His body converted to wraith-form at the last possible instant and passed through the floor.
The momentum carried him downward through solid rock, then slowed, then stopped. He began to rise.
Almost simultaneously, the pain hit.
The necromancer's magic came down through the stone like it didn't exist, because for Spirit Binding, it didn't.
The spell was trying to force him back into physical form while he was still inside the rock.
Get caught mid-transition in solid material and the rock would finish the job.
He pushed upward as fast as the wraith-state allowed, racing the dissolving effect, feeling the physical layer trying to reassert itself with every meter he climbed.
His upper body broke through the rock surface first.
Crack.
Clean, sharp, the sound of something that couldn't survive the physics of the situation.
His legs materialized inside the stone at the moment the form failed.
The rock did what rock does to things that suddenly become solid inside it.
Both legs simply ceased to exist below the knee, compressed into a fine red mist that stained the stone around the entry points.
"Cough — cough!"
He hit the ground on what remained of his upper body. His forehead was soaked.
His hands wouldn't stop shaking.
The edges of his vision were getting soft and the center wasn't far behind.
"Cough cough! I will find you...and then I will kill you,Cough!—I definitely will."
The Malevolent Spirit descended slowly in front of him.
The small, hollow-cheeked man it wore smiled down at him with the particular contempt reserved for things that have already lost.
"You're already dying. And you're threatening us with 'later?'"
Raphael looked at him. Fixed the face in his memory.
"I don't make promises I don't keep. And you made one mistake." His voice came out steady. "You gave me time. That's enough."
The spirit laughed. Didn't bother covering the contempt.
"Your legs are gone. You can't stand. What exactly are you going to do with this time, friend? Stay here and wait. That's all you have left."
He turned to leave.
Raphael's eyes, which had been drifting, snapped into focus.
His remaining hand moved into his coat pocket and came back with a small injector. Two milliliters of clear liquid, the needle no thicker than a sewing pin.
The Liberation Draught. The life band's emergency measure, removed quietly before he'd cut his wrist off, the one thing he'd kept even while abandoning everything else.
Eighty percent fatality rate. One hundred percent chance of lasting psychological damage in survivors.
Against a ninety-nine percent chance of dying in the next thirty seconds, the math was simple.
He activated Blood Frenzy first.
Thud. Thud.
His heart found its rhythm. Body functions jumped to Lv6, the familiar surge running through what remained of him.
He pressed the needle to the inside of his wrist and pushed the plunger down.
The effect was not gradual.
[Special compound detected.]
[Physical Functions elevated to: Lv7.]
[Physical Resistance elevated to: Lv2.]
[Arcane Resistance elevated to: Lv2.]
[Arcane Reserve elevated to: Lv3.]
[Duration: 90 seconds.]
The world went white.
Then it went away entirely.
---
Above the pit, Jack was watching the hole.
He turned to his brother. "How deep did the Earth Dragon dig?"
Jasmine glanced at the massive lizard resting beside him.
It lay flat against the floor with its eyes half-closed, rumbling faintly, entirely uninterested in anything that wasn't a direct command.
The scales along its back caught the light in slow, lazy ripples.
"Stack the tallest building in the 2nd District upside down into the ground."
Jasmine ran a hand along the ridge of its neck.
"It still wouldn't reach the bottom." He almost sounded fond. "No intelligence to speak of, constitutionally indolent, but the body on this thing is exceptional. The best kind of tool."
He closed his eyes and pressed his palm to the Earth Dragon's skull, his lips moving in the old language, a green circle forming along the Demon's forehead.
"Druidic Speech."
The intention crossed the gap between species.
The Earth Dragon made a low, unhappy sound, shifted its considerable weight with the air of something deeply inconvenienced, and pushed itself into the ground.
The pit walls began to close.
The floor around the opening contracted inward, the earth folding and pressing, and the building above, its foundation already compromised from below, began to sway at its upper stories.
"Either the fall finished him or the rock did. If neither, the burial will."
Jasmine raised one hand and cast Spirit Binding outward in a wide net this time, the spell sinking through the stone layers and spreading through the underground space in every direction, an invisible cage covering the entirety of the pit's depth.
"Even if he tries the wraith form, he goes nowhere." He lowered his hand. "Die."
Something in his expression suggested he was already planning the conversion, what a specimen like this would add to his collection of undead, what quality of death knight a body with this kind of history might produce.
David drifted up out of the pit and settled beside the brothers.
"How was he?" Jack asked.
A derisive sound.
"Half-dead and making speeches. Threatening us. A Lv2 holding out this long against five of us is honestly more than I expected, but still."
He began itemizing his share of the commission with the brisk efficiency of someone who considered the job concluded.
A shadow moved in the pit.
Not the Earth Dragon. Not the rock settling.
Something was climbing.
Fast. Fluid.
Moving up the sheer rock face with a speed that had no relationship to the condition Raphael had been in sixty seconds ago, the movement not human exactly but using the shape of a human, the body adapting to the vertical surface with every stride.
Jasmine's hand tightened.
The Spirit Binding net was in place. He could feel through it. Whatever was moving down there was physical, entirely, solidly, undeniably physical.
"That's not the wraith form. What—?!"
He couldn't finish the question because he couldn't construct a framework for the answer.
A man with no legs below the knee, alone, without assistance, climbing out of a pit that deep by purely physical means.
The geometry of it was wrong. The biology of it was wrong.
"Earth Dragon, stop him! now—!"
He pushed the command through the Druidic channel, trying to get the Demon turned around before the target cleared the rim.
A hand grabbed the edge of the pit.
And Raphael pulled himself out.
The dust settled around him in a slow ring.
His skin had gone the color of old paper, every vein visible and raised, black blood moving through them in sluggish pulses.
His eyes were entirely red, not the deep red of Blood Frenzy, something darker, the whites gone completely.
Black lines spread across every visible surface of skin, branching like cracks in dry earth, covering his face and neck and the back of his remaining hand.
The left arm ended at the wrist.
The right hand had become something else, oversized, the fingers fused into claws, coated in a viscous substance that caught the light strangely.
Where his legs should have been: tendril-mass.
Dense clusters of flesh extensions extending downward, supporting his weight, constantly shifting and repositioning, the movement of something that had decided legs were one solution among several.
He stood on them the way a man stands on solid ground, balanced, stable.
He kept his head down.
He didn't move.