Chapter One

Alexander walked through the hallway that led to the throne room in trepidation. He couldn't help but wonder what crime he could have possibly committed that warranted him having an audience with the Hunter King of Biafra. As a fresh out of school Hunter, if he was to be given a mission it would have to be within a squad with an experienced Hunter at the helm who received missions from he King and delivered the mission to the rest of them. At the moment he was without a squad, he had hoped to have received an invitation upon graduation like the rest of the other Hunters, but he hadn't. Was this why he was heading to the throne room this early in the morning? Had he done something that had hampered his growth as a Hunter and was about to suffer the consequences?

As he walked through the hallway, he noticed the number of guards that guarded the hallway and had to avoid eye contact with them. For all he knew they also knew about whatever heinous crime he had committed while in school and were laughing at him behind their stoic faces. Or maybe they didn't know and were simply wondering what on God's green earth had he, a 21 year newly minted Hunter done to warrant being escorted to see the King by a veteran Hunter?

At long last, after what felt like forever, he finally arrived at the door to the throne room which opened as they arrived. Upon entering the room he felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter. He was like a month old baby in the room filled with some of the world's most ruthless and dangerous Hunters, many of them in the room had killed centuries old Vampires before breakfast while some had killed about a dozen Vampires before dinner the night before, what they all had in common was their deadliness and resume as long as his arm, or even longer than his entire body multiplied by three. All in all, he was in a room filled with the big leagues.

The room was not silent as he settled in, instead it was filled with the noise of every Hunter talking with one another about some issue that had just arisen, and issue he couldn't fathom what it was about, not yet at least, maybe that was why he was there, to help solve a problem… hopefully that was what it was. The voies kept rising as they kept speaking with increasing levels of aggression, almost as if they were all more than eager to go to war with every Vampire that they knew of but had ignored due to them being harmless to their cause or because they were in locations that they couldn't breach; not yet at least.

Looking ahead, he saw the King, Queen and the Prince, but the Princess was not in sigh which had him intrigued, after all she hadn't been at the graduation ceremony either. At first when he noticed her absence at the graduation ceremony, he had assumed that just like others, she had used him as some kind of joke and may be at some corner of the room with her friends laughing at his own misery, but he had not found her with them. Now that she wasn't here either… wasn't that interesting?

"Hunters please, I need you silence." King Azubuike said from his throne in a tired voice. At his words that carried now volume, there was instant silence in the room. Being the King of Hunters was more than a title, it was earned, you had to be more ruthless than most of the Hunters in the room and must be master at your specialized area, the respect was more than the crown, but your experience and resume with the stacks of bodies as high as a mountain. "My daughter was kidnapped by Vampires on her way back from visiting her cousin in UBN. Her cousin told us that the Princess was taken by Vampires that is why I have called you all here, the most experienced and deadly Vampire Hunters in Biafra to help me bring her back." The King said.

"How long ago was she taken?" The veteran who had brought him to the throne room asked the King.

"Last night." The King said. The night they had had their graduation ceremony and partied so hard that no one in the school had cared that the Princess who had studied with them for four years was nowhere to be seen.

Alexander looked around the room and noticed how tense they had all gotten, one night with the Vampires was too much time to spend with them as human. Vampire Hunters who had been held captive by them before had not neglected to share their stories with them back at the Academy. Despite the fact that they had all survived the horrors of being held captive by a Vampire, the had not escaped without some mental scars. One could only imagine what the Princess could go through just for being the Princess of the Hunters in Biafra.

"They could be held in Fort Crag." A Veteran said with a deep breath in and a worried one out. "Fort Crag is the only logical place to keep her." While they tortured her in perpetuity was unspoken but heard by all.

"That's why you are all here." The King said before he gestured for his son to take the lead.

Fort Crag was one of the most impregnable Vampire Fortress that had withstood ten centuries of continued attacks from the Hunting Community. Somehow they had survived been attacked by Hunters which had made them a Hunter Free Zone, many Vampires had found refuge within those walls, Vampires that had committed great crimes against humanity; now they had the Princess within those walls. The only question on his mind and the mind of every Veteran in the room was how they would get the Princess out of Fort Crag.

"We must send someone into Fort Crag to rescue the Princess and then bring her out of the Fortress for our people to bring her safely home. If we notice a slight chance of taking that place down, then we will take the chance and end the Vampire reign over Nsukka" Prince Afamefuna said as he presented the map of Fort Crag in 3D.

Fort Crag, unlike other fortresses, was based underground which made attacking it almost futile. To get the Princess out, one would have to get into the underground fortress and hope to God they were not smelt as human the moment they got in.

"How do we do that? We are humans, they would smell us a mile away. Unless we plan to use a Vampire to rescue the Princess, I don't really see any chance of us getting in there undetected." Another Veteran said, a female Hunter who had taken down a couple of Vampire Lords in Biafra.

"We are going to get my sister out of that place and we will send a Hunter in to get her out." The Prince said confidently as he looked back at his father who had a look of a broken man. Perhaps he was thinking about the kinds of horrors his daughter could be going through, from having her blood drunk to being whipped, raped and worst case scenario, turned; the possibilities were endless.

"I suppose you have a plan to get a Hunter to walk amongst the Vampires undetected by them?" Another Veteran asked as he leaned against the wall to stare at the map and then the Prince.

"Yes we do." The Prince said confidently before he turned to look him straight in the eyes. "Alexander here once wrote a paper on how a human could walk amongst the Vampires undetected by them as human, in fact the Vampires would think they were Vampires themselves. An invention that breaks grounds and takes us to levels unimaginable."

"How do we know it works?" Another Veteran asked as they all turned their eyes to him to inspect him as one did a piece of meat they were considering eating or tossing.

"We don't, and I sorely wish that we had enough time to find out whether the experiment works, but we have no other choice. We either send a Hunter who will take part in an untested experiment and rescue the Princess from the Vampires or we attack Fort Crag with everything we've got." The Prince said.

"Also." Alexander said to the instant silence that descended into the room. If they had been wondering whether to eat him or toss him before, well now they were wondering who he thought he was to speak in a room full of the big leagues. However he had to say what he wanted to even if it came out in a croaky voice filled with nervousness. "It works." He said.

"So our grand plan is we either trust the 'untested' experiment of some Academy graduate or we full on attack Fort Crag. Tell me why plan A sounds logical and better than plan B your highness?" Another Veteran asked as she sized him up. Well he definitely did not like the way they were looking at him, almost as if telling him that he had no right to be breathing the same air as the rest of them, simply because they were more badass than he was. To him they were all a bunch of condescending pricks.

"One plan gives you lots more possible casualties than the other one." the Prince said. "Also, I seriously doubt that attacking Fort Crag head on would give us even a minuscule of a chance in getting my sister back alive. We would only do plan B when plan A fails."

Silence followed his words as every Hunter in the room weighed the plans before them. They might not like plan A, but from the whispers he could tell they liked plan B even less, they were stuck between a bad plan and an even worse plan.

"Which Hunter are we sending in?" Another Veteran asked after they had all come to a unilateral decision to go with plan A and trust the experiment of some Academy graduate.

"We have already screened ten Hunter Lords and have arrived at two possible names. There's Lord Caleb and there's Lady Fatima. We are going to let you Veterans decide who gets to go into Fort Crag, get in and get out with the Princess