The Monster's Apprentice: Chapter 84 - The Raven of Reghin | Part 2

May 18, 2026

“There are animals that, by sheer force or instinct, could be called monsters in their own right. Lions in the southern savannahs, for instance, have torn through caravans of travelers. But it is the bear, most commonly found in the northern woods, that commands the kind of power even seasoned hunters respect. Broad as an armored carriage, strong enough to tear the head from a troll, and fast enough to close the distance before you draw steel. Some say facing a black bear is like fighting a skinless ogre that never learned fear. But no bear, no matter how large or vicious, is more terrifying than a mother bear whose lost her cub. That is not a beast. That is a force of nature. And you’d best pray it doesn’t see you as the cause.”

— Warren Griggs, “A Commoners Beastiary of Ageria,” page 34

Screams filled the lobby. People scrambled from their seats; Some bolted for the doors, while others backed against the walls like trapped animals.

Mina glared menacingly over the counter at the nurse’s corpse.

Henrik approached from behind. “A succubus?” Mina didn’t so much as turn around to even answer his question, but he could see well enough that the answer was true. He turned back toward the frightened lobby guests. “Flee!” he shouted. “Flee for your lives! They are in danger here!”

“Not just theirs,” Mina growled. She marched around the desk and smashed the double doors open with a violent kick.

Gunshots exploded through the corridor. A succubus reeled as the walls were splattered with her blood. She whipped around, horns erupting from her skull. Her hellish cry was cut short as Mina grabbed her by the jaw and ripped it off with a sickening crack. The succubus doubled over, hands drenched with gushing blood as she grabbed at her face. Mina slammed her head against the wall with such force that it shattered in her palm.

Henrik watched from behind as the succubus’s corpse collapsed in a heap. Mina stood over it, her hand dripping red. “Another bullet would have sufficed.”

Mina looked back over her shoulder, her eyes wide and wild. Her silver iris burned like molten liquid. “Yeah.” She rolled her shoulders. The smell of blood was already in the air, but she didn’t care. Deep down in her heart, she knew that when she was done with this place, the stench of death would never fade away. “Get the patients out safely. Leave the rest to me.” Mina drew the sword from her back as she began through the hospital.

The vampire waited around the corner. The gunshots had alerted him. His claws were primed. The assailant was walking this way. He knew who it was; they had all been warned. He could catch her now, off guard, subdue her, and bring her to Lord Draven. The praise he’d shower upon him.

The vampire lunged around the corner. A blinding explosion of agony erupted as metal cleaved into his skull with a sickening crunch. The white-hot sear obliterated thought. His nerves screamed as his brain was bisected, leaving him to collapse in a twitching heap. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t move. The steel ripped from his head. Gray matter sprayed and splattered across the tiled floor like pink oatmeal mixed with shards of shattered bone. The blade came down again.

Another vampire burst from a nearby room. His wrist was seized in an iron grip, twisting until the bone snapped through his skin. Pain radiated up his arm as his tendons tore like frayed rope. He howled. Force yanked him down, and a knee punched up with crushing force. Bone pulverized under the impact. His nose shattering into a bloody pulp that erupted in a fountain of crimson. Teeth rained down like broken pearls amid the clatter of the fallen blade. The excruciating inferno throbbed in his sinuses. Every breath drew shards of bone deeper into his flesh. Searing pain erupted in his gut like someone had taken a fiery knife to it. The thick, slippery mass uncoiled from his stomach. His body convulsed in a futile attempt to hold itself together. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear. All he could feel wasthe never-endingg fire.

Yet another vampire tore down the hall. “She’s over here!” he shouted, drawing a gun from beneath his white coat. A bullet seared into Mina’s shoulder like a branding iron. She whipped toward the shooter and bolted too fast for him to keep up. She grabbed the pistol’s barrel, wrenching it upward under his chin just as his finger squeezed the trigger again. Fragments of skull and brain painted the ceiling in a violent burst. In his final instant, he experienced a cataclysmic pressure building in his cranium, then a shattering release of agony as his thoughts dissolved into red mist. His body crumpled lifelessly.

The sweet scent of blood assailed Mina’s senses. Limbs sailed through the air; Arms lopped at the elbow, legs hacked at the knee. Blood painted the walls in abstract horror and turned the floor into a treacherous mire. Bullets tore through flesh. Bones shattered beneath her boots. Mina sailed through the crowds with the grace of a dancer. Skin split, muscles convulsed. She made sure they felt every last, excruciating second of their lives before it fled.

Her gun blazed. One vampire dropped like a marionette with its strings cut. The other folded like wet paper against the wall as the silver bullet tore through his ribs and organs. Fiery torment lanced through his torso as one of his lungs collapsed in a gurgle of blood. He heaved on the floor. Blood bubbled from his lips.

Mina stalked toward him. “Where is she?”

He couldn’t answer. A bullet splattered his brains against the wall.

The vampires grew few, and the succubus hoard had started to emerge. Their feral screeches echoed through the air, signaling to the others to return to the nest and defend it. Mina blinded one with her blade, and she screamed as her world plunged into darkness. Hot blood cascaded down her face as the pain seared like acid on her raw nerves. Another took a bullet through the knee. Mina tackled her, smashing her skull against the floor once, twice, three times until the bone caved in and her brain oozed out like gray jelly in a puddle of red slurry. The blinded succubus staggered on, her screams muffled by the blood flooding her throat, her hands clawing blindly at the air. Mina grabbed her by the horn, twisting until it snapped off with a brittle crack. It was driven back into the creature’s gaping mouth, hooking through her throat and jutting out below the chin in a grotesque skewer. The succubus gurgled, her windpipe pierced and flooding with blood, her hands fumbling weakly around the impaling bone as choking suffocation gripped her before she collapsed, soaking in her own pool of viscera.

Mina prowled ward after ward. Bodies lay in her wake. Vampires, succubi, anyone who so much as tried stopping her. Distant screams ricocheted off the walls as patients scrambled in a blind panic. A few spotted her, blood-soaked and frenzy-eyed, and nearly pissed themselves. They had nothing to fear, though.

A fleeing vampire rounded a corner, right into her sword. His head severed cleanly at the neck. Mina snatched it mid-air and whirled to smash it into the face of a second vampire who had just appeared behind her. Both skulls caved inward with a loud, wet crunch. The living vampire’s mind registered a single, obliterating instant of white-hot agony as the force pulverized his frontal lobe and shattered the orbital sockets. Darkness swallowed him mid-scream.

The Feral cries of succubi multiplied through the corridors as more of their kind fell. Mina wrenched their limbs from their sockets, tearing their ligaments, bursting their heads under boots and blade like overripe fruit split open.

Emily had to be here somewhere. But where?

She marched into a surgical theater, only to be met with the excruciating agony of electricity shocking through her system. Her muscles seized violently, and every fiber of her body cramped. When it was over, she collapsed to her knees. Her weapons were still clenched in her fists, but her body was jerking uncontrollably.

She was cornered by three more vampires. Two aimed guns at her from the side while a third approached, smirking, electricity jumping between his fingertips.

“See, wasn’t that hard to subdue her,” he said with a chuckle. “Don’t know why the others—”

Mina forced her spasming hand to drop the sword and drove her claws upward. His face contorted into utter disbelief as the tips sank into the soft flesh. She crushed his testicles with such force that a hot, wet explosion erupted in her palm. The vampire’s eyes bulged as a high, whistling rattle escaped his ruined throat. Catastrophic pain radiated outward as the nerves from his groin to his spine ignited like fuses. His stomach muscles clenched as every scrap of his being focused on the pulverized ruin between his legs. His knees buckled as shock and agony stole his strength.

BANG! BANG!

The two flanking vampires staggered backward as bullets tore through their chests. Mina raked her claws higher, twisting them violently so the vampire’s innards slopped out onto the tiles in steaming coils. He stared down at them in dumb horror for the half-second before his legs gave out. Mina’s boot came down on his skull. The cranium burst open like an eggshell, and pink brain matter splattered outward in a blood porridge. She stood amid the carnage, chest rising and falling, the taste of blood thicker than ever.

She turned to the other two vampires. One was still breathing, despite the silver bullet in his chest.

“Where is she?” Mina asked as she retrieved her sword.

“Fuck you!” he spat.

Mina cocked an eyebrow. She holstered her gun and smashed her palm against his face. Her claws sank deep into the soft flesh of his cheeks. Heat surged from her palm, and in a sudden, infernal bloom, embers erupted from her skin. His screams were muffled as his lungs were scorched. His skin blistered, bubbled, and blackened like fat in a hot pan. His eyeballs are beginning to liquefy in their sockets. The stench of burning hair and flesh filled the surgical theater. He thrashed in her grip, clawing uselessly at her wrist. His nerves were charred to ash. When she released him, he slumped sideways. His face was a black, featureless crisp.

“I take it you still haven’t found her?”

Mina glared at the doorway. Henrik stood there. She didn’t so much as acknowledge him as she pushed past and staggered into the hallway, panting, lungs burning with blood-soaked air.

“Mina,” he said firmly.

She kept walking, gunning down a succubus who ran ferally into the corridor.

“Mina!”

She stopped and slowly turned back to face him. “What?”

“Are you alright?”

“I’ve never felt better.”

He sighed. “That’s what I worry about. You’re letting your bloodlust control you.”

Mina narrowed her eyes. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you? Because it seems to me you’re more interested in massacring these monsters than finding Emily.”

Mina glanced past him. The air was a haze of red mist, the floor a swamp of blood and guts. Mina’s hands were slick, her face painted red, her clothes heavy with gore. “They all deserve it…”

“That we agree on. But right now, our objective is to find Emily and ensure her safety. The most I expect from you is a beheading and a bullet.”

“You haven’t seen what these creatures are capable of!”

“I have now.”

Mina froze, staring daggers at him.

“You’re clearing a path to her, yes, but if you become what you hunt, Emily will never forgive you. Nor will you.”

Mina blinked and glanced down at herself. Her breathing was erratic and out of control. She needed to calm down. He was right…

Footsteps sounded behind. The bloodlust surged back like a dam bursting. A snarl tore from her throat as she whipped around, throwing her fist with such strength that she crushed a vampire’s head against the wall like overripe fruit had been struck by a hammer. Bits of jagged skull fragments and fluids exploded against the wall like a massive bucket of paint had been thrown at it. The force reverberated up Mina’s arm as the bricks cracked. Warm blood painted her face, and it was tasty.

Her lungs were burning, her heart racing so fast she could hardly see straight. Mina’s eyes were wide and bloodshot, her hands shaking. She needed a moment to catch her breath. Her body was alive, buzzing, every nerve flaring with so much sensation it was hard to differentiate pain and discomfort. She was dripping with so much blood and sweat that she felt like she had just climbed from a pool of water.

Slowly, she glanced back at the corridor, and the rest of her air left her lungs.

For the first time, she saw it for the massacre it was. A horrid, mmangledof corpses and gore that had turned the once relatively clean hospital corridor into a frenzied disaster. There were bodies she didn’t even remember cleaving through, but it was unmistakably her work.

“Mina…” Henrik said.

She snapped toward him, then followed his gaze. A vampire was kneeling in a spreading pool of his own urine behind her. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he raised his hands. He stared at Mina as though she were the devil given form.

She was.

Mina stepped toward him, prying a piece of skull fragment from her knuckle.

“Y-Y-You’re looking for him, right?” the kneeling vampire stammered. “H-He’s waiting…”

Henrik followed behind Mina, his chainmail rattling beneath his armor.

“Where?” Mina growled.

“T-The second f-floor!”

“And the conduit?”

“I-I-I don’t know—”

“WHERE?!” Her claws sank into the sides of his head as she seized him.

“I don’t know! Please!” he sobbed.

Her claws plunged into his eyes. He screamed a piercing wail, clawing at her wrists, but she was stronger, even exhausted. She tightened her grip. Bone cracked. The pressure built, then gave way with a wet crunch. His skull burst open like a rotten watermelon. His frontal lobe and bits of gray-pink slurry erupted onto her.

Henrik sighed. “We should head for Draven.”

“No…” Mina growled. “Go find Emily. I’ll handle him myself.”

“No, you will not. If you could, we wouldn’t be here.”

She glared back at him.

“I’m going to help you,” he said. “And then, we will find Emily together. I guarantee you that the girl is fine, wherever she is. He would not risk killing her.”

The succubi had completely surrounded Emily.

She kept her head on a swivel, her heart pounding like a drum. She had no weapons, no magic. Nothing. Two dozen bloodthirsty demons had her trapped. What the hell was she supposed to do? Emily looked frantically for a way out, but there was none. There was only one card she could play, but she knew it wouldn’t work.

“Stay the fuck back!” Emily shouted, her voice cracking. She got into a defensive stance, balling her fists. “Or I swear to god I’m gonna kill every last one of you!”

The corridor exploded with laughter. The succubi’s sultry gazes turned predatory, their smiles widening into hungry grins. One by one, they began to close in on her like a pack of wolves.

“Hold on, ladies,” Xeliara said, stepping forward. “She’s mine.”

Emily gulped. “O-Open the doors! Or I’ll cut you all down!”

Xeliara giggled. “Patients who don’t behave have to be punished, darling. And you’ve been a very, very naughty girl.”

Emily shuddered. She was really going to have to fight a succubus, Xeliara of all of them, barehanded. Last time she had gotten lucky, but now? Surrounded by dozens of bloodthirsty harlots? She wasn’t getting out of this alive. If she moved too far to either side, they’d grab her. She couldn’t think about that. She needed to focus. Right now, her only target was Xeliara. She wished she could unleash an inferno and incinerate them all in a single, uncontrollable spell. But she couldn’t.

“Come here, darling,” Xeliara cooed, beckoning Emily with a finger. “If you play nice, perhaps I’ll make your punishment a little less… invasive.”

Emily stood her ground, her heart racing.

For several seconds, Xeliara stared at Emily, the amusement in her face turning to displeasure.

Neither made the first move.

They both stood their ground… waiting.

Waiting…

Xeliara lunged.

Emily sidestepped the attack and ducked under her swing. She slashed her nails across Xeliara’s arm, but it did nothing.

The succubus simply laughed. The flesh of her armpits tore open. Two thick, muscular ovipositors punched out, each tipped with a clawed hand, slick with blood and mucus, mottled with patches of scaly, blackened skin that pulsed as if parasitic worms were writhing around underneath.

The walls of succubi began to close in. Emily jumped back as Xeliara slashed at her again, ducking and dodging around her. When Xeliara tried to cleave her down the middle, Emily twirled away using the momentum to bounce back and drive her fist into Xeliara’s stomach. But all that was achieved was getting her caught in Xeliara’s ironclad grasp.

“No!” she screamed, thrashing against the restraint of four hands. “Let me go!”

Xeliara giggled and turned Emily around to face her parents. “Oh, sweetie, you know I can’t do that,” she cooed. “But how about this? If you ask nicely, I’ll let mommy and daddy out. How does that sound?”

Emily didn’t want to trust her. She knew she couldn’t. These demons were manipulators, liars, and tricksters. But what other choice did she have? “F-Fine!” Emily cried. “P-Please, let them go!”

Xeliara gestured to one of the succubi, who retrieved the key ring and unlocked the cell doors. Emily stared up at her parents as they hobbled out in synchronous unison. Their expressions were blank. Suddenly, their straitjackets ripped apart at the seams. Claws tore through the fabric as their bodies began to change. Their faces contorted, the flesh rippling as it morphed into something else entirely.

Succubi.

Emily’s heart sank.

“Lord Draven suspected you would try to escape.” Xeliara leaned closer. “Did you honestly believe you could outsmart him? You, a fragile little thing who can’t even control the power thumping inside her? You’re not going anywhere, sweet little Emily. You’ll never escape it, no matter how hard you try.”

Tears welled up in Emily’s eyes as she struggled against Xeliara’s. She didn’t know what to do or what to think. She balled her fists, and her face twisted.

“Oh, sweet Emily,” the demon purred, “naughty little girls who don’t behave must be taught a lesson.”

The hallway once more erupted into laughter, and Emily was suddenly being dragged away. She thrashed against Xeliara’s restraint, but every movement only tightened her grip, the claws pressing into Emily’s skin, threatening to slice through if she kept struggling.

She didn’t know where they were taking her, at least, not until the air grew foul. The bland, gray walls of the asylum were gone, replaced with ones smeared in old blood and a rotting stench that burned Emily’s nostrils.

They were taking her to the nest.

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED TODAY’S CHAPTER!

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