Raphael pushed the door open.
Moonlight. Four figures in the street, and him stepping out into it with a cigarette between his lips, taking one long pull before he even looked at them properly.
They'd come prepared. Long swords, hunting knives, shotguns.
Weapons distributed among the group with the kind of casual readiness that suggested this wasn't their first house call.
Some of them wore work clothes, the heavy canvas of laborers.
Others were in business dress, suits that had probably looked respectable this morning.
All of them wore the same badge over their hearts — a spiral rendered in densely packed teeth, curling inward.
The Gluttony Church.
Behind him, from the windows and the door frame, Evelyn's thorns came out.
They spread fast, threading through the fence posts and up the lamp poles, weaving themselves across every exit route until the street had become something else, a closed space, circular, the walls made of interlocking bramble.
An arena.
Raphael counted under his breath. Dropped the cigarette and put his foot on it.
The farthest one had already read the situation as bad and was raising a hunting rifle, thumb finding the hammer.
BANG.
The shot went through empty air.
He was already between two of them, the speed leaving trails of red light at the corners of his eyes.
And the one on his left hadn't finished processing the fact that the target had moved before the claws found his throat.
Blood. A lot of it, immediately. The undead's hands went to his neck on instinct, the motion purely biological, the expression on his face not quite catching up yet.
Behind him, the second one was already swinging a long sword.
Raphael's other hand had the silver blade reversed and raised without him looking.
The sword rang off it, the block precise and economical, and then he was turning, the pivot adding force, and the claws went through the swordsman's chest.
A third one, off to the side, fired a sawn-off shotgun.
Raphael pulled the first one in front of him.
The pellets shredded into the undead's back, and the damage was considerable, but the body kept moving, the arm coming up, the long sword still in its hand, still with instructions to use it.
He didn't step back. He grabbed the blade.
His palm opened immediately. The edge cut through to the bone and blood ran down the steel, but the sword wasn't going anywhere now, locked in a grip that had stopped caring about what it cost.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The shotgun again, no hesitation, no concern for the body currently between them.
Pellets tore through the undead's back and some of them kept going, finding Raphael through the thinner sections.
His coat went dark with blood. His brow came together briefly.
He bit down on the swordsman's neck.
While he drank, the one whose skull he'd sheared through during the first half-second had finally caught up to current events.
The undead pulled the knife from his belt and drove it into Raphael's back.
Pulled it out. Did it again. Found a new angle. Did it again.
Raphael didn't move.
The blood he was taking in was doing something very specific and immediate to the wounds opening in his back.
The tissue closing behind each new cut faster than the next one could be made, the skin smooth again before the blade had even left.
He was healing faster than the damage was arriving.
The undead with the knife was, by any meaningful metric, not participating.
Raphael didn't spare him a glance.
[Sin acquired: +2.3.]
[Current Sin: 9.6 / 40.]
The system notification was what finally made him disengage.
He released the desiccated swordsman and took the long sword from the dead hand before it could fall, wrapping both fists around the grip.
He turned.
The rotation added everything it had to the swing.
The moonlit blade left a line of silver light in the air, and the undead with the knife stopped having a head.
The reloading sounds from behind him were fast but not fast enough.
The long sword moved. It moved through the knife undead's remaining limbs with the efficiency of someone who had decided the matter was concluded.
Arms and legs separated cleanly, scattered across the grass by the force of the cuts.
The pieces still twitched. They just weren't a threat anymore, which was the relevant criterion.
He shifted to the silver blade. Found the heart. Drove it in.
[Sin acquired: +2.7.]
[Current Sin: 12.3 / 40.]
The crack of a shotgun shell chambering.
He located the sound without turning his head, took two running steps, and threw the long sword like a spear.
The shotgun fired at the same moment.
Dense pellets hit the blade mid-flight and the steel fractured, but the front half of a sword, thrown by something running at Lv4 physical capacity, doesn't stop because it's been broken.
The shard kept its velocity, kept its direction, and went through the undead's eye and into the brain behind it.
The head snapped backward from the impact, neck exposed to the moon.
The silver edge found the angle.
A clean curve through the throat. The head joined the accumulation of heads on the ground.
The body, lacking any further direction, pointed its shotgun at itself and discharged several more times on its way down.
That left the one with the hunting rifle.
He'd been maintaining distance and using it, several shots taken at Raphael during the engagement, all of them at a target moving too fast to bracket.
The math had turned against him.
In the time it had taken him to cycle through his ammunition without connecting, two of his associates were gone and a third was being handled in a way that suggested the same outcome was imminent.
He came forward. Closed the gap. Raised the rifle, at this distance, speed wouldn't matter, the pellet spread would find him wherever he was.
Something took the shotgun from his hands.
Raphael, directly behind him, pressing the barrel against the ground and firing.
The pellets hit the concrete and scattered in every direction, the ricochet pattern wide and unpredictable, several fragments cutting into the rifleman's legs and briefly destroying his ability to maintain a clean sight picture.
When his vision cleared, Raphael was in front of him.
The silver blade described a single short arc.
The undead's hand, the one still holding the rifle, the wrist and everything below it, left the body and turned upward through the air.
He watched it go.
Then he looked back down.
Thud.
The silver blade went through his skull, and he was done.
"Done."
Raphael's weight dropped through his heels as he drove the silver blade downward, threading past the spine, splitting the last undead clean through the center.
Before the body had finished falling, he pivoted and cut sideways, separating it at the waist. Cold blood caught him across the cheek.
*[Sin acquired: +2.4.]*
*[Current Sin: 14.7 / 40.]*
He turned toward the final one.
Then the arena wall tore open.
The thorns split outward, a clean rupture, the bramble shearing apart, and a figure stepped through the gap.
Heavy robes. A staff carved from dead wood, the grain pale and knotted, held in one hand. The face was familiar.
*[Sinner detected.]*
*[Jason Lance.]*
*[Cardinal Sin: Gluttony.]*
"...Jason Lance."
The man in the robes raised the staff. The last undead launched itself at Raphael without preamble.
Raphael didn't look at it. Both hands reversed the blade behind him, drove it backward on instinct, and felt the impact of the point going through a chest.
The hands that grabbed his shoulders were already losing their grip, he turned his wrist, let the rotation carry through his whole body, stepped cleanly to the side, and the arm swung off at the shoulder.
He brought the blade up and down in the same motion, pinning the remains to the ground through the throat.
*[Sin acquired: +2.5.]*
*[Current Sin: 17.2 / 40.]*