The Sinner Hunting System

Raphael opened his eyes slowly and took in Elena’s face, the color of a ripe apple, radiating heat in all directions. He raised one eyebrow.

"What are you looking at?"

He followed her gaze downward, cleared his throat once, and explained with a completely flat expression.

"Normal physiological phenomenon. Wasn’t it in your textbooks? Maybe you missed that lesson."

He yawned after saying this. Not a trace of embarrassment. The overall energy was: why are you making such a production of this.

Elena had known what he was like for several days now, but this still left her thoroughly speechless.

How did a person exist like this. How did someone move through the world with this complete absence of self-consciousness.

"Don’t change the subject! You took the medication! How are you still, how is it still—"

She pointed at his trousers and couldn’t finish the sentence.

Raphael waved a hand.

"That product is formulated for animals. The effect on humans is naturally reduced. Don’t look so horrified, give me ten minutes or so, the dosage will catch up."

Then something seemed to occur to him. He stood up from the couch and walked over to her, using the height difference to look down at her from close range.

"What are you afraid of. I’m not going to eat you, little bunny."

Elena’s lips moved. She bolted into her bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it with considerable force.

The corner of Raphael’s mouth lifted. Something genuinely pleasant moved through him.

"She’s adorable."

Like watching a small animal react. The responses were consistently entertaining.

"Dying once isn’t entirely a bad thing, I suppose."

He said it to the empty room.

The thirty-three percent of memory he’d lost in rebirth was mostly the darkest material from the Black Gloves years, the kind that accumulated and didn’t leave.

And the death had apparently washed away the emotional cost of the Rick contract as well, those grey moods that used to surface without invitation.

What he had now was natural feeling, feeling he could acknowledge and sometimes couldn’t quite control, including the particular urge to mock things that expressed itself more freely than it used to.

That was the Superbia affinity making itself at home.

He went to the kitchen to start breakfast.

From the bathroom, a shriek, Elena had apparently found the artwork on her face.

A small bird landed on the kitchen windowsill and chirped at him with great attention.

He smiled slightly.

Time moved in that unhurried way it does when nothing urgent is pressing.

The police search wound down over the following days, and by the time it ended, the date had arrived: July 7th.

Over those days he’d been accumulating moonlight energy, enough for roughly six small-scale strikes or three larger ones.

During the mornings he stayed in and talked with Elena, working at the synchronization rate in a measured way, hoping that when she eventually awakened, the bond would be deep enough to yield useful mutation skills.

In the afternoons he explored the city, learned the layout, and picked up practical items, a mask, sunglasses, various things useful for looking like someone else.

When the time came, he dressed in the stalker’s signature outfit, flagged down a taxi, and rode out to the eastern outskirts alone.

---

Cloud cover had moved in over the city. The scattered streetlights along this stretch of road didn’t reach far enough to matter.

The abandoned vehicle processing plant sat in the dark the way abandoned things do, comfortably, without apology.

Hollowed car shells, rusted engines, parts and tools and flat tyres piled into rough hills that spread across the yard in every direction.

Raphael walked the perimeter. He found the entrance inside one of those hills of scrap, a door, corroded so thoroughly it had become part of the texture of everything around it, invisible unless you were specifically looking for it.

He knocked. Nothing.

He took out the brass key, ran his eyes over the door surface, and couldn’t find a keyhole anywhere.

He thought about it.

Then he lowered his voice.

"All prosperity casts a shadow."

The moment the words finished, a brass lock appeared on the rusted door.

"Interesting."

It hadn’t materialized from nothing. It was more like the lock had been there the entire time and he’d simply stopped being prevented from perceiving it, not a failure of attention, something operating at the level of rules rather than visibility.

The same category of thing as the Prophet’s face, which couldn’t be retained in memory regardless of how clearly you saw it.

"D-Brotherhood?"

His expression did something complicated for a moment, then settled back to neutral. He used the key, opened the door, and stepped through.

What was on the other side had no relationship to what was outside.

A fully modern stairwell. Wall sconces providing actual light. The contrast with the rusting wreckage outside was absolute.

"Spatial magic?"

He pulled the door shut behind him and went down.

The stairs went on for a while. At the bottom was something that looked like a conference room, down to the functioning central air conditioning.

A round table, chairs arranged around it, a number of them already occupied.

One was a high-backed chair at the head of the table, and the person in it moved with the specific ease of someone who owns the room.

A tall glass sat at her elbow. What was inside it was a deep red that was too thick to be wine, the smell reaching him from across the room, blood and alcohol layered together into something that functioned as a beverage.

Strange, he noted, and scanned the room.

The rest of the attendees were dressed similarly to him, fully covered, no identifying features deliberately exposed.

A smaller number hadn’t bothered, sitting openly in ordinary clothes with faces showing.

Those people looked approximately human but weren’t, in ways you registered quickly: scales running along one person’s neck and jaw, another with vertically slit pupils, a third with canine ears sitting at the top of the skull.

Beast-kin.

Raphael filed this with some surprise.

These were races the Federation had spent decades preventing from crossing its borders, the Secrecy Legislation from the early twenty-first century had been specifically designed to keep non-human species out of public life, one component of a larger project to maintain a version of reality that ordinary citizens could be kept inside.

And here were several of them, in a basement meeting room under a scrap yard.

Which confirmed what the radio transmission had suggested. This was the underground. Not a physical description, a category.

The network of operations that existed in the space law couldn’t easily reach: black market supply chains, unlicensed establishments, trafficking, contraband in every form, all of it woven into a structure that functioned like its own parallel economy.

He looked around the table.

A collection of people like this almost certainly included sinners, probably a number of them. If he were to hunt freely here...

Raphael caught himself and almost laughed quietly.

That thought was extremely arrogant. The old version of him wouldn’t have gone there.

The Superbia affinity had been making itself at home in his thinking, and this kind of impulse, surveying a room full of people and calculating their value as prey, was something it generated without effort now.

He pressed the urge back down and focused on the woman at the head of the table.

The hood partially covered her features, but what showed was enough, a jaw with good lines, lips full and very red, and from the hood, two curved horns extending backward from the forehead.

Dragon. Or at least partial dragon. At minimum, that lineage was present.

He’d only looked for a moment, and through his sunglasses at that. She caught it anyway.

She raised her head. A face came fully into view from beneath the hood, genuinely striking, the kind of beauty that didn’t need announcement.

Her pupils were vertical slits, the red of them a different quality from a vampire’s red, something colder and older.

Dragon eyes.

"Hm..."

Her red lips parted slightly. She laughed, soft, brief, and looked back at Raphael with a return gaze that carried unmistakable amusement.

[Witch detected.]

[Crossroads of Fate: Erythra Epsloh.]

[Cardinal Sin: Existentialism.]

[Error: Fate Bond cannot be established. Level gap too significant and subject unwilling.]