Jason's face had gone dark.
Whatever composure he'd maintained through the truck impact, through being pressed flat by steel coils, through rebuilding himself from a smear on the ground.
The expression he was wearing now had none of it.
He stared at Raphael with the specific fury of someone who had not planned for this and resented the fact deeply.
"You..." The words came out through locked teeth. "You're pathetic."
Raphael almost laughed out loud. Pathetic. The man who put his three-year-old in an attic and locked the door was calling him pathetic.
Jason turned toward Evelyn. A smile pulled at his mouth, the contemptuous kind, the kind that was covering something else.
"Witch. I'll admit it freely, you're strong. You came closer than you should have. Across a full level gap, you nearly finished me."
He let the pause sit. "Real talent. It's a shame your road stops here tonight."
He laughed, and the fractures running across his body began to seal at a rate you could actually watch.
Nearby in the rubble, the dead-wood staff answered some pull and rose on its own, drifting back into his hand.
"I don't know what trick you used to spike your power the way you did. Doesn't matter anymore. You don't have anything left."
Raphael looked at Evelyn.
She had both hands flat on the ground, one knee down, cold sweat matting her hair against her forehead.
Her body was running small, involuntary tremors she wasn't bothering to hide.
The thorns around her were down to a handful of sparse, thin runners.
But her eyes hadn't moved off Jason once.
"You still in this, partner?"
She looked at him. Winked.
"Obviously. Partner."
Raphael breathed in slowly.
The full moon sat high and clean above them, no cloud cover left to interrupt it.
He could feel Blood Frenzy responding to it, louder than it had ever been, the moonlight hitting his skin like pressure finding a crack, the power underneath straining at whatever was still holding it.
Jason scoffed. His arm dissolved from the elbow down, the flesh breaking apart into dense, wet clusters that the staff's glow reshaped, one by one, into tendrils.
"Go ahead and try, boy. Whatever you do to me, I heal faster than you can cause it."
The flesh creature that had retreated when the fighting peaked came crawling back now.
It positioned itself in front of Jason with something almost submissive about it, and he grabbed it without ceremony.
Bit into it, tore through it in a few efficient mouthfuls, the chewing wet and audible.
No bones. Gone in seconds. He ran his tongue across his teeth when he was done. His arm grew back.
Raphael watched all of it in silence and thought.
The .357 couldn't cycle fast enough. Single-shot pressure against something that closed wounds in real time wasn't a strategy, it was noise.
He needed truck-level impact force to threaten a Lv4 Flesh Bishop, and there were no more trucks.
He looked up at the moon.
Closed his eyes.
One intention. That was all the second stage needed.
When he opened them, the red was different, deeper, fuller, the color of something that had stopped being a visual phenomenon and become a state of being.
*[Status: Blood Frenzy (Full Moon Amplification).]*
*[Effect: Physical functions elevated to 300%.]*
*[Physical Functions: Lv5.]*
Jason raised the staff.
Raphael wasn't there anymore.
"What..."
The danger sense hit Jason before the information did. Something ancient and animal, firing from somewhere below thought.
Thud.
He hadn't seen it. His chest was simply punctured.
Claws through the center of it, the hand already inside, and his instinct to collapse the flesh and lock the arm in place triggered immediately.
The wound wasn't closing.
He stared at it. Pushed more mass toward it. The flesh crept inward at a fraction of its normal rate, sluggish, like something moving through the wrong medium.
"Impossible. What is this, what kind of damage."
He understood the math. Vampiric ability doubled physical functions.
A Lv1 human body, even one trained to this level, reaching Lv2 output, it should have skidded off his defenses.
Even Evelyn at Lv3 peak had needed the thorn-drain to meaningfully hurt him.
The thought was still assembling when the claws came back, through his eye this time, punching clean through the socket and out the back of the skull.
"AHHH—"
Half his vision went dark. Jason's scream came out before he'd decided to make one, the sound raw and reflexive.
"That damage level? no. No. Lv5 physical functions?! You're a Lv1!"
He swung the staff in wide, frantic arcs, the flesh-dissolution spell spraying outward with no targeting behind it, just range.
Saturating the area, hoping coverage would compensate for the fact that he couldn't find the target.
The tendrils around him swept in every direction, raking up dust and debris and empty air.
At Raphael's speed, Jason's screaming didn't arrive sharp. It stretched, pulled low and slow by the gap between them, reaching him as a deep, distorted backdrop.
He couldn't see the dissolution spell directly.
But Lv5 dynamic vision caught every pause in the staff's sweep, every half-second the tip held a direction before moving on.
He read the tendrils off those cues.
Went over the low ones, ducked under the high ones, stepped back from the wide ones.
His counters were deliberate and sparing, in, leave a wound, out before the next sweep.
Lv5 physical functions didn't make him bulletproof.
His physical resistance was still Lv1. One solid hit from Jason and the math reversed completely.
So he didn't take hits. He moved, and the afterimages he left behind multiplied the confusion, and Jason's attacks kept landing on places he'd been a half-second ago.
"Why?! Why can you both do this to me?! You're below my level — WHY?!"
Every time an attack missed, Raphael was already somewhere else on Jason's body.
Gut opened. Throat punctured.
A section of spine separated between one breath and the next.
Jason was accumulating damage the way something does when it can't track what's hitting it.
Scattered, everywhere, the wounds building past the point where regeneration could keep pace.
He looked like a piece of furniture that had been stored badly for decades. Holes in everything.
The expression on his face had gone somewhere past fury into something rawer.
He stopped trying to target and drove the staff straight down into the ground.
The dissolution spell flooded outward through the soil in all directions, unfocused, broad, giving up concentration for reach.
Raphael's legs began to go again.
Slower than before. Much slower.
If last time had been ice cream in August sun, this was an ice cube in October. inconvenient, present, not immediately catastrophic.
Spreading the spell thin had cost Jason most of its potency.
But it was enough to make Raphael visible.
Jason caught a glimpse of him and his eyes locked on like something snapping shut.
The staff came up.
Evelyn's last thorn crossed the distance like a thrown blade.
In Raphael's red-washed vision, he watched Jason's forearm separate at the mid-point and fall.
The cut clean, the limb tumbling away, the stump left standing empty in the air for a moment before Jason's mind caught up to what had happened.
"You BITCH—"
His eyes looked ready to leave his face entirely.
The flesh at the stump reached outward desperately, tendrils of raw meat groping for the severed arm, managing a partial, ugly reconnection.
Functional enough to hold, not enough to pretend it was fine.
Then he stopped caring about his arm.
He turned toward Evelyn.
She was on the ground. She couldn't move. And Jason had just remembered that.
Every tendril he had left snapped into alignment, pointed, dense, aimed at a single target.
They launched all at once, a wall of strikes driving toward her, so many of them that the spaces between might as well not exist.
"I might die here. But so do you, witch!"