Ascendant Path of a Lustful Vampire

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The day's first class was already underway when Caius entered the classroom, offered an apology to the Professor who looked endeared by him, and accepted it quite quickly and waved him off to take his seat.

Caius acknowledged Delia and Eloise as he walked past where the two were seated side by side. His smile to Eloise was gentle and had her heart skipping as always. His smile to Delia was more like a smirk that the stormy grey-eyed beauty couldn't quite endure being faced with and looked away.

Caius crossed eyes with Aylin then and she blew him a smile and gave him a wink. She looked very accomplished. Like she had done something… sneaky and wanted to clue him in on it.

'What could it be?' Caius asked himself as he turned his eyes to where he had been letting his legs lead him.

Kaya kept a seat open by her side as she always did when they sat together in classes such as this. She seemed to have caught Aylin's looks and gestures at Caius. Or maybe—and more likely—her eyes had just been on the Ice Witch for a while so she naturally caught everything she did.

"Good morning," Caius told his half-elf lover, delighted by the twitch of her ears when she turned her eyes away from Aylin and got pulled into the wonder of his purple eyes.

She thought she could detect a hint of red in them but that might have been a trick of the light. Or a trick of her own mind wanting to see that red. To have it stare down at her hungrily. With an intent to devour her. In more ways than one.

"You're hyperventilating," Caius told her with a little chuckle as he sat by her side.

Kaya knew he was right. Her mind was going far too wide at the moment and she felt she was at risk of turning into a puddle on her seat. Still, she managed a confident smile.

"I'm fine," she said, "You missed breakfast."

"I did," Caius admitted, "Anything interesting happen?"

The question wasn't one he might have asked on a norm. While the conversations that were had at the Cafeteria were interesting enough, they were usually not the type to be recounted later. It's usually a 'you had to have been there to really get it' sort of thing.

Also, Kaya just wasn't the type to gab about that kinda stuff and repeat herself. Eloise was very much the type though and Caius expected he would have got a complete enthusiastic rundown in that sweet singsong voice of hers about anything discussed no matter how significant it might be.

But we digress.

Caius asked if anything interesting had happened because he had a strong feeling that something HAD happened. He would like to take credit for this feeling and praise his intuition but really, the tension he felt between Kaya and Aylin clued him in and prompted him.

"Well, there is something…" Kaya said slowly with her hand flying across her book to take down notes as they were dictated by the Professor up front.

"Hmm," Caius intoned, having that 'feeling' of his get proven right.

It couldn't possibly have been a fight, could it?

That would have been the second time that week that Aylin had been involved in a physical exchange. Well, the one with Doran could hardly have been called an 'exchange' of course, since it had been so one-sided.

"What happened?"

"She decided to join us," Kaya said with enough inflection on that first word that her derision was clear.

Caius raised his brow knowing, of course that the 'she' said with such vile was referring to Aylin Khione.

"Really?" He said, prompting Kaya to continue.

"Yes," Kaya said, "Just came over, planted herself down, and refused to take her insufferable ass away."

Caius glanced over at Aylin and it turned out her attention had never left him as she gave him a wave and basically flipped Kaya off with the look she gave the half-elf who she could just tell was talking about her.

Calus WAS surprised that Aylin would join their table. When he asked her to be amicable, that hadn't exactly been what he meant. Not right now anyway. Not so soon. It was so clear to him that Aylin hadn't done it for just the sake of co-existence and tolerance. There was a fighting edge to it and he was already tired of possibly having to mitigate that.

That said, he did think it was a good thing. Whatever motives Aylin had had in mind when she decided to 'intrude' at the table, she had accomplished the very important task of putting her and Kaya in close proximity with each other which could help in maybe turning around their antagonism with each other.

Maybe.

And that was if Aylin was even allowed to remain at the table.

"Oh, she can stay alright," Kaya said with an insidious sort of smile when Caius asked what her response to Aylin's arrival was.

Kaya's smile alluded to some plan already being in place or in the process of being made.

Caius sighed.

"Don't resort to violence," he said, "Never that."

"Please," Kaya said with a casual wave of the hand she wasn't using to take notes, "Violence would be so inelegant. There are many better ways of dealing with the likes of her."

"Oh? And what better ways might those be?" Caius asked.

With a smile, Kaya relayed the idea Delia had clued her in on to Caius. His knowing would not derail it after all. Try as he might, he couldn't really get her to stop torturing Aylin by regaling her with the tales of the hot moments she had shared with him.

Caius just looked at her. He didn't know whether to laugh or frown. He settled on a mystified smile. He was simply amazed by what Kaya's brain—as he didn't know Delia had origins suggested it—could cook up.

Did he think it was an actually elegant solution? Not really. It seemed silly to him even.

But he saw some good in it. It was good to prepare Aylin's mind with the possibility of having to share and not being as possessive as he knew she still was. Kind of like building up tolerance or maybe even acceptance for the things to come.

That was why, when Kaya asked him with that insidious smile of hers,

"What do you think?"

He just smiled and shrugged.

"So long as violence is avoided, go off, dear."

A few minutes passed after that as they listened to the lecture before Kaya remembered a question she had had but had gotten overridden by the conversation that just ended.

"What kept you anyway?" She asked, "I was almost worried something had happened to you again."

Caius chuckled lightly.

"I'm not really that incident-prone," he said and then shrugged, "I was just a little busy."

'A little' was underselling it. He had been very busy.

Unlike the other task he had given 'Ophiuchus' that they had yet to compete in over a week thus far, gathering all the Alchemical resources he wanted had been completed within a day or so. And it would have been even earlier—at least according to Arlette whom he had placed in management of the organization—had they not needed an ample amount of ingredients and to also acquire some more obscure manuals of Blood Alchemy.

In any case, there were about Ten Storage rings filled to the brim with resources for him to 'waste' on the less than ten percent chance of successful refinement issue that plagued Blood Alchemy.

Caius had spent quite some time after school yesterday poring through the Manuals. While Blood Alchemy was a fairly significant practice in [To Kill A Demon Lord…], like many things, its actual details were absent. There were rough ideas like the names of Alchemical Products and techniques but nothing substantial enough to make having read the novel make Caius proficient in the art.

He needed to actually do research. He needed to pull in different methods and techniques and see if he could arrive at the point he was headed. In a way, despite so much information available to him, he was still starting from scratch.

He had been at it late into the night and, following a short sleep, he was right back to it at dawn.

There was so much he needed to do and know that he wished he hadn't actually slept and of course, there were ways to circumvent that need to rest. Alas, in lip-twitching irony, with him being a Vampire at the Third Circle, those ways could also only be arrived at with Blood Alchemy.