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***
I finished mopping up the floors four hours after entering the building. I was mostly only done with the vampires so quickly because of getting the achievement. I don't know if they only became available after the hundredth level of the system, or if I just hadn't done anything significant to earn the reward before, but I was pretty sure that it was a very useful achievement. The achievement I got was called "Improper Vampirism" and was given to me for drinking the life force of a hundred vampires. It greatly sped up the demonic siphoning and just saved me a lot of time. During the hunt I received many messages from the system, but the most important were only two. The one received immediately on the next vampire after the ancients and the last one.
Your demon blood has surpassed the level of the first stage and the first shackles of the bloodline have been removed from your racial skills. The maximum skill level now becomes level forty. Soul absorption also becomes more effective and you now have a 2% chance to gain some useful skill or feature of the absorbed victim. The summoning of a phantom of your demonic essence becomes available to you.
The power of your demonic bloodline has reached level 22
When I saw the first message, I was very surprised. And I didn't even know that I had any restrictions on anything other than the greater power already available and the opening of hidden skills can affect my blood pumping. Though given the speed of my telekinesis, I think in a week or two I would have hit the ceiling and learnt about the limitation. Phantom summoning worked predictably similar to the game, but also rather frustrating. The phantom itself was just a single right demonic hand composed of dark grey transparent energy. It had a lot of power, about a thousand and a half of it, but unfortunately the vampire smeared on the wall couldn't find out exactly how different it was from mine without acceleration. But in every barrel of honey there must be a spoonful of tartar, and here this spoonful was the time of existence of the hand, it held only three miserable seconds with a rollback of a couple of minutes. And it is not even clear whether it worked so weakly only because of the recent receipt or at this stage, it is simply impossible to use it longer.
Having finished checking the simpler powers, I moved on to the most dubious part. In principle, the true gaze quite easily allowed me to see the souls departing from dead bodies, but somehow I was not in a hurry to run up and swallow the clots of energy. Now that I thought about it, I decided to take a chance and swallow the soul of the weakest undead I'd seen on all the floors. She was a vampire who looked nineteen or twenty years old, but her auric gaze showed that she had only been a bloodsucker for five years. It was obvious that she'd only got to such a high floor for her giant... eyes and pretty face in addition to the first distinguishing feature. While I was sucking the other vampires out after passing the first stage I noticed that even without true sight I could still see the vampire souls departing, but when I tried to grab it my hand passed through the clot rather easily without touching it. Using magic, I was only able to shake the soul a little, but the demonic mana distributed over my hand allowed me to grab the clot quite easily. Since I didn't know how absorption worked, trying to eat someone with a couple of hundred years of life experience was stupid and I didn't have a way to store souls, I had to just let go of the clot and stop feeding the sheath covering my palm.
Back to the vampire, I finished her existence and when I saw the clot coming out, I grabbed it. Unlike the previous clots, this one was the least contaminated, indicating the small number of people she'd killed, but what a year she'd had. Sighing, I pushed the clot into my mouth and waited. Nothing happened at first, but after a dozen seconds, a system alert popped up in front of me.
Till the end of soul digestion 6:23:59:49.
Realising that there would be no immediate benefit and I would have to wait a week, I left the building after taking all the hard drives from the floor of the ancients and injecting a virus into the building's system that broke most of the equipment connected to the network.
When I got home, I climbed into the shower. Washing up and a little refreshed after a fun night out, I checked the time and realised that I was still a dozen hours away from meeting the Shield. There was no sleep in sight, so I decided to meditate a bit and think about the problem that was already a little more obvious. I needed to hide my demonic essence from the Ancient One, and with her ever-increasing power, that was a difficult task. After sitting on the mat for eight hours without moving, I finally opened my eyes and unmoving, I pushed the lying Tiny off my lap. Considering that demons mostly fall on spreading their aura, infecting the surrounding astral parasites, turning them into more aggressive versions not dangerous to dark creatures, but quite lethal to humans, I'm already out of the zone of the most extreme risk. My mana and aura have no effect on the surrounding mental rubbish and it's not clear whether it's because of the low stage of blood power or just the DMC demons themselves.
In my chosen class I found a temporary solution to the problem. The aura of the spirit of vengeance hides all demonic hints around me and if I keep myself in an almost ready to turn state, its concentration simply overrides all my other essences. Of course, the Ancient One might be surprised at such a strong Yahwa force around me, but it certainly won't cause her any negativity. I don't know if such a trick will be enough for my aura after I pass the next stages, but for now we'll limit ourselves to this auric blanket and look for other ways to solve the problem in parallel. At the very least, we need to hold out only until Strange, and as I remember he had nothing against Demons and even had a couple of friends in their camp.
Since I still had time before the Shield, I decided to drop in on my mutants. Grabbed a couple of gifts for Sam from the lab. Still, I felt a little sorry for the guy, he was in a very precarious position right now. Like, the teenager is "locked up" with three hotties, and the only competition has rolled off into the sunset, but in reality, even after getting out of his cocoon of insecurity and self-defeat after the Chitauri attack, and realising that he can save people and is worth something, the guy has a new dilemma. His brain finally noticed that there were some beautiful girls around, except that even though he was very late in discovering the opposite sex, which made it possible to achieve normal friendly relations with companions, which are much easier to transfer to a deeper side, the guy was confused. It turned out, so to speak, disoriented, on the one hand, he has a pink duo of Rene and Dani, which is still for the sake of the experiment is not ready even for a moment to become a trio, and on the other Ulyana ... well he still seemed to remember how the girl actively with a manic smile chopped materialised spirits with her sword, and the character of the girl to say so heavy. In general, while it came to him all the calm/non-dangerous girls had already been taken away, and the remaining one could get a good beating or worse, when trying to hit on her, verbally lower her self-esteem to the level of Limbo, which is actually a different dimension.
Anyway, after checking the camera recordings and realising that the guys hadn't done anything terrible while I was away, I decided to assess the development of the team's skills. Ulyana had already shown a decent level during the invasion, so I concentrated mainly on the three remaining members of the squad. Rane is currently taking enhancers, which should loosen up her body and strengthen her starting data so that the girl will be much easier to handle. She is also learning how to use her partial transformation into a wolf in combat and training in martial arts. Dani at the moment, with the help of books and rare help from Rasputina, has learnt to block access to her constructs and even take control of one of them. So far, her maximum is a single, lanky humanoid with white-coloured skin, no face and a long, sharp-toothed mouth from ear to ear. Its strength is only twice as strong as a normal human and equal to some kind of badass jock. Also its fingers can become sharp and can be quite a dangerous weapon. Her progress is pretty good, but I advised her to try to change the appearance of the constructs to something less intimidating, after all, they need to get the support of the people, and the public masses the appearance of a creepy Slenderman, somehow does not appeal.
Sam's control has improved a bit again, and he's almost reached the bar I require for hero status. During the invasion, a couple of demolished corners of high-rises wouldn't have been a big deal, the Hulk did more damage than that, but in peacetime minimising damage to the city is essential. Not only does it have a positive effect on civilian opinion, but it saves my finances, which can be used for something more useful than repairing the city. After the demonstration and a new batch of tips and tricks, I took Sam aside and handed the boy a couple of ampoules, describing the regimen. The drug helped to shorten the time required by training to bring his body to its peak. The guy, of course, did not slack off before and trained every day, but thanks to this he will be able to shine in front of the ladies with good abs in a month. All the more chances he has, that battle outing brought him and Ulyana closer together and showed the guy from a pretty good side. Plus he still has no competitors, those who train Rasputina in Kamartadzha are mostly quite mature men and ladies who are at least thirty-five. Still, the girl had a lot of power, and the mages' main goal was to teach her control and how to unleash it.
When I was done with the mutants, I went to the Shield base, where I would be given a new assignment and most likely try to get seriously harnessed. I still shuddered to think of how the UDAR had been whisked around the planet for a couple of months so that Fury could get my skills and talents as accurate as possible. And I'm a hundred per cent sure that's what it was for, because it was clear from the guys' reservations that they'd never had such intense weeks before. And now my father, on the heels of the Avengers' popularity, had officially made me a level six agent and a similar security clearance, which must have angered Fury. I mean, how do we get agents promoted so fast, where has that ever happened? So I guess Cyclops is gonna take me on another tour of all the different parts of the world.
***
Congratulations on absorbing a hundred souls of ancient vampire-kind. Unfortunately no power is without a trace and now you must choose one of the two weaknesses of the children of the night.
1.Sunlight begins to burn your skin and in a minute of direct contact with the sun's rays you can be burned alive.
2.Your skin starts to reflect the sunlight in places and because of that you start to glow in the sun.
Stopping my hand subconsciously twitching towards the first option, I began to think. This was a very difficult decision and many of my life principles had to be logically weighed.
After half an hour of horrifying mental torture, I made up my mind and pulled my hand towards the message hanging in space.
I jumped up sharply and hit my head on the ceiling of the quinjet and caught Natasha's surprised and worried look.
-What happened? - Asked the spy.
-A bad dream. - Pierce answered, wiping a drop of cold sweat off his forehead.
***
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