Dark Venom and Crossbow Pistol

Sibbechai’s corrupt visage contorted into a mask of scorn and contempt. “More sorcery,
Helmuth?” the vampire hissed. “Is there no limit to your hypocrisy?”
The witch hunter captain continued to mumble his conjurations, allowing the zombie monsters
to shuffle and shamble their way between himself and his undead enemy. “The tools of your
loathsome kind can be made to serve the cause of Light,” Helmuth Klausner snarled. “By such
perversions is this great land threatened and by such perversions shall every last witch and wizard be
driven from the Empire!”
The vampire paid only partial attention to the witch hunter’s words, watching as the zombie
creatures of the madman closed in upon it. The monster’s face twisted with wry amusement. “Is this
the best you can do?” Sibbechai laughed. “I find your efforts insulting.”
Sibbechai launched its lean form forward, the vampire’s clawed hands lashing out, tearing the
head from the shoulders of the nearest zombie as easily as a child pulling wings from a fly. The
necrarch snarled a word of power and the next zombie toppled, crumbling into dust before it even
finished falling to the blood-soaked cobbles. Sibbechai spun about, gesturing with its clawed hand,
sending another blast of dark magic searing into a pair of the shuffling corpses, the unholy power
turning both cadaver-things into walking torches.
The vampire was spinning about to smash its way through the last of Helmuth’s zombies when
sharp, blinding pain surged through its body. The vampire stared down with revulsion as a pustulent
mass spread across its chest, a green morass of goo alive with maggots and filth. The vampire ripped
the robe from its withered body, hurling the tainted garment into the face of an approaching zombie,
the creature shambling onward a few moments before the writhing corruption ate through its skull
and consumed its festering brain.
Helmuth Klausner snarled as he saw the vampire’s inhumanly quick reflexes react to the
pestilential spell the witch hunter had directed at it. Klausner had travelled far to uncover and
destroy the corrupted festival, had nearly been killed by the loathsome and bloated priest of Nurgle
who had acted as the carnival’s master. He had done so because he had imagined that the spellcraft
of such a sorcerer might prove of great use against the restless dead. Fortunately, there was more
than one way to burn a bat.
The witch hunter pulled his heavy blackpowder pistol from its holster of blackened leather. The
vampire saw the man’s reaction, the undead abomination not even deigning to consider such a crude
device any threat. Sibbechai ripped through another pair of zombies, finding its path to Helmuth
unhindered.
Helmuth returned the corpse-thing’s stare, the fanatic zeal in his veins countering the aura of
supernatural malice exuding from the vampire’s eyes. With calm deliberation, Helmuth lifted the
pistol, whispering the slithering words he had extracted from the mangled body of a wizard in
Averheim, the words of an ancient and pre-human spell of guiding. The pistol cracked and roared as
Helmuth depressed the trigger, foul black powder smoke blowing back into his face and causing his
eyes to tear.
The vampire darted aside as the witch hunter’s crude weapon fired. It had fought many men who
employed the smelly, unreliable firearms before and had learned that even on the rare occasions
when their bullets did strike, they could do the monster no lasting harm.
But Sibbechai had not reckoned upon the sorcerous augmentation of the witch hunter’s
marksmanship, nor the uniqueness of the shot he had loaded into his weapon. The golden ball
smashed into the vampire’s shoulder, spinning the necrarch around and slamming it to the ground.
Sibbechai snarled in agony and disbelief as it tried to lift itself from the broken cobbles.
A strange paralysis seemed to spread from its injury, making even its wasted limbs seem as
heavy as stone. The witch hunter laughed, slipping his smoking weapon back into its holster.
“Surprised, monster?” he sneered down at the struggling vampire. “I’ve learned a few new tricks
since last our paths crossed.”