The Hunter's Guide to Monsters

Speed was a function of strength and dexterity.

The latter more than the former, for draculkar.

Krow tumbled and leaped from glowing stair to glowing stair, avoiding spikes, pits, pendulum blades, chains, and arrows.

Why was this a registration test?!

If this was how they 'drew blood'....

Whoever posted that 'guide' to draculkar registration on the forums obviously needed to die a few times.

Even with his STR and DEX at 50, he was far from unscathed.

When he finally stumbled off the stairway, he had a dozen minor cuts across his skin, his Travelcoat was visibly mending the slash across the cloth of his belly, his boots were splashed with something viscous, and his hair was looking a little ragged.

He slumped on the floor, panting.

Now that he thought about it, the difficulty of the death-trapped stairway must adjust to the challenger's level...

Krow felt the ache all over his body.

The sense simulators of the neurovirtual game system dulled pain, but otherwise calculated avatar biological response to Stats and a set of data unique to each race.

Draculkar had low VIT.

Krow was used to feeling exhausted. He pushed himself up, popped open some potion vials, and studied the room.

The walls were checkered tile in a number of colors, thousands upon thousands, looking like iridescent scales covering the walls.

There was a familiar pedestal.

He stepped forward.

Something clicked under his boots.

"Shkav." He leaped back, alert and nearly vibrating with tension.

Fortunately, only a table rose from the stone floor.

Or, more like an altar, as it looked like a single giant black marble slab carved and inlaid with jewels.

On the jeweled tabletop was a board game.

He studied the enameled gridlines and the crystal pots on each side.

A game of weiqi-go.

Across the table, an old draculkar appeared, in spirit form, silent.

Krow leaned back, wary for a moment, before remembering that this was registration.

If the challenge was too complicated, players would complain. So the ghost shouldn't be here to possess him.

Right?

The spirit was wearing court dress, a single pauldron on his shoulder. The device on the pauldron was colored pink and gold, which meant this was a high noble or royalty.

The ghost lord stared at Eli, face stern and unmoving.

Who knew what the correct way to approach a possibly royal draculkar was. Krow wracked his memory, but his draculkar friend had never spoken at length on etiquette.

He defaulted to something basic, and bowed.

"Greetings, high lord."

That was polite enough right?

The ghost inclined his head, more graceful and austere than the receptionist of the tower. "You have come to the claiming late."

Krow internally winced, kept his face neutral.

Gojo said high nobles were tricky to please, and many were quick to avenge perceived insults on the point of a sword.

Come to think of it, what the hell, they used ghosts of their high nobles to guard the vaults? Even in a small village like this?

Or was this just the game?

The ghost moved again.

Click. The phantom hand put down a gently circular smooth stone, starting the game, the sound of it echoing against the enclosing walls.

Black moved first.

Krow hid a smirk. It was a 9x9 line grid.

At this point, it was only advanced tic-tac-toe.

Fifteen minutes later, he regretted even thinking it was going to be easy as the game announced his first failure cheerfully.

Did Redlands put advanced AI even in their mini-games?

The old draculkar inclined his head, like the first time. "Again?"

He grit his teeth. "Yes."

"Win three of five games, and I will acknowledge your reasoning to be in this place."

And if he didn't win, he'd be clanless?

Krow groaned. "Can I get a chair around here?"

A chair rose just beside him. Crystals gleamed on the detailing.

He sighed.

An hour later, he put down his final stone.

He checked the board again, frowning in concentration. He was fairly sure the old man had no moves left that would turn the tide, but he'd been wrong before.

It was already the last game. And he'd lost another already.

The grid gleamed, signaling game end, then glowed white.

The old draculkar nodded. "Mm. Good. Ilas Krow, wasn't it."

Yes! "I am, high lord."

"Very well. Add your blood to the history of our Kin." The old spirit stood and disappeared.

Krow jumped up and pumped a fist in the air. "Finally!"

The jeweled table and chair receded, and the floor was plain stone parquet once again.

He took a cautious step. Don't trust old spirits.

Nothing more happened. He signed in relief and made for the pedestal that held a fantasy slot-machine.

It was smaller, but more decorated than the pedestal in the character-creation area. The human one was decorated in carved reliefs.

This one was also decorated, only rather than reliefs the décor was in abstract design with jewels and precious metals.

He activated the pedestal. There were two levels greyed out.

He studied the choices: his two losses took out the two top tiers of social ranked clans in the draculkar race.

This was different from the human race registration, where the fictional backstories were assigned from certain regions rather than from clans.

Maybe because there were fewer draculkar than humans?

The draculkar kingdom of the Marfall mountains was extensive though, ruling the peaks of the Urla Mountain Range and traditionally clashing with the vargvir in the foothills and the lowest slopes.

The pedestal ranked draculkar in 5 basic social tiers: royals, high nobles, lesser nobles, commoners, clanless.

Krow didn't know the specifics of the social structure, only that there were numerous clans in each social tier.

Except the last, the clanless, which were generally those banished for some major misstep, like treason, by the current elected ruler.

And then, of the noble and royal tiers, different clans could hold different titles.

Sounded complicated.

But it wasn't like Krow was going to have to deal with upper society much. He was going to be a border noble.

From Gojo's stories, there was a subtle implication that nobles from the borderlands of the kingdom were less respected than the nobility of the highlands and lowlands.

That was fine.

Krow had things to do and no time to be tangled up in noble plots.

He pulled down the lever of the slot machine on the pedestal.

The machine hummed as the symbols within began to move, faster and faster.

It whirred to a stop and he stared at the frame. Tickticktick-tick-tick..tick…tick…..tick.

Black staff diagonal against three concentric black circles all on a lavender background. The staff head had two crescents, curved backs to each other, facing outward.

Krow smiled, amused. A traveler's staff.

That was his clan sigil now.

Clan Yulsukh.

Krow looked over the data.

Interesting.

An ancient clan, many notable exploits in history, whittled by time and war to a few families left. Then no families left.

He was the only one.

It was the same the last time. Probably, all the families and clans assigned to players had died out.

He returned to perusing the clan summary data.

Historical specialization in silversmithing, cartography, and a collection of great swordsmasters.

A merchant clan in the commoner tier.

Excellent. With his plans, having the history of a merchant clan would give him points in negotiation.

Clan Yulsukh gained clan status through mapping the dimension behind the Isles of Night, and discovering the method of enchanting nightsilver.

Huh.

The Isles of Night was a smaller expansion, the last before the Quake. An archipelago in the east, past the Dawn Sea. The lands of the Nightworld hadn't been cleared yet, when he joined the game the last time. He'd been preparing to head there after he reached Lvl 10.

It was planned even this early, apparently.

He could work with this, yes. The added bonuses to Trade and Metalworking were excellent. There was a bonus to Swordwielding too, but that wasn't useful to him now.

The slot-machine disappeared.

[Congratulations! You have successfully gained the might of Clan Yulsukh!]

He smiled, pleased. If he could not immediately acquire the bonus land functions of the nobility, then the merchant clans were the next best choice.

He was about to turn away when the spirit popped up again, eyeing Krow keenly.

What now?

"In your blood glows the light of Kalvarkis. Do you choose to claim this extinct bloodline?"

"Extinct line?"

Registration as a human had him only choose the region of the backstory, which had some bonuses to Rep if a player moved his hometown to that region.

Hometown was automatically set as the spawn point. It could be changed only twice.

StrawmanScare had a bonus to STR because the region he'd won from the machine had a lot of knights, plus added VIT since he nailed the registration challenge the first time.

What was this about extinct lines?

This was because of the bloodstone, wasn't it.

He thought claiming that line involved some Bloodright test?

"You cannot fool this room, child. The blood of the Great Ancestor shows in the meanest of his descendants, even if only having a whiff of the blood. The House you hail from, it has not been seen in this world for an age."

It was the bloodstone.

"I choose to claim it."