Quinn discovered he couldn’t just bite anyone. The moment he tried, his incomplete hybrid nature caused the victim’s System to flag him as an . A colony-wide alert would follow. He learned to be surgical: a tiny incision, a stolen blood-pack from the medical incinerator, a drop of his own saliva to seal the wound.
So when a strange, crimson notification flickered across his vision as he coughed blood into his palm, he assumed it was a hallucination. My Vampire System
The Lurkers’ own blood, black and viscous, erupted from their wounds. Quinn shaped it into a dozen spinning discs, each one a razor of frozen gore. He didn’t just kill them. He harvested them. Every drop of their blood became his ammunition, his shield, his sustenance. Quinn discovered he couldn’t just bite anyone
While other students at the Atlas-7 Combat Academy trained their flashy Firebolts and Steel Skin, Quinn lurked in the margins. He fed in shadows. He grew stronger. By the end of month two, his Blood Rank rose to C-Rank (Fledgling). New skills unlocked: Mist Form (escape), Claw Rend (combat), and the most terrifying of all— Blood Puppetry (control a bleeding target’s body for 3 seconds). He learned to be surgical: a tiny incision,
First, he was dying. The bone-white lesions on his forearm had spread to his neck, a slow, calcifying rot the doctors called “Cellular Decay Syndrome.” It was a death sentence for anyone without the credits for gene-therapy. Quinn, an orphan scraping by on the fringe colony of Atlas-7, had no credits.
He used it once, on a bully who had cornered him. The boy’s own combat knife stopped an inch from Quinn’s throat. The bully’s arm simply refused to move. Quinn whispered, “Walk away,” and the boy did, tears streaming down his face, screaming internally. The turning point came during the Mid-Year Trial: a simulated dungeon-break in the colony’s lower sectors. A real rift had opened, spitting out beasts. The teachers sealed the exits, turned it into a graded exercise. Survive for six hours. Kill as many as you can.
And then the new System screen appeared.