The lightning came down at the crossroads and opened Raphael's back to the bone.
The flesh around the wound had carbonized, black-edged, smoking, the tissue scorched through in a line that ran deep enough to show white underneath the char.
He was on one knee, breathing in rough pulls, sweat running down his face, his eyes twitching involuntarily.
The electricity hadn't finished with him, it was still moving through his body in disorganized currents, locking his limbs, making every voluntary motion a negotiation.
Footsteps. Unhurried.
A figure came from the far end of the intersection, white robes, a badge on the chest in purple and gold, the stylized symbol of a lightning bolt rendered in two interlocking colors.
The lamplight found her face as she closed the distance. Sixty, at least, the deep lines of her face set into an expression of cold composure.
Her eyes were sharp in a way that the rest of her face wasn't.
Raphael had seen that badge in IFSA files. The Judgment Faction, one of several distinct movements within the church's fractured internal structure, and the most extreme of them.
Their doctrine centered on purification through judgment: the unclean were to be found, sentenced, and executed. The target pool was unrestricted.
Civilians, criminals, killers absorbed into the organization, anyone the Faction deemed impure was eligible.
That strike had real weight behind it. Not low level. Why is a Judgment operative in Keynes?
The red was already climbing his eyes. His fingers were lengthening. Blood Frenzy opened quietly, without announcement, and the wound across his back began to shed its charred outer layer in flakes, new tissue pushing up underneath.
"We have no history between us." He kept his voice level and let his feet move, subtle, gradual, closing the gap by degrees while he spoke.
"I'm Red Gloves. Not a rogue actor, not an unaffiliated Demon. Whatever jurisdiction the Faction operates under, I'm not outside it."
The old woman's eyes tracked his feet. She noticed. She didn't care, the look on her face was the look of something very large watching something very small decide to be brave.
She reached up and drew back her hood.
The scar started at the side of her face and ran all the way around to the back of her skull.
Old work, layered over with decades of healed tissue and the visible marks of multiple surgical repairs, but the original damage had been catastrophic.
Whatever had caused it had come close to finishing the job.
"Do you see this?" Her voice was flat and informational, the tone of someone reciting a fact rather than expressing a feeling.
"I was a young priest. Your father put me within one step of death with a single blade and walked away from the Federation's pursuit without consequence.
I have spent forty years becoming something that could not be walked away from."
She looked at him the way you look at a symbol of something rather than a person.
"He won't be the first I judge. You will. His son, who joined the very organization that let him go."
Raphael noted the wound's progress. A little more time and he'd have full mobility back. Not yet.
He let his expression do something approximating innocence.
"My father left when I was nine. Whatever he taught me, we were never close. His conflicts, his crimes, those belong to him. I've seen your church's doctrine.
There's a passage about not allowing hatred to perpetuate itself through generations. I'm fairly certain it's in the foundational texts."
The old woman's scarred face tightened.
"Say whatever you like. I know what I'm doing is transference. I don't care."
The flatness was gone now, replaced by something older and harder underneath it.
"I want you destroyed. I want Frank Alanster to feel what I felt, and since I can't reach him, you're what I have."
She raised one finger toward the sky.
Her mouth shaped a word in a language that had no common name, the syllables compressing something old and structural into a single utterance.
Raphael had never encountered the language before. He understood it anyway, not through learning, not through exposure, but through the same pre-rational channel through which an infant understands warmth.
Thunder.
His eyes sharpened. He'd felt this quality of comprehension exactly once before, the night the stone tablet's symbols had written themselves directly into his mind.
The System's language.
Above him, the black stormclouds that had dispersed after the first strike began to reconvene.
Purple lightning moved through them in long, threading arcs, the light of it turning the intersection a deep, bruised violet.
The pressure that came down with the clouds wasn't physical, it was something that registered in the chest before the eyes processed it.
Fast. End this fast.
The cloud formation needed time to complete. He wasn't going to give her that time.
He was gone from where he'd been standing, a single explosive step, the sound of the displacement cracking the air behind him.
Full Blood Frenzy on a full moon. Lv6 physical functions pushing every joint and muscle group to its absolute limit.
He crossed the intersection like something fired from a weapon, aimed directly at her center of mass.
"Speed." The old woman's second hand came up. Completely calm. A different word from the same language. "Gravity."
The weight arrived instantaneously.
Not impact, weight. As though the air above him had acquired mass, an invisible column of pressure slamming down across his entire body and driving him into the road surface before he'd completed a single stride. The concrete came up to meet his face.
His cheek ground against the rough aggregate, his arms pinned, his legs pinned, the entire apparatus of Lv6 physical output simply overridden by something operating on a different level of the mechanics of reality entirely.
He pushed. Pushed again. The pressure didn't shift.
"Pathetic." She kept one hand extended, maintaining the field, the contempt in her voice entirely without heat, just observation.
"The most wanted man in the Federation, and this is his legacy. A weakling in an organization that should have been his enemy."
Above the intersection, the stormclouds had finished building.
The sound they made wasn't thunder, it was something lower and more fundamental, the resonance of something enormous releasing stored energy.
It moved through the buildings on all sides and rattled the closed shutters and got into the walls.
Along the rooflines, preliminary discharge was already arcing, thin tributaries of purple-white light earthing themselves in antenna masts and elevator housings.
At the center of the formation, one bolt was drawing the rest into itself, pulling charge from every part of the cloud, thickening.
Raphael looked up at it from the road surface.
His heart rate was elevated past what he'd felt in the Lance fight.
The vampire constitution registered threats with the same direct, wordless certainty that a body registers heat, not fear exactly, but the pure biological fact of danger at a lethal level.
If that bolt landed, he was finished.
He closed his eyes.
He reached for the system with his mind the way you reach for something in the dark, by feel, by intent, by the specific quality of attention that meant this, exactly this.
*[Third Hunting Ground • Domination Moment.]*
*[Domination Target • Lv4: Flesh Bishop.]*