The moon cast its silvery glow over the sleeping village, bathing crumbling rooftops and overgrown cobblestone in quiet melancholy. The only sounds were the distant hum of crickets and the whisper of wind through the skeletal trees. But the silence did not last.

From the treeline, a dozen black-clad figures emerged, each bearing the crimson cross of Iscariot Section XIII, the Vatican’s blood-soaked blade. They moved like phantoms, seamless in formation—trained killers baptized not with water, but with fire, steel, and scripture.

At the head of this flock walked Father Alexander Anderson, juggernaut of holy wrath and Vatican-ordained Paladin. His body, reinforced by holy regeneration and years of supernatural combat, was a monument to divine violence. His cassock, once black, was now caked in layers of dried blood and dust, and two blessed bayonets swung at his hips—relics forged in the fires beneath Vatican City itself, etched with scripture and tempered in the blood of saints.

The cross around his neck pulsed faintly—not with divinity, but with judgment. The kind that left bodies in pieces and souls trembling at Heaven’s gates.

“Aye,” Anderson rumbled, wild green eyes gleaming under the moon’s witness. “Tonight, we are the Lord’s wrath incarnate.”

With a war cry more like a beast than a man, Anderson raised a boot and kicked the front door off its hinges, splinters whistling through the air like arrows. They stormed the manor, boots thudding with righteous cadence, until they found the basement hatch—rotting, sealed with chains slick from dried gore. With one mighty swing of his boot, Anderson shattered the lock, and the floor exploded inward.

Down into darkness they went.

The stench hit first—blood, bile, and sin. Wet, meaty noises echoed upward: slithering, panting, feeding.

The Judas Priest descended first, bayonets gleaming.

And what awaited him was Gomorrah made flesh.

The basement seethed with a living mass of undead filth, their bodies writhing together in blasphemous communion. Flesh was fused like wax in obscene configurations, limbs and torsos blending into a meat-woven altar of carnality and rot. Dozens of pale, naked corpses moaned and hissed and howled in ecstasy and hunger. Black blood oozed across the concrete. Eyes rolled in empty sockets. Tongues licked open wounds like sacraments.

Anderson's jaw tightened. “Fookin’ disgrace...” he spat. “Beasts rutting in th’ Devil’s cradle.”

He charged.

“IN NOMINE PATRIS, ET FILII, ET SPIRITUS SANCTI!”

His blades became a blur of divine punishment, slicing through bodies like wheat, black ichor splashing up onto his face. One of the undead lunged—he twisted unnaturally, snapping its spine with a backhand. Another bit into his side, but the wound closed before it could draw blood. His blessed regeneration, the miracle of Vatican augmentation, made him a living martyr—unkillable and unyielding.

“WE ARE THE SWORD O’ PETER!” he roared. “AND YE LOT ARE NAE BUT DUST AWAITTIN’ THE WIND!”

Holy water grenades were lobbed. Screams erupted as vampire flesh boiled, peeled, sloughed off bone like burning paper. Flames rose. Ash filled the air. Rosaries were drawn like garrotes. Cross-shaped stakes plunged into throats.

Anderson didn’t slow. He moved like a storm.

He was rage in vestments.

He was God’s fury made flesh.

One hulking vampire pierced him through the gut—he bled, yes, but then his stomach folded back in, the skin knitting like time rewound.

“No’ good enough, beastie,” he hissed through clenched teeth, before impaling the thing through the palate and out the back of its skull.

Eventually, there was only smoke, ash, and silence.

Anderson wiped his blades on his cassock, breath ragged.

Then he saw it.

Blood. Red. Human. Fresh.

Not the dead ink of monsters—but warm, wet, still tethered to a soul.

He followed it, past scorched bone and charred flesh, and behind a broken arcade machine and rusted washer—

—he found her.

A girl.

Small. Barely breathing. Marked by a vampire’s bite at the crook of her neck. Pale, trembling, her soul on a cliff’s edge between damnation and salvation.

Anderson knelt.

Her eyes flickered open. Human.

He sucked in a breath, chest heavy.

“Ach... ye poor lamb.”

She whimpered—quietly, but not like the monsters. It was a human sound.

He cradled her gently. His hand brushed back a blood-matted curl. She felt light in his arms—too light.

“I’ve got ye, now. Jus’ hold on fer me.”

A library card fell from her coat—torn, soaked, but still legible.

He read. “That’s yer name, then. Aye... I’ll remember it.”

Then he saw the bite again. And the faint, unnatural twitch beneath her skin.

She was turning.

He pulled a bayonet free. The silver gleamed cruelly under flickering fluorescents.

“I commend ye tae Almighty God, an’ entrust ye tae yer Creator...”

He paused. Trembled.

Then lowered the blade.

“She’s no’ gone yet... There’s still time. Still fight left in her.”