The Sinner Hunting System

"What? what just happened..."

The driver’s hands weren’t steady on the wheel.

Maybe the passenger had never been there at all, and the anxiety had manufactured the whole thing.

Maybe fear had given him an excuse to run that his brain had been too happy to accept.

Either way: he had driven away from a client, left him alone in the dark countryside, next to something that might or might not have been a malevolent spirit.

"Heaven protect me. And protect him too, he said he was an exorcist. He’ll be fine. He has to be fine. Definitely fine."

He told himself this until the guilt in his chest became something he could sit with, gritted his teeth, and drove into the city.

He was not going back.

---

Raphael watched the taxi disappear into the dark, bouncing hard over several potholes in its hurry.

He’d only stepped out to grab the tools he’d bought over the past few days, pliers, a folding knife, a torch.

He’d closed the door, and apparently that was enough. The driver had hit the accelerator and not looked back.

Thinking about the expression he’d caught in the rearview mirror, white-faced, shaking, every instinct screaming at him to leave, Raphael assembled the picture.

"Wide coverage, low intensity. Illusion magic."

Every hallucination he’d encountered since turning off the highway had been pushing visitors away.

The faceless driver, the girl in the road, the stuffed bear that couldn’t be touched.

Targeted deterrence, applied broadly and gently, not strong enough to stop someone who understood what it was, but more than sufficient to keep ordinary people from coming anywhere near this place.

Which explained why the castle was still here.

Any report of strange sightings in the area would never make it to IFSA’s formal intake process, and any non-transcendent who drove out this way would simply feel a growing, sourceless compulsion to leave.

"Better that he’s gone. It might get worse from here."

He swept the torch across the spot where the girl had been sitting. Empty road, empty grass.

"The illusions adapt."

He filed that away and was about to move when he heard it, a rhythmic sound from above, wings displacing air.

He angled the torch upward.

A large shape crossed through the beam, moving fast.

Female silhouette, narrow-waisted, the proportions of a woman, and then the proportions that weren’t.

Wings spanning considerably wider than her height, brown-feathered, the wing joints large and clearly powerful.

Her legs ran with dense feathering that thickened toward the ankle, ending in talons, large ones, curved, the construction of something that hunted.

She passed through the light and was gone before he could get a look at her face.

Without Lv3 Physical Functions running constantly, he wouldn’t have caught even that much detail.

Humanoid build, wings, avian talons. Multiple species fit that description, the feather-kin were one, a beast-kin sub-branch.

Not enough information to be certain.

"Illusion? No. Too solid."

He let it go for now, let his pupils go red, and moved.

Blood Frenzy through the forest, threading between trees, reading the terrain, leaving no clean trail through the brush.

The distance that had taken a car the better part of an hour on a wrecked road took him under thirty minutes at this pace.

He emerged from the tree line at the back of the hill.

The castle was close.

It was enormous. That was the first thing, the scale of it, the granite bulk rising against the sky, climbing to nearly two hundred meters at the main tower.

The wealth of whoever had built this was embedded in every stone.

The architecture was unmistakably old, a drawbridge system, a moat encircling the outer walls, a training ground laid out inside the walls large enough to drill an army, the faint outlines of stables and a cellar complex still visible beneath the overgrowth.

And all of it now: ruin.

The drawbridge had snapped at some point in the past and hung in a V-shape down into the moat, its chains long since gone to rust.

The moat itself had become its own ecosystem, standing water, thick mud, insects working through the stillness.

Vegetation had claimed the outer walls entirely, every face of stone hidden under layered greenery that had pushed through cracked windows and continued growing inside.

The evening wind moved through gaps in the masonry and produced a sound that was almost a voice, almost grief.

Still standing. Still massive. The bones of something that had once been significant, now given over entirely to time.

"Even the long-lived ones can’t outrun it," Raphael thought, and felt something he wasn’t going to examine too closely.

He didn’t approach immediately. He went still instead, eyes closed, and listened.

After a while he moved into the tree line, was gone briefly, and came back with blood still warm at the corner of his mouth.

"Pff. Terrible. Barely anything either. Blood bags are better." He wiped it away. "But it works."

He stood there for a moment, thinking about something he’d noticed over several instances of the blood thirst surfacing.

Witch blood was consistently the richest, there was a quality to it, a faint current of arcane presence underneath the taste.

And beyond that, it seemed to carry something individual.

Evelyn’s had a light, clean heat to it, the kind you got from spice. Elena’s was sweet in a simple, direct way.

He’d wondered about this before and wondered about it again now.

Evelyn eats spicy food. Elena has a sugar dependency.

"Strange thing to notice."

He shook his head, let the restlessness settle, and walked toward the castle.

---

Getting across the broken drawbridge took some work.

He made it eventually, dropped onto the stones on the other side, and walked into the castle’s interior.

The first space inside the outer wall was the training ground.

It was vast, open ground taking up more than half the interior footprint, wooden training posts still standing at irregular intervals across it, sections divided by low wooden fencing into something resembling arena enclosures.

Dust and grit and the smell of standing water.

He walked further in, and the grey-white shapes he’d been seeing as abandoned debris began to resolve into something else.

Not debris.

Bones. Hundreds of them, covering the ground in dense, overlapping layers, ribs and vertebrae and long bones, scattered between rusted helmets and armour plates still stained dark in places, corroded blades driven into the earth or snapped at the hilt.

One skeleton lay with a sword still through the chest cavity. Several had been severed at the limbs.

A few had no skulls at all; others were only skulls, the face still inside the helmet.

"Brutal."

He crouched and examined the armour more carefully.

Two distinct styles. Two sides.

One group: matched equipment, consistent manufacture, unified design. Castle garrison, formal, professional, well-resourced.

The other: everything mixed. Human Federation patterns alongside dragon kingdom metalwork alongside beast-kin confederation styles, weapons drawn from a dozen different traditions and eras.

Not soldiers. Something assembled from whoever was willing to come.

After a century of weathering there was nothing left worth salvaging. Even the blades were so far gone they would crumble at a firm touch.

He stood and moved toward the castle’s main entrance.

His foot came down on something that wasn’t stone.

A mechanism. The flagstone shifted downward by a few centimeters, then held.

And from behind him, from the direction of the gate, the direction he’d come in, sound arrived.

Not the thin whisper of the wind through broken walls. Something with weight to it. Something carrying bodies.

"Kill—! kill—! kill—!"

"Take back our families, our people!"

"Kill the vampire lord!"

His eyes opened.

The training ground was full.

On one side: armoured soldiers in matched formation, stance defensive, weapons ready, eyes with no hope left in them.

On the other: irregular fighters in mismatched gear, carrying whatever they’d brought, voices loud with the specific anger of people who have been waiting a very long time for this moment.

The fighting hadn’t started yet, but the air between them was already the air of a battlefield, every sound absorbed by the weight of what was about to happen.

And Raphael stood at the center of it.

"What...?"