The Outlier

Chapter Five

"Stark-sama," Krul asked. "Do you really intend to try to kill them?"

"No, but it's of little consequence if they do die. I said five days, but I'll drag them out after three. All I need is to scare them." Annemarie stood up and exited the room, retreating to her bedroom.

~oOo~

Through a series of other adventures in the city, Annemarie learned a few things. The first was that here, unlike in Russia, they were barely given enough food to survive. The second, was that this led to the older kids bulling the younger ones to survive by means of brute strength. Annemarie kept their names in mind.

Thankfully, there were a few older kids with nicer hearts and they either kept to themselves or some even gave up their food to give to the younger ones. Annemarie kept in mind the names of the humans when it was the latter too.

When three days had past and the two teenagers who had assaulted her were released, Annemarie glared them down with her eyes and threatened them with much worse if they ever were caught doing that again or if they spoke of her being down in the city.

Unfortunately, the dungeon just kept getting new prisoners who didn't know their place. Those were the first set of names Annemarie remembered. As for the second set, they found that a few times when they returned to the hovel they called a house, there was a full meal waiting for them, with fresh bread, rice, assorted fruits and vegetables, clean water and even a complete, freshly cooked chicken. It warmed her heart to see them call the little children in to eat.

Slowly, she saw that the amount of thrift and bullying declined. But there was one thing still bugging her.

Ferid told her not to worry about his little trading system, but she felt that something would go wrong. Her fears proved right on one life changing evening.

~oOo~

Annemarie woke up to the sound of screams. Not only that, but they were coming from the exit of Sanguinem. She sped to the source of the sound in time to see Yuichiro shoot a bullet into Ferid's head surrounded by the macabre that was an alarming amount of dead bodies. They had eye contact for a second before he tensed up in fear and ran out of the city. Annemarie let him, knowing that those kids on the floor were probably his friends.

She sighed. This is a mess. She walked over to Ferid, stabbed her hand into his head and pulled the bullet out. "...ngh..."

Annemarie turned around and saw the bloodied form of Mikaela. The city guards came running in. "Stark-sama!? What happened!?"

"I'm not so sure myself."

"I'm not quite sure either." Said Krul Tepes as she walked into the room. "What did happen Ferid Bathory?"

Said Vampire sat up and looked at them. Mikaela had a look of dread and shock on his face. "Well, as you can see, a group of humans rebelled against us. I managed to stop most of them, but one had just escaped."

"And exactly how did that happen?" Annemarie asked. Krul Tepes walked over to the dying Mikeala on the floor.

"Hey, hey, no need to be so cold. And after I had just gotten shot with a gun. I can only put on a smile because I don't want to embarrass myself to hard in front of two high ranking Progenitors."

Annemarie scoffed at that. "Get out of here." She said. He obeyed and left the room along with the city guards.

"It looks like this human is about to die too." Krul dragged her finger through the pool of blood in which he laid and licked it off her fingers. "That's a shame; his blood is delicious. Stark-sama, I would like to keep him around."