"Ngh—"
The dust hadn't finished settling before the claws were around his throat again, pinning him flat to the ground. The situation had flipped in the span of a single breath.
[Analyzing... Complete.]
[Lv5: Alpha-class Werewolf.]
[Cardinal Sin: Ira.]
[Classification: Demon.]
Alpha-class. The term surfaced from somewhere in the Red Gloves database, a category of mutation, the kind that certain Demons could achieve when specific conditions were met.
Raphael filed it away and focused on the hands around his throat, both of his gripping the werewolf's wrist, the muscles in his arms burning with the effort of keeping just enough space to breathe.
The werewolf snarled and lifted him off the ground. Then it drove him back down into it.
Crack.
The impact hit his back like a sledgehammer. Blood came up his throat and out of his mouth, landing across the werewolf's fur in a spray of red.
"Damn it!"
He said it through the pain, and he activated the Wraith Form.
The resistance in his hands faded. The werewolf felt it happening and squeezed harder, but there was nothing left to squeeze, the pressure found no purchase, the grip closed on air, and Raphael's incorporeal form slipped free as easily as smoke through a fist.
He drifted back, assessed, started moving toward where Lyndon's sword had landed.
The gun was the heavier hitter but the sword was the better tool for close work, and everything about the last two minutes had been very close work.
The werewolf's claws lit up.
Red light, the blood moon's color, gathering in the grooves between the nails, and then it reached forward and raked the air in a single broad motion, aimed at nothing, aimed at the space Raphael was passing through.
The sound it made was the same as before, that shrieking, compressed crack of displaced air, but the color was wrong. Not blue.
Red.
The net that expanded from the motion wasn't the measured crescent arcs from earlier. It was dense, overlapping, a cage of red blade-light that covered the full area around him in every direction.
"What—"
He lunged forward. Got one hand on Lyndon's hilt.
The net closed on his wraith form in the same instant.
It didn't pass through. Whatever the Alpha mutation had done to that ability, it had changed the quality of the output, the light hit the incorporeal form directly, and the incorporeal form had no answer for it.
The cuts were small individually and there were dozens of them, and Raphael's wraith body came apart in pieces, each piece dissolving into scattered light, and his consciousness went with it into static.
When he came back, he was physical again.
The forced reversion had dropped him on the ground, and he'd rolled several meters before stopping.
His whole body rang with a dull, pervasive pain that had no specific location because everything was contributing to it equally. He found the sword and grabbed it, got his hand tight around the hilt through sheer stubbornness.
The werewolf was already on him.
One moment of disconnection. That was the full extent of the opening he'd given it, and it was enough. In a fight running at this speed, a single moment of falling behind was the same as falling behind entirely.
"Damn..."
The only real option he had was to hold the sword and wait.
The werewolf built up speed in the approach, running on all fours, and the ground shook with each stride, five meters of Alpha-class Demon at full sprint, which produced a level of kinetic energy that the road surface clearly found objectionable.
Raphael drove Lyndon's blade into the ground point-first, braced behind it, and let the impact come.
It came.
He went backward. The sword dragged across the ground behind him, carving a deep groove in the asphalt from one end to the other, the blade bending under the lateral force, the edge rolling and distorting. It bled off speed.
Not enough speed, they hit the standing portion of the teaching building together at somewhere around 140 kilometers per hour, and the building expressed no enthusiasm for receiving them.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The werewolf had him by the collar and was using him as a battering ram through the interior, back-first through classroom partition walls, one after another in a continuous chain.
The scenery changed rapidly and absurdly, neat rows of desks, then the open expanse of an indoor sports hall, then the half-assembled furniture of a cafeteria mid-renovation.
Each wall announced its failure with the same dull boom, and the debris that followed each one was a little different from the last, and none of it improved the situation.
East side of the building to the west side, a straight line punched through everything between them.
They came out the other end.
Raphael pulled himself off the ground slowly.
Multiple fractures. He could feel them, the specific wrongness of bone that had been moved somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.
The vampire constitution and the borrowed Flesh Bishop capacity were both working on it, but this kind of damage required time he didn't currently have available.
And beyond the structural damage, the blood reserves that had been stocked up from twenty blood bags were running thin.
Maintaining Lv9 Blood Frenzy burned through fuel at a rate that didn't care how much he'd started with.
He wasn't a Lv9 transcendent. His body could reach those functions temporarily, but the experience to use them correctly wasn't there yet. The gap between having the output and knowing what to do with it was showing.
His life band chimed.
The alarm he'd set at the start of the fight. Forty minutes.
He looked at the werewolf.
The blood moon on its forehead had come down to a thin crescent, the red light barely visible, the reserves almost gone. It had been pushing hard too.
Then the rotor sound arrived from above.
A helicopter, red and blue livery, IFSA markings on the hull, the searchlight sweeping down and catching the werewolf in a column of white that made it throw an arm up over its eyes.
"Hey, partner!" Eva's voice over a speaker, and then Eva herself visible in the open door, one hand on the mounted gun with the energy of someone who had been waiting to use it for a while.
"We can't get low, it'd reach us, but we can do this!"
The trigger went down and stayed down.
The gun opened up at a rate that made conversation impossible. The rounds came down in a dense curtain, not targeted so much as area-covering, and the werewolf's entire zone of movement was inside it.
There was nowhere to go that the pattern didn't follow, and the hits accumulated fast, punching through the fur and the hide and into the flesh underneath.
"WORFF!!"
It looked at Raphael. One long look, the calculation clearly visible in it.
Then another burst from above and the calculation changed.
It turned and ran for the building.
The gun tracked it all the way to the doorway, sparks bouncing off the pavement at its heels, and then the angle was gone and the firing stopped.
A few blood bags dropped down from the helicopter door and landed near Raphael. Eva leaned out after them.
"Our firepower can't put it down, the close work is still on you! Get your blood levels up, come on!"
Then she leaned back in and looked at the pilot.
"Device deployment confirmed?"
The pilot checked the instrument panel and gave her a thumbs up.
Eva nodded, sat back, and closed her eyes.
Her consciousness traveled down through the arcane channel to the ground-level device, which had arrived safely by parachute several minutes earlier and had been waiting.
The projection materialized on the ground.
She landed, looked around to orient herself.
And stopped.
There was a mirror sitting in the street.