The blue blade-light cut through Raphael's body and split him into three pieces.
Then it passed through and disappeared, like it had never been there. No impact. No force transferred. The incorporeal form had taken a direct hit from something that could slice metal and felt nothing.
"Magic?"
The three sections of him drifted upward and rejoined each other on instinct, and then the second wave came shrieking past, close enough that he felt the displaced air even without a body to feel it with.
He pulled himself tighter and the crescent arcs carved through the gym equipment behind him instead, a dumbbell's metal weight plates parting along perfectly smooth edges and sliding apart in silence before hitting the floor.
He took stock quickly. Physical-law attacks weren't reaching him in this state. That was useful information.
The werewolf had registered the failure and the failure had made it worse. The fur along its back stood up fully. The claws started moving without any specific target, just sweeping, and the blade-light came down like rainfall, slashing indiscriminately across every surface in the room. Metal rang and fell. Concrete cracked. Rebar snapped in the walls.
Raphael floated through all of it, reforming each time a crescent passed through him, thinking.
He had maybe three seconds left in this state. When the Wraith Form ended, he'd return to being physical in a room full of those arcs, and they would not miss a physical target.
Running wasn't a real answer either. Eva's support was still thirty minutes out, and even then he had no certainty that a projection and a helicopter could meaningfully threaten something with that regeneration rate.
The only path was through.
He watched the symbol on the werewolf's forehead and noticed it had changed. The complete circle it had been when it started firing was no longer complete, the outline eating itself with each attack, the moon pulling back from full toward half.
The ability had a cost. It was draining the symbol to use it.
Time was on his side, and that meant the only move was closer.
He went in.
He drove himself through the werewolf's torso, not past it, through it, and the cold that Wraith Form carried into living bodies spread outward from the point of passage, working through muscle and bone from the inside. The werewolf's next swing came in slower, the movement thickening, like something running down a battery. But the blade-light still moved. Still dangerous.
Raphael did it again. And again. Using the werewolf as a fixed point, cycling through it from every angle, each pass leaving more of that deep cold behind, the chill building up in the joints and the nerve pathways until the attacks slowed from rainfall to scattered drops, the movements stiff and halting.
The symbol was a quarter of its original size.
Now.
On the last second of the Wraith Form, he didn't pass through. He went in and stayed, driving himself down into the stomach cavity and snapping back to physical existence the moment he arrived.
The cold detonated through the werewolf's entire body at once. Every muscle locked. The eyes went unfocused. The howl that started in its chest died before it reached the throat.
And Raphael was inside a stomach.
"Hss—"
The smell hit him like a wall. He registered it, pushed it aside, and immediately felt the gastric acid finding his legs, the tissue dissolving where it touched, the skin going in seconds. Something bumped against his leg in the dark, long and thin and jointed. He didn't look at it.
He pulled Lyndon's sword from his back and swung.
The blade punched outward through the stomach wall and kept going, finding the heart on the other side with the particular certainty of a weapon that had been used for this purpose for two hundred years.
Silver through the heart, from the inside.
The werewolf's body registered this with a sound that started as a howl and turned into something less composed.
"WORFFFF?!"
The claws came up and found nothing useful. It clawed at its own torso, tearing open skin and vessels, blood running freely, unable to reach the thing inside. The pain it couldn't locate made it move, slamming into walls, knocking through equipment, trying to shake loose something it had no way of grabbing.
Inside, Raphael was being thrown around by all of this.
The acid came in lateral waves with every lurch of the body, breaking against him and receding, each impact stripping more skin from his chest and arms. His legs were going.
The tissue dissolving faster than the vampire's constitution could rebuild it, the acid working deeper with each passing second. If he stayed much longer he wouldn't be standing, and then he wouldn't be doing anything.
The pain was hitting his nervous system faster than he could process it. Shock was close.
He made the decision.
He stopped trying to finish the heart and drove the blade into the stomach wall instead. One deep thrust, then a single enormous downward cut, putting everything he had left into it.
The belly opened.
Two raw, skinless hands reached out and grabbed the edges of the wound from inside.
Raphael pulled himself through.
He came out facedown on the floor in a mess of gastric fluid and blood, dragged the sword clear, and lay there for a moment just breathing.
The air in the room was clean compared to where he'd just been, which was saying something about where he'd just been.
His body was working on the damage. He could feel it, the vampire's constitution burning through blood reserves to close what the acid had opened, the skin coming back in patches, the muscle underneath repairing itself layer by layer.
The trade-off was immediate and familiar, the pallor spreading across his face as the reserves dropped, the thirst sharpening.
Not Blood Frenzy this time. Just blood loss, plain and simple.
He got to his feet, put distance between himself and the werewolf, and held the sword.
The werewolf was on one knee.
It had one hand pressed to its abdomen, the other arm down, its intestines showing through the gap in its torso, glistening and slow, the gastric fluid still running from the wound. Its eyes were still angry. But it was the anger of something caught, not hunting, the difference between a predator and an animal in a trap.
Everything between them had reversed in the space of about forty seconds.