Meanwhile, on the battlefield.
Jason's situation had deteriorated past the point where dignity was a meaningful concept.
He was being pressured, genuinely, consistently pressured, by a transcendent a full level below him.
His flesh tendrils could puncture vampire defenses without much effort. They could drill through packed road surface.
Against the thorns, they accomplished nothing.
The black spines were the problem. Every time they found purchase, they didn't just pierce, they drained, the connection opening like a tap, his vitality flowing out faster than he could consciously track.
And in the middle of a fight that required his full attention, he couldn't spare the focus to sever each link cleanly. He could only retreat and watch himself get older.
"This is what a witch is..." His eyes had gone fully red, something dark sitting in his voice. "You poisonous *creature.*"
He'd given up his body for this level. Discarded the flesh he'd been born into, rebuilt himself through ritual into something that could be called a Lv4 entity. He'd paid for it in ways that couldn't be refunded.
And here was this girl, barely grown, using power she'd never asked for and never worked for, pressing him back across his own arena with something she'd simply been *born with.*
The envy was so complete it had restructured his face.
But envy had its other side, and he felt that too, the hungry, patient variety, the kind that made plans.
He looked at Evelyn. The way the moonlight caught her.
"They say a witch's power can be taken, under the right circumstances..." He ran his tongue across his teeth.
"You'd better pray to whatever you pray to that you don't end up in my hands, little witch. Because if you do—"
High beams hit him directly in the face.
The darkness he'd been using as cover evaporated instantly. He went from invisible to unmissable in the space of a blink, lit up like a subject under interrogation.
"...What—"
He stood there for a moment, genuinely unable to account for what he was seeing.
Then the engine sound registered. The diesel exhaust. The growing vibration moving through the ground beneath his feet.
A heavy truck. Full size. Coming at him with the committed velocity of something that had decided this was what it was doing now.
For reasons that could only be attributed to a specific type of personality, the driver was holding the horn down.
*WHHHHHAAAAA—*
The decibels were considerable. Evelyn's hands went to her ears involuntarily, and the haze that had been building behind her eyes.
The particular gray of someone who has been running at maximum output for too long, began to thin. She blinked. The world came back into focus.
"Raphael!"
The relief in her voice didn't try to disguise itself. Then the confusion caught up.
"...Where did you get a truck?!"
She didn't wait for an answer. She already understood what he was doing, two years of shared operational instinct didn't require explanation, and she turned to assess the angles.
The Lance house sat to one side. She looked at it.
It needed nothing from her.
The thorns spread in a precise net pattern, the high beams illuminating Jason against the dark like a spotlight finding its subject, the accuracy suddenly trivial.
"You think I'll—NO—"
Jason's composure came apart. He flung his arms out and the flesh tendrils rose in response, not to attack, but to build, stacking themselves side by side into a wall of compressed tissue running perpendicular to the truck's approach vector.
Dense enough that the thorns couldn't punch through in a straight line. Dense enough to buy him seconds.
He turned and ran.
Open ground. That was the answer, get to open ground, let the truck pass by, let distance reset the terms of the engagement.
Out in the open he could fight the attrition battle properly. Let her burn herself down.
"You idiots! You can't!"
The ground moved under his foot.
"No!"
He understood immediately. His tendrils were all committed to the wall, nothing left to defend the approach below him.
The earth buckled. Thorns pushed up through the soil and found his legs and held, the grip immediate and absolute, and then the pull came and he was going backward whether he wanted to or not.
"No — No! NO!!!"
He threw himself down, drove his fingers into the dirt, tried to find something to hold. The mud gave him nothing.
His fingernails cut long grooves through the earth as he was dragged across it, hauled hand over hand toward the front of the house with no mechanism available to stop it.
Evelyn watched him arrive.
The thorns wrapped him efficiently, arms, torso, legs, pulling tight, sinking into the flesh rather than simply restraining it.
"Did you think you were the only one who could use the ground?"
She bound him to the front of the house with the thoroughness of someone who did not intend to do this twice.
In Jason's vision, which was now filled entirely with the approaching truck, a detail registered peripherally, something small and round, sitting in the garden off to the side.
The little ball. Moving slightly. Just once.
Raphael hit the door of the cab and jumped.
The thorns were already there, spines retracted, the bramble catching him cleanly and pulling him away from the truck's path in the same motion.
BOOM!!!
The sound was not like a crash. It was larger than that, the kind of impact that reshaped the air around it, the truck's cab driving through the front wall of the house and continuing.
Furniture and plaster and structural timber exploding outward in every direction.
The wheels found traction in things that had been indoors a moment ago.
What reached Evelyn across the distance was the vibration first, then the sound, then the pressure wave.
The first floor received the truck. The second floor, losing its support, came down on top of the first.
The building folded in on itself and on the truck and on Jason Lance simultaneously, the collapse building its own momentum.
The whole structure spending about four seconds becoming a very organized pile of material that was no longer a house.
Black smoke. Diesel spilling across the rubble and the surrounding ground, soaking in.
The tendrils in the air went rigid.
Then they shrank.
Not gradually, visibly, measurably, each one compressing inward from the tip as though something that had been inflating them was no longer doing so.
They dropped in pieces, each section hitting the ground and twitching briefly before going still.
Something shifted in the wreckage.
Jason Lance was no longer a three-dimensional entity.
He had been reduced to a thin stratum of organic material distributed across a meaningful surface area, finding the spaces between heavy objects to occupy in the manner of liquid rather than solid.
What could be seen of his eyes through the gaps in the rubble was still pointed at Raphael with an intensity that suggested he had opinions about the situation.
Then the coils let go.
The impact had finished what the braking had started.
The wooden cradles gave out completely, and four objects weighing several tons each rolled free of the cargo bay with the unhurried finality of geological events.
*BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.*
Each one punched through the cab on the way down.
Each one continued through whatever was beneath it.
Each one, arriving in sequence, addressed the question of Jason's precise location one more time.
When the fourth one stopped moving, there was no clear answer to where Jason was.
"...Strange."
Raphael looked at the wreckage.
By any framework he understood, the question of Jason Lance had been resolved multiple times over.
But the system notification hadn't come.
"...He's not dead. Playing dead, maybe."
He was calculating where to put a round through the fuel tank when Evelyn went down.
Not dramatically, just one knee finding the ground, and then she was staying there, the breath coming out of her in something between an exhale and a controlled collapse.
The fight had run the account to zero.
Raphael moved toward her.
The pieces on the ground answered the magnetic pull of each other.
Slowly, with the commitment of something that refused to accept the most recent several minutes as conclusive.
The scattered fragments of Jason Lance located each other, adhered, and began the process of assembling an upright shape.
What stood up was visibly reduced. The mass was less.
The movements were effortful in a way they hadn't been before.
Everything about him announced that he was running on whatever came after reserves.
But he was standing.
Raphael stared at him.
"You can't just stay dead? like a normal person?!"