The werewolf stopped like something had yanked the emergency brake.
The silver round was buried in its forehead, sitting right up against the inner face of the skull, the bone too dense to let it go any further. For one full second, nothing moved.
Then the skin around the entry point began to crawl. The muscle underneath contracted, tightened, worked the bullet back toward the surface with slow, methodical pressure, and the round dropped out of the wound and hit the pavement with a clean ring.
The werewolf's foot came down on it and ground it to pieces.
The blood moon on its forehead had lost a slice of itself. Not a full circle anymore, a waning gibbous, the edge eaten away, the red light dimmer than it had been.
"Hh... hh..."
The low growl that came out wasn't a charge signal. It was something more deliberate than that.
The werewolf's eyes stayed on Raphael and it didn't move, and even the animal underneath Manson's skull had learned by now that running straight at this particular target produced consistently bad results.
It turned and walked to the nearest tree instead.
At close to five meters tall in this form, the werewolf wrapped both arms around the trunk without difficulty. The muscles along its back and shoulders rose and locked, and it pulled.
The pavement around the base started to lift in sections, the tiles popping loose one after another in a chain reaction, the roots coming up with them, and a tree that had been standing for decades came free of the earth with a grinding sound that got into the back of the teeth.
The werewolf hefted it, rotated at the hips, and threw it like a spear.
The thing was fifteen meters long and wider than most cars.
It came in horizontal, spinning slowly, filling the entire width of the street, not a projectile so much as a moving wall, and there was nowhere on either side that wasn't covered by it.
It covered the distance in an eyeblink.
Raphael activated the domination without hesitation.
Flesh Bishop — Corporeal Reformation.
[Jason Lance — Soul Integrity: 85%.]
The tree hit him and hit the building behind him at the same time, and for a moment what had been Raphael was a wide, thin smear distributed across a surface area of several square meters of exterior wall. The wall buckled and partially collapsed.
The tree bounced once and wedged itself at an angle into the side of the nearest apartment block, lodged there, swaying slightly.
"Worffff!"
The howl rang off the buildings on both sides, victory, or something close enough to it that the werewolf didn't feel the need to be subtle about it. Then the smear on the wall began to move.
It gathered. It flowed. The scattered pieces found each other along the surface of the building and the pavement and the fallen debris, coalescing beside the embedded tree trunk, the shape assembling itself from the outside in, edges first, then depth, then volume.
"Don't get too excited." Raphael's face was the last thing to resolve.
His clothes had fused into the reformation, pressed flat against him, a second skin made of fabric and dried blood. "Nobody's won anything yet."
He said it lightly. What he actually felt was the particular quiet relief of something going right that very easily could have gone wrong.
The Corporeal Reformation worked on bone and organs too, not just soft tissue, without that, the tree would have settled things immediately.
Jason was screaming somewhere at the back of his mind and Raphael paid it no attention.
He looked at the surrounding residential buildings and the lit windows and the shapes behind the curtains, then held the same unhurried, taunting posture he'd been wearing since the fight started.
"Come on, then. Stray dog."
He was already moving as he said it, finding Lyndon's sword where it had fallen and swinging it back into place across his back. He took a position among the remaining trees and waited.
The werewolf didn't come charging this time. It stood and looked at him, the blood moon on its forehead pulling back from gibbous toward half, and the red light that had been bleeding off the symbol gathered instead along its claws, sitting in the grooves between the nails like something burning at low heat.
Raphael looked at it for a moment, then drew a finger across his own throat.
Then he ran.
He hit the exterior wall of the apartment block at full speed and didn't stop, the velocity carrying him up the vertical surface, each footfall finding purchase through sheer forward momentum, the physics of it working only because he was moving fast enough to stay ahead of gravity's objections.
He didn't slow until he was at the roofline, twenty-five floors up, and he came over the edge onto the roof in a single step.
Below him, the werewolf snarled once, the hesitation lasting barely a second before the hunting instinct won the argument, and it followed. Four limbs finding the wall, climbing fast, the concrete denting slightly under each impact point.
On the rooftop, they faced each other for a moment.
Neither moved.
The blood moon had settled at half, and with it the werewolf was calmer than it had been all night. Not calm, less out of control. It watched him with something that was almost patience, the mindless fury from earlier burned down to a banked coal.
Raphael looked behind himself.
Keynes University sat on the other side, dark, mostly empty, already half-demolished. Better than a residential roof with lit windows on three sides.
He spread both arms wide, leaned back off the edge, and dropped.
The werewolf's eyes sharpened. The small hesitation it had been running dissolved and it went over the edge after him, dropping fast, already scanning for the target on the way down.
The air below was empty. Just the ground coming up.
It twisted midair and found him.
Raphael was hanging from an apartment balcony two floors below the roofline, one hand on the railing, feet against the wall, the smile on his face carrying a specific quality of contempt that he hadn't bothered to suppress. The werewolf was already past him and falling.
He pushed off the wall.
The acceleration added to gravity and gravity added to momentum, and the sword was already out when he caught up, driving the point toward the center of the werewolf's chest on the way down.
Thud.
They hit the street together. The impact cracked the road in a rough circle and threw up a curtain of dust, and when it settled the werewolf was on its back with Raphael standing on its chest, both hands locked on the sword hilt, driving it down.
The blade stopped three inches from the heart.
"Worff!!"
Both hands came up and caught the flat of the blade, the silver cutting straight through the palms, blood running freely down the werewolf's arms.
It held anyway, every muscle in both arms going rigid, refusing to let the point go further.
The sword reflected the werewolf's eye back at itself. And in that eye, past the red, past the fury, something else was visible.
Fear.
Raphael sank his weight into it. Slow, steady, the blade descending one millimeter at a time, the werewolf's arms shaking with the effort of holding it, the point already through skin, already finding the tissue beneath.
The werewolf's thigh came up like a whip.
It caught Raphael across the back with everything it had.
"Hss."
His balance went. He pitched forward and the werewolf didn't wait, a heel driving into his waist and launching him sideways.
He hit the ground and rolled, and Lyndon's sword left his hand and skidded across the pavement.
"Cough — cough—"
Those legs. The muscle behind them was staggering, each kick taking a measurable percentage off of what he had left.
His physical resistance was still Lv1 and always had been, and every hit that got through cost more than it should. He healed fast. That wasn't the same as not paying the toll.
He got upright and looked for the sword.
The werewolf was gone.
"Damn..."
He bent to reach for it. A shadow crossed him from the far end of the street, growing fast, and then the claws were around his throat and the world went sideways at speed.
They went through the rubble together.