[Hunt complete.]

[Sin acquired: +9.6.]

[Current Sin: 53.16 / 160.]

Death Crow pushed its hunger toward him, but a derivative type couldn’t be taken into the First Hunting Ground anyway, and this one had left behind no Core and no arcane material.

Completely useless as a capture.

Raphael simply fed the soul directly to the weapon, as payment for the activations he’d been running, keeping the harpy elder’s soul in reserve.

The weapon had been fed. It would quiet down for a while.

He turned back to the body.

The black membrane was pulling away from the surface, retreating like a tide going out, peeling off the pale skin beneath, and then gathering itself back into the black robe still draped across the corpse.

Alp’s Shadow lay on the floor inside it, convulsing, the contract violation working through every layer of whatever passed for his physiology.

The invisible punishment had stripped away his capacity for resistance entirely.

As a precaution, Raphael dug through Sam’s cloth bag and found the exorcism materials that had been sitting untouched since he’d collected them.

He picked up the silver powder and dusted it over Alp where he lay.

The convulsing intensified. The presence in the robe grew thinner.

Raphael picked him up.

"I ask. You answer. Otherwise I kill you."

Alp hung there like a piece of ruined cloth. No response. But there had been no hunt completion notification, which meant whatever was in the robe wasn’t dead yet.

"Where did the vampire Blitz go?"

Still nothing. Raphael waited. Then he shrugged, dropped Alp on the floor, drew the revolver, and fired.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

The cylinder turned, silver rounds going in and coming out, and what had already looked like a damaged piece of clothing became a piece of damaged clothing with several new holes.

Alp thrashed against the floor with the specific motion of something that couldn’t stop moving, but not a single syllable came out.

Raphael lowered the gun and actually thought about this.

It wasn’t a matter of stubbornness. It didn’t look like a refusal to cooperate. It looked like a physical impossibility.

Earlier, the voice that had come through Alp had sounded adjacent to the thrall’s. Almost identical in texture. Which wasn’t how he remembered Alp from before, that had been a distinct presence.

"You can only speak when you’re being possessing someone else?" He turned this over. "Strange type of Demon."

A slight tremor in the cloth. An acknowledgment of sorts.

"All right. I’ll give you one opportunity to cooperate."

Alp was barely present, nearly nothing left of his capacity for resistance.

Raphael thought briefly about the wraith-form available to him as a countermeasure against any reversal, then picked the robe up from the floor and put it on.

The voice that arrived in the room was close to his but not quite his, like a harmonic out of tune with the source.

"Blitz went to the castle. He took the badge you gave him. He took a great many people with him."

"The castle. What’s he doing there?"

A pause.

"I can answer all of your questions. But only on one condition. You have to guarantee my freedom when this is over. Without that, there’s nothing to discuss."

Raphael made a short sound.

"I have a dozen ways to give you a convincing false promise. But what would that accomplish? You wouldn’t believe it and neither would I. Only idiots trust verbal agreements."

Alp was quiet for a moment.

"There’s a mechanism that binds us at the level of rule rather than trust. A Demon contract.

You can specify that I must be honest with you. I can specify the terms of my freedom. Once signed, it binds both sides at the soul level, neither of us can violate it.

The consequences, as you’ve already observed, are immediate and severe."

Raphael nodded.

He had seen it. Alp violating his contract with the thrall had gone from full capacity to near death in moments. The enforcement was real.

That also meant that putting Alp into the First Hunting Ground wasn’t viable, a Demon placed there was functionally dead.

Whatever intelligence Alp held would die with him. The contract route was the only one that preserved access to that information.

He knew the theory behind Demon contracts. Standard knowledge for any serious transcendent, for those without a Hunting Ground system, it was one of the primary methods for acquiring supernatural abilities.

Find a Demon willing to communicate, enter a trial together, succeed and the contract forms, the terms determining the cost.

Fail, and the contract breaks, with some probability of losing control of the result.

There was real risk in it for him. He’d always used the Hunting Ground directly, he’d never done a trial.

But what Blitz had done, the timing of it, pressed against him. Taking people to the castle. The badge. The ritual.

The castle’s illusions were gone now. Blitz had just received the confirmation. Whatever was planned there, the window for it had just opened.

Raphael closed his eyes and opened them. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"Agreed."

Alp walked him through the process. It matched everything in his memory.

The sleeve of the robe acting as a hand, rolling a pen across the debris of the broken desk and writing out a sequence of characters.

He looked at the script and felt something he hadn’t expected, recognition without prior learning.

The language was ancient, deep, with the quality of something that existed before other languages rather than alongside them. The same script the System used. Just two words: Demon. Contract.

He knew how to speak them before he understood how he knew.

He and Alp said the words together. A translucent sheet of parchment materialized in front of them.

Alp’s Shadow wrote first, using a quill made of compressed intent:

*Upon conclusion of the contract, you must release me. During the contract, you may not inquire into my intentions after departure, and may not threaten me or interfere with my leaving in any form.*

The cost column was blank. Alp explained without being asked.

"That column isn’t mine to fill. The trial determines it, based on how both of us perform. The contract sets the cost."

Raphael nodded. Everything Alp had said tracked exactly with what he’d learned years ago. The willingness to be accurate here was its own signal.

He wrote his own terms:

During questioning, you must maintain absolute honesty. All questions must be answered completely. Equivocal responses do not fulfill this requirement.

Additionally, during the contract period, you must provide all mutation skills within your capacity and cooperate actively when cooperation is possible, rather than observing passively.

The final items: trial type and contract duration.

Alp chose the Trial of Fear. Raphael had no objection, one was the same as another to him.

The duration took longer. Both of them had a position and neither was giving it up without argument.

After some time they reached a number that was a compromise for both sides.

Three months.

Raphael didn’t move to start the trial immediately. He still didn’t trust Alp without a third party in the structure somewhere.

He opened the door, left the booth, and found Miguel after some searching in the underground’s quieter corridors.

Miguel had news about David, the phone call, the content, what had been confirmed.

Raphael listened through it without interrupting, nodded, and relayed the relevant parts of his own findings, cutting out the specifics of what had happened in the booth.

At the end, he made his request.

"Once I’ve extracted what I need from Alp, I’m going directly to the castle. Whatever Blitz is planning there has a timer on it.

To do this properly I need to sign a Demon contract, that’s how I get accurate answers. You know what a contract guardian is?

A third party in the structure who can manually terminate the process if things break down."

Miguel’s expression sharpened.

"I don’t believe you trust me. A trial is a significant undertaking. And I don’t believe that Demon is genuinely willing to cooperate, I don’t know whether you follow any of the Gods, but for those of us who do, Demons are.."

He stopped.

"They are corrupt. They are evil. Cooperation with them is not something I can do."

Raphael just looked at him.

"I don’t expect the trial to actually begin. Personal reasons. That part is confidential."

Miguel pressed his lips together, weighed it, and arrived at a middle point.

"I can stand outside the door and prevent anyone from entering. Your trial with the Demon, I will not participate in that. It’s where I draw the line. I represent the Church. I will not make common cause with evil."

He said this in a strange tone. On the one hand, he was convinced of it, but on the other hand, what he was doing now was no different from cooperating with Demon.

Raphael, a wanted criminal and also labeled as evil by the church, looked at his young collaborator and chuckled.

"I hope so."