#space vampire

If justice truly mattered in bounty hunting, the Guild would have collapsed years ago beneath the weight of hypocrisy.

No- he was wanted, and that was what mattered.

Wanted meant his face had appeared on a chain code somewhere. Wanted meant someone with enough authority or enough money had decided the galaxy would improve with him dragged back in binders or dumped at their doorstep unconscious. Sometimes those people were law enforcement. Sometimes they were crime syndicates pretending to be legitimate. Sometimes they were grieving families. Sometimes they were worse than the people they hired you to hunt.

Credits erased the difference more often than most hunters liked to admit.

And credits were survival. So you learned a long time ago not to ask questions unless the answers would keep you alive.

Your work does not require righteousness. No shining creed. No illusion that you are one of the heroes from old Republic stories. Only a target, a trail, and a steady hand.

The target goes down harder than you meant him to.

The sound of it cracks through the alley a half second after your fist connects- a sharp impact of bone, armor plating, and duracrete that echoes briefly beneath the distant hum of Nevarro’s night traffic. His body slams shoulder-first into the wall hard enough to rattle a hanging pipe loose before gravity tears him downward. One knee buckles awkwardly beneath him. His head strikes the ground next.

Then stillness.

The target lies sprawled at your feet in mismatched stolen armor: cheap plates strapped over an older flight jacket stained with oil and sweat. One glove is missing. His fingers twitch faintly against the pavement before falling still again. You kneel beside him carefully, one gloved hand braced against the cold duracrete while the other instinctively moves toward the syringe housed along your gauntlet.

You flex your hand once, slowly, and feel the remnants of the blood still burning through your system. The sensation crawls beneath your skin like live current trapped inside your veins. Your knuckles ache from the impact, not from injury, but from restrained strength pressing against the limits of your own control.

Blood catches in your body like dry tinder meeting flame. Immediate. Violent. Your muscles tighten with unnatural responsiveness. Reflexes sharpen until every movement around you feels delayed by comparison. Your hearing stretches outward into impossible detail- the buzz of failing neon, the distant roar of engines overhead, the uneven heartbeat of the man at your feet hammering weakly against the alley floor.

And underneath all of it comes the hunger. Not just thirst, but a razor-edged awareness buried deep in your bones. The hunger is never elegant.

It is not a noble craving or a tragic poem. It is a blunt force in your ribs, a tightening in your throat, a pull so old it feels older than language. Even through armor and filters and layers of discipline, your body knows what it wants.

You let it have only what you planned.

Your gauntlet hums softly when you press your thumb against the hidden latch embedded beneath the plating. The syringe slides free with a faint metallic whisper.

Slim. Reinforced. Custom-made.

Not medical grade anymore, not after all the modifications you made to it over the years. The chamber is thicker now, insulated against temperature fluctuations and impact damage. Tiny filters line the injection system to keep contaminants out. The micro-pump near the base emits a low electronic murmur as it powers on, ready to draw blood quickly and quietly enough that most targets never fully realize what is happening to them.

You lean over the unconscious man and turn his head carefully to the side, exposing the line of his throat beneath the edge of his collar. Heat radiates from his skin in slow waves. Alive. Frightened, even unconscious. Your enhanced hearing catches the unsteady rhythm of blood moving through him, the pulse in his neck fluttering rapidly beneath the surface.

Hunger tightens through your chest with enough force to make your jaw lock.

The syringe settles against his throat with practiced precision, your hand perfectly steady despite the ache spreading through your veins. You have done this hundreds of times across dozens of systems: cramped ship corridors, freezing alleys on backwater moons, Imperial safehouses- a tiny puncture, barely enough to bleed.

Dark red immediately begins to rise through the transparent chamber in smooth, steady pulses, each one synchronized to the weak beat of his heart.

Syringes are better than biting.

You have never liked biting. Too personal. Too messy. Too much of the other person left behind in your mouth and under your nails and in the memory of your hunger.

Syringes turn the act into procedure instead of indulgence. A transaction instead of surrender. Blood drawn. Blood stored. Blood measured carefully in milliliters and sealed chambers instead of torn flesh and ruined self-control. 

The chamber fills by slow degrees.

One measured line at a time.

Enough to sustain the changes already burning through your body. Enough to keep your enhanced strength from fading completely. Enough to sharpen your senses through the coming night without pushing you into the dangerous edge of overfeeding.

You watch the dark red level climb steadily higher while forcing yourself to breathe slowly through the helmet’s filters. The scent still reaches you anyway, metallic and rich even through the purifier systems woven into your mask. Your fingers tighten once around the syringe as another pulse of heat rolls through your body. Your senses sharpen further with every passing second, the alley becoming painfully vivid around you. Every crack in the wall. Every drifting plume of steam. Every distant footstep somewhere beyond the alley mouth.

The syringe clicks softly when the chamber reaches its preset mark.

The micro-pump powers down with a faint descending whine, and for a second the blood inside the chamber continues to tremble from the rhythm of the man’s heartbeat before settling into stillness. Dark red fills the reinforced transparisteel nearly to the line you measured out for yourself long ago, the exact amount needed to sustain your abilities without pushing the hunger into something harder to control.

Your thumb presses the release mechanism.

The needle retracts with a sharp metallic snap before you pull the syringe carefully away from his throat. A single drop of blood wells briefly at the puncture site, sliding slowly across pale skin before disappearing into the collar of his jacket.

The insulated pouch at your belt opens with a magnetic hiss. Cold vapor spills briefly from inside.

The storage compartment is compact but heavily modified: refrigeration coils, shock padding, temperature stabilizers, and enough protection to preserve blood samples during long flights or firefights. You slot the syringe carefully into one of several secured brackets already housed inside. Others wait there beside it.

The pouch seals shut again with a heavy click, locking the blood safely away from you.

Only then do you finally look back at the man on the ground.

The orange neon above flickers across his face in uneven pulses, washing his features in alternating shadow and rust-colored light. Sweat glistens faintly along his forehead. His breathing remains shallow but steady, chest rising unevenly beneath battered armor plates that no longer look intimidating now that he is unconscious and bleeding onto cold duracrete.

His skin has gone noticeably pale. Just drained enough that the color has abandoned his lips and settled into a sickly gray beneath his eyes. He will wake dizzy. Nauseous. Head pounding hard enough to make light feel like a weapon driven straight through his skull.

He will only have the memory of a shadow in armor.

You slide one arm beneath the target’s shoulders and haul him upright. The man groans faintly as his head lolls against your armored shoulder, boots dragging across the alley floor while you pull him to his feet. His body sags immediately, unable to support itself. Whatever fight had been left in him vanished somewhere between your fist and the syringe.

Steam drifts low around your boots as you begin moving toward the street, guiding the unconscious man carefully enough to avoid drawing attention but quickly enough that nobody has time to study either of you too closely.

The target slips slightly in your grip once. You tighten your hold instinctively, catching him before his knees buckle fully beneath him. Your fingers dent the cheap armor at his shoulder without meaning to.

You loosen your grip immediately and continue forward.

The spaceport waits near the edge of the district, looming ahead in stacked towers of durasteel and landing lights. Ships crowd the platforms in uneven rows- freighters, starfighters, patched-up transports barely held together by hope and illegal modifications.

You move through the edge of the port with the unconscious bounty hanging heavily against your shoulder, keeping to the darker paths between floodlights while workers and travelers pass around you without looking too closely. Most assume you are transporting a drunk, an injured crewman, or another bounty in rough condition.

Your ship waits near the outer edge of the port where the lighting becomes thinner and the security scanners stop functioning quite as reliably. Smaller landing platforms stretch outward into darker sections of the spaceport where older vessels sit in varying states of repair and legality.

A narrow silhouette rests there between two much larger freighters.

The hull absorbs most of the surrounding light instead of reflecting it, matte black plating broken only by faint navigation strips running low along the body in dim white lines. The ship is long and lean rather than bulky, built with the profile of something meant to move quickly and disappear faster. The ship looks less like a military craft and more like something rebuilt too many times to belong to any single manufacturer anymore.

Which is true. The cockpit carries the angular structure of an old Republic patrol craft. The engine assembly was salvaged from a decommissioned Imperial transport years ago after you found it half-buried in a scrapyard on Corellia. The landing gear came from a mining shuttle. The forward cannons were purchased illegally from an arms dealer who later tried to kill you for a higher offer.

You kept the cannons.

A faint mechanical groan echoes from the hull as cooling systems cycle beneath the plating. The navigation lights flicker once, recognizing your approach signal through the transmitter embedded in your gauntlet.

You reach the loading ramp and pause as the unconscious man stirs weakly against you.

A strained noise escapes his throat. His fingers twitch once near his belt as though instinct still remembers reaching for a weapon even while the rest of him remains trapped somewhere below consciousness.

Your helmet angles downward toward him.

“Don’t,” you murmur quietly.

The ramp seals shut behind you with a heavy hydraulic thud that cuts the noise of the spaceport away almost instantly.

The unconscious bounty groans weakly as you secure him against the restraint bench. Magnetic binders snap tight around his wrists and ankles with sharp metallic clacks, locking him in place before he can wake fully enough to become a problem. His head lolls sideways afterward, bloodless face illuminated by sterile overhead lighting.

Your boots ring dully against the metal floor as you move toward the cockpit, peeling one glove halfway off along the way. The exposed skin beneath reveals veins faintly visible near your wrist where the recent feeding still burns through your system.

You flex your fingers once, watching the veins move under the ship’s lighting.

You slide into the pilot’s chair and wake the console with a touch. Old systems flicker sluggishly to life across the cockpit in uneven waves of blue holographic light. Navigation readouts bloom across the canopy glass. Sensor data scrolls slowly down one side of the display. A proximity alert continues blinking steadily near the edge of the radar screen.

One ship nearby, holding position.

You lean back slightly in the chair and stare at the signal for a moment, before opening your comms. Static crackles softly through the cockpit before the transmission stabilizes.

“This is a secure line,” you say evenly, voice distorted low through the helmet modulator. “So if you’re planning to pretend you aren’t following me, now’s probably the wrong time.”

For a second, there is only the faint hiss of background interference.

Then his voice comes through.

Flat. Calm. Recognizable immediately.

“I wasn’t hiding.”

Of course he wasn’t.

You glance out through the cockpit canopy toward the distant shape of his ship resting across the neighboring platform. Even from here, the silhouette of the Razor Crest is unmistakable.

“I got the target,” you tell him.

Din does not respond immediately.

You have noticed that about him over time. Most bounty hunters fill silence with threats, posturing, or useless commentary. Din Djarin lets silence sit exactly where it wants to. Lets other people grow uncomfortable enough to start talking more than they should.

It is an irritating habit.

Especially around someone with secrets.

“The client’s waiting in the north district,” he says. “Private transfer. No Guild involvement.”

You nod automatically before remembering he cannot see it through the comm.

“Fine by me.”

“You still want the split?”

“Depends,” you answer dryly. “You planning to suddenly develop a conscience and donate your half to charity?”

“No.”

The blunt honesty almost earns a real laugh from you. Instead you reach up and tap two fingers lightly against the edge of your mask, staring out through the cockpit canopy at the distant glow of the city beyond the docks.

Working with Din Djarin was never supposed to become a habit.

The first time had been an accident born from bad timing and worse odds.

A backwater moon somewhere beyond the Outer Rim trade routes- dust storms, failing moisture farms, and a settlement so small it barely deserved the name. The kind of place where people disappeared quietly and nobody paid enough attention to ask why. You had tracked the target there after a three-week pursuit across multiple systems only to discover another ship already waiting at the landing pad when you arrived. At the time, you considered turning around immediately.

Then the blaster fire started.

You still remember the sound of it echoing through the settlement streets while the sun beat mercilessly against your armor plating hard enough to make the seals at your neck ache. The target had hired extra muscle, mercenaries, heavily armed, desperate enough to fight to the death over a payout they were never going to live long enough to spend.

And right in the middle of the firefight stood a Mandalorian in battered beskar armor firing with calm, brutal efficiency.

At first you assumed he would become another obstacle.

Most bounty hunters were.

Territorial. Greedy. Trigger-happy enough to shoot first rather than risk splitting a reward.

But halfway through the fight, after you crushed one mercenary hard enough to crack the wall behind him and Din silently blasted another before they could shoot you in the spine, both of you arrived at the same conclusion without ever needing to say it aloud: cooperation was more efficient than killing each other.

You watched each other’s blind spots through the rest of the hunt. Shared ammunition once. Exchanged exactly fourteen words total before dragging the target back through the sand toward the settlement landing pad.

After that came another job. Then another. Then another.

A pirate captain hiding in an asteroid refinery. A failed Imperial scientist trying to disappear into the Mid Rim. A gang operating out of a derelict cruiser where the lights failed every seventeen seconds, forcing both of you to fight half-blind through the dark.

Every time, the arrangement remained temporary. You never called yourselves partners.

Partners implied permanence. Loyalty. The kind of emotional attachment that eventually got people killed in your line of work.

But over time, something quieter formed anyway.

A pattern.

If a hunt looked ugly enough, one of you contacted the other, no discussion necessary.

The strange thing was how naturally the rhythm developed between you despite the silence that usually filled the space between conversations. Din rarely asked unnecessary questions. You avoided giving answers that mattered. Somewhere along the way, that became its own form of understanding.

Din lifts off first, and you wait exactly ninety seconds before following. Enough distance to avoid looking coordinated to anyone monitoring outgoing traffic. Not enough to lose each other entirely.

The atmosphere shudders violently against the hull during ascent. Clouds streak past the cockpit glass in blurred gray bands before suddenly giving way to open space: cold, endless, black beyond comprehension. The stars spread endlessly ahead in dense rivers of white light. Nevarro turns slowly beneath the ship, wrapped in thin atmospheric blue while freighters crawl across orbit like insects around a dying fire.

Your hands settle automatically against the controls. 

The familiar rhythm calms something inside you. Piloting requires focus, precision, constant adjustment. It leaves less room for hunger to creep into the edges of your thoughts.

The comm crackles softly.

“You’re drifting left.”

You glance at the proximity display where Din’s ship moves several klicks ahead of your position.

“I know.”

The navigation system projects the route ahead in pale blue lines across the canopy. A quiet run, around a two hour flight, with drop-off in a private docking bay on the far side of the sector.

Which means, naturally, the universe decides to ruin it. The cockpit erupts in sharp red light as alarms begin flashing across the console.

“Contact!” you snap into the comm at the exact same moment Din says: “I see them.”

Three ships burst from behind a nearby debris cluster ahead- fast-moving interceptors dropping their stealth signatures all at once. Angular hulls painted matte black, old Imperial designs modified for Outer Rim piracy.

The first laser fire streaks across space almost immediately.

Brilliant green bolts rip past your cockpit hard enough to light the interior of the ship in violent flashes. One shot clips your port stabilizer with a deafening impact that rattles the entire hull.

“Wonderful,” you mutter.

Another volley tears toward you.

You slam the controls hard right.

The stars spin violently across the canopy as your ship rolls beneath incoming fire by less than a meter. Heat scorches across the outer hull. Your engines howl in protest while inertia crushes briefly against your ribs.

Ahead, the Razor Crest banks hard beneath incoming fire.

The gunship moves differently than smaller starfighters- less graceful, more brutal. Where sleek fighters evade, the Crest endures. Din angles the ship sharply through the laser barrage while the ventral cannons answer back in heavy bursts of red fire.

Another barrage hammers your rear shields. The cockpit shakes violently enough to blur your vision for half a second.

And the blood inside your system answers instantly. The world sharpens.

Every warning light becomes painfully vivid. Your reflexes accelerate beneath the surge of unnatural strength still lingering in your veins. The interceptor behind you suddenly feels easier to predict- its movements slowing fractionally in your perception as predatory instinct floods hot through your chest.

Ahead, the Razor Crest rolls directly into the path of another pirate ship, and the Crest’s forward cannons erupt in a deafening barrage. The pirate interceptor explodes into burning fragments so close that debris scrapes across the Razor Crest’s shields in bright showers of sparks.

Your hunter swings wide behind you again.

You kill your engines instantly, and the interceptor overshoots in confusion.