They looked at each other across the wrecked room.
Then the werewolf picked up its own intestines and pushed them back in.
Both hands grabbed the edges of the wound and pulled inward. The flesh pressed together and held, sealing itself along an invisible line, clean as stitching. No sound. No visible mechanism. It just closed.
The moon symbol on its forehead dimmed. Full moon to half moon, the glow receding.
Both of them were burning through something. The werewolf had its stored lunar energy, whatever that symbol represented, and it was spending it to stay functional. Raphael had blood, and he had very little of it left.
One more Blood Frenzy activation, maybe. Short duration. After that he'd be running on empty in the most literal possible sense, the kind of empty where the body starts cannibalizing itself just to keep the lights on.
Not yet.
He looked through the broken window at the sky. The clouds had thinned. The moon was almost perfectly full now, the disc nearly complete, the light of it strong enough to throw shadows.
Full moon amplification, an extra hundred percent on top of the base doubling. Lv9 physical functions, theoretically. But even if the ceiling opened up, the blood cost of sustaining that output was staggering, and he was exactly the wrong person to be making that trade right now.
Then something clicked.
University medical bay. Any institution this size kept blood bags on hand for students with anemia or bleeding conditions. Standard supply, sitting in a cabinet somewhere, probably on the ground floor.
He didn't retreat. He went incorporeal again and drove himself into the werewolf for the third time.
The gap between activations was too short. He could feel the Wraith Form burning faster, the duration already shorter than the last time. Less than six seconds, probably closer to four.
The memory of being on the receiving end of this, of Rick doing exactly this to him in the nursery, was still fresh enough to be instructive. Full possession required time and sustained willpower, pushing into every part of the body simultaneously. He didn't have time for that.
He picked the legs and ignored everything else.
Three seconds of total focus on two limbs. The werewolf's legs stopped being its own, and Raphael used the last of those seconds to drive them forward at full sprint into the load-bearing wall across the room.
The impact was enormous.
The wall didn't just crack, it came down, and it took its structural responsibilities with it. The ceiling above lost its support on one side and dropped in sections.
Adjacent walls, suddenly bearing loads they hadn't been designed for, started going too. The bearing columns that had been sharing the work found themselves doing all of it and gave out in sequence.
The first domino had been pushed.
A quarter of the teaching building came apart in a rolling chain reaction, the collapse spreading outward from the room where the fight had been, floor sections dropping onto floor sections, rebar tearing loose, concrete breaking along stress lines that had been accumulating since the first impact of the fight.
The debris pile that formed was enormous, and the ground shook with it, and the trees along the street shook too, and leaves that had been on branches were suddenly on the pavement, and then the evening wind caught them and sent them rattling against what was left of the building's outer wall.
In the settling dust, a figure stood on the building's perimeter.
He was dressed like someone who had a meeting to attend. Suit pressed, shoes polished to a high shine, hair neat. His eyes were the unusual detail, the pupils vertical, animal, sitting wrong in an otherwise composed face.
The wind moved around him in a way wind didn't naturally move, clearing the dust from his path, leaving him untouched in the middle of a cloud that was coating everything else in grey.
He watched Raphael's incorporeal form burst out of the debris field, snap back to physical existence at the peak of its arc, and hit the ground.
He looked at his palm.
Three lines, each one crossed out in red.
The first had shown Raphael failing to react in time to Manson's mirror, getting pulled into the mirror world.
The second had shown the werewolf's ambush landing clean, Raphael cut in half, the fight ending there.
The third had been the worst. A few seconds of delay in seizing the werewolf's legs, and the building had come down on him while he was still inside it, the rebar finding him as the Wraith Form ended, his body distributed across the rubble in a way that wasn't a body anymore.
Three predictions. Three failures.
"Interesting." The word came out with genuine amusement. "To slip past that many futures. Some actual ability there."
He raised one finger and began writing on his palm, unhurried, the strokes careful.
"Though that ability ends here."
He wrote: Even with the rubble leaving Manson Vanessa badly injured and contained, he does not die. The near-death encounter accelerates his werewolf bloodline. He mutates. He becomes Alpha.
He considered it for a moment, then added: Due to the mutation, he will forget certain things. The mirror his father Pablo gave him. The fact that he was the one who reported the unknown witch's location to the Tribunal. The truth stays buried.
Two badges on his chest. One bore the rank of Colonel. The other bore the emblem of IFSA.
The name on the second badge: Pablo Vanessa.
"If you don't cut down a new shoot early enough, it becomes a problem you can't uproot later."
He said it quietly, to no one in particular, already turning away.
"Don't blame me for this, boy. Blame yourself for touching that Stone Tablet. Blame yourself for walking into this hunt."
He started walking. The wind kept the dust off him. He hummed something old, a folk melody without a known origin, and his voice was low enough that the words were more for himself than for the empty street.
"In this hunt, we are all hunters. We are all prey."
Ahead of him, a translucent interface materialized in the air, covered in the abstract symbols that sat underneath every language rather than belonging to any of them.
[Sin-Fruit expended to disturb a Hunter's fate.]
[Target: Raphael Alanster.]
[Target designation: Hunting Ground Hunter No. 13. Codename: Sinner.]