The harpy folded her wings and dove like a bird of prey, talons driving straight at his face.
Raphael adjusted his footing and stepped back. The claws closed on empty air and produced a sharp crack of displaced pressure.
"Strong."
The harpy pulled up immediately, banking hard back into the sky, and in the moment of separation Raphael got a proper look at her.
The body was a woman's below the chest, but feathers covered most of it, dense in some places, sparse in others, with thin arms and heavy thighs, talons larger than her own head, and a wingspan close to five meters when the wings opened fully.
The head was where ordinary anatomy stopped making sense entirely: human eyes but without whites, black from edge to edge, no ears, just two structurally distinct openings on either side of the skull, and the nose and mouth had merged into a single feature, a flesh-colored beak, large and sharp.
"God, you're ugly."
