"Lost control?"
Jack sounded uncertain. The thing standing on the other side of the room matched his mental image of what that looked like well enough.
Jasmine's expression was more careful.
"Partially. This looks more like an IFSA compound, the kind that releases the sin-self to access power beyond the user's natural ceiling.
Time-limited. Rarely exceeds two minutes before it burns out."
He kept his voice level.
"Hold position for two minutes and he dies on his own. But until then, he's extremely dangerous."
Jack grunted and took one step to the side, testing an angle, trying to establish a flanking position.
The moment his foot touched the floor, Raphael's head snapped up.
Like an animal that registered the vibration before the sound.
His eyes had nothing behind them, no calculation, no recognition, just the raw targeting instinct of something that had reduced the room to threats and distances.
He was gone from where he'd been standing.
Crack.
Jack felt the impact before he saw it, a shape moving at a speed that made visual tracking pointless, It was like being hit by a train that had derailed at full speed, completely out of control.
He hit the wall with enough force to push partially through it, his body embedding in the concrete and plaster, arms pinned, something broken in more places than he could currently count.
"God!"
Jasmine reacted immediately. His hands moved through the air, drawing a circle in arcane light, and the necromancer's particular ability to reach across the boundary between states expressed itself in the form of a door opening in the middle of the floor.
Cold air flooding outward, the smell of something very old, and through the door came the undead.
Dozens of them.
Rotting, skeletal, moving with the purposeful shuffle of things being directed rather than things choosing to move.
They poured through and turned toward Raphael without hesitation.
From above, the Malevolent Spirit, David, folded his form and dove like a thrown blade, aiming for possession, betting that a half-controlled target drowning in undead was the right moment.
Raphael raised the revolver with his remaining hand and pulled the trigger twice.
David veered off. He didn't know if vampire-hunter silver rounds could finish him and he wasn't interested in finding out. He pulled back and waited.
Raphael's head turned.
The eyes found Jasmine.
Below his waist, the tendril-mass spread outward in both directions, extending across the floor, climbing the walls, reaching both ends of the floor simultaneously.
The flesh drinking the arcane output from his body and expanding, thickening, two massive rope-like structures that met no resistance as they grew and curled and prepared to close.
Jack peeled himself off the wall. Every movement was an argument with several broken bones and his grip on the cleaver had become theoretical rather than practical.
He assessed the situation and made a decision.
The Alp's shadow crept across his skin, folding him into the background, and he moved along the wall toward the stairs.
"Coward," said the shadow that was the Alp, with the tone of something mildly disgusted.
Jack didn't slow down.
"Two minutes and he burns himself out. We come back when he's done. That's the intelligent choice."
He favored his left side and kept moving.
"I've never had a job go this badly. I hit my target clean and they're still alive. Still moving. My professional reputation is in ruins..."
The sound that came from Jasmine's direction cut him off.
"NO—!"
The two tendril-trunks closed at the center point.
The noise they made was a single enormous crack, the sound of something hitting itself at full force.
Everything between them ceased to be, the undead formations compressed, reduced, the individual bodies becoming components in a larger equation that solved itself as pressure and then as fragments.
Bone powder. Scattered limbs.
The fine mist of things that had been converted into simpler materials.
The flesh absorbed what it could reach.
[Sin acquired: +1.2.]
[Sin acquired: +1.8.]
[Sin acquired...]
[...]
[Current Sin: 59.2 / 80.]
Raphael waved one of the tendrils at the remaining scattered fragments the way someone waves away an insect.
Several attempts produced nothing. He refocused.
Jasmine stood very still and experienced what it felt like to watch years of careful cultivation reduced to residue in a single motion.
The undead he used as front-line forces were Lv1 constructs, yes, disposable by design, their value in numbers rather than individual capacity.
But disposable and casually obliterated were meaningfully different experiences, and right now he was having the latter.
More importantly, that impact had told him something about the force behind it.
"At least Lv6. No... higher."
A Lv2 opponent. That was what the file had said. A Lv2 opponent who was currently displaying output that had no business existing in the body he'd been assigned.
Jasmine raised his hands and began drafting a higher-tier summoning array, the Lv3 and Lv4 constructs, the ones he genuinely didn't want to spend.
He held the motion and thought about the calculation. Two minutes, maximum.
Throw everything in, absorb the losses, wait for the flame to go out.
But two minutes was also enough time for those constructs to be destroyed, which would leave him with nothing.
A necromancer with no undead was just a person in a robe.
He was still weighing it when Raphael came through the tendril-cover directly at him.
"Damn!"
He looked at David. The Malevolent Spirit looked back with the careful expression of something that had decided the risk-reward calculation did not favor aggressive action while the clock was running.
Jasmine drew a different symbol.
Not a summoning. A compulsion.
"Get over here."
David registered the necromantic command and had approximately no choice about what happened next.
His form twisted and descended whether he wanted it to or not.
"You backstabbing—!"
He dove. He closed his eyes and waited for the silver round that would answer.
He heard the trigger mechanism click twice.
He opened his eyes.
"He's out of ammunition!"
The relief lasted less than a second.
He made contact and the scream that came out of him was not the sound of a confident entity executing a plan.
"GET OFF ! GET OFF —! HE'S POISONED! HE'S COATED IN SOMETHING, GET IT OFF ME—!"