The possession hit and Raphael stopped mid-stride, the body locking up as two competing signals tried to use the same machinery simultaneously.
Jasmine took the opening and ran, moving up the stairwell, putting floors between himself and the thing in the room below.
David cursed him loudly and continuously.
The pain wasn't physical, it operated on the spirit directly, the corrosive damage working inward from wherever it touched, the kind of injury that had no nerve endings to process it and therefore no ceiling on how bad it felt. He looked toward the source of it.
Raphael's midsection.
The clothing had been torn apart during the transformation and worked into the flesh, absorbed into the churning mass of the Corporeal Reformation.
And with it, an aluminum canister, crumpled and split open, its contents dissolved evenly throughout the body's tissue the way butter works into dough when you fold it repeatedly.
Distributed into every cell.
The canister hadn't contained food.
Spirit Oil.
IFSA standard issue, Red Gloves specification, applied to silver blades for combat against wraith-type and ghost-type Demons.
Raphael had fused it into himself during the reformation, and every movement of the living flesh was a fresh application of it directly against David's incorporeal form.
Raphael made a sound that had no human origin and kept fighting forward, the competing wills inside him generating a constant physical struggle, the body's tissue writhing with the conflict, which made the oil contact worse, which made David's suffering worse.
The canister got squeezed free by the movement and dropped to the floor.
Some of the label had been corroded away. What remained was legible.
Spirit Oil.
"You absolute maniac!" David spat. "Who fuses sword oil into their own body? how does your brain work!"
Then he felt it. Underneath the wildness, underneath the pressure and the heat and the loss of control, a thread of something else.
Faint. Brief.
The specific satisfaction of a predator watching something walk into the trap it built.
"You're still thinking. You can still think!"
The realization landed badly.
"You didn't lose control?!! The shooting earlier, you were aiming! You fused the Spirit Oil deliberately. You were waiting for me to possess you—!"
Jasmine, somewhere above, cut the compulsion spell.
David was free.
He left Raphael's body at a speed that suggested he had no interest in staying a single additional second, moving upward and away without looking back, the damaged parts of his consciousness trailing behind him.
Raphael went still.
The chaotic pupils shifted. A fraction of something, not quite rational, there and gone, moved across his face and disappeared.
The sin-self was winning.
His actual consciousness was losing ground steadily, the thing the Liberation Draught had released expanding to fill the spaces his rational mind vacated, and the spaces were getting larger.
The thing running most of him now was cold and arrogant and wanted blood, and it operated with a certainty that was the opposite of doubt.
If his Superbia affinity ever reached a hundred percent, it would probably look exactly like this.
Forty seconds remaining.
He reached into the flesh of his other side and pulled out the second canister.
Toxic Oil, the plant-compound preparation, multiple poisoning effects on contact.
He'd exchanged for it before leaving for Keynes and never had a clean opportunity to use it.
Not against the Inquisitor, wrong moment.
Not against the werewolf, the wolf toxin running through Manson's blood was already competing with everything else, and this wouldn't have added much.
Now it would be used on himself, because the mathematics of the situation required it.
He crushed the canister in his fist. The viscous compound coated his claws, the smell of it sharp and specific.
The last coherent thought that passed through what remained of his rational mind was approximately: I'm going to die anyway.
The poison won't have time to matter before the drug runs out and the crash kills me.
And then the sin-self finished consuming what was left, and that voice went quiet.
The arrogance that replaced it didn't fill the space the way panic would have.
It settled in like something that had always belonged there. It looked at the room.
Five assassins. All hidden, all waiting for the timer to expire.
The sound that came from Raphael's throat wasn't a roar so much as an announcement.
The tendril-mass split, multiplied, and sent tendrils into every corridor and floor simultaneously.
The branches spreading through the building's skeleton, hunting by feel along structural surfaces, chasing the residual traces of movement.
Walls cracked where they passed.
Load-bearing columns took impacts they weren't rated for.
The building began to register these contributions with the low, building vibration of something that was starting to express a structural opinion.
Jasmine appeared from above, having made his own calculation about waiting.
He came down fast, a massive undead general in full bone-plate armor beside him, a two-handed sword constructed from assembled skeletal remains raised and ready.
Jack was in the shadows somewhere close, the Alp's concealment doing its work.
The floor cracked open and the Earth Dragon heaved itself back out of the rock, gray-scaled and enormous, oriented toward the target.
"Together — now!"
Jasmine read the moment correctly, the tendrils were threaded through too much of the building's complex interior to be fully responsive, the divided attention creating gaps. He committed everything.
The bone general came from the front. Jack materialized from the side.
Both weapons swung at almost exactly the same moment.
Shhhk.
The blood pressure running through Raphael's system was extreme, the tendrils had been drawing hard on both blood and arcane reserves, and when the great bone sword cut through his midsection, the blood came out in a pressurized arc.
The upper body lifted slightly from the impact. Jack's cleaver took the head off cleanly on the follow-through.
Three pieces.
The head went upward in a slow arc.
Jasmine allowed himself one moment of relief.
The flesh at every cut site moved immediately. Dense filaments extended from each surface, found their counterparts, and pulled.
The three pieces reconnected with an organic efficiency that had nothing aesthetic about it and everything functional.
The head came back down and seated itself on the neck.
Raphael's eyes moved to find Jasmine.
The expression in them said: you walked into this.
He turned. His right claw drove through Jack before Jack could do anything about the angle, the reach faster than a body missing both legs below the knee had any right to be.
Jack's heart came out in Raphael's fist.
Still beating.