The Sinner Hunting S Chapter 122: I Have Returned From Hell

Chapter 122: I Have Returned From Hell.

"I know, I know. The D-Brotherhood. The underground world’s kingmakers, the ones who specialize in elimination, of course I haven’t forgotten. Crossing you would mean my life. But."

A pause.

"If the ritual fails, I’m finished anyway, and the deal collapses with me. Simple arithmetic."

David drew a slow breath and pressed the anger down.

"What do you want done with the person who retrieved the badge?"

Blitz considered for a moment.

"Get rid of him. Method doesn’t matter. He’s no longer useful, the payment I offered was a fabrication from the start, I was never going to honor it. As for what he’s actually capable of..."

Another pause.

"The castle’s final challenge favored intelligence and adaptability over raw power. He might have just been lucky and clever. I’d assume nothing exceptional. Shouldn’t be difficult for your side. Yes?"

David’s response was a cold exhale.

"I know exactly what you’re implying. You’re questioning our competence? Alp has reached Lv4, and your servant is capable enough. What difficulty could there possibly be in handling one bounty hunter?"

Blitz’s voice took on a quality that was hard to read.

"Bounty hunter? No, no, no. My friend. Who told you he was a bounty hunter?" A short, loaded silence. "Caution is a virtue, sometimes."

David’s brow furrowed. Before he could respond, the line clicked dead. The dial tone sat in the room like a deliberate insult.

He stared at the phone. Then he threw it.

"Arrogant vampire—!!"

He stopped.

Something in the room felt wrong. He turned toward the wall.

Nothing there. Smooth surface, no visible disturbance. But the feeling of being watched didn’t leave.

"Strange. I could swear there’s someone..."

---

In booth 04, the figure at the desk tilted its head, listened to something, and made a raspy sound that was almost a laugh.

"Good. Very good." The voice had taken on a different quality. "The item has been confirmed. You did well. Now, you can leave."

Raphael’s eyebrow went up. He smiled without warmth.

"Taking the goods and skipping the payment? Do you actually think you’re capable of that?"

The figure rose slowly from the chair.

"What do you think? You’re on my territory. You believe you walk out of here intact? This building is full of my people. I have methods, I will break every bone you have and leave your body here."

Raphael’s fingers moved slightly. He tilted his head back and looked down.

"If you think you can, then come and try. Vampire’s servant. You imitate your master with such dedication. It doesn’t hide what’s underneath."

The figure’s fingers clamped around the desk edge. One hand came up and tore the hood away.

An ordinary face. Nothing remarkable about it. No longer bothering to hide.

"When did you know?"

Raphael made a short, contemptuous sound.

"From the moment you opened your mouth. A real vampire doesn’t fly into a rage over insults to the race.

They don’t have that concept, their arrogance is too personal, too individual. Even within their own kind the hierarchy is absolute and impersonal. Racial pride isn’t something they feel."

He moved around the room in a slow, deliberate circuit, watching the expression curdle.

"Only one kind of person does. The converted thrall, a human who was made into a vampire. Contemptuous of humans because they’ve convinced themselves they’ve risen above it, while simultaneously worshipping the real thing that created them.

You raged at the insult because being told vampires are beneath contempt felt like someone denying you the elevation you staked your identity on."

He opened his hands and shrugged, making his posture deliberately open.

"And the other side of it, you’re genuinely afraid of him. Reverence wrapped in fear, dressed up as loyalty. You’ve made him into your redemption."

He paused.

"He doesn’t see you that way. You’re a tool. Expendable. Not a thought in his mind."

The last line landed somewhere specific. The thrall’s face came apart.

"Damn you! damn you!!!

I’ll open you from the throat down, I’ll pull your intestines out and use them as decoration, I’ll drink from your skull!"

He grabbed his own shirt and tore it in half. Beneath it, at the center of his chest, something was embedded in the flesh, a crimson seed, gel-like in texture, threads of red extending outward from it through the blood vessels under his skin, spreading across his entire torso like roots.

He moved.

Faster than the eye expected, one instant at the desk, the next directly in front of Raphael, the claws extended, the eyes fully red, the face no longer recognizable as human.

He grabbed Raphael by the throat and drove him back into the wall.

"This is the power the vampire gave me, a height that humans can never reach."

[Analyzing... Complete.]

[Lv3: Vampire Thrall.]

[Cardinal Sin: Superbia.]

[Type: Derivative.]

Raphael’s sunglasses slid off and hit the floor. The blue eyes beneath were exposed. His expression didn’t change. He rolled his neck slowly and let the vertebrae settle.

"Is this all? This is your full capability?" He let the pause sit. "Pathetic. Genuinely, embarrassingly weak."

A short exhale of contempt.

"And you even abandoned your name. Vampire’s Thrall, honestly a better fit for you."

The thrall screamed and raised his claws for a strike that would have gone through Raphael’s chest.

And in the thrall’s red vision, an answering red flooded into Raphael’s eyes.

"What?!"

Thud.

Raphael’s claws, sharper than razors, punched through the thrall’s abdomen in a single motion. Blood hit the floor in a wide spray.

The thrall’s own claws drove back at him. They broke the skin and went no further. Lv3 Physical Resistance was an absolute wall at this level, and the thrall hit it and found nothing on the other side.

"No! this can’t! you’re also a vampire, how can you be a vampire?!"

Raphael’s hand moved inside the wound. His fingers closed around something wet and firm.

He pulled.

The intestines came out in a bloody tangle, held in his fist.

"You thought I was a vampire? No. I killed one and took what he had. That’s the difference between us."

He drove his boot into the thrall’s stomach and sent him to the floor.

"Get up. Pathetic."

He shook the intestines loose from his grip and looped them around the thrall’s neck as he lay there, yanking him back to his feet by the improvised hold.

Then left, slamming him into the floor. Then right, sending him into the desk, the wood split down the center on impact, the whole structure collapsing inward, splinters and debris going in every direction.

The thrall coughed up blood, body locked in pain across multiple locations, the abdominal wound still gaping.

But the vampire’s regeneration was working, it brought him back from the edge of unconsciousness slowly, and he pulled himself into a blur of movement and put distance between them.

The black cloak on his body shifted.

Alp’s Shadow’s voice came out of it, difficult to sustain the composure, recognition having cut through everything else.

"You. You!.You’re alive. How are you alive?"

Raphael’s smile was cold and entirely without warmth.

"It’s me, Raphael. Yes. Surprised? I came back from the hell, Alp. Now it’s your turn to go."

In response to Raphael’s disdainful chuckle, Alp almost roared, his voice filled with disbelief and an inability to accept the reality before him.

"Impossible. You were dead. Definitively dead. No one can refuse the ferry across the River of Darkness. and keeps walking among the living—!"

Alp couldn’t process it. Beside him, the thrall reached inside his own abdomen and began feeding the intestines back in, the blood-slicked coils pressing into the cavity as the flesh slowly closed around them, drawing in what had been pulled out, the layers sealing over dust and all.

A brutal injury by any normal standard. Not fatal for a vampire, though.

They fed on blood, not food, a pureblood’s internal architecture bore almost no resemblance to a human’s.

No stomach. No intestines. That particular organ set was a remnant that only survived in the converted, still present because the transformation hadn’t had the patience to remove every human component.

Raphael walked toward them with an unhurried rhythm. The booth’s acoustic lining was doing its job, whatever was happening in here stayed in here.

"Have you decided how you’d like to die?"

He drew Death Crow from his back as he said it. In the blood gem, something distorted and constrained, the harpy elder’s shape just visible beneath the surface.

The thrall’s composure had changed. The contempt was gone. He was listening for something, jaw tight, and when he came back from it he was shaking his head with a furious determination.

"Run? No! This building is full of our people. I’m not running like a kicked dog. Kill him. Help me kill him!"

He seized the black robe moving on his body. Alp’s Shadow shuddered against the grip of whatever bound it there, made a sound of resigned frustration, and stopped resisting.

Bang!