Raphael approached like a shadow, no sound, no displacement of air that would register. All Blitz felt was a sudden cold at his back.

He turned on instinct, eyes sweeping for the opponent who had been absent from his field of vision for too long.

Nothing there.

Then Death Crow drove into his throat.

The blade went deep, the dragon blood on the edge igniting on contact, Blitz’s blood at the wound site boiling immediately, the fluid there scorching away into ash and vapor, the burning spreading inward from the entry point in all directions.

The pain hit his rational mind like a physical impact, disrupting the control he’d been maintaining over the blood-spear formation. The spears went still in the air, suspended, waiting for a command that his fractured concentration couldn’t deliver.

Miguel didn’t wait for a second invitation. He collapsed the circle’s spread inward, compressing the formation, and the reduced diameter converted into concentrated power, the lances that came through weren’t the broad-spread volley of before.

They were small, dense, precise, each one forearm-length and moving like something thrown by a trained hand.

Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk.

The ice lances crossed the stairwell in sequence and drove into Blitz’s back, one after another after another, the cold they carried reaching into the tissue around each wound and cutting through the nerve connections at the spine.

Blitz tried to form a counterattack. His arm responded in fragments, the signal from his brain arriving at his limbs in pieces, each simple command requiring multiple seconds to execute, the motor pathways interrupted at intervals he couldn’t override.

What he was experiencing defied simple description. Above his neck: the dragon blood burning, the flesh at the wound going black and falling away in sections, his blood at the contact sites consumed rather than spilled, the oil demanding its own toll in fire and dissolution.

Below his neck: the cold had occupied his nervous system entirely, reducing his body to something that responded to his will only intermittently, a machine with damaged connections that stuttered and seized when he tried to command it.

The intention to strike formed in his mind and went nowhere. It encountered the cold and stopped. Ice and fire met at his center and cancelled each other’s movement.

The invisibility expired.

Raphael materialized in front of him, fully visible, every muscle in his body carrying the tension of Blood Frenzy running at absolute capacity. His eyes were entirely red.

Lv6 physical functions, every enhancement the vampire’s blood had granted him, concentrated into a single motion.

"Die."

The vein at his forehead stood out as he drove everything he had downward. Death Crow’s edge moved in a clean line, the sound of bone giving way and muscle tearing distinct in the enclosed space.

The blade found the spine and followed it, from the neck downward, continuous, splitting the vertebrae one by one like a blade moving through dense wood, the cut precise and deep and all the way through.

Blitz came apart at the vertical axis, the two halves of his torso falling in opposite directions.

A vision arrived in the moment his body separated, the lightless river, black and still, the wooden boat coming from somewhere upstream with a ferryman aboard, the gesture of one hand indicating passage.

And beyond the river’s far shore, a silhouette facing away from him: the version of himself who had completed the ritual, ascended to Lv6, received the title of Viscount, the beginning of a long arc of restoration for his bloodline.

That future receding from him, the gap between it and the present becoming everything.

Raphael raised Death Crow again.

Click.

The blade swept horizontally. The head and the two halves of the torso completed their separate descents toward the stairwell’s lower levels, the trajectory of each piece independent and final.

Thud.

Three separate landings. Three sounds.

Blitz watched from the floor, his own half-body visible, the cold that Miguel’s ice had left working inward from the cut surfaces, the flesh going pale and then darkening toward purple-black.

The interior structures that an ordinary body would have kept hidden were exposed at the clean cut line, the blood already crystallizing as it met the cold air, spreading outward from the wound across the stone.

When that viscous, slightly thickened blood touched his cheek, Blitz’s eyes shifted.

The vampire’s life force was something a human’s wasn’t. He hadn’t died yet.

And in these last seconds of it, a different light moved through his eyes, something that wasn’t calm and wasn’t resigned.

He reached through the connection that still linked him to the half-moon badge, still open at its midpoint, still receptive to the host’s will. He pushed a single intention through it and closed the half-completed ritual.

The consecration framework that had been anchored at the Hiyori Nightclub’s distant location detached and returned.

The principle of sacrifice reconsolidated here, in this stairwell, the blood-red cocoons all around them receiving new designations, new marks appearing on their surfaces, the people inside them reclassified from remote sacrifice to immediate sacrifice.

As the ritual’s host, he retained authority over the lives enclosed within them, and that authority remained as long as he retained consciousness.

He wasn’t going to ascend. He understood that clearly.

He was going to make them pay for being here.

His teeth clenched. His voice rose into something between a shout and a dying animal’s cry, and the command went out through the ritual’s remaining connections, and the blood-red cocoons began to shudder and contract.

"If I can’t complete it, then you die here too! You think you can save people who have nothing to do with you?! You think that’s heroism?! Then show me how many you can actually save?"

Raphael hadn’t anticipated this. He’d been ready for a final-stage transformation, prepared for a last surge of desperation, but a deliberate final act directed at the captives wasn’t in the pattern he’d calculated for.

He cut the levitation effect immediately and dropped, falling toward Blitz’s head as fast as the stairwell allowed, using Shadow Jump at the last meter to shed the remaining velocity and land.

Around him, the cocoons nearest Blitz had already begun the process, their membranes contracting inward, drawing tight against the people enclosed inside them.

The people inside were waking up as the pressure hit them, the disorientation of consciousness returning into immediate pain, the sound of bones under compression filling the air, the screaming arriving with the waking.

Raphael’s left hand became a claw. His right drove into Blitz’s eye socket and lifted the head to eye level.

Blitz was still laughing.

Raphael bit down on the severed neck’s exposed edge.

Dragon blood entered through his canines directly into the skull. This time it reached the brain tissue.

The burning stopped being a peripheral sensation and became total, Blitz’s thoughts stopped mid-sentence, his jaw went slack, the laughter terminated. What came out of him after that was random and unmeaning.

His connection to the ritual became intermittent, the commands going through in fragments, the cocoons’ motion stuttering, the contraction rate slowing by more than a factor of ten.

A vampire’s body held considerable blood even in the skull. Raphael drew on it without restraint, the cheeks collapsing visibly inward under the extraction, and when his canines found the blood-source essence, the core of a vampire’s true nature, Blitz produced one coherent sound.

"No—!"

Raphael bit through it and tore it free.

The texture in his mouth was unlike any blood he’d taken before, it resisted, pushing back against integration, refusing to become part of him.

Dense and granular, a liquid that felt like fine crystals suspended in something thick, something that wanted to remain exactly what it was. The blood-source essence of a vampire, extracted whole.

He took the empty levitation potion bottle from his shadow, spat the essence into it, and sealed it.

[Hunt complete.]

[Sin acquired: +42.59.]

[Current Sin: 95.75 / 160.]

He exhaled.

The head in his hand was already going, the accelerated decay that followed a vampire’s death, the flesh collapsing inward at visible speed, the structure losing coherence and drying and finally fragmenting into black ash that lifted away on the stairwell’s air currents.

He looked around at the cocoons. They had gone still. The membranes had lost their elasticity, hanging slack and dry against the forms within, the rhythmic pulse entirely absent.

He went to the nearest one and pressed his ear against the surface.

A heartbeat. Faint. Present.

He stood back up.

"Still alive. At least that."

He took out Death Crow, preparing to split the membrane open and begin the work, and heard rapid footsteps from below. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

"Wait!"

Miguel was crossing the stairwell at a run, breathing hard, he’d been moving since Blitz went down but the stairwell’s scale had made the crossing a significant distance. He stopped, caught his breath, and looked at the cocoons with urgency.

"Don’t open them yet. I observed a few of them when I was coming through, they have a life-sustaining function built into the design. Whatever the original intention was, it’s working in our favor right now."

He looked around the stairwell and the quantity of cocoons hit him visibly. He inhaled sharply.

"This many... I have three recovery potions on me and I’ve used all my parchments. If we open them now we can’t adequately treat everyone in time. Leave the sustaining function active for now. I’ll go back for the Archbishop. Can you wait here?"

Raphael was silent for a moment.

He looked at the cocoons, at the faint pulsing still visible in the membranes, the signs of life continuing inside each one, small and resilient.

"Yes."