1 Into the Depths

"Didn't your mother teach you not to eat things from strangers?"

Such was the question asked by a fairly tall silver-haired and clear blue-eyed man, as he looked at the mangled, bloodied and uneven stump that was once his right arm.

Jagged teeth marks marred the torn flesh and exposed bone from which crimson blood oozed, dripping in thick droplets, and creating a macabre pool on the floor.

He calmly redirected his gaze towards the large-bodied, red-scaled, winged and tailed, fire-breathing reptilian apex predator that was in front of it.

Right before the creature's very eyes, new tissue began to grow on the man's arm, the jagged edges of the wound rapidly smoothing out and his bones reforming.

The freely flowing blood stopped, the same instant that muscles, tendons and veins regenerated with vigour, before being covered by fresh pink skin.

In a second, the stump was no more and a fully formed arm stood in its place.

It was as if the injury had never occurred at all, and the man's arm looked brand new, unblemished, and perfectly functional.

'Thankfully, I took off my jacket first.'

He thought to himself before turning towards the apex predator who had sensed something off and spat out the thing it had bitten, the man's arm.

However—

"GUH!! *Cough!!* Guk!"

—it was already too late.

"Judging from the current situation, it's clearly obvious that she didn't."

The moment he spoke, the creature's breathing turned laboured and blood began dripping from its eyelids.

A thick, frothy substance drooled from its jaws, and it wheezed with every breath, struggling to draw in air.

The silver-haired man calmly cracked his neck whilst this happened, placing a palm on his right shoulder and rotating his right arm clockwise, and then in reverse.

"Let's use this as a little warm-up now."

With a nonchalant demeanour, he strutted up to the creature whose body was now covered by a thin layer of light, presumably trying to detoxify whatever it had been infected with.

He clenched his right fist and pulled his arm back, infusing it with energy and gathering strength within it before throwing out a punch, aiming straight at the creature's face.

**BAAMMM!!!!

An omnidirectional shockwave spread out on impact, shattering the earth beneath him creating a massive crater on the ground, with the point where his fist collided with the creature as the centre.

The creature's large body was sent flying out of the rising cloud of dust, drawing a perfect arc in the air before crashing down onto the ground with so much force it bounced back up into the air.

It rag-dolled on the ground for a few hundred metres, rolling into a sea of flames that was once a large building structure, and eventually falling into the massive kilometre-wide crater of fire at the centre.

The lips of the silver-haired man who watched all this happen with a palm raised in front of his forehead, curled up into a satisfied grin as he enthusiastically shouted out loud.

"Strike!!"

Now then, understanding why this blue-eyed man was using this creature to play a strange variant of golf, requires us to backtrack to the events of six days ago.

◇ ◇ ◇

Unnamed Underground Ruins

Brentlet Island

Arnmouth Ocean

Planet Estea

26th December

Year 2017 of the 51st General Calendar

"Let's blow it all up."

"Can you not choose violence every goddamn time?"

An exasperated voice rang out across the massive hall as a pair of young adults looked at bantered with each other while standing in front of a giant weathered-looking door, adorned with intricate runes.

"It looks like it would not be able to take even a single explosion. I can do the honours."

The young red-eyed man spoke as he held up his palm, generating a simple-looking ball of flames within it.

However, the expressions on the faces of all the dozens of other uniformed men and women who were standing dozens of metres away from him paled as the sheer amount of energy coming from that single ball of flames made them want to run away.

"If you'd use those things you call eyes to see, and that thing in your head to think, you should figure out that any 'Ancient' looking structure, that has 'Runes' on it, is clearly not as weak as it looks."

A female voice rang out as a hand waved over the ball of flames in his palm, snuffing it out before moving on to smack his forehead, with enough force that he was sent flying across the hall and slammed onto the walls.

**BAMM!!

Despite the fact that he was smacked into the hall with the force of a speeding subway train and slammed onto it with enough force to instakill a normal human being, he was perfectly fine, and the wall wasn't so much as scratched.

There were naturally reasons for this.

The wall was enhanced with runes so it was far more durable than it looked, while he, simply was not a normal human being.

He wasn't even a human being in the first place, much less a 'normal' one.

He was a being from a race considered supernatural, a Vampire.

Both he and the lady who smacked him, his twin sister.

"Davina, What the heck?! You got dust on my clothes!"

The man shouted as he used a handkerchief to dust off his clothes, his handsome face contorting into a frown.

He was a physically slender male, with short black hair and blood-red eyes, slightly pointed ears and fangs one could catch a glimpse of when he spoke.

His sister didn't look much different, a bit shorter than him with an hourglass figure, chin-length black hair and bangs that framed her face.

They both wore a uniform that consisted of a pair of suit trousers, white long-sleeved shirts and knee-length jackets that were dotted with golden buttons and similarly coloured aiguillettes.

"Alright, enough playing around, you two. We're on a serious mission here."

""Tell that to him/her!!""

A third voice chided the two of them who retorted simultaneously before turning to glare at each other, the speaker being a tall grey-haired man named Jorin who was dressed in a similar uniform as they were.

"Tsk…why the hell am I teaming up with these fo-."

"I've figured it out!"

The fourth voice was cut off by the energetic shout of a fifth, followed by a rumbling sound as the massive doors in front of them slowly opened up.

"While you guys were fooling around, I figured out the codes and opened up the door.

Now then, let's get going, those mutts are not far off from where we are."

The dark haired and amethyst-eyed woman spoke to the others before walking into the room beyond the door, the other four following a beat later, with the rest of the uniformed men and women trailing a few meters behind them.

Though they all wore uniforms, the uniforms of the leading quintet were very different from the others, and also had a different crest on the shoulders, differentiating their ranks.

"So, tell me again, David. Why are we kids being sent on such a dangerous mission like this?"

"Because none of the older Vampires can make any moves, given the fact they are under close watch by all the other races who don't want us making any moves to get to our target."

"And why were we specifically chosen?"

"Because we're the strongest of the younger generation Vampires who've achieved Superior Grandmaster Level strength at just 18 years of age."

The twins had a little Q&A session with themselves as they walked down the hallway, heading towards the depths of this ruin where their target lay.

"Still, who was it that leaked the location of the 'target' and how were the Higher-ups able to validate the rumours?"

"That's not something kids like us need to know."

"We're already 18 though? We ain't kids anymore."

"That's by human standards. We might as well be babies as far as Vampires are concerned.

I mean, out of a 2500-year lifespan, what's a measly 18 years?"

David replied to his twin sister with a shrug of his shoulders, seemingly not caring about being considered a 'kid' even though he was 18.

This classification didn't only apply to Vampires, but to almost every other race on the planet.

Elves, Dwarves, Dragons, and even the Vampire race's anthesis, Werewolves.

These races all possessed long lifespans on default, except humans, that is.

Even so, humans also gained increased lifespans when they got stronger as well, just that since the other races had a head start at birth, their lifespans were always at least 3 times that of a human on the same level of power.

"Alright guys, let's focus.

We have no idea what kinds of ancient traps are in this place. I can estimate we're already more than 5000 metres below sea level and who knows how many more metres deeper we have to got to get to our targets."

The voice of the woman who went by the name Wanette, the same person who unlocked the door they were stuck in front of a few minutes ago rang out as she twirled her finger in the air, using her energy to form a rock and tossed it onto the ground in front of her.

*WHOOSH!

The instant it touched the floor, a low sound rang out, like something whooshing through the air at breakneck speed. The five Vampires, however, were able to clearly see the thing, or rather, things that whooshed through the air.

"That's fairly fast."

The male twin remarked as he looked at the array of darts that now pierced into the walls on both sides, plucking one of them out and letting the liquid around them drip onto the floor.

"They have syringe mechanisms that are laced with poison? No, acid."

Seeing the small drop of the strange liquid bore a hole three times the size of the drop upon contact with the floor, he shuddered to think of what would have happened if it hit him.

'And the floors are enhanced with runes too…'

They all increased their wariness after seeing this, treading carefully while using their energies to sense any strange things in the area.

Though they had been sent on missions before, they had never been sent on anyone so dangerous and so important before, so they had been talking and bantering to lighten up the mood and relieve the tension they were feeling.

But right now, they clearly could not afford to do that anymore.

The Ruins they were in were rumoured to belong to an ancient civilization of heaven knows how many millennia ago.

Walking through them, they could see that these ruins were not like anyone they had ever seen before, starting from the fact that it was 5000 meters below sea level and was located inside some sort of artificial air pocket that saved them the stress of using the water diving gear they had brought along.

It seemed to be a large castle of some sort, with multiple sections and maze-like hallways that seemingly had no end.

For lighting, the runes on the floors and walls handled that, but the fact that they were still active by some means even though these ruins clearly had not had any activity for at the very least, five millennia, only served to prove how unordinary they were.

A few hours of adventure later, they came to a stop when they encountered another strange and mysterious-looking door, with the most complicated set of runes and intertwined magic circles they had ever seen on them.

This door they encountered, the largest one yet, served to be the impromptu pause to their exploration as they could not go further without opening it.

But opening it was a whole different ball game entirely.

They ended up spending the night there, waking up the next day to continue their attempts at unlocking the door and meeting no luck.

Same with the third day, the fourth, and the fifth.

On the sixth day, David who had gotten fed up, woke up and chose violence.