Chapter 112: It’s Over... Right?
Death Crow took the elder’s head and the blood gem ignited imdiately, a sharp, brilliant pulse of light, and sothing formless was drawn into it, struggling, wearing the elder’s features like a mask it hadn’t finished putting on.
[Hunt complete.]
[Sin acquired:
18.9.]
[Current Sin: 43.56 / 160.]
The weapon was freshly fed and had no interest yet in consuming what it held. The elder’s soul sat sealed inside the gem.
After a mont, the System produced a separate notification.
[Error: Target soul cannot be detected by First Hunting Ground. Connection to First Hunting Ground failed.]
"As expected."
The First Hunting Ground worked by capturing the prey at the mont of death, locking them in that final instant to preserve a kind of living state, the foundation that made contracts possible.
One necessary condition was absent here, and the connection simply hadn’t ford.
Not that he wanted a contract with this one. Her demonstrated abilities had nothing useful in them.
Shared vision required the ability to command the flock in the first place, which required the elder-specific authority she’d been born with, and even then, the cardinal sin mismatch would have gutted whatever he tried to extract.
Dogmatism and Superbia were too far apart.
Better to keep a Lv4 soul in the gem and a Lv4 Core in his bag.
He pressed one hand against the elder’s head and waited, feeling the flow of energy through the body.
"There."
Whether it was arcane material or Core, it lived in the skull.
He picked up her head, drank two mouthfuls of blood to settle the blood thirst that had begun stirring again, and then gripped the long head feathers and pulled them all out in one motion.
Seven of them. Each one patterned in multiple colors that ran parallel without bleeding into each other, the overall effect resembling a peacock’s tail feather.
The owl’s eye potion still had him seeing in black and white, but he rembered the colors clearly enough.
[Analyzing... Complete.]
[Arcane Material: Harpy Elder’s Crown Feathers.]
[Grade: Lv4.]
He waited. Nothing further appeared. The System apparently reserved detailed entries for relic-class items, everything else received a na and a grade and nothing more.
"I’ll have to ask at the black market. Strange, though, why is this listed as a required material?
The other corpses existed in reality but everything supernatural about them went straight into the Hunting Ground."
He raised Death Crow and split the elder’s skull, leaving half the cranium intact and pulling out what connected to the brain, a semi-translucent gel-like structure, shaped like a rooster’s comb, the sa root from which the head feathers had grown.
The elder’s Core.
The option of last resort for bounty hunters who couldn’t take their prey alive.
It could be integrated into the body through specific thods, granting access to all the target’s mutation skills, at the permanent cost of the original owner’s fractured consciousness sharing the space indefinitely.
"Lv4. Uncommon enough at the black market. Should fetch a decent price."
He put it away, found the small knife at his belt, and cut into the elder’s chest.
The crystal ca out with so effort, palm-sized, the material visibly superior to the lantern’s and far beyond the ceiling crystals on the third floor.
The quality gradient was real.
[Analyzing... Failed.]
[Error: Insufficient clearance. Item has been encrypted by another hunter.]
Raphael’s expression shifted slightly toward the strange.
The other hunters seed to be working with a version of the System that operated differently from his.
Fate marks. Encryption. None of these were things he’d been able to do himself.
He shook his head and searched through the elder’s feathers one more ti. Nothing, predictably, harpies had no use for currency.
But tucked into the feathers near the talons, sothing small and hard: the Half-Moon Badge, exactly where she’d been holding it when she was still trying to negotiate.
He looked up.
With the elder dead, her illusion work had ended. The sky over the castle was clear and simply dark, the false flock gone as though it had never been assembled.
The real harpies had scattered to wherever harpies went when their leader was no longer giving instructions.
"Leaderless monsters revert to nothing. And without the illusions protecting this place, the castle will start showing up on maps."
He could predict the rest of it. The harpies would disperse across a wider area, continue hunting individually, but without the elder’s coordination and the illusion cover, bounty hunters would pick them off one by one.
The threat wouldn’t reassemble. The castle itself would eventually attract an archaeological survey, or draw in grave robbers searching for treasure that wasn’t there.
None of it was his concern anymore.
He laid everything out on the rooftop and took inventory.
The Half-Moon Badge, his primary objective, the thing that opened access to the vampire.
Two uses from that eting: the opportunity to hunt Alp’s Shadow and settle that account, and the possibility of contracting a pureblooded vampire to replace the artificial version he currently ran.
A proper vampire contract under Superbia would unlock the full mutation selection.
Death Crow, the death-sense ability would be directly useful for investigation and tracking, and Death Sentence gave him a way to pressure prey after initial contact.
Sin accumulation from the harpy hunting, aningful gains, and the elder had left behind crown feathers and a Core despite her subordinates having nothing of value.
Sam’s notes, the undocunted monster catalog, including the harpies themselves, filling gaps in what the IFSA archives had missed.
The purple crystal, unknown function, but the elder had treated it with the care of sothing precious.
The miscellaneous items: the unidentified white-gold bracelet, the silver Marquess’s Wife figurine, five apprentice-grade recovery potions, one apprentice-grade cold resistance tonic.
Losses: twenty-nine silver rounds and the lantern, which had gone into the treeline below and wasn’t worth the ti to recover.
He packed everything into Sam’s cloth bag until the seams were strained, and looked east.
The sun was coming up. The first light of it hit the castle walls and lit the old granite in amber, and the castle sat in it the way old things do, neither changed by being seen nor indifferent to it, simply present.
The owl’s eye potion was fading. Color ca back gradually, the grey-scale dissolving at the edges, the warm tones of the early morning finding the rooftop and the scattered feathers and the bloodstains on the stone.
"Finally."
Raphael exhaled and let himself acknowledge the exhaustion for the first ti.
It ca in like a tide, the full weight of a night that had started at dusk and was only now ending, settling into his limbs all at once.
He wasn’t in a state to go after Alp’s Shadow. He walked down the stairs and headed toward the road.
---
The highway back to the city ran straight and pale in the early morning.
The sun found him on the open road and the warmth of it cut through the chill that had been sitting on him since the forest, and sowhere in that warmth the tiredness deepened into drowsiness.
He’d been noticing this more since the vampire contract. Sothing about the blood that didn’t love morning.
Then he saw the taxi.
Parked at the road’s edge, the chatty middle-aged driver pacing beside it, clearly having been there for so ti.
When he spotted Raphael coming down the road he moved forward imdiately, visibly relieved.
"You made it! I knew you’d make it. Look! I ca back. I wanted to apologize for last night, I just—"
He laughed, a little awkward about it, the self-awareness of soone who had run away and knew it.
Raphael had no particular feelings about the matter. He accepted the apology, got in the car, and let the engine do the work of getting back.
The driver was talking again almost imdiately, filling the car with the account of his own internal journey through the night, the guilt, the debate, the eventual decision to return at dawn.
Raphael listened to the rhythm of it and looked out the window.
Then his eyes sharpened.
In the rearview mirror, behind them on the road, the little girl in the red dress had erged from the tall grass.
She sat in the sa spot she’d been sitting in the night before and began to play with the stuffed bear, going through the sa sequence of motions, the sa movents, at the sa pace.
"What...?"
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