A vast, complex information stream poured into Raphael's mind all at once, absorbed and processed at a speed that made the surrounding moment feel like it had slowed by a fraction, the world outside his skull going quiet while the data resolved itself into structure.
The Flesh Bishop's abilities spread through his consciousness like a branching diagram, each capacity extending outward from its root into specialized applications.
*[Flesh Bishop • Corporeal Reformation: Liquefies the body's flesh and blood, allowing free reshaping of physical form. Evasion of lethal injury becomes possible. Cost: 1% soul integrity per day.]*
*[Flesh Bishop • Tendril Branches: Separates portions of flesh from the body, expands them through arcane infusion into elongated, tendril-form weapons. Usable for offense or defense. Cost: 2% soul integrity per day.]*
*[Flesh Bishop • Inertia: Applied through direct contact or channeled through the staff across an area, induces inertia in the target's flesh and muscle. The tissue relaxes, loses tension, loses the ability to generate force, and will gradually begin to dissolve. Cost: 2% soul integrity per activation.]*
*[Flesh Bishop • Assimilation: Forcible partial merging of flesh with a target through physical contact. Can strip skin or sever limbs. Absorbed tissue requires time to fully integrate, rejection occurs without it. Immediate use as a weapon carries no side effects. Cost: 4% soul integrity per activation.]*
CRACK.
Thunder. The sound of it pulled Raphael back from the information flood with the force of a physical blow. The remaining abilities on the list went unread.
Above the intersection, the purple bolt had finished drawing itself together, dense as a ship's cable, coiled and straining, the energy held at the threshold of release like a bowstring at full draw.
No time to deliberate.
His Gluttony affinity gave him simultaneous domination of two mutation skills. He didn't hesitate, he seized the first one.
*[Jason Lance — Soul Integrity: 99%.]*
From somewhere deep in the Third Hunting Ground, a scream tore through the walls between spaces.
Soul-level extraction: the penalty translated directly into force, stripped from Jason's spiritual substance and fed into Raphael's body as borrowed capacity.
The flesh pinned to the road began to change.
Under the continued press of the gravity field, his body didn't fight the pressure, it surrendered to it differently, the tissue losing its solid cohesion and spreading laterally instead, thinning as it extended outward in every direction.
His clothes stayed in place as the body beneath them flattened and widened, a spreading pool of living matter across the road surface.
The gravity kept him down. It couldn't keep him still.
The first bolt landed.
It hit the center of the flesh pool with a sound that was more pressure than noise, burning through a significant section of the spread tissue, scorching the concrete beneath to black glass.
Raphael lost the mass, felt the absence the way you feel a limb that's no longer there.
His right hand. Gone. The area around the impact carbonized outward in a radius, and the current traveled through the remaining flesh pool in branching threads, numbing everything it touched.
Now.
He'd been waiting for exactly this gap, the moment between the first strike completing and the second one building.
It was the only window he'd had since the gravity field came down.
He'd considered Rick's Wraith Form the instant the old woman pinned him. But the stormclouds overhead had closed that option immediately.
Wraith entities and yang-natured phenomena occupied opposite ends of a spectrum, and lightning sat at the extreme end of yang, among the most lethal things a semi-incorporeal form could expose itself to.
If he went wraith and the second bolt came down before he cleared the field, there would be nothing left to clear.
But the first bolt had just landed.
The second was still gathering.
He activated Wraith Form.
The shift came with a wave of something that wasn't his, a dark, settling weight, a grief that didn't belong to his history pressing in through the edges of the ability. He didn't have time to examine what that meant.
The gravity field released the moment his body crossed the threshold into incorporeality. He didn't use the opening to retreat.
He went directly toward her.
"Spent force." The old woman's surprise was real but brief, overridden almost immediately by something colder.
The array of abilities he'd displayed, the flesh liquefaction, and now this, sharpened her disgust rather than her caution. Her free hand came up, finger leveled at the incoming mass.
"Holy Light."
The word landed in the same ancient register as her others, and the response was immediate, her fingertip detonated into brilliance, the light of it carrying a quality that went past photons into something that registered on a level the body didn't process visually.
Heat that burned from the soul inward. The flesh pool that had been rolling toward her began to blister across its surface, densely and all at once, like water coming to boil.
"Damn it!"
He dropped the Wraith Form and collapsed the spread flesh back into a half-body mass before she could complete the second gravity incantation, the reformed bulk slamming into her before the words had finished leaving her mouth.
He activated the second domination simultaneously.
*Flesh Bishop • Assimilation.*
The condensed flesh wrapped around her right arm and contracted.
Crack.
Clean. The arm came away at the shoulder with the kind of force that a car accident produces, she didn't feel it immediately, the pain arriving late behind the shock, the seconds between the snap and the scream occupied by her gaze traveling to the empty space where her right side had been.
"AHHH! You, you filth! I'll kill you! I'll..."
She clamped her remaining hand over the wound.
Bone end exposed to the open air, blood running between her fingers.
Her mouth was already moving in the old language again, reaching for something in the healing register.
Raphael hit the ground and stayed on his feet.
His body reassembled itself. The flesh pool had been carrying his clothes through the whole sequence, so the reformation left him covered, mostly. His right sleeve hung empty.
The system report arrived with the contact.
*[Analyzing... Complete.]*
*[Lv5: Junior Inquisitor.]*
*[Cardinal Sin: Vanitas.]*
*[Classification: Human Warlock.]*
"Not a sinner." He said it without particular emotion. "Unfortunate. Your power's no use to me."
He picked up the severed arm. Set it against his own shoulder socket and held it there while the assimilation did its temporary work.
Rejection response present, he could feel the tissue arguing with itself, but functional enough for immediate use. Temporary was all he needed.
He released the domination on Corporeal Reformation and redirected to the second slot.
*Flesh Bishop • Tendril Branches.*
*[Jason Lance — Soul Integrity: 93%.]*
Another scream from somewhere that wasn't here.