Blitz watched Raphael from the air with flat, cold eyes. The phantom visions had dissolved completely. The fear that hadn’t belonged to him was gone.

"Do whatever you have left."

He dispersed again, a single motion, the body splitting into droplets, the blood tide rolling outward toward Raphael across the stairwell floor.

The form left him vulnerable to Death Sentence accumulation, he was aware of that, but the complete immunity to physical attack made it the better option at this stage of the fight. It had worked so far.

Raphael pulled the revolver and fired without hesitation. Silver rounds punched into the advancing wave, each one producing a brief sharp flash of burning where it passed through, and then passed through, hitting the stone wall behind, the contact too short to do real damage.

The tide slowed slightly with each hit. It didn’t stop. He worked through the cylinder, the shots coming steady and even, the blood cloud absorbing each impact and closing around the brief searing wound it left behind.

When the last round fired, he kept pulling the trigger. The empty chamber made its small metallic sound again and again,click, click, click, and he stood with the muzzle pointed at the advancing cloud, weapon empty, looking like someone who had reached the bottom of their options and was watching the end come toward them.

Blitz registered the hollow clicking and drove forward without hesitation.

Raphael’s expression changed at a specific distance. His hand had already entered the shadow at his side, he brought out the blade oil, applied a third of the vial to Death Crow’s edge in a single practiced stroke, and by the time he raised his head the blood tide was almost on him.

He swung in the same motion, the blade splitting the wave cleanly down the center, the two halves forced to stream past him on either side, neither half touching him.

"That was worth something, was it? Keep struggling."

Blitz intended to collapse the two halves back together immediately. He managed to start the motion before the burning arrived.

It came from the edges of the split, the surfaces where the blade had contacted the blood. The fluid there began to roll and churn, rising into fine dense bubbles, the sound of it filling the stairwell in a low continuous boil.

The smell followed: scorched organic material and something sharp like sulfur.

A short involuntary sound from the air above. Blitz tried to merge the two halves and extinguish the heat through mass, every point of contact between a clean portion and a burning one caught immediately, the reaction spreading inward rather than being smothered. Joining the halves made it worse.

"What in the—?"

He could feel it precisely: a thread of something that wasn’t vampire blood and wasn’t human blood, woven into the fluid at the point where the blade had passed. Minimal in volume, maximal in purity, and carrying a rejection so absolute that it didn’t need mass to express itself.

His own blood was moving away from it instinctively, those portions unable to escape being consumed where they stood, boiling down, burning to nothing, refusing to be reintegrated.

He could neither merge the halves nor recover his humanoid form. The thread held the wound open and kept spreading.

He made the decision quickly. He severed the affected sections entirely, cutting them loose, jettisoning a significant volume of himself to contain the contamination. The blood tide shrank visibly. The burning stopped at the new boundary.

He rose, merged the clean remainder, and reformed as Blitz.

The reconstruction looked worse than before. Hollowed cheeks. Deep eye sockets. An entity whose substance was substantially blood, and who had just sacrificed a meaningful portion of that substance to avoid a worse outcome.

He circled at altitude on his bat wings, watching Raphael below with focused attention.

From the beginning of this fight, the opponent had produced something unexpected at every turn. He wasn’t willing to assume the surprises were exhausted.

Approaching in melee while the oil might still be in play would be accepting an unnecessary risk.

A pulse moved through the spatial connection that anchored him to this enclosed space. His attention shifted briefly outward, through the bond he could perceive the castle’s entrance, and there was the gold-haired figure, working through a sequence of parchments, invoking the sky-god’s domain over spatial boundaries.

He recognized the divine jurisdiction in the

cadence of the words. If the prayer was answered, even this sealed space, built and bound by the half-moon count himself, would struggle to hold.

The timeline had shortened.

While his attention was split, Raphael was already working, coating the blade again, moving efficiently.

At his feet, the portions Blitz had discarded had finished their process: gone to black ash, the dragon blood having refused to permit reabsorption into anything vampiric, consuming itself rather than yield. The ashes held the faint smell of the combustion.

"Two strikes remaining." He straightened. "Efficient."

Blitz pulled his attention back. The second arrival couldn’t be prevented. He needed the fight resolved before the odds changed.

He kept his distance and separated a volume of blood into his palm, channeling arcane energy through his embedded marks into the fluid as it left his hand.

The blood reshaped mid-air, rods first, then longer, then nearly two meters each, the surface hardening into something that could hold an edge, an array of blood-spears forming in tight ranks before him. Every point angled downward at Raphael. His arm swept forward.

The spears launched simultaneously, dense and continuous, filling the stairwell’s vertical space from multiple angles. Not aimed precisely, designed to funnel.

A high-speed vampire was extremely difficult to hit with a thrown weapon, and Blitz had no interest in trying. He was here to cut off movement, not to strike a single target.

Raphael went to Blood Frenzy speed the moment the volley began, a red blur threading through the stairwell, railings, level changes, the height differentials of the ascending steps all serving as deflection points. For a moment the motion looked fluid. He had room.

The first wave missed. The spears that had passed him or buried themselves in the walls and floor began to vibrate. Blitz called them back, pulling them free, reforming them at his side.

The second volley was a coverage strike, every recovered spear relaunched simultaneously, the trajectories calculated to intersect every remaining path in the geometry of the space Raphael was occupying.

It was the difference between throwing at a target and removing the places the target could go.

The blood-spear matrix came down.

Raphael burned most of his remaining arcane reserves in a single expenditure and used Shadow Jump to step entirely outside the attack’s footprint, reappearing on the stairs several levels down.

His landing turned into a roll, then into an uncontrolled tumble that ended when he hit the wall and stopped. He coughed once, something metallic at the back of his throat, and checked the capsule bottle.

Two left.

Blitz, circling above, showed no particular effort in his expression. The large-scale attack had cost him relatively little, at his level, arcane expenditure at that scale was manageable.

The dragon blood burning had been more genuinely tiring. The asymmetry was clear: if this rate of exchange continued, no number of capsules would keep Raphael in the fight long enough.

Raphael swallowed one capsule, felt the arcane energy spread through the channels in its familiar painful rush, and held Death Crow and thought.

The oil had been decisive both times it had landed. Two applications remained. The constraint was reach, Blitz had been circling well above melee range since the first burning, and Death Crow’s balance was wrong for throwing.

The weapon was not a javelin. Getting it to him wasn’t straightforward.

Blitz’s expression shifted.

The specific quality of it, a predator who has watched the prey walk into the prepared position, registered on Raphael a moment before the sound reached him.

Something above, from the underside of the steps overhead. He looked up.

A blood-red cocoon directly above him.

The steady rhythmic pulse it had maintained since he arrived in the stairwell was gone. It was expanding now, continuously, the membrane being stretched thinner with each second, the surface splitting in fine lines at the points of maximum stress, red light bleeding outward through each crack. The expansion wasn’t stopping. It was accelerating.

"Damn it!"

He was already moving. The radius was wrong.

The cocoon detonated.

The shockwave expanded through half the stairwell in an instant, a concussive blast that had no single direction, it came from everywhere, filling the enclosed space completely, the sound of it enormous.

BOOM.

A loud bang echoed in the stairwell. It wasn’t the explosion of a fireball; there was no fire, no flames, only splattered blood. It didn’t come from Raphael, but from the human being encased in that thing.

Blitz laughed, as if he could see the enemy’s miserable state, as if he could see the scene of blood and flesh flying everywhere, but when the dust settled, his smile froze on his face.

"What?!"