The moment the tendrils redirected, Raphael was already moving.
One speed reduction hadn't changed what he was. Lv5 still meant Lv5, and he crossed the distance before the first tendril hit the ground, Evelyn already in his arms when the volley landed.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
They came down like a burst of heavy rainfall, punching deep holes into the road surface in a tight cluster, the impacts kicking up a surge of dust and debris that swallowed the area whole.
Jason's sightline disappeared behind a curtain of grey.
"Did I get them?"
He stared into the cloud with that unhinged smile still stretched across his face, the tendrils pulling back overhead after the volley to regroup and guard.
The dust thinned. Moonlight cut through the top layers easily enough.
Nothing there. Just craters and wreckage and a whole lot of empty ground.
Then a faint shift in the dust at his side, a whisper of displaced air, a shadow that was there for less than a blink.
A white flash.
Clang.
Jason's field of view lurched upward without warning. He found himself looking down at his own neck, which had nothing above it.
"You think that's enough to kill me?!"
He was Lv4. He was the master of his own flesh.
Two thin threads of raw muscle pushed up from the stump, found the connection points at the base of his severed head, and yanked it back down onto his shoulders with a wet, decisive snap.
He rolled his neck. Looked back.
Raphael stood in the dissipating dust with Evelyn held against his chest, arms underneath her, her weight settled and secure.
At his hip, the silver short blade still wore Jason's blood in a thin red line along the edge.
"Ha. Hahaha. You fool!"
Jason raised the staff, and his triumphant expression came back like it had never left.
The flesh-dissolution spell reached out again, and he watched Raphael's body begin to show the signs a second time, the skin around his legs going soft and wrong.
"I knew you'd go for her. You dodged the tendrils, can you dodge magic while your attention is somewhere else?
My staff was trained on her the whole time you were moving."
He stepped forward, closing the gap with unhurried confidence. "Lv1 body, already compromised. How long do you have? Thirty seconds? Less?"
Raphael didn't look at him. He leaned close to Evelyn's ear and said something low, one hand already moving along her waist, feeling past her coat, finding two recovery draughts tucked there. He pressed one to her lips.
Then, quietly, still not looking at Jason:
"Cover me. Ten seconds from now, hit the signal with everything you have."
Evelyn drew in a long breath. The arcane reserves that had run bone-dry began to stir, slow at first, then faster, the potion doing what it was made to do.
She placed her palm flat against Raphael's chest, pushed off lightly, and slipped backward into the dust with the particular ease of someone who has always known how to disappear into a situation.
"Trust me, partner."
Just that. Then she was gone.
Raphael's silhouette vanished from where it had been standing and reappeared inside Jason's reach, not pulling away, but staying close, circling, flashing through the spaces directly around him, front and back and sides.
His speed was dropping in measurable increments now. Visible. Jason could see it happening.
The tendrils above swung left, swung right, couldn't find an opening. Too close to the target. Too much risk of hitting the wrong thing.
The ground moved.
Thorns pushed up through the road surface in multiple points at once, the cracks opening without sound, debris and dust spraying upward.
And then the thorns were gone again, back under, slipping back into the dark like they'd never been there.
One by one, tendrils went dry and dropped from the air, desiccated, landing in pieces. Gone before they hit the ground.
Evelyn was hunting from below. Picking them apart in the low visibility while Jason was busy watching Raphael.
And Raphael kept demanding his attention. The wounds accumulating on Jason's body required it.
Each one deeper than the last, each one healing slower than the one before it, the regeneration that had been effortless at the start of the evening now visibly laboring.
But the dissolution was working.
Raphael's left side was going first. The muscle losing its definition, going pliable and soft, the flesh starting to slide.
His speed kept dropping. Jason started to keep up.
He waited for the right moment, read the pattern, let the claws commit, and when Raphael's hand drove through his chest, Jason contracted the flesh around the arm and locked it.
The staff came down across Raphael's left hand.
The crack of breaking bone was clean and sharp.
Then the dissolution spread directly into the hand, targeted, precise, the muscle going to rubber almost instantly.
The fingers wouldn't respond. The whole arm hung loose from the shoulder, dead weight, useless.
Jason watched and counted.
Dry flesh kept falling from above. The tendrils dying one after another, each drop marking another loss. He counted those too.
Ten seconds. That was all this needed. Ten more seconds and the vampire would finish dissolving.
Whatever damage output he carried, he'd be delivering it with no handle, a blade with nothing to hold it.
Then Jason could take his time.
Raphael's voice came up through the dust. Low. Completely calm.
"That's enough time."
The silver short blade came off his hip and went straight up, thrown hard, fast, punching upward through the cloud and out the other side.
Then both claws drove through Jason's hands and pinned them flat to the ground.
The staff wrenched free. Hit the dirt and rolled.
Jason looked up at Raphael's face, the skin hanging loose, barely attached, the flesh underneath sliding like melted wax trying to hold its shape, and laughed.
"How many seconds do you need to kill me? A Flesh Bishop has no physical weak point. You can't finish this!"
He started counting out loud. Each number delivered like a sentence.
Out in the dust, Evelyn wasn't listening. She was working, thorn after thorn finding tendril after tendril, clean and methodical, her attention split perfectly between the kills and the cloud in front of her.
When the white flash of the blade arced above the dust line, she didn't hesitate for a single beat.
The remaining thorns abandoned their targets mid-strike, curving upward in a half-circle, and came straight down.
Raphael's lips moved, barely. Something like a smile.
He planted his foot in Jason's stomach, ripped his claws free, and stepped back.
Jason scrambled upright. Reached for the staff at his feet.
Two thorns came down from above and went through him, piercing, coiling, pulling tight.
He screamed and grabbed at them and couldn't stop what came next.
The drain started immediately. Not on the tendrils this time. On him. On his core.
"Get OFF — get off me!"
Raphael walked over and kicked the staff away into the rubble.
The truck impact had already done the real damage to Jason's core long before any of this. Everything since had been running on fumes.
The staff had been the compensation mechanism, the thing bridging the gap between what he actually had left and what he was projecting.
Without it, there was no bridge.
He had maybe five seconds of meaningful resistance. Raphael had maybe three.
"Three seconds!" Jason's laugh had gone ragged and high. "You're dying, you hear me? Three seconds and you're done!"
Raphael stood still and waited.
He looked terrible. Skin slack against the bone, the flesh underneath moving with the consistency of something that had forgotten how to stay solid, the dissolution working through him in slow visible waves.
He stood in the moonlight and didn't move and didn't speak.
The silver blade turned in the air above them.
Gravity found it. The blade fell straight down, vertical, perfectly aligned, the air shrieking along the edge as it dropped, a single high note that lasted less than a second.
Tzzzng.
It took Jason's head off cleanly.
This time, nothing reached up to retrieve it.
The flesh across his body went still. The tendrils dropped all at once.
Everything that had been Jason Lance simply stopped trying, and the Lv4 Flesh Bishop of the Gluttony Church became a very large amount of cooling material on a suburban road.
[Hunt complete.]