The Sinner Hunting System

First suspicion, then certainty. There was no other candidate.

Who else would have stayed at the scene after his death, going through the wreckage, picking up anything valuable?

Only the D-Brotherhood’s people.

Only someone who had been there and watched him go down.

The coincidence felt absurd. Then a thought moved through his mind.

The fate mark. The Prophet’s enhancement, the one that had sunk into his palm like a seal pressed into wax.

The man had described it as a probability adjustment.

Encounters that would have had a fifty percent chance of happening became near-certainties instead.

He’d been talking about witches, but witches had only been the example.

The actual scope almost certainly covered anyone whose fate had already intersected with his, enemies included.

If there was a one-in-ten-thousand chance of running into an old adversary in this city, the mark turned it into a near-guarantee.

He remembered the feeling of the dark river, drifting on it, feeling the soul beginning to sink, the particular unpleasantness of that.

The impulse to act on this, to do something about Alp’s Shadow right now, arrived quickly and departed just as quickly.

The dragon-witch at the head of the table could suppress every impulse in the room simultaneously, and he had no interest in finding out what happened to people who forgot that.

His expression stayed where it was.

The meeting moved into its final phase.

The vampire spoke again. This time it was a commission rather than a sale.

"Looking for someone with investigation and exploration experience. A long-abandoned vampire castle needs to be searched.

The objective is a crest belonging to an ancient bloodline. Danger rating: low. Risk is minimal. Location is the difficulty."

The attendant read it aloud while the vampire looked around the room, visibly seeking takers.

Nobody moved.

A vampire castle, business connected to an ancient bloodline, danger rating self-reported by the party who wanted you to go in, the room had made its collective assessment and the assessment was no.

If you died inside, there would be no accountability and certainly no compensation.

The silence stretched.

Raphael ran through it. This was a path toward Alp’s Shadow, an opportunity that wouldn’t present itself again.

He had vampire abilities and the Wraith Form, if the situation inside was genuinely bad, he could phase out and leave.

He wasn’t fragile.

The attendant was about to mark the commission as declined.

Raphael raised his paddle.

The vampire looked at him with mild surprise, the expression of someone who had put the request out more out of habit than genuine expectation.

"Good. The payment, you’ll be satisfied. Your choice of fifty thousand Colin or A Magic item, with two choices: one or the other."

Raphael nodded. The second option interested him considerably more.

Relics were specific, they appeared only under particular conditions, couldn’t simply be manufactured.

Magical items were different: artificially produced, with usage limits, susceptible to damage, often carrying side effects, but purchasable and tradeable.

Fifty thousand Colin was roughly the market price for a standard magical item.

By comparison, Lyndon’s sword had cost him a hundred and 189 in merit points,That is, 189,000 Colin

The vampire smiled slightly and added one more condition.

"As for which items, come out of the castle alive with what I need, hand it over, and I’ll tell you then."

The contempt in the framing was obvious, a human contractor, treated as expendable, terms contingent on survival.

Raphael didn’t react. He needed exactly this kind of access.

"Where do I find you afterward?"

Where do I find you to hunt you, was the actual content of that sentence.

The vampire glanced around the room, then wrote something on a piece of paper and passed it to the attendant to relay. Raphael pocketed it.

The meeting moved on.

Later in the session, near the end, a new commission came from an unexpected source.

The speaker didn’t use the attendant, he stood up and delivered it himself.

He was beast-kin, dog-eared, broad-shouldered, and visibly struggling to contain something that had been building in him for the entire meeting.

"Everyone. I believe a slave trade has begun targeting our people."

The room’s attention shifted to him completely.

His voice came out with a ragged quality, badly matched to his physical size.

"It started with my sister. She was walking home from school through an alley and never came back. I searched for a long time and found nothing."

He stopped for a moment.

"Then my wife. She was pregnant. She disappeared while searching for my sister. I paid what they asked.

The kidnappers took the money and gave nothing back, and by the time I found any trace of her, she was already gone."

He let out a long, exhausted breath.

"It’s not only people I know. Others too, serpent-kin, feather-kin, cat-kin. Any beast-kin branch, every case involving females with no awakened power.

I can’t bring myself to think about what’s happening to them. I only want to ask, anyone willing to spare some time, any beast-kin willing to look into this, please."

He stepped back two paces and went to his knees in front of the table.

He pressed his forehead to the floor. Once. Again. Hard enough to break the skin. Blood from the impact.

"Please. Please. If anyone finds anything, I’ll give everything I have. My savings. My house.

The supernatural creature I’m contracted with. I’m asking you. Please."

Raphael watched this without expression. He’d processed too many scenes like this during his IFSA years.

Human trafficking ran through both federations like something burrowed into the structure of things, nested in the shadow of whatever order existed above it.

The profit margins involved were the kind that made people willing to do anything, a hundred percent return made a person bold, two hundred percent made them reckless, three hundred percent made them willing to burn whatever they’d previously considered sacred.

He raised his paddle.

The room’s responses separated into categories.

Among the humans, some accepted the commission, some stayed silent, and a small number produced quiet sounds of contempt, the particular tone of people who considered beast-kin standing as self-evident in its limitations.

Among the beast-kin attendees the response was close to unanimous: grief and anger, or both at once, every one of them taking the commission.

The vampire made a cold sound and leaned back in his chair.

"A mob. Even assembled together, what exactly do you think you can accomplish."

Erythra drank from her glass throughout. She had produced nothing for the meeting except the cursed items her attendants had sold on her behalf.

Everything else, from opening to close, she had regarded with the mild inattention of someone waiting for a matter to stop happening.

The meeting ended in that particular atmosphere and the room began to empty.

Raphael moved quickly. He checked the address on the vampire’s note, somewhere in the eastern outskirts, near this same part of the city, flagged a taxi outside the compound, and got in.

The driver was a middle-aged man who had opinions about everything and wanted to share them.

Raphael responded when responses were required and otherwise watched the city change outside the window, thinking about the trafficking commission, the vague familiar sensation of having cleared operations like this before.

The specific memories were gone with the lost, but the shape of the experience was still there.

"So, friend, what brings you out to those coordinates at this hour?"

The driver turned around to look at him as he asked.

Raphael’s pupils contracted sharply.

Where the man’s face should have been, there was nothing.

No eyes, no nose, no mouth, a smooth expanse of unbroken skin where every feature should have been.

Completely blank!