieces.
Dracula, barely suppressing his rage, stalked towards the pigsty, ready to silence his offspring permanently.
“You’re dead meat!” Vladimir exclaimed, his eyes gleaming with malicious glee as he surveyed the wreckage of his recording device. “You broke the radio!”
“Hmph, like a mere radio is beyond my means,” Dracula scoffed, his voice dripping with disdain. “I am a Vampire Prince! Do you really think I cannot afford to replace such a trivial trinket?”
Vladimir nodded slowly, a sly smile spreading across his face. “True, but this particular radio belonged to Thor. I borrowed it from Master.”
Dracula froze mid-step, his murderous intent evaporating like mist under a scorching sun.
The prospect of slaying his son could wait.
This… this was a matter of grave importance.
He crouched down, meticulously examining the shattered remnants of the recording device.
The mighty Vampire Prince, reduced to a bumbling tinkerer, desperately seeking a way to salvage the situation.
If he couldn’t fix it…
Dracula shuddered to think of the consequences.
Tendrils of blood magic seeped from his fingertips, gathering the scattered fragments and painstakingly piecing them back together.
He was nothing if not thorough.
While Dracula toiled away, Vladimir seized the opportunity to slip into the living room and discreetly hand Mike a crumpled piece of paper.
“My esteemed Master,” he said, his voice as smooth as silk, “do you recall the radio you lent me yesterday?”
Mike blinked. “Yes, I believe I also lent you 100,000 gold coins along with it.” Vladimir: ???
100,000 gold coins? Where had that come from?
“Actually, you know what, forget about the gold,” Mike said magnanimously, waving his hand dismissively. “Consider it your Employee of the Year bonus.”
With the radio incident settled, Mike turned his attention to more pressing matters.
Vladimir had informed him that the pigsty was indeed home to a significant number of Pig Monsters.
Including Dracula’s long-lost son!
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Mike said, addressing Remus’s mother. “I was wondering if, perhaps, around ninety years ago, a middle-aged man happened to pass through this town?”
The woman’s eyes widened in recognition. “Yes! Yes, he did!”
However, her knowledge of Apollo was limited to that single encounter.
“And the pigs in your pigsty…” Mike prompted.
“Oh, Remus found them wandering around. We’ve had them for years.”
According to the woman, the pigs Remus had brought home were docile creatures, content with their simple existence of eating, sleeping, and repeating.
Of course, they weren’t raising them out of the goodness of their hearts.
Valuable items, clearly not from the town, would often appear near the pigsty.
Selling these treasures provided a much-needed source of income for the struggling family.
Mike pressed for more information, but the woman could offer no further insights. Remus, too, had no explanation for the mysterious appearance of the pigs.
The trail had gone cold.
But Mike wasn’t discouraged. “Would you be willing to sell me your pigs?” he asked.
“Oh, no, no, no!” the woman exclaimed, waving her hands frantically. “I completely forgot! You brought back my Remus! You’re our family’s savior! A few pigs are nothing! Please, take them! Consider it a token of our gratitude!”
After much back and forth, Mike reluctantly agreed to accept the pigs.
With the ownership of the Pig Monsters settled, Mike instructed Vladimir to round them up.
A few minutes later, a procession of heavyweight contenders emerged from the pigsty.
They lumbered into view, each vampire easily weighing over five hundred pounds.
“Those are vampires?” Mike stared at the fleshy behemoths, his eye twitching involuntarily. “They look like sumo wrestlers!”
The chubbiest of the bunch, his face flushed and sweaty, wheezed, “Nearly a century without exercise… our weight… got a little… out of hand.”
Clearly, Vladimir had taken the time to school them in basic etiquette.
As Dracula had suspected, these vampires were nothing special. The strongest among them
was a mere Count.
They were unlikely to possess any valuable information.
Mike wasted no time in transferring them to his private space.
“And deduct their food expenses from your salary,” he instructed Vladimir, who merely sighed in resignation.
With the vampire sumo wrestlers dealt with, Dracula approached, a bruised and battered young man in tow.
The young man, his face swollen to twice its normal size, his skin pallid, his eyes sunken and filled with a haunting emptiness.
“Master, allow me to present my son,” Dracula announced, his voice laced with a mixture of shame. “My flesh and blood.”
Apparently, after careful consideration, Dracula had decided to let his son live.
This wasn’t due to any paternal instincts on Dracula’s part. In his mind, his son was as good as
dead.
However, he was now at Thor’s mercy.
A son, even a disappointing one, was still an asset.
Vladimir had already proven himself to be a liability, eager to throw Dracula under the bus at freeweɓnvel.com
any given opportunity.
Therefore, if Dracula wanted to curry favor with their new master, he needed to prove his
worth.
“This… is my former son, now a nameless Vampire Duke, stripped of his birthright.”
Under Dracula’s watchful eye, the bruised and battered Duke bowed low, his posture a display of subservience.
“Spare me the theatrics,” Mike interrupted, cutting straight to the chase. “Why haven’t you
killed him yet?”
Knowing Dracula as he did, Mike couldn’t fathom why he would allow his son to live after
nearly a century of porcine existence.
Dracula hesitated, casting a wary glance at Vladimir. “He was the deputy leader of the Blood Ancestor’s personal guard,” he finally admitted. “He was present in the Blood Ancestor’s divine kingdom during the attempt to ascend to Supreme Being.”
That was a compelling argument.
Vladimir’s face darkened.
Dracula, it seemed, was even more cunning than he had realized. To think he had managed to place his own son as a high-ranking member of the Blood Ancestor’s guard…
The circumstances surrounding the Blood Ancestor’s downfall remained shrouded in mystery.
However, now was not the time to dwell on ancient history.
There were more pressing matters at hand.
“He claims…” Dracula continued, his voice grave, “that he encountered Apollo.”
“Oh?” Mike raised an eyebrow. “And what did Apollo have to say?”
The pale-faced Duke trembled, his voice a barely audible whisper.
“To break the cycle… journey east… dog devours the sun…” “When the moon is high… and the town empty…the cycle can be broken…”