A rough semicircle forms around the tavern's entrance, mostly within the light of upraised lanterns. There are shouts of anger and order back and forth, but so far as she can tell no stricken cries as of yet.

In the upraised lamplight she gets her first look at one of the zombies. It's a hulking thing, barely intact, slow and ungainly. 

One of the defenders hacks off its hatchet arm, then takes its head off and it falls.

Another one takes its place.

One of the peasant women on the far side of the tavern signals to Nikola, and she comes over to investigate. 

She scowls when she sees it - there's a light in the darkness on the other side of the inn, distant but sharp. 

"Fire," she says to Aletha. "It is raid. We are busy with varghul, we cannot also save houses."

The zombies are hideous. Viscerally frightening. Something in her says that they're wrong.

She's glad she's good at controlling her facial expressions.

Her horror can stay hidden behind her mask.

There isn't a point to that fire beyond cruelty. Not unless you're trying to draw them out, and everyone's already occupied with the zombies.

Hmm. Unless the one attacking this village expects them to maybe have more support? Like, for example, their vampiric overlord?

"If Crin Illemvich was here, would she put out fire? Fire is maybe- vampire does not know if she is here. Fire to draw her out, attack when distracted."

"Maybe," Nikola says. "Village burn but varghul die, people maybe starve after. No village, Crin weaker."

She looks out towards the blaze. "Varghul not smart to set fire. Their lord set fires, maybe."

There's a cry of pain from in front of the inn.

"Or maybe Varghul just kill us." 

A man stumbles in through the inn doors, a heavy string of curses following him. A heavy cut marks his right shoulder, his arm limp and barely holding on to his hatchet.

Two of the women take him aside and start tending to the wound as best they can. One of them takes his hatchet off him and passes it to Nikola. 

She passes it to Alethia in turn. "Here. You should have axe."

She nods and takes it.

She really wishes she had healing magic right about now. Or magic to put out fires.

Where's the fire? On the edge of the village? Is it still contained to one house?

It's in one of the outlying buldings at the village's edge. As it goes up fully it lights a good amount of the area around it, casting off sparks and embers.

There's a figure in that light, passing away from the flames, that doesn't walk like a zombie.

Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, it's your time to shine.

It creeps over her like cold in her veins, and all her senses sharpen. The single house lights the whole village now, exposing the movements of the things in the dark.

Her canines press into her tongue, growing sharper and longer, and her skin pales. 

She has a sense for where the zombies are now, and can, however faintly, feel the cold grip that animates them and binds them to kill. The magic is black and repulsive, and seethes - but she has a sense it would answer if she called. 

She is new, she is untrained, and she does not want to give up the element of surprise. A magical contest isn't necessary when she can simply kill that vampire and take his raised servants after his head has been parted from his shoulders.

"I see vampire. I will kill."

Nikola simply nods. "Good. Good luck."

She exits the building.

She could try to sneak up on him. But he's barely more than a hundred feet away. The village is small. And when you move as fast as vampires can, that's really not much distance at all.

Vampires are fast creatures. They are stronger and swifter than humans. They are more graceful. They have faster reaction times.

She is strong, stronger than she should be. Not merely as strong as a vampire would typically be, for she was strong already before her transformation, and now those two sources of strength compound. And now she is graceful too. And together those mean that she is fast. Fast, fast, fast enough that when she launches herself off the ground, the vampire idly walking away from a burning building is going to find that she is moving faster than he can.

It's simple physics, really. She's much, much stronger than he is, and masses less to boot.

He's going to have time to react to her approach anyway.  The village is small, and she is fast, but vampires are like that.

She will endeavour to hit him hard enough that this does not matter.

He draws his sword and blocks the blow with the flat of it - but the strike shatters his sword and the hatchet's blade both, and knocks him back four paces with shrapnel in his chest. 

He hisses and falls back, then pulls a dagger from his belt and tries to stab Alethia back.

He has a dagger and Alethia has a stick now that her hatchet no longer has a head.

She is at a disadvantage.

However. That advantage in speed from before? That's still there. How quickly your arms accelerate, when you throw a punch, is, in a vacuum, directly proportional to how much force your muscles exert. Force over mass equals acceleration. In humans, as your arm grows stronger, so to does it grow more massive. And so you do not, normally, have the situation that exists now arise, where there is a woman with arms about as long as the man she is fighting, who is multiple times as strong despite moving less mass.

She is not very skilled at fighting. Not yet. But that is the kind of speed advantage that makes striking someone's wrist with a stick as they attempt to stab you a plausible thing, even if you aren't very skilled.

His dagger's knocked aside, but his lunge carries him headlong into her. 

He goes for her neck with his teeth.

Drat, not hard enough- vampires are durable and she was hitting him with a stick and he let his hand get knocked aside of course she didn't break his wrist- and then his teeth are lunging for her neck-

She'll elbow him in the chest as hard as she can.

She manages to bring him up short and keep him from tearing out her throat, but he reverses his dagger and strikes for her chest - 

Reversing a knife doesn't take long but it takes long enough for her to notice it happening, and her hand to snaps out and grab his wrist as the knife comes in.

Then, she does two things in quick succession. She headbutts the bridge of his nose hard enough to bloody her own forehead slightly. And she she squeezes his wrist quite literally as hard as she can.

He's probably too durable for her to just snap his wrists like that, but she's pretty sure she felt bones break when she headbutted him.