They moved at the same time.
Two afterimages where they'd been standing.
The concrete under their feet didn't crack so much as detonate outward, fragments spinning off in every direction, and the shockwave from the launch rolled through the rubble field and lifted every leaf on the ground into the air at once.
The leaves didn't come back down. They just stayed there, pulled into the currents the two of them were generating, orbiting the whole mess like they had nowhere better to be.
At Lv9, the world had slowed. Not stopped, slowed. Dust rising in lazy columns. The sound of the wind separating into individual threads.
A loose piece of rebar tumbling end over end, each rotation distinct and unhurried.
Everything dialed back to a pace Raphael could read properly, could move inside of, could actually think within.
Everything except the werewolf, which kept pace with him beat for beat, the only thing in this slowed-down world that wasn't slow.
Raphael swung. The werewolf brought its arm up, claws spread, and the blade hit them with a crack that rang off the surrounding buildings and a shower of sparks that scattered like thrown coins.
BOOM.
The ground under both of them punched downward. Not from the impact, from the wave that came off it.
The road surface fractured in a rough circle ten meters across, the edge of the shockwave picking up dust and small stones and flinging them outward at chest height.
They separated. Came back together somewhere else. Separated again.
Across the rubble field. Along the fence line. Out into the open street, where there were no pedestrians and the streetlamps were still somehow functioning, throwing pools of yellow light across the asphalt.
The fight kept moving because neither of them could stop it. Every exchange ended with one of them shedding force and the other chasing, the whole thing drifting across the campus grounds in a rolling series of collisions.
A tree on the far side of the fence snapped cleanly in half. An air conditioning unit mounted outside a ground floor window took a single footfall and became a pile of parts.
A section of the outer wall developed a gap in it that was roughly the shape of a person moving very fast through solid material.
The residents in the surrounding buildings couldn't see the actual fight. They could see the aftermath, left behind like punctuation.
For Raphael, all of it felt like warming up.
He looked at the trees lining the street. Thick ones, old ones, the kind that took two people to wrap their arms around.
Something occurred to him.
He reached into the domination, and from somewhere deep in the Third Hunting Ground, Jason Lance made a sound that was mostly just suffering.
Flesh Bishop — Inertia.
[Jason Lance — Soul Integrity: 86%.]
The logic wasn't complicated. Applying the effect directly to the werewolf was nearly impossible at this speed, the contact windows were too short, opening and closing in fractions of a second, not enough time for even System to finish a scan.
But during the Lance fight, Jason had spread Inertia through his staff into the surrounding ground, saturating an area instead of targeting a single body.
Same principle. Different anchor points.
The werewolf came in with a punch that had a car's worth of mass behind it. Raphael caught it on the flat of the blade and took the full weight of it, and this time he didn't let himself slide.
He drove the sword into the tree trunk beside him, stopped hard, and pressed his free palm flat against the bark.
The Inertia moved into the wood.
One tree wasn't going to be enough. The thought arrived and departed in half a second. He was already leaning backward, and the claws came through in a wide arc that passed across his throat close enough that he felt the air move, and the tree next to him took the follow-through and dropped at the base without ceremony.
"Savage," Raphael said.
He reversed the sword into the ground, loaded his weight onto it, and launched off it, both feet finding the werewolf's chest at the same moment.
Thud.
Vampire strength wasn't the werewolf's kind of strength. At baseline it wasn't even close. But at Lv9 the explosive output was something different from baseline, every muscle in both legs firing at once, all of it delivered in a single instant to a target that hadn't braced for it.
The chest caved. Blood came out of the werewolf's mouth in a short spray. Ribs voiced their objections in a series of sharp cracks that Raphael heard clearly even over the ambient noise of the fight.
The werewolf stumbled back three steps before it caught itself. It looked up.
Raphael was walking unhurried to the next tree. He put his palm flat against the bark. Gave it a single pat, like he was checking if it was ripe. Moved on.
The rage hit Manson under the fur like a lit match hitting dry paper.
Being dismissed like this, being treated as something not worth the urgency of a finishing move, it landed in a place that had been tender since the first time Peter had laughed at him in front of the class.
The roar that tore out of the werewolf had nothing calculated in it. Arms locked over its skull, covering the head, it charged directly into the gun barrel Raphael was raising.
"Animals stay animals."
He kept walking between trees, touching each trunk as he passed, the revolver coming up between contacts.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The rounds punched through the thick hide, silver doing what silver did to Demons regardless of how dense the exterior was.
The bullets buried into the arm bone and stayed there, blood welling up heavy and dark through the grey fur. The arm screamed with it.
But the head was covered. And the charge didn't slow.
Raphael checked the distance, decided reloading wasn't worth the time, and stepped sideways.
The werewolf hit the tree like a loaded truck with the brakes cut.
The trunk ceased to exist. The upper half launched sideways and drove itself into the asphalt several meters away, standing upright, leaves still attached to the branches, somehow completely intact, completely absurd.
A full cascade of loose leaves rained down across the street and the werewolf swung at them, at the empty air where the enemy had been standing, at nothing, before it caught up with what had happened.
The howl it let out rolled the leaves across the pavement.
When the fur cleared, Raphael was at the far end of the street.
Back against the last tree, cylinder freshly loaded, expression entirely composed. Like he'd been waiting there long enough to get bored.
The werewolf dropped to all fours and came at full speed.
Raphael raised the gun and shot five times. The werewolf cut left, cut right, used the Inertia-soaked trees on both sides as partial cover, its reaction speed keeping pace with his, round after round going wide or burying in wood.
He lowered the gun.
Waited.
The werewolf cut direction again, body committed forward, the weight of the previous step still carrying through, the inertia of the charge fully loaded, and Raphael raised the gun and fired with no visible windup, no pause, zero frames of preparation.
The werewolf tried to cut again. Its body said no. The joints were just slow enough, just that fraction stiff from the Inertia that had been bleeding out of every tree it had used for cover, and the sharp angle it needed wasn't there anymore.
Bang.
Between the eyes. Clean.