Chapter 52: Falling From the Sky
The helicopter locked the periter. The werewolf had nowhere to run that the searchlight and the gun wouldn’t follow, and both of them knew it.
Raphael drank one blood bag on the way back in. Then he walked through the door.
The werewolf was waiting.
"Two of us running on empty." He stopped a few ters out, sword up. "Good ti to finish it."
The werewolf’s eyes were different now. The blind fury from earlier was still in there, but sothing had layered over it, sothing quieter, and worse.
Regret, maybe. Fear. The particular look of a creature that has already worked out how the next few minutes end and is trying to make peace with the answer.
The helicopter had closed every exit. There was nowhere to go that didn’t lead back here.
"I didn’t kill them." The voice that ca out was rough with animal undertone but recognizably young, recognizably Manson’s. "I only put them sowhere. Sowhere specific."
Raphael stopped moving. Nodded once.
"I know."
The red light on the werewolf’s forehead dimd further. The crescent was barely visible now, the moon almost spent, and as it faded Manson’s consciousness rose to fill the space the rage was vacating.
"The sin of wrath." He said it without self-pity. "It doesn’t let
think. It just carries
forward. I’ve done a lot of things I wouldn’t have chosen."
A pause.
"But I don’t regret all of it. My life has been what it’s been. The people I killed, most of them had it coming. So of them didn’t." He didn’t look away. "I’m not pretending otherwise."
Raphael listened and said nothing.
"One thing. That’s all I’m asking." The claws on both hands slowly dimd, the red light draining out of them. "Find my foster mother. Give her enough money to live on. Tell her I’m sorry."
He straightened.
"I’m not running. What I did is mine to answer for."
Raphael exhaled slowly through his nose.
"I don’t know her. But I’ll have soone look into it, if she wasn’t involved, we’ll make sure she’s looked after." He paused.
"I’m not a good person either. The blood on my hands is heavier than yours. You don’t owe anyone a confession."
The corner of the werewolf’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Sothing in the direction of one.
Neither of them said anything after that. They ca together at the sa mont, without signal, and the fight resud, but changed. No tricks, no terrain manipulation, no activated skills.
Just the sword and the claws, moving back and forth between attack and deflection and counter with the directness of two people who have run out of ti for anything elaborate.
Claws t blade. Blade t open palm. Weight shifted, force redirected, distance opened and closed. No flourishes. No wasted movent.
Every exchange was the product of being hit enough tis to understand exactly what worked and what got you killed.
Gradually, the blade started finding angles the claws couldn’t follow.
The werewolf’s reaction ti was slipping. The crescent on its forehead was nearly gone, and with it the amplification that had been keeping the gap closed.
Wounds were accumulating on the grey fur without the rapid sealing they’d had an hour ago.
Then the werewolf made a decision.
It let the sword in.
The blade bit into its palm and kept going, edge embedding in the at, and the werewolf’s grip locked around it and used the montum of Raphael’s own forward drive, rotating its whole body, swinging him once, releasing, and this ti the trajectory was up and out through the nearest window, straight toward the waiting helicopter above.
The pilot saw him coming and pulled back fast, clearing the airspace.
Raphael hit open sky at speed.
The familiar sensation. Altitude building, ground receding, the math underneath it all pointing toward an unpleasant conclusion.
His physical resistance was Lv1 and always had been, and the landing at the end of this arc was going to express an opinion about that.
But he’d done this before. He knew what to do with it now.
He bit down on the sword hilt and freed both hands. The fingers split and extended, the flesh unraveling into tendril growth, the arcane feeding them and accelerating the expansion, thick ropes of living matter shooting outward in every direction, finding buildings, wrapping trees, driving into load-bearing walls and anchoring, punching straight down into the earth like pilings.
A network. A web. He hit the full extension of it still moving, the energy of the werewolf’s throw converting into tension across every line, the whole structure pulling toward its limit.
He cut the arcane supply.
The tendrils stopped growing. Locked at maximum stretch, every line humming with stored force.
Below, the werewolf was tearing three of the outer anchors loose bare-handed. Then it stopped. Looked up. Understood.
It ran up one of the remaining tendrils instead of destroying it, four limbs working fast, covering several hundred ters of vertical climb in seconds, rising toward him.
Raphael hung near the apex of his arc, almost stationary now, watching the werewolf co.
The werewolf calculated the distance. Kicked off the tendril and launched.
"It’s over."
Behind the werewolf, several ters back, following on the sa line, detached from its anchor without fanfare, one tendril had been there the whole ti.
The werewolf had never looked back.
"See you on the ground."
The red surface filled its vision an instant before impact.
Sothing moved in the werewolf’s eyes in that last fraction of a second, the fury gone, a strange clarity in its place, sothing that looked almost like relief.
The tendril’s base held. The tip was free. All the accumulated force traveled the full length of it and arrived at the point of contact at once.
CRACK.
The sound carried across the whole district. The werewolf’s chest drove inward, the ribs giving way, and the montum it had built going up reversed completely and sent it down, fast, accelerating, a long way to fall.
Blood ca out of its mouth in a spray that caught the moonlight. In the red of its eyes, Raphael’s face reflected back.
Then every tendril behind Raphael released simultaneously.
He went forward like sothing fired. Every anchor’s worth of stored energy returning to his body at once, no loss, no transition, just the speed of it, which was considerable.
He extended a tendril from his cheek to hook the sword hilt in midair and threw it forward, blade aid at the heart, one beat ahead of himself.
Then he followed.
He hit the poml with both feet and drove it the rest of the way through, his weight and the sword’s weight and all the accumulated velocity of the fall forming a single point.
A white line drawn across the sky from altitude to impact, the sword and the man and the werewolf all arriving at the ground together.
A spear dropped from above.
A judgnt delivered from a very long way up.
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