On the other side of the city, beneath the castle and the storm-dark sky, a different kind of confrontation had begun.

Inside the enormous sealed stairwell, two red blurs collided and separated at speeds that left afterimages on the air. For the first time in any fight Raphael had been in, he was not holding his own on speed,he was being dominated.

A genuine Lv5 vampire with Blood Frenzy active reached a physical capability of Lv8, a ceiling that seemed to represent the limit of what the ability could produce, and even at that ceiling it was enough to completely suppress a Lv6 Blood Frenzy from Raphael’s side.

Crash.

Another high-speed collision. Blitz moved through the space like his name, a single coherent lightning strike, there and gone, materializing at Raphael’s back before the perception could register where he’d been, and the claws opened his abdomen in a clean stroke.

"Damn it—!"

Raphael used Shadow Jump again, the third time in as many minutes. Without it, he’d have been falling back on wraith-form continuously, burning through a resource he needed to preserve.

Shadow Jump wasn’t free either, the arcane reserves had dropped sharply, but at least the other option remained intact.

He pulled another capsule from his coat during the brief distance the jump had bought and swallowed it.

The conversion hit like a wall of water against a sealed door. The compressed arcane energy flooding his channels found residual reserves still present, unlike the last time, when he’d been running completely dry, and the collision between the incoming surge and the remaining contents was violent in a way the body registered as pain.

Blood ran from both nostrils. His head produced a dull concussive throbbing. The colors in the stairwell began overlapping, vivid hues bleeding into the darker ones and back again, the visual field doubling in layers.

Across from him, Blitz had not moved to press the advantage. He looked at Raphael once, with the particular quality of someone choosing not to bother, and then his attention shifted entirely to the blood-red cocoons covering the underside of every step above and below them.

He produced the Half-Moon Badge.

He began speaking in a language that wasn’t any language Raphael had formally learned, and yet it was fully intelligible, the same ancient register the System used, the one that felt less like a specific tongue and more like the origin point from which other tongues diverged.

"Moon. Your chosen one brings you offerings. May their souls soothe your inconstant nature. May their blood restore the crimson that once colored you.

I, in the name of Jestan, begin the investiture. I pray for the moon’s favor, I pray for the moon’s blessing, I pray for the descent of divine power, open what remains within this badge, the blood-source essence belonging to Count Jestan."

Even in the solemnity of the words, Blitz couldn’t entirely suppress the edge of mockery in his delivery.

The reverence for the moon was genuine enough, but the supplication in his tone was a performance, hollow and slightly contemptuous of its own form.

The stairwell responded.

Vibrations moved through the structure, emanating from the cocoons, spreading through the stone, a low rhythmic pulse that had no obvious source and came from everywhere at once.

Raphael’s assessment shifted immediately.

"He was lying. Or Alp was." The investiture ritual was supposed to last an entire night. This had barely started. Which meant...

He put away the dragon blood blade oil he’d been about to apply. Too early. If the goal was disruption rather than a decisive strike, he needed different tools, attrition, not execution.

He pulled several recovery potions from his shadow and secured them within easy reach, then waited for Blitz to continue the next invocation.

He didn’t give him the chance. He moved.

A blood-red blur crossed the stairwell, and because Blitz was divided between maintaining the ritual and tracking the incoming attack, his reaction came a half-beat late.

Raphael drove into him and bore him to the ground, and before Blitz had fully disengaged from the ritual’s mental state, Death Crow was already coming out of the shadow at Raphael’s side and swinging for the neck.

The blade made contact.

Then the System delivered its analysis, finally, in the aftermath of the strike:

[Analyzing... Complete.]

[Lv5: Vampire Baron.]

[Cardinal Sin: Superbia.]

[Type: Demon.]

Lv5, meaning four advancements. Eight mutation points total. And the physical resistance was sitting at Lv5 as well. Blitz had spent almost everything on the defensive ceiling.

The death stroke that should have opened the neck left only a shallow mark, Death Sentence attaching to the wound like frost on glass, the blade stopping there as though the remaining tissue were stone.

The contact yanked Blitz back from the ritual completely. His pupils reset, found Raphael, and the expression that settled onto his face was not calm.

"Insufferable human. No one ever taught you not to interrupt someone while they’re occupied?"

The irritation in his voice had an edge of something more specific, the interruption hadn’t just been a physical disruption. Whatever state the ritual required, breaking it at that moment had cost him something he was going to have to rebuild.

His hands returned to their combat configuration. At Lv8 physical functions, the single swipe that knocked Death Crow from Raphael’s grip was effortless, Raphael couldn’t even tighten fast enough to stop the weapon from spinning free.

It fell into shadow below them, and he quietly activated Shadow Merchant to draw it back into his own shadow before Blitz could track its trajectory.

The following claw came for his throat. Raphael’s right hand became a claw as well and closed around it in a scissors grip, holding the tips one inch from his neck.

The strength differential was obvious and not closeable. He stopped trying to win the force exchange and started redirecting it, using the angle he’d created to guide Blitz’s own momentum, turning the trapped claw into the path of the other one.

The two sets of elongated claws caught each other in the tight space, too long for the geometry, locking up against each other with a continuous grinding of hardened edges.

Raphael drove his own claws into Blitz’s chest, grabbed hold, and swung. He used Blitz’s own body as the mass, his head as the striking surface, and brought it into the stone balustrade at full force.

The granite shattered at the impact point. Blitz went through the gap and out into the vertical space of the stairwell.

He corrected in the air without apparent effort and landed clean on the step below, his expression reorganizing into something sharper.

"Since you’re this eager to die, let me show you what separates us."

Blitz’s body came apart.

Not violently, deliberately, dispersing into a cloud of discrete blood droplets that hung in the stairwell’s air and formed their own gravity. His voice came from everywhere at once.

"This is the height you can never reach. This is what it means to be vampire, at its core. Until you abandon the human body you were built with, you will never touch this."

The cloud converged.

Not like a wave, like a high-pressure system releasing, each droplet carrying kinetic energy, all of it pointed in the same direction. The impact struck Raphael and the section of balustrade behind him simultaneously. The stone gave way. He went over the edge.

He fell, turning in the air, and landed on one of the blood-red cocoons.

"Damn it!"

The cocoon yielded under his weight and kept yielding. The surface had the properties of deep mud, the more resistance he applied, the faster he sank.

Thin filaments extended from within and wound around his legs, pulling steadily.

At the same time, the blood cloud descended over him, individual droplets finding exposed skin and dissolving it, drawing fluid from beneath through the opened surfaces, pulling from every point simultaneously while the cocoon held him in place.

He triggered wraith-form immediately. His physical body shed its mass and the suction lost its grip. But in less than a full second of contact, the vampire had taken enough that the deficit was already registering, the lightheadedness, the specific depletion that the blood thirst answered to.

He moved upward through the stairwell in the incorporeal state, passing through everything between him and the ceiling, and reasserted when he reached the top.

His expression, when he came back to physical form, was not his own.

The hunger had moved to the front of everything. His eyes had gone fully red.

The instinct was immediate and specific, the cocoon beside him, the blood visible through the membrane, the scent of the person sealed inside reaching him through whatever sensory amplification the blood thirst applied. The instinct had language, internally: open it. drain it. now.

Below him, the blood cloud descended again and gathered itself back into Blitz’s shape. He looked up at Raphael with the amusement of someone who had just successfully identified a weak point.

"Go ahead. Drain whoever’s in that cocoon. Kill the person you came here to save." He gestured magnanimously.

"I won’t stop you. Letting you restore yourself isn’t in my interest, true, but the look on your face when you come back to yourself afterward strikes me as worth the trade."

Raphael took one step. Then another.

Not toward the cocoon.

Toward Blitz.

The amusement on Blitz’s face faded by degrees, replaced by something that was not quite respect but was adjacent to it.

"Interesting."