The city at night was alive with its usual glow, neon lights painting the streets in artificial hues, the hum of crowds drowning out the silence beyond. But in the shadows where the light didn't reach, the gears of fate had already begun to turn.
Something was off these past few nights. The streets were still busy, but the footsteps of passersby carried an unspoken tension. The air felt heavier, thick with a quiet dread—like the charged stillness before a storm. The alleyways seemed darker, the corners deeper, and every gust of wind carried whispers no one dared acknowledge.
"Vampires," they whispered.
At first, it sounded like nonsense — just another urban myth.
But soon, it pulsed through every subway car, every night market stall, passing between strangers with a nudge and a nervous glance.
No one said it loud.
But everyone heard it.
It started two weeks ago. A few homeless people vanished—no witnesses, no traces. Police filed the reports and moved on. Then the first body appeared.
A man was found in a narrow alley, pale as wax, eyes wide open and glassy, with two distinct punctures carved into his throat. His blood had been drained with surgical precision. The police issued a vague statement: "an unusual death, under investigation."
But then came the second body. And the third.
People started talking.
"Bite marks on the neck."
"Completely drained of blood."
"It's vampires. It has to be."
Panic crept in with the fog. Police patrols doubled. Curfews were enforced. Yet every night, more and more people were turning up dead—or vanishing. The pattern was always the same: lifeless eyes, crumpled bodies, and the unmistakable signs of exsanguination.
The city held its breath, its streets eerily still, save for the occasional flicker of police lights cutting through the dark.
On the outskirts, in the skeletal remains of an abandoned industrial district, rusted factories stood like the carcass of some forgotten beast, the scent of oil never quite fading. The shadows were thicker here—in a place abandoned by both time and light.
Several figures moved in the dark.
Their eyes were solid gray—no pupils, no whites, just an unnatural, depthless void. They twitched, restless, driven by hunger.
These were the Gray-Eyed—failed vampires. They were once human victims who didn't die when bitten. They retained their outer form but lost everything else—reason, memory, identity.
Driven only by a primal urge to feed, they wandered the night in search of blood.
Worse, their bite carried the same infection. Any victim they drained had a chance to become one of them.
As such, their lives are pathetically short. Once discovered by vampire hunters—or worse, by the vampire clans themselves—they are swiftly eradicated.
Their existence is a threat to humans, but to the vampire clans, they are little more than filth—an embarrassment to be quietly erased. No one speaks of them as kin; they are a mockery of what it means to be a vampire.
On the second floor of a collapsed warehouse, a figure crouched in the shadows.
He wore a long dark coat. In his gloved hands, he held a compact crossbow, runes etched along the shaft glinting faintly in the moonlight. His eyes were sharp, the kind that had seen too much and felt nothing. He gaze locked onto the three figures below, unmoving.
"Targets confirmed. Three Gray-Eyed, contained," he whispered into a receiver. He tapped a signal device, sending a blink of blue light into the night. Elsewhere, others were already moving into position.
The creatures below tensed. One snarled, sensing danger—
Thwip.
The bolt struck between its eyes.
The creature let out a strangled cry before collapsing into ash. Nothing remained but its clothes and a few scattered trinkets on the ground.
The others lunged wildly, enraged by the loss. They didn't get far. Arrows flew from multiple directions, each tipped with silver and inscribed with anti-vampiric sigils. In seconds, both were reduced to dust.
Twelve seconds. That's all it took.
The hunters emerged from the shadows, quiet and methodical. An older man knelt, sifting through the belongings left behind. From a pile of worn jackets and scuffed wallets, he pulled three ID cards. He flipped open a notebook and began matching names.
"Twenty-seven reported missing in the last two weeks. We've recovered twenty-five," he muttered, scratching out names with a steady hand.
Another hunter added, "Two remain—one gone three days, the other seven. They must've been turned into Black-Eyed vampires, or we'd have found them already. Probably hiding after realizing what they've become."
The older man frowned, shut the notebook.
"Put out an alert to local police. Those two need to be found before they make a real mess." His voice was calm, but carried a chill sharper than any blade. "They need to learn the rules of being a vampire."
He handed the IDs off and walked into the night without another word, disappearing into the darkness like smoke.
The others exchanged looks, nodded silently, and vanished in different directions, as if they'd never been there at all.
But every hunter present knew the truth in their bones.
This was just another routine purge in an endless night.
The real threat wasn't the mindless Gray-Eyed they'd just reduced to ashes.
It was the ones who made them—the true vampires who broke the Covenant.
Vampires weren't mere legends to hunters. They were a documented threat, classified by bloodline and hunger. Most followed the ancient rules: feed discreetly, never kill, and most importantly—never turn humans recklessly. These civilized ones hid in plain sight as CEOs, nightclub owners, coroners... their existence tolerated so long as the body count stayed low.
But there were always exceptions.
Rogues who treated humans like cattle. Monsters who turned victims for sport, leaving behind feral Gray-Eyed like discarded wrappers. And this recent outbreak—twenty-seven mutilated corpses in two weeks—bore the hallmarks of one such anarch.
Somewhere in this neon-soaked city, a true vampire was turning factories into breeding grounds. And tonight's slaughter proved they were growing bolder.
The hunters dispersed without a word. Their mission was clear:
Find the maker.
Burn the nest.
Restore the balance.