Geralt was most of the way to Canterlot when he was attacked. The letter had summoned him to the court of Celestia immediately, and now he could guess why. The train breaking down, he realized, had been no accident; it had been orchestrated.
He barely managed to dodge a clawed swipe from the impossibly quick vampire, dancing back while swinging his silver sword, and got a satisfying hiss from a momentary contact with the beast.
Higher vampire. The worst foe I could run into; if I hadn't upgraded my medallion with Twilight's help, he would have taken my head off immediately.
The vampire snarled at him, and Geralt returned the expression, his cat eyes narrowing viciously. This was no altruistic guardian angel like his old friend Regis; this was a monster, through and through. Geralt growled.
"If you think your regeneration will save you from me, you're sorely mistaken, bastard. You're not the first higher vampire I've dealt with; not even the third."
The vampire screamed at him, so loudly the ground shook, and Geralt barely had time to sidestep the worst of it and raise a Quen shield to block out the rest. Even so, he felt like he would throw up, and staggered drunkenly.
That's new. Damnit, these creatures are completely unpredictable.
The vampire took the opening to pounce on the witcher, but it was hardly like Geralt didn't expect the followup; it caught an Igni blast for its trouble. A normal creature would have been engulfed in a blazing inferno and sent hurtling backward, but this one barely halted its motion. Geralt leveled his sword and squared off, circling and desperately trying to come up with an effective tactic.
Great, he's fireproof. That's just what I needed.
The vampire grinned horribly. "Experienced witcher you may be, but you're no match; it's been too long since I've had a good meal in this shithole."
Geralt gathered his stamina while the vampire spoke, and then smirked. "Yeah? Here, eat this."
The witcher threw his hand out in the sign of Aard, but this wasn't like the weak version he used on the Manticore previously; Geralt drew on all of his mutations and pushed all of his energy into the spell, and what resulted was more powerful than a point-blank shot from a ballista. The vampire barely had time to widen its eyes before the wall of force slammed into it, carrying it up and away, and ice crystals formed in the air itself from the sudden passage of wind; the vampire was frozen solid, and crashed into the ground with tremendous force.
That should buy me a second.
Geralt swiftly downed a Tawny Owl, for endurance, Black Blood, to make himself even more poisonous to the creature, and then one of his rarest potions; a decoction from an ancient leshen, granting him a temporary mutation similar to theirs. The more he drained his stamina with signs, the faster his energy returned, his metabolism speeding up.
The witcher had just finished coating his blade with vampire oil when the creature, still visibly frozen and worse for wear, staggered back towards him. It laughed – a horrible, deeply inhuman sound – and scraped the frost off of its face with one of the claws that emerged from its fingers.
"If that was the best you had, witcher—"
Geralt hurled a moondust bomb, which filled the air with deadly silver shrapnel. The vampire avoided the worst of it by a swift dodge, but caught enough splinters that its transformation would be inhibited. Geralt leapt on it where it stopped, his silver sword screaming through the air at a speed no human warrior could swing it; even so, the vampire swatted it aside with a claw and swiped at Geralt's midsection, tearing open some of the maille under his coat and spilling some blood.
The horrible, acrid smoke that rose from the vampire's claw told Geralt the Black Blood potion had done its job, and the vampire recoiled in shock; Geralt pressed his advantage, going into a whirlwind spin to the vampire's side; he was clearly out of range, but the special runes on his sword created a vicious wind-cutter effect that slammed into the surprised vampire a half-dozen times, drawing blood from his head, neck, and shoulder before he fled out of range.
Geralt pursued with a diving roll, taking a quick stab at the vampire; the creature parried this, but its riposte was slow, and tore open only the air as the witcher danced around him, chasing the point of his sword after the vampire smacked it aside in a balletic pirouette. Two cuts to the creature's uninjured shoulder, and Geralt changed direction and sidestepped the vampire's panicked swipe at his previous position just in time to slice open one of the monster's hamstrings.
The vampire tried to leap away and cloak itself in shadows, but the detonation of a Northern Wind bomb interrupted this, freezing it solid again; not a moment later, the witcher's sword cleft into its back, severing its spinal cord and puncturing its heart. Geralt readied to finish the vampire off completely, but this was a miscalculation; enough time had passed since his Moon Dust bomb had detonated that the vampire had managed to recover from the silver shrapnel.
Even as it fell to the ground from his strike, the vampire changed, growing radically in size and tearing out of its fine clothes.
Oh shit.
The witcher just barely managed to start a jump backwards before a huge, vicious claw – the size of the witcher in full – swept out at him, tearing open the front of his jacket and maille effortlessly. The witcher screamed in agony as he was gored; a fatal injury, to be sure, for any humanoid.
But Geralt hadn't let the invulnerability of the higher vampires go unstudied, nor had Professor Moreau, who had developed the final mutations Geralt had discovered and undergone in Toussaint. Even as the vampire – now in the form of a giant bat – stared in disbelief at its claw melting off under the wealth of toxic blood it had spilled, the witcher's body put itself back together.
Geralt drew his crossbow and fired his explosive silver bolt right into the creature's face, peppering it with silver shrapnel again and halting its regeneration. As he reloaded, he laughed cruelly.
"How romantic. Two human-looking creatures demonstrate the depths of their monstrous nature in a foreign world."
The vampire howled and dove at him. There was no way for the witcher to dodge the attack; normally, the best he could hope for would be to barely survive it using Quen.
Geralt dropped the silver chain from his arm, reverting to his pony form, and dashed under the leaping, utterly flabbergasted vampire. Unsure of what had happened, the monster barely had the time to register that it had failed to make contact for some reason it couldn't fathom before the witcher's blade drove through the back of its skull and into the ground.
"But humanity is worth little in this particular world, anyway."
The vampire, almost entirely incoherent from the devastating wound, barely managed to speak.
"You... a pony...?"
Geralt drew out the dagger he had made from the materials Discord had given him and deadpanned at the struggling creature.
"I'm a witcher. Die, monster."
And with that, he plunged the dagger repeatedly into the vampire's head, fraying its connection to its elders with every blow. After the fifth strike, the connection was severed entirely, and the vampire burned away to ash right underneath the witcher's boots.
Geralt scoffed, putting away his sword and dagger, though he kept a hand on his silver sword until he reclaimed and tied his silver chain back to his wrist. He snatched up the torn, bloody jacket the monster had worn.
Maybe this will work as a trophy. I guess that vampire hadn't heard of me; I've faced one who felled entire worlds, so I'm not easy prey for even these creatures.
The witcher staggered a bit from his wounds and laughed at himself.
Perhaps I should leave the bragging for after I see how bad the scarring is.
With that, Geralt continued on his way to Canterlot at long last.