The Sinner Hunting System

"Clementine? You mean the eldest of the Castile family, that Clementine?!"

The count, who had been wearing such a magnificent air of arrogance just moments before, now looked like he’d seen a ghost. He snapped the pipe in his hand clean in half.

"Damn it, damn it all! someone of that stature, here of all places? The Grand Inquisitor..."

He took a sharp breath, stamped his foot hard as if venting something, and crushed the head of the boy’s father under his heel.

The man convulsed once, then stopped moving entirely.

The boy stared at the scene in front of him. The impact of it was too much, his mind simply gave out, and he crumpled to the floor.

The count had dropped all pretense of elegance, pacing back and forth across the room with no destination.

Then from beyond the edge of the candlelight, a clear, cold woman’s voice cut through.

"Are you looking for me?"

The count spun toward the sound. His head shook over and over, something coming out of his mouth in a low continuous murmur, and he backed out of the candlelight entirely.

Then, a burst of violent noise from all directions at once, lasting less than a second.

The fighting was over before the sound had finished registering, and in the same instant the projection collapsed, the candle snuffed out as if an invisible hand had simply pressed it flat. Darkness everywhere.

After a moment the flame struggled back to life. Weaker this time, much weaker.

A half-body dropped from above and landed on the stone table, one arm, one great bat wing folded across the back.

From the coat pocket a key tumbled free, old and plain, bouncing twice on the stone before coming to rest somewhere beyond the reach of the light.

The boy beside the table had been drained to a husk. During those seconds of fighting the count had apparently found a use for him.

In the dark, Clementine’s cold voice came again.

"Filthy creature. Keep running. How long does a vampire last after someone tears out their blood-essence?"

Footsteps approaching the candlelight. One booted foot crossed into its edge, and the projection began to tremble, straining against itself, as though her presence alone was more than it could hold.

"Poor child. May you find rest in God’s country."

Then that gaze crossed the centuries again and landed on Raphael.

"Hm? You again."

His body locked up completely. He couldn’t move a single finger. In the corner of his vision the candle stand was fracturing, dense cracks spreading outward across its surface, the projection on the verge of collapse.

"...Alanster bloodline." A pause. "Heavy with sin. I will find you."

Half a silhouette appeared at the edge of the light, and froze, as if someone had pressed pause.

Crack.

The projection shattered. The candle stand dissolved into fine points of light, then nothing. Not even ash.

Raphael let out a slow breath. Thoroughly marked now.

And by the sound of it she’d been alive from that era to this one, and whatever level she’d been at then, she certainly hadn’t stopped there after several hundred more years.

The dark settled back around him. He picked up the torch and kept moving.

He was a practical person. One empty threat made across centuries wasn’t going to stop him from doing anything.

He followed the memory of the projections back to the corner beside the stone table and searched carefully through the dark until he found something, a patch of dust thinner than everything around it, faintly shaped like the outline of a key.

He crouched down and looked closer.

"Still fresh. Someone took this recently. But there are no footprints anywhere else, unusual shoes, maybe, or an unusual way of walking."

He stood and looked around the room.

"Someone got here before me. Made it through all three projection layers and took the key."

He pulled his attention back and pressed on deeper into the castle. Two questions were turning over in his mind as he walked.

The first was what had actually happened here.

The projections pointed toward trafficking, vampires treating humans no differently from livestock, which had been ordinary enough in the era before the human federations came into being.

That kind of thing was everywhere in those years, and a petty count running an operation like this wouldn’t have been unusual.

His abilities hadn’t seemed particularly impressive either.

Not the sort of thing that would bring a Grand Inquisitor personally.

The IFSA archives described Grand Inquisitors as: power approaching divinity rather than humanity; impartial to the point of severity; encountered perhaps once per century.

Something of that stature, leading a raid herself on a place like this, it didn’t add up.

The second question was who had built all of these projections.

From outside the walls to deep inside, the whole castle was layered with them. But toward what end?

He shook his head and stopped thinking about it for now.

He circled the ground floor and eventually found, near the outer wall, a spiral staircase with a hollow center, the kind designed around a statue at its core. The base was still there. The statue was gone.

The stairs brought him to the second floor. Above that, solid wall, no further passage up, though the castle clearly rose much higher. There was another way, somewhere.

Words had been carved into the threshold here, cut deep into the stone, too deep to be removed with everything else.

Dining Hall. Meal times rotate weekly, changed daily. Sequence disrupted: 1, 17, 5, 15, 11, 6, 7. Saturday: two meals. One day: none.

No fighting within.

The numbers felt strange, most of them clustering around midnight and the early morning hours, which fit vampire schedules well enough.

He committed them to memory, a faint sense of something unpleasant settling over him.

A vampire’s dining hall. What else would be on the menu.

He stepped inside.

His arcane energy went quiet, still there, but pinned down, impossible to push into his limbs.

The physical amplification simply wasn’t available. He tried to step back out. The restriction stayed on him.

"Fine. Window access is off the table then."

The hall covered the entire second floor, the ceiling nearly ten meters overhead, long rows of dining tables filling the space from end to end.

At intervals along the walls, round recesses, a different shade from the surrounding stone, where something had once hung, taken away with everything else across the centuries.

And on the ceiling: iron cages, suspended in dense rows, each about the size used for holding large pigs, running parallel to the tables below.

Hundreds of them, most rusted, some hanging open, some closed.

At the center of the floor, a broad heavy base, the same size as the one in the stairwell, also empty.

On top of it lay a lantern, on its side, apparently abandoned there without care.

It had the shape of a kerosene lamp, but there was no reservoir, no fuel mechanism, the structure was solid, built around a multifaceted crystal column at the center.

"Another one. A puzzle or something else? Whoever arranged these projections, they’re leading someone somewhere on purpose. But why?"

At this point Raphael had gotten used enough to the arranger’s logic that he didn’t waste time, he picked up the lantern and pushed his arcane energy into the crystal immediately.

It vanished. The connection cut the moment the energy left him.

"This feeling... strange. It’s like... a battery?"

A faint output began from inside the lantern, barely anything, exactly matching in volume what he’d put in. Raphael’s mouth twitched.

He kept feeding it.

The more he poured in, the brighter the crystal burned.

His face took on a slightly grey, flat quality, the look that came with heavy arcane drain, and he was well past the halfway mark of his reserves before the crystal finally filled and the lantern snapped on.

A hum, low and resonant, and a directed beam shot forward at an angle, considerably brighter than his torch.

He lifted it and swept it around the room.

Wherever the light touched, the hall changed.

Brilliant décor, lavish and deliberate.

Expensive wine, fine tobacco smoke hanging in warm air.

Figures from across the social world, dressed as the wealthy and well-connected, gathered here to shed whatever face they wore outside, pale skin, red eyes, canines extended, every one of them a vampire.

They raised their glasses and spoke and laughed, and from time to time they looked upward, gesturing at the cages overhead with the casual interest of diners consulting a menu.

Raphael raised the lantern.

His pupils contracted.

The cages were full.

Not animals.

The cage was full of people.

Living people. Hundreds of them.