"...So you finally show yourself. The witch."
The flesh-tide drew inward. Compressed. Rebuilt itself upward into Jason's shape with the unhurried confidence of something that knew it had time.
He looked at Evelyn, and for the first time something moved across his face, not just the flat affect he'd been wearing all evening, but something with edges.
When he said the word witch, his jaw was tight around it.
"Do I know you?"
Evelyn said it without particular interest and was already looking elsewhere, reaching into her coat, pulling out a blood bag and a small vial of green liquid, tossing both to Raphael.
He caught them with a hand that was mostly muscle. The skin that should have been there was still finding its way back, and the blood bag adhered slightly to what remained of his palm.
The system text was still floating in his peripheral vision, left over from the moment of contact.
*[Sinner detected.]*
*[Jason Lance.]*
*[Lv4: Flesh Bishop.]*
*[Cardinal Sin: Gluttony.]*
"Lv4..."
He breathed through it.
Without Evelyn's thorns pulling him out of that mass when they did, the encounter wouldn't have ended with him standing.
He'd felt the level gap as a physical fact, the difference between what he was and what he'd been submerged in, as immediate and clear as drowning.
He tipped the blood bag back and drank.
The self-healing was running but the surface area was wrong, too much damage distributed across too much of him, the recovery spreading thin.
He picked up the vial and turned it in his fingers.
*[Analyzing... Complete.]*
*[Arcane Potion: Recovery Draught.]*
*[Quality: Common.]*
*[Effect: Significantly accelerates natural regeneration.]*
"Arcane potion."
He didn't spend time on it. He drank it.
The combination was immediate and disproportionate, vampire regeneration at baseline was already considerable, and the potion didn't simply add to it so much as multiply it, the two effects compounding into something that moved faster than either should have managed alone.
The exposed muscle closed over.
The skin came back. In a few seconds, Raphael looked like someone who'd had a difficult evening rather than someone who'd been partially eaten.
He looked down at what remained of his coat. Shook his head with something that was almost amusement, reloaded the revolver, and took his place beside Evelyn.
Jason watched all of this. Then he walked to where the dead-wood staff had fallen and picked it up, and the sound he made was something between a breath and a hiss.
"Traitor." The word came out aimed at Evelyn. "You stand with IFSA agents. You refuse your birthright and spit on what you are. Asmodeus is ashamed of you."
Evelyn made a short, cold sound.
"Birthright implies I was ever part of your church. I wasn't. There's nothing to return to."
Jason's eyes moved to Raphael. They narrowed.
"Human. Do you understand what you're standing next to? What she is? She's a witch.
Don't let her deceive you, don't let that face make you forget what's underneath it."
Evelyn's hand tightened. A small, involuntary motion.
She looked sideways at Raphael, caught him already looking, and her fingers found the blue pendant at her throat without her deciding to reach for it.
Her lips parted once and found nothing to say.
"You know what a witch is?" Jason pressed forward.
"They are children of Original Sin. Children of what your kind would call a dark god. She is beautiful, yes.
But beneath that surface is something that may be less human than I am, standing here in front of you."
Raphael looked at Evelyn.
She was watching him with an expression that was doing its best to be neutral and not quite succeeding.
"...Are you finished?"
He looked back at Jason.
"I already knew."
Evelyn's eyes went slightly wider.
The thorns closest to Raphael shifted. The spines along each tendril pulled inward —
Not a fighting posture but something else entirely, something that moved the way a hand does when it opens.
"Witches have been reviled for a long time. Burned for it.
The story people tell is that they bring tragedy wherever they go, born sinners, sources of plague, sparks that start wars."
He kept his voice flat.
"That's just a convenient story. What she is to me is Evelyn Vigo.
That's the beginning and end of it. I don't particularly care about the rest."
He let a beat pass.
"This woman worked alongside me for over two years. She is someone I'd trust behind me."
A short exhale, almost contemptuous. "You thought a few sentences of provocation was going to make me turn on her over superstition?
That's your play? Idiot."
The corner of Evelyn's mouth moved.
Around her, the thorns, which had been sitting heavy and a little subdued, straightened.
They reached toward Raphael with something that had no tactical explanation, the spines carefully retracted, the tendrils curling around him in what could only be described as warmth.
*[Crossroads of Fate: Witch — Evelyn Vigo.]*
*[Synchronization rate increased to: 18%.]*
*[Next Fate Bond tier requirement: 30%.]*
*[Next Fate Bond skill reward: Profane Thorns.]*
Raphael glanced at the vines surrounding him.
Profane Thorns. So that was what they were called.
He filed it away and raised the revolver.
"I'll be honest, you were worrying me a little."
His tone had returned to its default register: flat, functional, unbothered.
"But you went for persuasion instead of pressing the advantage.
Which means you're not confident you can take us cleanly." A pause. "Are you?"
Jason didn't answer.
Which was, in its own way, an answer.
He raised the dead-wood staff over his head and drove it into the earth.
"Then die together. Both of you, burn with your delusions."
His legs went liquid. The lower half of him dissolved into the ground, absorbed, his upper body remaining above the surface like something growing from it.
Then the ground moved.
Tendrils came up from everywhere, slick, dense ropes of flesh pushing through the dirt and extending upward, reaching from every direction at once, filling the space between them and Jason with a hundred moving lines of attack.
Raphael raised the gun and picked his angle, and put his back entirely in Evelyn's hands without a word of negotiation.
He didn't need to say it. She was already moving.
The profane thorns launched outward like thrown spears, intercepting, piercing, wrapping.
Where they met the flesh tendrils they held, the spines driving in and pulling at something that moved through the mass the way blood moved through veins, drawing it out.
BANG.
The silver round crossed the arena in a white line and connected with Jason's skull.
The result was immediate and considerable.
His head came apart at the structural level, the pieces separating, what remained hanging from his neck by the thinnest coherent tissue.
"That easy?"
The instinct that fired in Raphael's chest said no before the word had finished forming.
His wrist was screaming from the recoil. He couldn't follow up fast enough.
In the gap between shots, the flesh on the ground moved. It rose along Jason's neck, filling the spaces, rebuilding the architecture of a skull with the same purposeful efficiency it had used to assemble the ghouls.
The head reformed. The jaw closed. The expression that returned with it was almost pleased.
He raised the staff.
The light that came from the dead wood was different from anything it had produced before —
Brighter, older, carrying an undertone that made Raphael's eyes want to look somewhere else without knowing why.
"Ngh—"
His legs stopped working.
Not a blow, not an impact, they simply ceased to be reliable, the muscle losing its definition from the inside out, the edges going liquid and dripping, each drop absorbed immediately by the ground beneath him.
He caught himself on both hands, palms against the dirt, and looked down and understood immediately and completely what the title Flesh Bishop meant.
Not just commanding external flesh. All flesh. Including what was currently inside a Lv1 vampire's legs, doing the work of keeping him vertical.
He could feel the ground wanting the rest of him.
Above, the tendrils had found each other, tangling in the space between them, locking together with the patience of something that didn't get tired.
The bramble caught in the coils and bound, Evelyn's reach neutralized by sheer entanglement.
And from the ground, four feet away, a single tendril came up fast and straight.
Aimed at his heart.