(In actuality, the Merc Fort was the last thing on Ridley's mind at the time... he had far more important things to worry about, I was to learn later. Sucks to be him.)

Even with all the Highland soldiers prancing about, it wasn't too terribly difficult to keep my neck out of the noose. I've been poking fun at organized warfare for some eighteen chapters now, and if you think I'm in any danger of letting up now I'm honestly surprised if you don't need help dressing yourself in the morning.

There's some fourteen miles of badlands between Toran and Jowston, basically because the two countries don't know how to play nice with one another. On either side of the badlands is a huge stone wall. Old man once said, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Or at least, tolerant ones.

Historically, folks from Toran and Jowston hated each other. Though there was never a full-blown war, there were more than a good-sized handful of border disputes. I guess Barbarosa and Granmeyer (keep up, kid, he's the mayor of South Window, ya know) could never quite agree on where in the badlands the border was drawn. I suppose that's why they were badlands.

It's not terribly difficult to cross the badlands... there's no path leading through, just a whole lot of forest and rocks. Deserters from any given army which come tromping through are known to lurk there, as well as folks trying to escape from the law. It's not often used as a way of travel from one country to the next, since Jowston sees Toran as nothing less than barbaric, and Toran views Jowston only with cold and distant suspicion.

Keep in mind, this discription fits the realms nicely during the time before the war with Highland.

The plan was to shoot southward through said badlands and personally deliver the news to Pohl's folks. He'd asked me for one thing - a bit of rock with his name on it - and I didn't want to disappoint him. I wondered for a while what I'd say to them. And after becoming drunk on that bit of masochism, started thinking about other things. Like why I didn't bother buying any god damn supplies.

Must've been nine or ten at night. When travelling alone, I rarely kick up for the night. It suited me just fine to march through the twilight. It was cool out, kind of moist, and all around soothing. Much more pleasant to travel by moonlight, says me, then under the burning sun. More dangerous, of course. Hell with that. Just try to get the jump on me when I'm alone. I'm a rock in some ways, but in others I'm utterly paranoid. Good luck tucking your sword into my flesh after the sun's down. Not much slips by my in that state of mind, which is probably how I caught a flash of cloth and a glint of steel dodge behind a crop of bushes some hundred yards in front of me.

I remember it suddenly get real cold and quiet, kind of like the world suddenly died away. The depths of the abyss seemed to reach around me. And being the wordly kind of adventurous type I am, I knew that had to mean one thing... there was something undead here.

Grab a pen and take notes, because you're about to get a quick lesson in undead. In the simplest terms, undead means that you ain't dead, but you ain't alive either. You're not really one or the other, and yet you're not really in between.

So what ARE the undead? It's like a dual existance, kind of. Your body lives on here on earth, but it's not really your body anymore. You don't breathe, or eat, or drink, or piss... you function solely on willpower alone. At least, that's what I'm told. Your soul (or what's left of it) survives elsewhere. Some other plane of existance, maybe. My guess would be you're kind of half here and half in Hell. But hey, that's my guess, and it's probably not worth much in the end.

The thing knew I was here, and was probably waiting for me to wander past it so it could pounce on me and eat my brains or suck my blood or feed off my eyeballs or whatever else undead folks do to us who're still alive. It probably didn't even know I knew it knew where I was, though, and therefore I had the advantage.

I dropped to the ground. Not all the way, mind you. I was kind of half-kneeling, half-crouching in the long grass there. My hand instinctively resting on Shiko's hilt. There were rustling sounds in the bushes, and squealing, like this thing was struggling with some kind of dumb prairie animal. Maybe a gopher or a rabbit.

Of course the animal was struggling It was being fed upon.

Eventually the squealing and rustling stopped. Everything was still for a moment or more, the silence kind of drawing itself out, complimenting the blackness. I waited to see if the thing was going to come after me next. If so, I was going to feed it a nice big helping of sword, easy enough.

And like I said, for a while nothing happened. I didn't count of the minutes (or hours) I sat crouching there. To make the first move, I knew, was to underestimate the thing. And that's something I didn't want to do. Because yeah, maybe it was careless. But it was still undead. And in all my years of plowing through monsters, I learned to respect the undead. No matter what you chopped off a zombie, the rest would still come clambering after you. I mean, the thing is already dead (in some form of the word) for crying out loud, so it's not like you could kill it with any conventional method.

In fact, that's how I first came to meet the Old Man. But that's a different part of a different story that I really don't feel like getting into.

Suddenly, all at once, the thing lunged at me with its inhuman hopping skill (bugger but that sounded stupid), bearing it's bone-white fangs and snarling like the beast it was. The bushes burst into flame behind it-- don't ask me how, they just did-- and two things happened almost simultaineously.

First, my mind snapped directly into gear. In big, burning, blood red letters my brain realized what the thing was: vampire.

That word shot from my brain, across my shoulder, down my arm, into my hand, and through my sword. I don't remember swinging exactly, I just remember striking the thing with my blade and smacking it out of the air. It's foul, black blood sprayed from its arm or its chest or neck or wherever the hell I managed to cut it. You may be wondering how I know the color of its blood if it was that dark outside to begin with. Two reasons: for one, it was cold. For those of you who failed biology, blood is normally warm (well, human blood anyway, and it was clear to see that this thing was, at one time, human) to the touch. And the second, it just feels black. If you dip your hand into a barrel of oil without knowing it was oil, you could just feel the blackness of it. Same way with this thing's blood where it hit my face.

Not only was it black, but it also felt somewhat corrosive. Not really acid-like corrosive, more like the blood was chewing at the flesh of my face. I doubled back in pain (dropping Shiko to the ground in the process), pawing at my face, trying in vain to get rid of the crap. I don't even want to think about what may have happened had the stuff hit me square in the eyes.

As I was staggaring backwards, the thing tackled me from the front. One thing about vampires, they have claws. Once human or not, those things have sharp-ass nails that don't seem to care how thick your clothing or armor is. This particular vampire thought it would be a nice gag to thrust said claws just up under my ribcage, trying to tear through my chest.

So I did what I had to do. I played dirty.

Martial artists and other barmy fistflingers have this neat trick when faced with a blind forward tackled like that. They fall to the ground, using that momentum to force themselves into a backwards somersault. As they roll, they tuck their knee up into the sap who lunged at them and fling them backwards, head-over-heels. Considering that it was pretty dark, and that I was trying to mentally deal with the pain of five tiny little daggers piercing my chest, and that I'm not a barmy fistflinger I did pretty well in executing this move. Well enough, at least, to regain my composure and dive for my sword.

As I forced my way to my feet, trying my hardest to ignore the tearmarks near my ribcage, I got my first good look at the thing (thanks to the fire it had started). It was white - white as a ghost (or whiter) - and its clothes were torn and tattered. What looked to be dried blood was caked all over its flesh, especially in the areas where its clothes had been clawed away, leaving the gaping, never-healing wounds to show through underneath.

And it had fangs. Throw away any misconception you have of vampire fangs, folks. These things were freaking knives, sharper'n vorpal, sticking out of the thing's upper lip. It wasn't until after the fight that I entertained the thought of how close I came to those things plunging directly into my jugular. One tries not to think of such things during a brawl.

The eyes, though, were the most horrible. They were milked over, kind of a glossy grey, without pupils. But when it looked at me and snarled its vicious, dead growl those eyes lit up with the Devil's Fire, wanting to burn my soul from within and make me one of itself.

To hell with Hell. I had to take this thing down... and the faster, the better.

The thing lunged at me again, just as it had done before. Blindly, stupidly, as if its brain hadn't any thought on its mind but the pulsating veins in my throat. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have put it past the bastard. I threw my weight forward, thrusting my sword out like a spire, impaling the thing on its tip and along the blade. With the followthrough I managed to crash into its face with my left shoulder, which (if I do say so myself) was chiseled out of solid rock.

The vampire went soaring backward (carrying Shiko, still nabbed in the thing's gut, along with it), and it landed within a few feet of the flames. It writhed there for a while, spewing it's inky blood like a fountain. It's face, too, had caved somewhat inward where impact with my shoulder had damaged it. The thing's nose and upper lip were mangled and near indistinguishable from one another. Made me wonder whether or not the damn creature still had a skull.

Not surprisingly, it wasn't done yet. It stood, turned to me (the burning hatred still afire in its eyes), and flashed its glinting fangs. It clutched my sword hilt (Shiko was buried a good halfway through the thing's chest) and pulled outward, removing the blade and several pints of blood. It did this without so much as a hint of pain, but that didn't really come as a surprise to me either. What use is pain to a being that already died?

It threw my sword to the side; I can only guess as to why. If the vampire indeed kept a shred of intelligence from its former life, it may have been because it didn't know how to use a two-handed sword. If, however, and more feasably, it was acting on pure hunger and instinct it probably just didn't see any use in the weapon at all. At any rate, I now had to climb through two obstacles to reclaim my weapon; those being of course the monster itself and the now towering flames.

So this was it. Me and the monster, one on one, a grunge match to the death. Well, death in my case, anyway. Or, more rightly, undeath. Now would have been a good time to summon the power of my rune, but I hadn't had a chance to recharge it since I played with the Highlanders at the Merc Fort.

Of course, there was always something else I could call upon in times like this... god damn dumb luck. The past few weeks had been chronically unlucky for me, so I guess Fate took to it to make sure I got a few cheap shots in to kind of even out the scale. That cheap shot came in the form of a headbutt, aimed directly at the charging thing's chest (which, given the sheer amount of blood pouring forth from its wound was probably not the brightest of actions), in the direction of the flames.

As the vampire scrambled backwards into the bush, lit up with its own unholy fire, I started a mad dash for Shiko. I almost expected it to leap out of the pyre and scratch at me again, though by now you should have picked up on the fact that about the only thing you can expect from these undead freaks is the unexpected.

I sat there and watched the thing burn. It flopped around for a few minutes, the corpse putting up the last remaining struggle for its corpeal existance. Then, just as suddenly as the flames started, they died down and flickered out, leaving the charred vampire behind.

Until that time, the first gave off no smoke. It was magical flame, after all, and magical flame doesn't give off smoke. Well, not unless Viki is involved. But just as the thing stopped its futile struggle, one trail of smoke floated up out of the flames and towards the moon. Don't hold me to this, but I say it was the last bit of life in the thing, finally being released.

I sheathed Shiko and continued southward.

I didn't really give it much thought until well after the combat itself, but I'm willing to bet a first-mint potch that the thing had something to do with whatever it was that attacked Simon and Adrian's camp. [re: Vik 11] Might have been Adrian's nephew Denis himself. But don't hold me to that either.

I never told anyone about that midnight meeting with that particular brand of Hellspawn, until now. I guess I never really thought it that significant. Ho-hum, another monster encounter. Big fat hairy deal. But I guess it was kind of significant. A kind of closure, maybe. A way to take out my last aggressions (better aimed at Highlanders but, hey, I'll take whatever I can get) before appearing again in civilization.

Or maybe I just needed some filler material between that whole Merc Fort hulabaloo and the crap that happened in Toran.