Chapter 314: The Price of Staying Weak V
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Others both knees. One man hit the floor with both palms and nearly cracked a tooth from how hard he bit down on his own cry. Another clutched his throat as if he could physically tear the burning out through flesh.
Raka stayed standing for three breaths longer than most.
Then even he folded half forward with a low, ugly sound dragged out of him against his will.
Bat Bat drifted a little behind Sekhmet and whispered, with real awe for once, "Oh. This one is bigger."
Mira could not take her eyes off them.
The transformation stayed close to the body, under skin, in bone, in blood, in the places where their old mortality was being refined into something more predatory and less forgiving.
Light traced their veins from within.
Their skin changed tone slowly, becoming colder, paler, smoother in some and harsher in others depending on what they had been before. Their faces sharpened at the edges. Their breathing altered. Their muscles tightened and reset. Their spines arched. Fingernails thickened and darkened slightly before settling into a cleaner, harder shape.
Then the teeth.
Mira saw that part and actually drew in a breath.
One by one, canines lengthened. Not grotesquely. Properly. Elegantly in the cruel way vampire beauty always seemed to carry cruelty inside it. Sharp teeth.
A few of the men choked in the middle of transformation, startled by the feeling of their own mouths changing.
One grabbed his jaw with both hands as though trying to stop it.
It did nothing.
Raka had stopped making any sound by then. He stood in the center of his men with his head lowered, one hand braced against a nearby table so hard the wood crack under his grip. The swelling in his face made the scene look almost absurd, but the bloodline power tearing through him erased any possible humor from it. He looked like a man being burned alive from the inside by something cold.
Sekhmet watched all of it with complete attention. He needed to see how they handled it.
How much structure they retained. How fast the bloodline overwrote weakness. Which bodies took to it well. Which nearly broke. Which eyes came up first when the pain passed.
This was data as much as transformation.
That was why his expression stayed still even while the hall filled with groans, sharp breaths, strained curses, and the occasional choked scream.
Mira noticed that too.
He was not detached in the careless sense. He was studying them. Owning the process fully, yes, but also learning every detail as it happened.
That made her understand something else.
He was building an army. Not merely collecting followers.
Building...
The first men began stabilizing.
One by one, they stopped writhing and started breathing again. Hard at first. Then deeper. Then in a new rhythm entirely. Eyes opened. It was bright red. Alert in ways they had not been minutes earlier.
The first one to rise was not Raka. It was one of the men from the middle line, broad-shouldered, scar face, once average by the standards of underground violence. Now he rose too smoothly, too quickly, and the moment he did, everyone nearby felt the difference.
Predator.
Not a full true vampire. Not noble blood terror. But enough.
Then another rose. Then two more. The room began filling with red eyes.
Mira felt the back of her neck go cold.
Raka rose last among the stronger ones.
Slowly and Deliberately.
His hand left the table and he straightened to full height, chest rising once as he tested the body he had been given. The swelling on his face remained, but it was already shrinking. Not quickly enough to be pretty. Quickly enough to matter. His one good eye opened fully. The other, though still bruised, was no longer closing under the damage the same way.
He looked at his own hand first. By Flexing the fingers. Then he looked at Sekhmet.
The hall around him was no longer full of his old men.
Not entirely.
They were still his men. He knew that immediately. Their faces remained. Their roughness remained. Their loyalty line moved to Sekhmet. They had crossed into a different state together, and that changed the atmosphere of the room more than any number of weapons could have.
Bat Bat whispered, "Now they all look like they need better mirrors."
No one answered her.
Raka took one breath, then another, and finally said, voice deeper now in some small difficult-to-name way, "This..."
He stopped. Not from lack of words. From a surplus of sensation.
The men around him were having the same problem. Looking at their hands. Their teeth. Each other. One touched his own throat and jerked slightly at the colder texture there.
Another stared at a polished metal tray on the wall until he caught sight of his own red eyes in the reflection and recoiled, then leaned closer again in fascination.
One of the younger men actually laughed.
It was not a sane laugh.
It was the laugh of a man who had lived long enough in the lower dark to know when he had just stepped onto the stronger side of a line he thought he would die beneath.
Sekhmet let them have a few breaths.
Then he said, "Stand straight."
The reaction was immediate. Every one of them corrected their posture at once.
That told Mira almost as much as the transformation had.
The bond. The bloodline obedience.
Not broken will. Not puppet strings in the childish sense. But something in the body now recognized him as the center line and moved accordingly before old street laziness could argue.
That, perhaps, was the cruelest thing for her.
She had made what she once thought was a clever contract. Work. Terms. Exchange for cultivation materials. Distance preserved under usefulness. She had hidden her deeper history. Hidden her enemies. Hidden the full weight of what she needed because she believed caution would protect her until the right moment.