A Wolf's Howl, A Fairy's Wing

Frustration flared on Sigurd's face. Erik's grin widened in response.

The frustrated vampire's eyes swiveled across the field, trying to find any sign of either Liv or Astrid, but saw neither. He couldn't even feel the link to Liv's control sigil anymore.

"Wondering where they are?" Erik chuckled smugly as he continued to walk over to him. "There's no need for that. They're out of your reach, anyway."

"Listen, boy—" Sigurd began, eying Erik cautiously, but Erik interrupted. "I think everyone's done enough listening to you for a while," he scoffed, before suddenly appearing in front of Sigurd with a hand around the vampire's throat.

Wounded and mentally exhausted as he was, Sigurd had no way to resist Erik's physical force. He gurgled, his face showing panic and useless anger.

"L— Let me g— go…!" he squirmed and pointlessly tried to hit Erik's sturdy body. He attempted to access his runes, but his body was empty, and too tired to generated any more energy.

"No, I don't think so," Erik shrugged, before talking to Elora in his mind, "Can you do it?"

"Yeah, just give me a moment," she responded, her tone gleeful. She loved showing arrogant people that she and her protector were better than them.

Erik nodded, and put his other hand on the struggling Sigurd's chest. Soon, a dark green light began to shine, and a sigil started taking shape.

"W— What are y— you…" Sigurd started, but Erik didn't listen to him. It took a full minute for Elora to carve this sigil onto a third-ranker like Sigurd, but in the end it was done. Elora was a third-ranker in her own right, after all. Sigurd felt the connection to his runes was cut. "N— No…!" he uttered, terrified, his eyes wide open.

But it didn't matter.

With access to his power cut off, Erik tossed him onto the ground. Sigurd tried to use this moment to scramble away, but he found himself in front of Frostfang, who sneered at him with satisfaction and glee.

With a swift kick, the disgraced and defeated third-ranker flew back towards Erik, who had just taken out a number of sturdy chains.

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Mere moments later, a struggling Sigurd was gagged and hog-tied.

"There, that's better," Erik chuckled, before kicking the vampire back to Frostfang as if they were playing a game.

"Don't kill him, understood?" Erik growled, his deep, transformed voice reverberating through the area. "Nor any of the other vampires. I don't mind if any of them get roughed up a little, particularly not with Sigurd, but no deaths. I'll personally take care of anyone that defies me."

His final words were spoken in a threatening tone while his piercing amber eyes glared dangerously at Frostfang.

Frostfang didn't move, but he glared back at Erik for a moment, as if considering what the cost would be of defying Erik.

"You're welcome to fight me over this," Erik grinned sadistically. "I wouldn't mind beating you up a little again."

Frostfang scoffed, but relented, "Fine, no deaths. What are you gonna do, though?"

"You'll see," Erik shrugged, before taken out a sigil stone and activating it.

"Girls?" he spoke into the sigil, an expectant smirk on his face.

"Master!" two voices exclaimed loudly from the other side with a worried tone. "Are you alright?! We're sorry!" they continued in unison.

Erik chuckled, "Yeah, I'm fine. It wasn't your fault. Did you leave that Lars person alive?"

In the background, he could hear the groans of a clearly wounded man in pain. "Y— Yeah, he's still alive…" Emily responded, the pout clear in her voice. "When he 'claimed' to lose contact with Liv I may have… gone a little crazy."

"A little crazy she says," Emma scoffed with a roll of her eyes.

"Well, you weren't doing any better!" Emily snarled, angrily.

"I didn't torture him!"

"Neither did I! Technically… Besides, you didn't offer up any of your usual objections!"

"Well—" Emma began to respond, but Erik interrupted for this continued any further. "Alright, alright. Just tell me what happened. Didn't the covenant stop you from harming him?"

So the sisters told him what happened after Lars lost contact with Liv. They were naturally worried, but they had very different approaches to deal with it.

Emma had clutched the communication sigil and constantly tried to contact Erik, while Emily had gotten a little murdery. First she tried to kill Lars, accusing him of somehow breaking the covenant and betraying them, but the covenant prevented her. So instead, she used a loophole.

First, she ordered her second-ranked slaves to hold Lars down. Then she started collecting weapons, before coating their blades in her darkness, and handing them out to the regular, non-enslaved vampires around. Finally, she told them to 'do what came naturally,' with no small amount of threat in her voice.

The vampires naturally understood what she wanted, and scared as they were, they started stabbing Lars with the weapons she provided.

Now, Lars had become a groaning pin cushion while the darkness coated weapons acted like both the weapons and salt in the wound.

All the while, a nervous Emma had simply watched as she worriedly clutched the sigil stone.

After they were done talking, Erik smiled and shook his head. "You know, I'm sort of proud you already figured out how to circumvent these covenants, but couldn't you just follow what happened through the second-ranked ghouls?"

Silence descended as the other side of the sigil remained quiet. "W— We didn't think of that…" finally came a mouse-like version of Emma's voice.

"I think we need to teach these vampires a lesson for not suggesting it to us," Emily growled right after her little sister.

Suddenly, Erik could hear some panicked voices in the background, but he just chuckled. "Alright, well I just wanted to tell you that I'm fine. Everything's solved over here, so just hold down the fort until I bring Liv back there, alright?"

The sisters quickly affirmed and told him to be careful, before the connection was broken.

'They could both use a little more focus, but they're cute, and I love them,' he smiled warmly to himself as he put the sigil stone away.

Next, he teleported into his dimension, and ended up in Astrid's room. There, a nervous Astrid was pacing in front of a growling, frozen-from-the-neck-down Liv Frost.