"It is important to make the distinction between monsters and paranormal persons. While we might think some paranormal beings are monstrous in their actions, they are all sentient beings with complex goals and desires. Monsters are the unthinking beasts who only have their base instincts to rely on." – German ambassador to United Nations during a discussion about international security.

Kurt peeked around the pillar while covered by the illusion Val had cast, making it appear like the little alcove they were in was terribly uninteresting to look at. The 'low' part of the ceiling gave way to a three-story atrium with balconies around the second floor with two massive staircases leading from there to the third floor.

On the ground floor, the wings to either side of the main staircase extended onward beyond his sight around the corners of the 'T' shaped atrium. He could also see there were rooms and open spaces behind the staircases that led to a large glass walled area that he couldn't get a full view of.

"Ok, we have passed from mansion to palace at this point." Val muttered under her breath.

"No kidding." Kurt whispered in reply. "I say we pick a wing and work our way down before circling around to the space behind the stairs."

"A good plan but how are you going to handle them?" Kristi pointed to the ghouls scattered along the hallway they could see down.

That was a good question. Kurt didn't have any experience fighting undead but knew the basics well enough after having read a few personal accounts on the subject. "Hmm. I think I have a solution." He said after a moment to think. "Let's pop back to the house for a minute."

They began to slowly make their way backward under the cover of the illusion. While Val was good, they didn't exactly want to push the limits on how much movement she could conceal. He just hoped that his plan wouldn't stress her abilities too much either.

Once they were back in the entry corridor, they quickly trotted to the portal and made their way through. Penny met them on the other side and followed them down into the workshop. Val caught her up on what the rift was like as they went and shared their updated theory about the entrance that the altars made.

Kurt immediately went over to the lockers and opened one that he didn't often go into these days. From it he grabbed a complete gun, an upper receiver, a barrel and a spring. He then laid them out on the bench while fishing around in his more secured hazardous item's locker for some silencers.

"Three-hundred Blackout." Kurt said when he noticed all the girls staring at him. "Shooting a two-hundred-ish grain bullet, it is sub sonic so no crack like our current guns."

"Doesn't that limit the range?" Kristi said while looking at one of the guns. She had recalled some information she had picked up about ballistics, when she and Val had gone through training in the Order.

"Yeah, and the lethality." Kurt confirmed. "But, if we can take a bunch of headshots, then it won't be a problem. I am also guessing that the ghouls aren't very smart?"

"Not in my experience, no, they aren't." Kristi said after picking up the barrel and recognizing it. "Is this for that sub machine gun I have?"

"Yup." Kurt opened the drawers at the bottoms of the lockers and pulled out the boxes marked '300 BO Hornady A-Max – 209gr' and '9mm - Speer GD – 147gr'.

"Val, can you take the upper off your rifle? I only have one dedicated gun in this caliber, but I have an upper that you can use." Kurt explained what he was thinking.

"Yeah, hang on." Val responded before walking over to the far corner to summon her rifle and clear it before taking it apart. She then put the new upper receiver group in place and tested the function before storing it and grabbing magazines to fill with ammunition.

Kristi performed a similar action with her TP9 and put the nine-millimeter barrel back in before beginning to shuck the six-five ammunition into a plastic box, emptying all her full magazines. Kurt began stuffing mags for the two other guns with the help of Val while Penny went to assist Kristi.

Ten minutes later, they were all staring at the piles of loaded magazines on the bench. "This is less than I would like to have." Kurt said. He had fewer magazines than he had hoped, having to split the pile with Val, but at least Kristi was fully stocked, having a over-full combat load once more.

Penny looked at the piles of thirty-five AR magazines and the empty boxes that once held ammunition. "Want me to see if Renee has any of this A- Max stuff?" She was holding the flattened carboard sleeve the ammunition had originally come in.

"Can you? That would be great." Kurt said and began putting magazines into his pouches and storage ring. "I don't normally shoot a lot of it but if we can get another few thousand rounds that would be sweet since I have a feeling, we will be needing quiet guns quite often."

They began loading up and were off, headed for the portal a couple moments later. Once more they crossed over and into the rift, back tracking their way along the entrance passage and peeking through the doorway.

"Shit." Val hissed, stopping and backing up. They had all but committed to going through the door, so she bumped right into Kurt and they both struggled to stay upright from the sudden course correction. Kristi was thankfully able to help stabilize them by grabbing them by the collars to help balance them.

"What's wrong?"

"Four of them right in the center of the hallway." Val said after regaining her balance. "They seem to be just standing there." She then recapped what she saw and also commented that the door across the hall was open.

"Ok, let's take them out under the cover of your illusion then cross over to the other door, assuming nothing comes out of it." Kurt said and got a nod from each of the girls.

They all stacked up, with Kurt going high along the door, Val going low and Kristi taking the back, planning to step out from around them and cover the now open door across the hall. On the whispered count of three, Val opened the door, and they all leaned or stepped out.

Cah-thwack, cah- thwack, cah- thwack, cah- thwack. Kurt and Val quickly placed head shots on the four ghouls standing only twenty yards away. None of them had time to begin to react to their fellows' losing chunks of skull, if they ever would have.

"Clear." Kurt whispered and they began to push across the hall.

This time Kristi was first through the door while Val was acting as the caboose of their little murder train. She peaked around the frame of the door and then stepped fully into the room with Kurt right behind while the kitsune stopped just inside and covered the hallway.

"Clear." Hissed Kristi a moment later.

They then reconvened for a moment before pressing back out into the hall and moving to their previous lookout spot. After advancing under the cover of the illusion, they saw that the ghouls had moved, now standing in little clumps rather than evenly spread out along the length of the hall.

"I don't like this." Val said after they completed their quick peek down the hall.

"What's wrong?" Kurt asked. He knew very well that intuition was often right in the matters of danger or threats that remained unseen.

Kristi answered for Val as they ducked back into the alcove. "Ghouls don't really move without external stimulus. The only time they would adjust their positions would be if there was prey to chase or if there was someone telling them to move."

"Vampire." Kurt said and began looking at the balcony above with more scrutiny. He still couldn't see much of it, but he could at least see the stairs.

"Yeah." Val said flatly. "I had a feeling we might have a run in with one sooner or later."

"Nothing to do but stick with the plan until then." Kristi said. There was a certain hardness, an edge in her voice again. Kurt once more made a mental note to ask about it when they were done with the current rift. He didn't want to pry but also was well aware of how previous trauma tended to linger and make people act strangely.

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Without having anything to point them to a source of the strange behavior, they continued with their plan to clear the wings of the ground floor. They decided that the right wing would be the best one to start with since they were on that side and it had the most ghouls that were closest to the center of the atrium.

Kurt and Val spread out a little, finding some cover and concealment in the architecture and the décor while Kristi carefully flipped over a stone bench to lay on its side and give her a physical barrier. Once they had settled into position, they began to eliminate the ghouls from closest to farthest.

Calling the shots, though in a whisper over his radio, Kurt guided them through the slaughter of the monsters. They managed to take several of the groups out completely before any alerted to something being wrong. Unfortunately, the ones that had clustered in groups of five or more proved a little more difficult.

There was also the matter of the illusion that Val was maintaining. She ended up stopping them several times to 'prevent ripples'. Kurt wasn't sure what that meant but he was not going to argue when she was the only thing keeping them from being bum rushed by a horde of undead.

Slowly but surely, they worked their way down the wide hallway toward the end of the wing. It was decorated similar to the main hall with low benches and long planters in the center as well as along the walls. It actually reminded Kurt of a mall or museum with how things were set up. The strange part was all the empty picture frames hanging on the walls. It looked like there should be art in them, but they didn't even have scraps of canvas or even backers in the empty frames.

"Doorway." Val said after they repositioned. They had stopped after clearing over a hundred and sixty yards of hallway. "Right hand side."

Kurt peeked from over the top of the planter he was hiding behind and saw the double doors leading off the wide hallway. It had a sort of opulence to it that suggested it lead somewhere important. The panel doors were decorated with fine carvings around the inlets for the panels. The center portion was covered in brass scrollwork that sprawled from the middle hinge to the handle in the middle of each door.

"Ok, let's peek and see what is in there before we make a call on the rest of the halls here." Kurt said and checked on Kristi after Val nodded. "That good with you?"

"Yeaaaaah." She said, drawing the word out while she watched their back and covered the hall they had just come down. It had been a nerve-wracking experience to have enemies behind them, but they couldn't do more than keep an eye on the opposite hall and its shambling occupants.

"What's wrong?" Kurt said. He didn't like the way she drew out her response and was acting jumpy.

After chewing the inside of her lip for a moment, Kristi answered. "I feel like we are missing something, but I can't place it." Her eyes darted along the hall, lingering over the stairs in the atrium for a while longer.

"Something we need to back out for and regroup?"

Kristi shrugged, not taking her eyes off the far hall on the other side of the atrium. "I don't know. Let's push a bit and see if it jogs my mind." She felt confident that they could fight their way through this rift if needed but knew it might come with injuries.

Kurt decided to take her at her word and gave Val the signal to start moving. A few seconds later, they stood before the door, and she was pressed against it with one ear flattened to the wood.

"I thought I heard something but now I don't." She said.

"What did it sound like?" Kristi asked from her position, crouched along the wall.

"Talking? Maybe? It was hard to tell." She backed up to let Kurt stick his camera probe under the door and swivel it around. "What do you see?"

He reeled in the cable and put it away. "Just a bunch of ghouls loitering around, the camera didn't really show the back of the room though. They were all facing the far side of the room so something must be there."

Once more, Kurt stopped and gauged the situation, asking the girls if they wanted to back out or continue. They both agreed to at least check the room in front of them before making a call. With that, he gave the go ahead for Val to open the door.

The kitsune made a gesture before reaching out and pressing down on the latch securing the two doors in the middle. With barely any resistance or noise, the door swung slowly inward and revealed the room before them.

The room revealed itself to be a spacious meeting room with tall windows in the walls that showed the empty void beyond. There were empty picture frames and blank tapestries hanging between the windows, again giving a strange half-finished feeling to the room. A raised section stood along one row of windows, and it was unclear if it was a window bench or stage. The high ceilings and two massive crystal chandeliers that hung over a beautiful parquet floor. Unfortunately, most of that lovely floor was taken up by monsters.

A couple dozen ghouls stood at the far end of the room, some thirty yards away, all of them looking up at the man standing on a bench atop the raised section in front of the far wall of windows. Kurt saw his blood red eyes locked on them as soon as the door swung open.

The two groups stood there, staring at each other, as if unsure of who was supposed to move first. In the end, the vampire started moving first. The ghouls hadn't begun to turn around yet but that all changed when Kristi leveled her machinegun at the group of monsters and pulled the trigger.

In his time in the rift thus far, Kurt wouldn't say the ghouls were particularly dangerous. Sure, in dense enough numbers they would be, but they didn't have quick reflexes and weren't exactly gifted in the decision-making department. Most of their engagements had happened without a single one taking a step toward them before they had been killed…again. Apparently, that hesitation only applied when they were surprised because once they oriented on a target, they moved with surprising speed.

"Val, push left!" Kurt yelled to Val over the sound of Kristi's gun tearing into the undead as they began to run toward them. He then raised his own rifle and began firing at the faces of as many as possible.

Val, only hesitating for a fraction of a second, snapped her rifle up and began to pump rounds into the crowd. She shook off the sudden lethargy that she had felt when the vampire locked its gaze with hers. She was now surging into action, like a haze over her mind had finally faded. She only wondered where the vampire had gone…

Kurt was in the middle of changing magazines when he got a creeping sensation crawling up his spine. It was that same sixth sense of being watched, and he decided to act on it. He ducked into a turn then drove his legs down and rifle up like a spear.

The end of his rifle muzzle connected with the underside of the vampire's chin as he ducked under its lunging attack. It seemed to Kurt that the creature had been trying to bite him but instead it got a mouthful of muzzle device as its momentum carried it onto his rifle.

The monster floundered for a moment and its red eyes seemed to shake in their sockets as it tried to decide what to do. This hesitation gave Kurt the time to inspect the pale face of his foe as his perception slowed time. It had a rather beautiful face if not for being twisted in a rictus of pain and rage, its fanged mouth snapping at him.

It was tall and lean, reminding Kurt of many of the elves he had met but unlike those life-filled beings, this vampire was more the pale interpretation, like how a mortician would touch up a corpse to resemble being alive. The clothes it wore resembled the ones the ghouls had except for not being tattered and shredded.

Fortunately, the strange stalemate came to an end when Kristi intervened a second later. Out of nowhere, a long knife that bordered on short sword flashed into being right behind the Vampire. Its face didn't even change expressions as the blade parted its head from its shoulders.

Unfortunately, Kirsti's timely intervention carried the blade through the vampire's neck and into Kurt's rifle. The impact of sharpened steel meeting aluminum handguard, then steel barrel, rattled his hands and he nearly dropped the gun from the shock. Him dropping his rifle had nothing to do with the fact that a sword was suddenly an inch from where his fingers gripped the fore end of the rifle…not at all.

"Shitfuck!" Kurt shouted as he backed away from the tumbling head. "Thanks Kristi." He said after a moment to realize what had happened.

She just nodded and dismissed the short sword before turning back to mop up the remaining ghouls that were now crawling toward them. Several well-placed headshots later and they were the only ones left 'alive'. Kurt began inspecting his rifle after confirming the ghouls were all dealt with.

"Sorry, I expected more resistance to cutting through it." Kristi said as she approached him. She had an abashed look on her face while looking at the deep cut in the handguard.

"It's fine." Kurt said after determining that it was only the handguard that was damaged, leaving the gas system and barrel perfectly serviceable. "I can get Alec to order me a new handguard and expense the cost to the Order."

"Was that a lesser vampire?" Val asked, kicking the corpse as she passed, starting a circuit around the room.

"A very weak one." Kristi answered. "It might be a little starved since it was just created and there isn't any 'food' for it."

Kurt had reloaded his rifle and moved back to the door, checking the hall they had cleared already to make sure there weren't any surprises coming their way. The hall was thankfully empty and the ghouls he saw on the far side hadn't moved their way yet. With that out of the way, he began to survey the room in the other direction from Val.

It seemed that the room only contained ghouls and the vampire because there wasn't anything else besides some low benches along the walls. "What were they doing in here?" He wondered aloud and was slightly surprised when Kristi answered.

"I can't be sure, but it might have been the vampire trying to raise a ghoul to some more potent undead." She was now inspecting the nick in her blade from where it had encountered a steel barrel. "If it was starved like I think, it might have been preparing these for a sort of sacrifice to raise one to a revenant or something similar."

"Two questions." Val stated, having completed her circuit of the room. "One, why are all vampires' necromancers? Two, where did you get a sword?"

Kristi laughed as she stored the blade in question. "Haha. It's a seax, not a sword, but I have had it for a while. My mother gave it to me before I left the horde. I just didn't have much use for it and didn't carry it after leaving my home world since, well, guns."

"Also, not all vampires are necromancers, the one that I know is gunsmith and really never uses his vampiric magic." Kurt answered.

"Is that the one who has been making things for you?" Val asked.

"Yeah, but more importantly, we have a rift to close." Kurt said, cutting off the info dump she likely wanted. "I can introduce you to him when we are done here."

"Ah, right." Val said and did a quick magazine change. "Let's kill some ghouls!"

"They are already dead." Kristi said, also changing magazines on her TP9 after stowing her larger belt fed LAMG.

"Let's re-kill some ghouls!" Val corrected with equal enthusiasm.

Kurt led the way out into the hall before swapping places with Val as she took the lead, once more casting her illusion to cover their advance.

"Next up is that other wing then we clear the area behind the stairs." Kurt said in a whisper. "I want to clear this floor before we go up." He got a thumbs up from Kristi and a nod from Val as they set off to continue their grisly work.

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