Thud. Thud.

His heart drove hard against his ribs. The blood’s salt-iron sweetness hit something primal.

A switch thrown deep in the vampire’s nature, and what came through the Blood Frenzy wasn’t the controlled amplification he was used to.

Thud. Thud.

Something moved through his veins that had no word for it, a heat that wasn’t temperature, the red flooding his pupils completely, the canines extending past his lips, the color draining from his face until what was left was pale and sharp and wrong.

Thud! Thud!

His fingers became claws, the edges catching the harpy’s terrified reflection as they extended, razor-thin and perfectly still.

He made a sound that didn’t belong to a person, grabbed the lower half of her beak with one hand, and drove her head into the nearest stone.

Crack.

Crack.

He swung her by the beak, again and again, skull connecting with rock, the forehead split on the second impact, blood coming freely, the bone cracking on the third, something white and dense beginning to show through.

By the third strike her whole body had gone rigid, every muscle seizing, the involuntary tremors running through her from head to talons.

He wrenched sideways. The lower beak tore away from the hinge and hung loose and bloody against the side of her face, connected by almost nothing, no longer capable of closing.

Then Raphael’s red eyes moved to her neck, longer than a human neck, thinner, covered in feathers, the pulse visible beneath them.

He pressed one hand down over her thrashing wings and dropped his weight onto her, teeth finding the neck through the feathers.

The first bite pulled a mouthful of them free. The second broke the skin.

He fed without restraint.

This was nothing like the careful, measured drawing of blood from Evelyn or Elena, those had been controlled, deliberate, a medical procedure dressed in intimacy.

This was the pump running at full capacity, drawing hard and fast, and the harpy’s body responded by losing the argument it was having with gravity at accelerating speed.

She struggled. Her talons swung at him and couldn’t find purchase. Her wings battered against his side, the impact registering somewhere distant and meaningless.

He bit again, deeper, tearing rather than puncturing, the blood thirst in complete command of the motion.

The wing came up again, hard. He grabbed it with one hand and pulled.

The wing came off.

He dropped it and returned to her neck.

When he finally lifted his head, he didn’t know how much time had passed. His mouth was soaked with blood.

The harpy’s neck had been torn open, a portion of it separated from the rest and lying on the ground nearby. The twitching had stopped.

[Sin acquired: +4.8.]

[Current Sin: 24.66 / 160.]

The blood thirst ebbed slowly, the way a fever breaks, still present, the heat receding by degrees rather than all at once.

Raphael wiped the corner of his mouth and looked at his sleeve, at the vivid red soaked into the fabric.

He sat with it for a long moment.

That was the first time he’d hit the limit. The complete loss of choice, the point where the wildness simply took over and the rational self watched from somewhere very far away. He didn’t like what it felt like.

He looked back at the castle. The sky above it was clear of the dense formation, only scattered shapes circling at altitude now, the elder somewhere among them.

He moved to stand and felt a sharp pain shoot up his arm. He looked down.

Black lines were spreading outward from Death Crow’s grip, crawling up through the skin and into the arcane channels beneath, methodically draining what little remained in his reserves.

"Right. The cost."

Everything he’d killed so far had been low-grade. No souls worth feeding to the weapon.

And the alternative payment, arcane energy, was nearly gone after the exploration and the prolonged fighting. He had no choice but to stop and deal with it.

He sat with his back against a tree root and opened Sam’s cloth bag.

He pulled out one of the green recovery potions, knocked the stopper free, and drank the whole thing in a single motion, letting the vampire’s regeneration layer over the potion’s effect and work on the internal damage.

"All basic low-grade stock." He sorted through the rest.

"Expected, a freelance bounty hunter without IFSA or church backing can’t access high-tier materials.

Five more recovery potions. Smell like apprentice-grade. Barely adequate."

Beyond those: exorcism supplies, salt solution, mercury, silver powder, and three items that qualified as actual potions.

The System identified them without effort.

"One apprentice-grade cold resistance tonic. Useless. One owl’s eye potion, night vision enhancement..."

He considered it. Deep in a forest, still hours before dawn.

"Fine. Useful enough."

He drank the owl’s eye potion without ceremony.

The world desaturated immediately, color bleeding out, replaced by the high-contrast greyscale of enhanced night vision, the effective range stretching long and narrow, the distant treeline snapping into focus with a clarity the dark had been hiding.

"Not bad."

He looked at the last vial. The System’s identification arrived and he smiled, genuinely, without performance.

"Blue Blood Potion. Entry-grade at that, one tier above the absolute baseline."

He briefly considered whether this was the Jester’s arrangement, another link in the chain.

The Jester enjoyed sequences. But a bounty hunter who needed to augment physical functions with arcane input would carry this as a standard supply.

It wasn’t necessarily placed. He set the question aside.

"The benefits of meeting someone in the same line of work."

He drank it.

A thin stream of warmth moved into his drained arcane channels, nothing fast, nothing dramatic, but steady, filling the dry spaces in the second circulatory system the way water slowly fills a cracked vessel.

The stomach processed it and kept processing it, conversion running continuously, the magic returning in increments rather than all at once.

Along his arm, the black lines from Death Crow’s drain slowly retracted, pulling back through the skin and retreating into the weapon. It had taken what it needed.

The Blue Blood Potion’s recovery continued until his reserves reached approximately half, then finished.

He sat in the dark and breathed.

Then he stood, brushed the mud from his clothing, and walked back toward the castle.

---

On the rooftop, the elder had stopped circling some time ago.

She was resting against one of the battlements, her eyes seeing through the eyes of the scattered harpies combing the forest below, searching for a target that had gone still.

The teleportation portal activated.

Raphael stepped back onto the rooftop, lantern in hand.

"Were you looking for me?"

The elder spun. Her expression, whatever harpies had instead of one, communicated something close to disbelief.

"You survived. How. How is that possible?"

She opened her wings immediately, the instinct to take the sky overriding everything else.

Raphael had expected this. He walked at an easy pace toward a position that gave the lantern a clear angle on the whole rooftop, finding the geometry he needed, not rushing.

He didn’t activate it yet. He waited.

The elder’s eyes went to the lantern. She recognized the crystal, the same material as the one embedded in her chest, the one entrusted to her by whoever had given her this task. She looked back at Raphael.

His pupils were already red.

"Oh no—!"

Even with only half her wings deployed she tried to get airborne immediately, the threat recognition overriding the preparation, but Raphael had already become a red blur closing the distance.

Her feet left the rooftop and a hand closed around her neck in the same instant, the impact carrying the weight of something that had not bothered to decelerate.

Both wings collapsed inward. Her back hit the battlement behind her hard enough to shake the old stone.

[Analyzing... Complete.]

[Lv4: Harpy Elder.]

[Cardinal Sin: Dogmatism.]

[Type: Demon.]

"Lv4." The words came out flat. "You’re weak."

Her strength against his was negligible, less than the resistance of a stuck drawer.

He barely registered it as he lifted her by the neck, swung once, and slammed her into the battlement.

Then he grabbed her head and used it as the working end of a hammer, driving it into the carved granite of the crenellation in steady, deliberate repetitions.

Cracks spread through the stone with each impact, the ancient masonry beginning to fracture along the fault lines that centuries of weathering had left waiting.

"You—! You—!"

One final impact. The wall section broke apart, and the falling mass came down across her neck, pinning the elder in the rubble.

Raphael drew the revolver, lining up the finishing shot, and felt the air cool at his back. He turned and fired without looking.

Crack.

The silver round went through the attacking harpy’s skull. She dissolved before she hit the ground.

When he turned back, the elder was free.

She’d torn herself out of the debris and taken the air, bleeding heavily from the head, hovering at a height that put her just out of reach, her expression carrying the specific quality of something that has never been treated this way before and cannot process it.

All around her, harpies materialized, dozens of them, and a number of them wearing her exact appearance, her features, her coloring, until she was invisible inside the flock.

Raphael walked back to the lantern at an unhurried pace, like a stagehand stepping to the lighting board.

He activated it.

The beam swept out.

Every harpy near the elder vanished the moment the light found them, there one instant and gone the next, as cleanly as they had appeared.