Chapter 109: Opportunities Heneath the Treetops
This many harpies couldn’t have gathered in this short a ti. There was no rational explanation for it.
But the sky above him said otherwise, and he had no choice but to accept what was in front of him.
"Sothing’s wrong."
He couldn’t pin it down, but everything about it felt off.
The density up there was beyond anything that made tactical sense, they were packed so tightly that the outlines of individual bodies blurred into each other, the layers creating a visual stutter he couldn’t resolve.
"Too dense. They’d get in each other’s way attacking , they’d pile up into each other. That many bodies can only be useful for defense."
His eyes found the elder.
Kill the commander, scatter the troops. If he could take her out, this mob would fall apart on its own.
The harpies didn’t wait for him to finish the thought. Four of them peeled out of the formation in a tight cluster and dove from four separate directions.
Raphael looked at his empty left wrist, thought for a fraction of a second, and threw Death Crow high into the air, spinning it into the moonlight, catching the reflection off the blade and flashing it directly into the eyes of the nearest one, the one coming from the north.
A fraction of a second of lost vision at that dive speed was enough. She went sideways and plunged into the treeline below.
He caught Death Crow on its way back down. Rotated the revolver in his other hand and put the last silver round in the cylinder into the harpy coming from the south.
She burst into foam the instant the bullet made contact.
"An illusion. An illusion—!"
That was why the elder’s crystal had looked so familiar. The sa construction, the sa fundantal function as the lantern.
Which ant the army crowding the sky above him had its own explanation.
The two remaining harpies ca in from his left and right simultaneously.
He didn’t retreat, he accelerated toward one side, closing the distance fast, compressing the gap and pushing back the mont of contact with the other.
The harpy on the chosen side hadn’t anticipated the approach. Her claws spread wide as she tried to brake, wings hamring the air.
"Scared?"
Raphael’s mouth curved slightly. Real one.
Crash. Crash.
Blood Frenzy at full output. He was behind her before she could register the movent, Death Crow’s hooked blade drove into her back between the wings and bit deep.
He dropped his center of gravity and stopped her dive cold.
Then he began to spin, using himself as the axis, adding montum in incrents as the rotation built, more speed, more centrifugal force, the harpy’s weight working against her with each revolution, until the other harpy was almost on him.
He released.
She went out like a projectile. The harpy coming in from the other side hit her mid-arc at full dive speed and dissolved instantly into nothing.
Crash.
The thrown harpy’s montum didn’t die with the collision.
She hit the rooftop and carved a long bloody furrow through the stone, and didn’t stop until she slamd into the battlents at the edge, the crenellated granite that had stood for centuries took the impact like a cannonball and ca apart.
A massive section of the wall ca down across her.
She convulsed twice. Every feather on her body was soaked red. Then the rubble settled fully and the convulsing stopped.
[Sin acquired:
3.2.]
[Current Sin: 19.86 / 160.]
Raphael moved to the edge and looked down.
The northern harpy was nowhere, no body, no blood, nothing. Illusion, obviously. Even the ground was clean.
He assessed.
Three of the four had been illusions. One real. The pattern was easy enough to read: the elder was grinding him down, using the cost of fighting the real ones and the wasted motion against the fake ones to drain him until she could finish it herself.
He wasn’t going to give her that.
He looked at the rooftop. Flat, open, nowhere to work from, every second he stayed here was the seconds she needed.
The stairwell was open. The castle’s interior was open. He could co back whenever he chose.
His eyes found the zip line at the rooftop’s edge. The far end had frayed loose long ago, no longer anchored, just hanging in the branches of a tall tree at the tree line.
"It’s what I’ve got."
He ran for it. The formation above registered the movent and converged.
He reached the anchor point, hooked Death Crow’s inner edge against the cable, and jumped.
The angle was steep. Speed built fast. The tree was coming up quickly, and so was the realization that the speed wasn’t going to cooperate.
The hooked blade scraped against the old cable with a continuous shower of sparks, the friction eating into tal that had been corroding for decades.
Behind him the formation was spreading thin, the speed and the distance breaking their density, the coordinated mass scattering into loose individuals.
The cable snapped.
Mid-line. Without warning.
The remaining half went slack in his grip, and without the tension there was nothing, he hit the tree trunk directly at speed, the impact slamming through his entire fra, a brief total whiteness in his vision.
The mont to catch himself was there for an instant and gone. Death Crow swung wide and caught nothing.
He fell freely, no deceleration, straight down from several dozen ters.
He hit the ground.
Crash.
The mud was deep from recent rain, and a thick layer of fallen leaves had accumulated beneath the tree, and both of these things provided so cushion.
Not enough. The impact ca through his spine like sothing trying to separate the vertebrae, and for a mont his body stopped responding to instructions entirely, nothing would move. Even trying produced nothing.
Lv3 Physical Resistance was the only reason he was still conscious. At Lv1, a fall like this would have shut everything down.
At Lv3, it was the worst pain he could currently rember and a complete temporary loss of motor function, the signals from his brain traveling sowhere and not arriving.
His vision was sared at the edges. A high flat tone occupied both ears, displacing everything else.
Sensation across his whole body was dull and distant, arriving like sothing filtered through deep water, recovering in incrents he had no way to accelerate.
Above him, the dense canopy closed off the sky. The harpies lost him entirely.
Then, following what had to be a received command, they dispersed, spreading out in organized arcs across the whole forest, beginning a systematic search, covering the upper airspace in an expanding grid.
The elder moved without her escort now. Every body, real and illusory alike, sent outward to find him.
From her position above the treeline, a fall from that height ant a body to be located, not a threat to be tracked.
"He dares speak of killing ."
A quiet, unhurried sound. Sothing like amusent.
She turned the Half-Moon Badge over in her talons, studying it from angles she hadn’t examined before, looking for sothing she might have missed.
---
In the mud and the leaf litter below the tree, Raphael felt a faint irritation on his skin. Light, repetitive. Like sothing small landing on him from above.
The ringing in his ears was fading at the edges. Through it, the distant sharp pitch of a harpy’s voice.
Then a focused pain in his chest, sothing sharp pressing down, breaching the surface of his skin and eting resistance it couldn’t push through.
Not retreating. Pressing again. And again, rhythmic, persistent, each strike driving a small spike of sensation through the numbness and pushing the concussion back further.
His hand moved. His eyes opened.
A harpy stood on his chest, both talons gripping his shoulders, her beak striking his sternum over and over with the patient determination of sothing trying to reach a heart through a ribcage.
When his eyes opened she redirected imdiately, the beak snapped toward his eye, fast and straight.
Raphael’s hand closed around her beak.
The tip stopped one fist’s length from his eye.
The post-concussion disconnection making every output arrive at half-strength, the signals there but the delivery broken sowhere along the way.
The harpy scread and pulled. At Lv1 she shouldn’t have been able to free herself from him.
She did anyway. The beak ca loose and drove straight into the back of his hand.
Drip.
Warm blood ran from his palm across his wrist and reached his lips. His own blood, the faint salt-iron sweetness of it touching the inside of his mouth.
The blood thirst ca awake all at once, completely.
Sothing shifted behind his eyes.
Those usually cold, azure eyes now revealed a wild, beast-like savagery. When the urge to crave blood reached its limit, the vampire’s insane nature was unleashed.
Raphael’s face gradually contorted into a grotesque expression, his vampire fangs protruding, reflecting the harpy’s neck.
There, the carotid artery was vividly red.
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