There were dishes on Earth that mixed blood into their sauces, and people had been known to mix viper or turtle blood with alcohol and drink it. But those things seemed different from giving rabbit blood to a baby.
That was Vandal’s take on things, but it didn’t look like she was going to change her mind. I guess I can give it a try. He was sure it wasn’t going to taste good, but he still extended his tongue and lapped a little up with the tip of his tongue. He was surprised when it actually tasted okay.
Hey. I can drink this. It tastes a bit metallic, but it smells okay…in fact, it’s actually good! It wasn’t mixed in a cocktail or drowned out by spices, but the rabbit’s blood was as easy for him to drink as his mother’s milk had been. That definitely surprised him. Dalshia stroked his thickening hair as she explained.
“You can drink blood, Vandal, the same as your father. But you don’t have to do it to survive, so please only do it when you’re hungry but I’m not around, okay?”
That made sense. He was half vampire. Another reason people hated dhampirs. For now, though, it gave him another alternative to milk.
Around six months after Vandal had been born, and around the time he started to crawl. Dalshia had left her son alone again, taking a trip into a nearby town.
I’m lucky she’s being so positive about what a smart baby I am. Everything that was odd about Vandal, including his use of magic, was simply “amazing” to his mother. She didn’t suspect or read anything more into it than that.
“Dhampir really are amazing,” she would say, suggesting that was where she pinned the cause of everything strange about Vandal. He was happy she didn’t take things any further than that. He was a 6-month-old baby, after all, without the power of speech. He was continuing his vocal training but couldn’t get words out yet. Otherwise he would have explained everything.
About Rodocolte, about my past lives, and about Hiroto Amemiya.
In the light novels and manga that Vandal had encountered on Earth, characters often kept secret the fact they had been reborn from another world. But he planned on trashing that trope completely. He needed to share this information with Dalshia, at least, as quickly as possible. She was his mother, after all.
If this was your run-of-the-mill reincarnation, or just a daytrip to another world, I might choose to keep quiet, Vandal thought. But that’s not the case. One hundred other people are going to also be reborn into this world, and with cheat codes loaded and ready to go. Hiroto Amemiya and the gang, his “friends” who had never searched for him on Origin, leaving him to die. Once they died in Origin themselves, they would also be reborn here in Ramda. He had no idea when that would be. When Vandal died in his previous life, they had looked to be around 20. It might take fifty years for them to get here, unless they got into accidents or the like. Of course, that was presuming the passage of time was the same in Origin and Ramda. One day in Ramda could be a year in Origin.
While that extreme was unlikely, they were coming to here to Ramda eventually. Even Rodocolte didn’t have the means to prevent that, as Vandal knew all too well.
What if Rodocolte says something before they are reborn? That could be a problem. I shouted at him that I wanted to kill them all. If they’re going to be reborn before I die here, he’s sure to warn them. After all, Rodocolte’s plan was to have them advance this world. He didn’t want them to die before they could do that, and so he was sure to warn them about Vandal.
That would put them on guard about him. They had all grown up in peaceful Japan in their first lives, so they might be willing to hear him out, or try to apologize for what happened on Origin. Amicable vigilance was understandable.
But he also couldn’t write off that some of them might try to locate and kill him first. Just like how Hiroto had ended his life so tragically in Origin, he couldn’t predict what might have happened to them. Even if they started out as heroes, warriors for justice, who knows what years of fighting twisted terrorists and criminal collaborators could do to them.
Heroes. They were a problem.
Just before I died, they said something about a report of undead. That’s why they came to kill me. They must have been using their cheat abilities to be some kind of international band of superheroes. Like some American comic book.
Upon their arrival, they had met the evil undead who wiped out the entire lab staff. Not the best first impression.
Before he died on Origin, Vandal had saved some of the other test subjects. Hopefully that had cast him in a slightly better light—postmortem, of course.
I wonder what happened to all of them. I’ve been reborn into a completely different world, so worrying about them now doesn’t really get me anywhere. I guess that’s something I really do have to leave up to the heroes. He was worried about whether they all made it out safely or not, but there was little point in such thinking right now.
He was a half-vampire, a dhampir. If they still had that Japanese pacifism and humanitarianism, that respect for life, things might work out. But he was equally as worried that such values may get overwritten by the anti-vampire and anti-dhampir sentiments of Ramda. He wouldn’t stand a chance against 100 enemies with all their cheats enabled.
This was what Dalshia had been dragged into. It was too dangerous, and too unfair to leave her in the dark. That was why Vandal wanted to tell her everything about himself.
If that makes her leave me, so be it. He had only known her for six months, but she was still the only mother he had ever known. No one in any of his lives had ever treated him with such tenderness.
I mean, if possible, I’d rather she didn’t leave, Vandal thought. If giving up on his revenge was what it took to achieve that, well…he wasn’t going to forgive or forget, not at this point, but maybe he could just keep out of the heroes’ way.
That was how attached Vandal had become to Dalshia. His mental clarity since being reborn also played a role, but he cared so much for his mother that he was willing to give up on his revenge.
In which case, once he was a little older, he would tell Dalshia everything. If he could then use his knowledge from Earth and Origin, and his death attribute magic, they could probably live a relatively comfortable life. After that, he could sit back and watch the cheaters help improve this world. It almost sounded nice.
Vandal was crawling around, building his muscles as he thought things through. He realized he was hungry.
I guess I’ll drink some blood.
He picked up one of the live rabbits in Dalshia’s basket. He was only 6 months old, but he was a dhampir with a skill called Brute Strength, letting him catch it much easier than expected. Then he used Death to Bacteria and Death to Bugs to clean the struggling rabbit, before biting into it. Blood tastes good, but mom’s milk tastes better. He mercilessly sucked down the twitching rabbit, appeasing his empty stomach, but thinking about his mother’s bosom.
That day, however, Dalshia didn’t come back at the normal time.
Name: Vandal
Race: Dhampir (Dark Elf)
Age: 6 months
Alias: None
Job: None
Level: 0
Job History: None
—Status
Vitality: 18
Magical Power: 100,000,600
Strength: 27
Agility: 2
Muscle: 33
Intellect: 25
—Passive Skills
[Brute Strength: Level 1] [Rapid Healing: Level 1] [Death Attribute Magic: Level 2 (NEW)]
[Resist Maladies: Level 1 (NEW)] [Resist Magic: Level 1 (NEW)] [Night Vision (NEW)]
—Active Skills
[Suck Blood: Level 1 (NEW)]
—Curses
[Unable to carry over experience from previous lives]
[Unable to enter existing jobs]
[Unable to personally acquire experience]