Miguel’s hand closed into a fist. He held the thought for a moment before speaking.

"I knew nothing about this ritual going in. If I’d studied more of this in my earlier years I wouldn’t be standing here without a direction."

He let out a breath and looked at the people around him, the captives kneeling on the floor, the collars pulsing with that slow red light, each of them being drawn somewhere they couldn’t resist.

He hit the wall beside him once, hard.

"Archbishop, I’m asking you to stay here and watch over them. Whatever help you’re able to give, please."

The Archbishop made a sound of assent, though his tone carried a thread of regret beneath it.

"I have nowhere pressing to be. And I expect my presence here has already been noticed by certain eyes within the Church, the Tribunal is probably mid-argument about what you and I have done and whether to treat it as a scandal. Going back would just mean walking into that."

He paused, and the lightness left his voice briefly.

"The difficulty is that this isn’t my area of competence. I can also feel it, the ritual’s host isn’t here. They’re in an enclosed space at considerable distance. I can generate some interference from this end, but whether that’s enough to interrupt the ceremony entirely is not something I can control from here. The key isn’t in this room."

Not here. Miguel turned the Archbishop’s words over and found the answer sitting underneath them, the castle Raphael had mentioned, the enclosed space Blitz had retreated to. He understood immediately. And then just as quickly he ran into the next problem.

The Archbishop would never betray an ally’s location deliberately. But the Archbishop’s presence at a specific location wasn’t entirely within his own control, a figure of his standing attracted attention as a matter of course, and if he accompanied Miguel to the castle, the eyes that followed him would arrive as well.

Raphael, who had come into this without asking for recognition or compensation, who had acted on feeling rather than obligation, would find himself exposed to an institution-wide manhunt within the hour.

Miguel lowered his head.

"Archbishop, I know where the vampire is. But I have to go alone. I can’t let anyone else know the location. There’s someone there I owe a debt to, and I refuse to repay it by handing him over."

The Archbishop looked at him with an expression that held more information than it seemed to.

He surveyed the room around them, and said nothing. But the silence communicated something.

If Miguel went alone and failed to interrupt the ritual, the captives here would continue toward a destination none of them had chosen. And if he met Blitz without Raphael’s backup, he might not come back. He understood both of those possibilities.

He met the Archbishop’s questioning look and nodded, without hesitating.

"If someone passing through without any obligation to me was willing to risk his life for people he doesn’t know, what standing do I have to hold back?

This is my responsibility. When I accepted this assignment, I had already accepted the worst outcome that could come with it. The only thing I’d genuinely regret is having the chance in front of me and choosing not to take it."

The Archbishop didn’t respond. He just looked at his student, for ten seconds, then longer, then longer still. Something in that look was storing the details, recording the changes. Finally he nodded.

"You’ve grown up, Miguel. You really have." His voice was quiet, and it meant something. "I trust your judgment. If you believe this is the right path, then take it. And remember, whatever you face out there, you won’t be facing it alone. I’ll be with you."

Miguel pressed his fist to his chest and bowed his head.

"Thank you."

He didn’t hesitate after that. He left a brief account of the green-haired man’s situation for the Archbishop to manage, then turned and ran, taking the stairs at speed.

As he moved, he pulled the last parchment from the very bottom of the gilded case, the one he’d kept in reserve. It was different from the others: it depicted a doorway, translucent and incomplete, more suggestion than structure.

He didn’t activate it immediately. He took one of the arcane capsules first, let the initial shock of the conversion pass through him, and began the invocation while the impact was still rolling through his channels.

"Greatest of illusionists, embodiment of secrets, master of the space between, great god of the arcane, I call on your power. Activate this parchment. Open a door to the place I most need to reach."

The sourceless flame caught the paper. His arcane reserves emptied in under a second, full moments ago, now stripped down to nothing, and before him, where there had been corridor wall, a doorway opened from nothing, built from compressed magical energy that shimmered slightly at the edges.

He stepped through without slowing.

The door closed behind him. The corridor stood empty.

The Archbishop let out a long exhale, the kind that belonged to someone watching something they can’t control and choosing to accept it. He shook his head, and something fond moved in his expression.

"Children grow up. Let them go."

---

In the castle’s sealed stairwell, the blood thirst was doing what it always did when it had been waiting long enough, pulling everything else toward the surface and refusing to be reasoned with. The hunger was too strong for the controlled contact he’d managed with Evelyn or Elena. If he bit into anything alive, the animal portion of the blood frenzy would drive him past stopping before the rational portion had a chance to intervene.

He ground his teeth, used the Shadow Jump, and came in behind Blitz with Death Crow already in motion.

"Pathetic."

Blitz dissolved the instant before the blade reached him. The blood cloud scattered again, diffuse, liquid, dispersed across the stairwell, and Death Crow cut through it again and again without connecting. Every strike landed on nothing useful. The fluid absorbed the force and reformed around it, indifferent. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Blitz reconstituted above him, unhurried, looking down.

"I’m beginning to find this tedious. Look at yourself, you can’t touch me, you can barely stand, and the whole display is becoming difficult to watch. I had half a thought of incorporating you into the ritual. Letting it burn away the human components, giving you the blood you so clearly need, making something worthwhile out of you." A pause that contained genuine dismissal. "I see now that opportunity is wasted."

He pulled a thread of blood from the surrounding cloud and shaped it in his hand, long, thin, a spear of condensed fluid hardening in his grip. He raised it.

The cocoons behind him began to shudder.

The rhythm of expansion and contraction spiked, faster, more violent, like a heart rate climbing toward crisis.

Blitz’s arm stopped mid-throw. His expression shifted.

"The Archbishop, naturally. Interfering from that distance. High as his level is, the ceremony’s host and the ceremony’s location are separate. He can apply pressure, but he can’t reach the center of it from there."

A brief pause in his certainty.

Then something else arrived, not from inside him, but pressing from outside, the way an illusion presses, replacing what was real with what wasn’t. He looked toward where Raphael had been standing and found a river there instead.

No light. No motion he could resolve, though something moved in it. Sound was disappearing, the rhythm of the cocoons, the breathing of the captives, all of it going quiet until only the silence remained, dense and complete.

On the surface of the lightless water, a robed figure made of bone stood with a scythe, the empty eye sockets turned toward him.

"What is this, damn it—!"

He threw himself backward, wings erupting from his back, and the spear of blood left his hand at full force. It drove through the figure and through the scene behind it. The vision burst like a pressurized membrane, the river, the silence, the robed figure, all of it gone as though it had never been.

"An illusion? When did?"

He was still working through the disorientation when Raphael’s intentions became clear.

In the moments when Blitz had dissolved into the blood cloud, the physical strikes had connected with nothing. But Death Sentence didn’t require physical damage to apply. Each swing had landed something real, and those marks had been accumulating, and they had all just released at the same moment.

Raphael didn’t explain any of this. He was moving toward where the spear had buried itself in the floor after passing through the illusion.

Before the blood could begin withdrawing back toward Blitz, he grabbed it.

A body built on the same vampire’s essence gave him a claim on the material. The spear strained toward its origin and found itself held instead. He brought it to his mouth and bit down.

The blood exploded into fluid, running down his throat in a stream he swallowed without pausing, warm, full, precise, the blood thirst meeting it the way dry earth meets rain and not letting go until nothing remained.

He exhaled.

Looked up at Blitz, floating above him.

The corner of his mouth curved.

Round two.