A red blur cut through the center of the city, threading between fast-moving cars, leaping between rooftop ledges, carrying a faint iron smell on the air.

With Blood Frenzy pushing his physical functions to Lv6, Raphael moved in something close to a straight line across most of the city.

Pedestrians stopped and stared at whatever had just passed them. A reporter looked at a blurred photograph and tried to construct a headline worth running.

Social media filled with shaky videos and breathless speculation about vampire sightings. The police switchboard went unanswerable. IFSA alarms triggered across the district.

In under fifteen minutes, half the city was looking in the wrong direction, which was exactly what Raphael had needed.

With that kind of attention pointed at him, the Church’s operation at the nightclub had room to move without drawing scrutiny.

As the city fell behind him and the road turned rural, the blood thirst climbed with the distance. He was well into the outskirts now, on a stretch of road with no street lighting, moving at a speed that made the darkness irrelevant.

At intervals along the way, small animals stiffened and collapsed, the vampire’s speed was enough that they felt nothing, reduced to hollow husks before any signal of pain had time to reach them.

Blood Frenzy outpaced any vehicle. Less than an hour from the nightclub’s underground to the remote castle on the edge of the city’s territory.

The castle was not quiet.

Storm clouds had gathered overhead, lightning moving through them at irregular intervals, a heaviness to the air that settled on the old stone like a weight. At the entrance, a silhouette stood alone, waiting.

"He’s waiting for me?"

Absurd as it seemed, the evidence was clear. Blitz stood with his hands clasped behind his back, and when Raphael arrived he turned only his eyes.

"You came. I knew a bounty hunter couldn’t solve illusions the Jester designed alone. You’re more than you look, I understood that much from the beginning. A pity I didn’t remove you earlier."

He regarded Raphael with the evaluation of someone adjusting a prior estimate.

"You seem stronger than before."

Raphael considered the opening, and decided to use it.

An angry opponent was easier than a calm one.

"I want to ask you something first. Where are the people you took?"

Blitz shook his head, unhurried, turning away with that characteristic posture, chin elevated, regarding everything from slightly above it.

"What I want has never changed. Advancement of my life-form. Everything else has been a means to that end, nothing more. As for the cargo..."

A light sound, dismissive.

"I’m not obligated to satisfy your curiosity. I’m speaking with you at all only because you carry something of my bloodline’s nature."

He stopped and looked more carefully at Raphael, the red eyes conducting a specific examination.

"Strange. You have the vampire’s essence, but no blood-source core. Not a contractor, your movements are too native. Too instinctive."

He tilted his head.

"Tell me what you are. My own kind, or a human who hunts my kind?"

Raphael had what he needed. He went for the sore point.

"Unfortunate news: I haven’t killed a real vampire yet. Though that changes tonight. The vampire’s name is Blitz Jestan, the one who looks at everyone from his chin."

He let that sit.

"As for my Blood Frenzy, it came from someone I hunted. An artificial vampire, if I recall the description correctly. Your kind, processed through some industrial method? Interesting product."

Blitz’s expression went flat and cold, the phrasing landing precisely where it was aimed.

"Artificial. Artificial." A sound that was almost a laugh. "A biotechnology company. Of course. That explains it." He paused. "And now I have no remaining uncertainty."

He said nothing further. He turned and walked through the castle entrance.

"Human. If you have the nerve to follow, do so. Mark the date. It will be the anniversary of your death, and this place will be where they don’t find what’s left of you."

Raphael made a short sound of amusement. Even the villain’s taunts were conventional.

"After you."

He stepped across the threshold.

The world inverted. His senses went dark.

---

Complete blackness, no light source anywhere. Something in the entrance had triggered, depositing him in a sealed space. He didn’t move immediately.

He’d prepared for this. He reached into the surrounding shadow, withdrew the night-vision potion Miguel had given him, and drank it.

His blue pupils contracted slightly, then released a faint luminescence. The darkness resolved into full color, the world rearranging itself through a different kind of perception.

He was standing in an enormous stairwell. The space exceeded the first and second floors combined, the construction and style identical to the castle exterior. Rising from the center: a massive pillar.

Around it, stone spiral stairs wide enough for several people abreast, the steps ascending along the pillar and along every interior wall of the castle.

And from beneath almost every step, suspended there, a red object hung.

The shape of it was something between fruit and cocoon. The surface was coated in a clear viscous fluid and it pulsed at regular intervals, expanding, contracting, expanding, with the rhythm of a heartbeat or of breathing, the two indistinguishable.

Dense. Dozens of them visible from where he stood. More above.

No rules against disturbing the host’s property applied in this space.

Raphael raised Death Crow and brought it down on the side of the nearest one.

The exterior resisted like dense rubber, the adhesive surface nearly catching the blade. He wrenched it free, struck again, and cut through.

He looked inside.

His eyes went still.

A person. Alive. Unclothed, half-submerged in blood-red fluid, knees pulled to the chest, curled into the posture of an infant. Eyes closed, expression composed, as if sleeping.

Each breath drew a response from the cocoon’s walls, the membrane contracting slightly with each inhale, as though body and vessel had merged.

"There are people inside these."

He looked at the stairwell. A cocoon under nearly every step. Dense, repeating, ascending above his sight. At minimum one hundred from where he stood, probably more.

"Damn it."

This was where the people from the nightclub had gone. Sealed inside these things, like the iron cages in the dining hall’s projection but wrapped in living tissue instead of metal bars. Hundreds of years apart and exactly the same logic.

He was still scanning the stairwell for Blitz when the voice came from directly behind him.

"Looking for me?"

He didn’t have time to turn. Claws opened his chest, the vampire’s hand driving into the center of the ribcage, fingers probing, searching for something specific.

Raphael triggered the wraith-form immediately.

The contact broke. He put distance between them and reasserted physical form, pulling a recovery potion from shadow without hesitation and drinking it in one motion.

In a fight at this level there was no space for conserving supplies, staying whole throughout was the only priority.

"Unfortunate."

Blitz extended his tongue and tasted the blood on his claws. His expression soured.

"Terrible. Something of my bloodline’s quality, mixed with something common. The human underneath ruins it."

He flicked his hand and the drops fell on the torn cocoon beside him. The membrane absorbed them instantly, sealing itself over the cut with visible eagerness.

"Neither one nor the other. Unpleasant."

He reset his posture and looked at Raphael again from the elevated chin.

"Was no one ever kind enough to teach you not to touch things that aren’t yours?"