The Sinner Hunting System

Raphael’s eyebrow went up.

If this was still an illusion, it was the most elaborate one he’d ever been inside, more immersive than anything a three-dimensional screen could approximate, the kind of presence that registered in the body rather than just the eyes.

Then one of the figures moved toward him directly, and the question of whether it was real became considerably less theoretical.

A dog-kin warrior, broad across the chest, advancing to the center of the field without hesitation. His eyes found Raphael and locked on.

"...A human. Why are you here?" He didn’t wait for an answer.

"Doesn’t matter. I don’t know how you got in ahead of us, but you’re not one of the baron’s servants. So you’re with us. Fight."

He clapped Raphael on the shoulder with a hand that had real weight to it.

"...What."

Raphael stood there with the specific feeling of a situation that has become absurd faster than he can track it.

This figure from the past, historical projection, illusion, whatever it was, had seen him, interacted with him, touched him.

He’d been drafted.

More fighters were pressing in around him now, a loose formation of beast-kin and humans and a few other species, moving toward the defensive line with the unified purpose of people who have been waiting a long time for this moment and are done waiting.

He looked at the snake-kin warrior beside him and tried anyway.

"Just so you know, I’m here by accident. Would you believe that?"

The snake-kin looked straight ahead. No response.

"Can’t hear my voice, but can see my presence. So the illusion has limited interactive capacity, small-scale contact only, not full integration."

Under other circumstances he would have found someone less recklessly trusting than a soldier who accepts battlefield allies without verification.

But these were historical projections, not people making real decisions.

And under other circumstances he wouldn’t currently be standing in a sixteenth-century training ground surrounded by combatants.

Then the castle shook, somewhere deep inside, a single resonant impact, and the sky changed.

The blue bled out of it rapidly, replaced by red, not sunset red, not fire red, but the specific deep saturation of blood pooling in still water, spreading to every corner of the sky above the castle walls until there was nothing blue left.

The dog-kin warrior roared once.

The entire irregular force lurched forward.

They broke around Raphael and crashed into the defensive line, and the world became the sound of metal meeting metal, and screaming, and the wet impacts of things hitting people at speed.

"Fine. They’re only projections."

He picked a target and moved, a guard with a two-handed sword nearly as tall as he was, who saw Raphael coming and swung immediately, a horizontal cut aimed to bisect him at the waist.

Raphael timed his jump and came down on the flat of the blade.

The guard’s hands dropped under the sudden weight, the sword’s tip grinding against the stone, momentum killed.

Raphael was already pivoting, his body rotating at the waist, Blood Frenzy surfacing for just one instant in his pupils, he didn’t want to, but breaking a regulation helmet required it, and his fist landed on the side of the guard’s head with the sound of a small detonation.

Bang.

The metal split. Half the helmet spun away across the flagstones, revealing a face the color of old paper, canines extended, saliva running from the corner of the open mouth, eyes red but unfocused, the specific vacancy of something that runs on instruction rather than volition.

[Analyzing... Complete.]

[Lv2: Vampire Thrall.]

[Type: Puppet.]

He understood. These weren’t soldiers choosing to serve.

These were conversions, whatever the baron had taken from other species and remade in his image, loyal because loyalty had been built into them at the point of transformation rather than chosen.

Raphael grabbed the guard’s collar, reset his stance, and hit him again. And again.

The cracks spread fast, running across the face of the helmet like ice giving way, until one final impact and the head opened like a dropped melon.

He stepped back.

The guard’s body flickered and dissolved before it reached the ground, no corpse, no blood, nothing remaining to confirm it had existed.

Just the empty space where it had been.

"As expected. Historical projection. No sin accumulation."

He was about to move on when something hit his arm.

An arrow. Clean line across the skin, enough to draw blood, not deep enough to matter.

He turned.

The shot had come from a feather-kin fighter on the other side of the line, one of the irregular militia, currently pointing at Raphael with an expression of pure alarm.

"He’s a vampire too!"

Raphael’s mouth twitched.

He’d only opened Blood Frenzy for the fraction of a second needed to crack the helmet, then shut it immediately, specifically to avoid exactly this.

He’d been too slow closing it.

"Fine. Historical projections. I’ll hit both sides."

He exhaled, let his eyes go fully red, let the fingers extend, the nails sharpen.

"No sides in this."

He said it quietly to no one in particular, and threw himself into the center of the fighting.

Both lines faltered.

The militia looked at him with the grey faces of people who have just recognized they are about to die.

A few of the guards with residual awareness straightened, raised their fists, hope surfacing in their expressions.

"The baron is here! we’re saved!"

One of them said it.

The next moment he was looking at the empty space where that guard had been standing, his head now in Raphael’s fist inside its helmet, separated from the neck in a single smooth motion.

The body stood briefly from momentum before understanding the situation and falling.

"...He’s killing his own side...."

"The vampire is killing other vampires!"

The battlefield fragmented further into chaos, individual combats breaking apart as both sides tried to reassess what was happening in the middle.

A human mage pulled a formation circle together, fire coalescing at the center and rushing toward Raphael in a churning arc.

"Die, vampire!"

Raphael was in front of her before the fire arrived.

He swung the helmet he was holding.

The impact went through the top of the skull.

The mage’s body remained standing for one full moment, arms still raised, the fire dying without direction, expression frozen in the instant before death registered, then dissolved into sparks and was gone.

Screaming, in every direction, from both sides simultaneously.

Blood hit the flagstones in the intervals between dissolving projections.

The red above deepened.

Figures on both sides caught single flashes of movement, red light crossing the courtyard, too fast for visual tracking, and then found themselves already falling, the impact already past, the damage already done.

A beast-kin soldier: the leather vest opened, the heart behind it opened, the body folding before the mind caught up.

A guard trying to flee: both legs taken at the run, the man continuing forward in the air for a moment before understanding he had nothing to continue with, dragging himself forward on the flagstones with the specific despair of someone who has no remaining options.

A mage with a circle half-drawn: both hands removed at the wrist, the formation incomplete, the expression calcifying on the face.

A feather-kin archer trying to use altitude as an advantage, already airborne, Raphael hit the wall in full stride, redirected off the vertical surface, landed behind the archer, snapped the wings at the joint with both hands.

The fall was immediate and not short.

At Blood Frenzy Lv6 against a field of opponents capped at Lv3, most of them Lv1 and Lv2, this was not a fight.

It was a demonstration, conducted at a speed that reduced the participants to brief obstacles.

The population of the illusion thinned. With each figure that dissolved on death, the projection became less stable, the historical overlay flickering, the ruined present pushing through in patches, aged white bone and corroded iron appearing in the gaps between the living combatants.

Two timeframes in the same space, separated by centuries, each visible through the other.

The blood thirst sharpened.

Raphael felt it in the way movement quality degrades when something deeper is demanding attention, slight hesitation at the wrong moments, the clean precision of his striking coming loose at the edges, small wounds accumulating where they shouldn’t.

His regeneration cleared them as fast as they appeared, but the fuel cost of doing so fed back into the craving, and the craving expanded to fill the space the feeding created.

His eyes found a guard.

The guard swung his sword in a wide desperate arc.

Raphael caught the blade in his open palm, the edge sinking into the meat without managing to go further.

His fingers closed. The steel broke.

He took the guard by the throat, drove him down onto the stone floor, pinned him there, and bit.

The guard struggled twice. The body finished drying out and dissolved.

The blood was from the past. It had no real content, no warmth that lasted. It filled nothing. It made the craving louder.

The red above had stopped spreading and started condensing, pulling inward, gathering into drops, falling. Blood rain, fine and warm, landing across the stone and the weapons and the dissolving projections alike.

Thunder, somewhere far inside the castle.

The illusion stopped holding.

The crack ran through it from the inside out, the whole historical overlay shattering at once, the militia and the guards and the carnage of the courtyard going to nothing, the ruined training ground returning fully, silent and ancient and dark.

And in the moment of dissolution, from deeper inside the castle, something looked.

A gaze. Spanning a long period of time.

Coming to rest on Raphael with the weight of assessment rather than surprise.

[Detecting...]

[Error, error, unable to identify, insufficient clearance.]

[...]

[Correction: authorization acquired.]

[Lv14: Clementine Castile.]

[Cardinal Sin: Superbia.]

[Type: Demon Lord Candidate.]