"Jack—!!!"
The word tore out of Jasmine before he could stop it.
He sent the bone general forward immediately, the great skeleton raising its two-handed sword and bringing it down vertically, splitting Raphael from crown to base. The cut was clean. Deep.
The flesh closed around it anyway.
Fine filaments extending from both halves, finding each other, pulling the surfaces back together with the same patient efficiency as every time before.
But the impact had done something.
Raphael's claw was still wrapped around Jack's heart, and it hadn't moved.
It's working.
Jasmine reached for the general again, the sword coming up for the hand this time, the wrist, sever the arm entirely.
But, the tendrils he'd dismissed had been threading back through the building's corridors the whole time, and they came from behind without warning.
Between his brother and himself, he chose without hesitation.
The general's blade redirected. The tendril went in pieces.
Raphael moved.
The sound was brief and final. He removed the heart the way you take an apple from a branch, a single motion, clean at the root, and crushed it in his fist while Jasmine watched.
"No—!"
Jack's eyes went empty. His knees found the floor, and then the floor found the rest of him.
Raphael grabbed him by the throat before he'd finished falling.
The Lv4 constitution was keeping Jack from fully crossing over, but the poison was already expressing itself, the skin greening, the mouth producing foam, the whites of his eyes rolling upward.
The toxic oil on the claw had done what it was designed to do.
The black shadow that had been Jack's companion detached itself from his body, hanging loose like a coat that had lost its wearer, trailing green filaments where the toxin had followed it into contact.
It drifted for a moment, then made its decision and dove into the nearest shadow and was gone.
"Damn it! damn it!!!"
Jasmine ran the calculations fast.
There were death magic techniques that could preserve Jack even now, reconstruct something from what remained, the bone general was proof that function could survive death if you knew the methods.
But every method required the body as a medium.
Taking a body away from the thing currently holding it was a different problem entirely, and he was out of allies to help him solve it.
The Alp was gone. David was gone. The Earth Dragon was present but required active direction, and doing two things at once against something moving at this speed was not a viable strategy.
He made the call.
The Earth Dragon received its instruction and lunged, the massive body sweeping both Raphael and what he was holding over the edge and into the pit, the weight and momentum carrying them down together.
The floor began to move again.
From below, the sounds of impact carried upward, Raphael didn't die from falls, hadn't died from anything today that should have finished a person.
But time is killing him.
Jasmine moved to the edge and looked down.
He picked up Jack's cleaver from the floor. It was heavier than it looked.
He held it for a moment, then stood there in silence as the earth completed its work, the walls pressing inward, the crack sealing itself from all sides simultaneously until the floor was smooth and unbroken and gave no indication that anything lay beneath it.
The sounds from below stopped.
The Earth Dragon dragged itself out of the ground nearby, blood running from its mouth, the skin along its flanks showing large patches of necrosis, the toxic contact had done real damage.
Jasmine fed it one of his remaining draughts and hoped it would hold together.
The building shuddered.Jasmine made his decision, he had no other choice.
He ended the magic, recalled the general, and ran.
The Earth Dragon followed, the ground trembling under its weight, the two of them breaking out through the construction site perimeter as the structure behind them came apart floor by floor.
The upper stories losing their support, dropping onto the stories below, which dropped onto the stories below that, the whole column of it compressing downward in a cascade that raised a cloud of concrete dust visible from the far side of the city.
When it was done, there was a pile where the building had been.
Jasmine stood at the perimeter and watched the dust rise.
He looked at his palm. At the symbol there.
"Prophet. The assignment is complete. Target, confirmed eliminated."
The voice that came back carried an odd quality. Unhurried. Faintly amused.
"Successful? Is that right. Good. I'll note it."
Jasmine frowned.
He told himself it was nothing. But the Prophet, one of the Fate Council's most significant members.
The man who had never once expressed doubt about an outcome he'd already seen, had sounded, in that moment, like someone who was being polite about not believing you.
---
Elsewhere, a figure in a nun's habit moved through the forests at the edge of Keynes City with the directness of someone who knew where she was going.
Silver hair. Clear green eyes. Black combat suit underneath the habit. Vigo Evelyn.
She found the crash site without difficulty. Half a helicopter still burning where it had landed.
The other half somewhere distant, located by the faint glow on the horizon.
The pilot hung unconscious in the branches of a tree above the wreckage.
No Raphael.
"The bond signal was right here. I know it was."
She stood still and felt more carefully.
There, the far side of the city, toward the coast. Faint.
Much fainter than it should have been, attenuated to the point where she'd mistaken the absence for the thing itself on first pass.
"He's in two places."
She touched her chin, thinking. Searched the immediate area.
One severed hand, lying in the grass. The IFSA life band still locked around the wrist.
The skin was pale but not cold, still holding temperature, the cut at the end already scarred over, the connection to the distant body apparently ongoing in some form she didn't have a framework for yet.
She prodded it experimentally.
It was softer than she'd expected.
"Strange ability. Unsettling, honestly."
She picked it up, crushed the life band between her fingers, and tucked the hand carefully into her coat pocket. Then she started walking toward the coast.
The connection severed.
Not faded, severed. There and then gone, the thread dropping away into silence.
"...Raphael?"
She stopped walking.
Then the signal reappeared, distant and in the wrong direction entirely.
"You really do keep surprising me."
The hand in her pocket began to move.
Vigo looked down at the slight bulge in her coat, felt the object shifting against her side, apparently trying to go somewhere.
She reached in and took it out.
"Don't be impatient. Stay with me a little longer."
She traced a symbol across the wrist. The movement stopped. The hand went still.
She examined it for a moment with the expression of someone who has decided to keep something that wasn't theirs.
"What should I call you? 'Raphael's Hand' is too formal. No, the King's Left Hand. That has better weight to it."
There was a hint of teasing in her tone.
She smiled the way she smiled at things that pleased her, openly, without apology, with the specific warmth of anticipation.
"Wherever you've gone, I'll find you. And when I do..."
She tucked the hand back into her coat and changed direction.
"Wait for me, darling Demon Lord candidate."
---
In a river with no light and no shore, Raphael's consciousness drifted on the current, moving toward something it couldn't see.
[Hunt complete.]
[Sin acquired: +14.8.]
[Current Sin: 74 / 80.]
[Scapegoat resolved. Designated recipient: Jason Lance.]
[Scapegoat: Sacrifice a soul to receive passage across the River of Death in your place. Rebirth occurs at a randomized location.]
[Warning: Designated soul is incomplete. Memory damage will occur upon rebirth. Estimated memory loss: 33%.]
At the far end of the lightless river, something white began to glow.
---
Volume One — Requiem, Complete.
Volume Two — The Wandering Knight, Coming Soon.