The Sinner Hunting System

The black knight lurched left and right, swinging wildly at something it couldn’t reach, the enemy was inside it, and it had no answer for that.

Raphael let it thrash, waiting patiently for the Wraith Form to cycle back, letting the black knight carry him up and down the corridor in its increasingly frantic search for a solution.

The white knight, scattered across the floor in pieces, was already putting itself back together.

The detached arm plate had propped itself upright on its gauntlet fingers, knuckles walking across the stone like a crab, dragging itself back toward the shoulder socket.

When it arrived, the connection sealed, not with flesh healing over flesh, but with the clean snap of metal drawn to metal, some kind of magnetic reunion.

Raphael watched through the visor. He couldn’t do anything about it from in here.

It’s reassembling. Completely. And it’ll keep doing that no matter how many times I take it apart.

The conclusion arranged itself plainly: violence wasn’t the path through this. It had never been.

The thought that this was another projection layer was beginning to take shape in the back of his mind.

A suit of armor that moved without a wearer, that couldn’t be killed, that rebuilt itself endlessly, none of it followed any rule he’d ever encountered.

It was the logic of an illusion. Only inside a constructed space could any of it make sense.

And if it was an illusion, he looked up at the long crystal strips set into the ceiling, the same shape, the same faint glow as the lantern.

"The lantern only revealed the projections when light hit them. The light source, that’s the answer."

The candle on the ground floor had defined the radius of each scene.

Only what the light touched had appeared. Which meant...

The black knight found its answer at exactly the wrong moment.

No intelligence behind it, just trial and error running through iterations until one worked. It gathered itself, turned, and ran straight at the wall.

The chest plate hit stone with a tremendous crash, the metal buckling inward, the broken edges driving into Raphael’s chest.

"Hss—!"

Light came in through the gap. Through the split in the armor, his neck was visible from outside.

The black knight picked up the white knight’s discarded dagger and angled it toward the gap, but the armor’s own geometry blocked it, the blade finding no angle that worked, only the very tip making contact before it jammed.

The dagger dropped. The black knight grabbed the steel sword still pinned through the white knight’s chest plate, wrenched it free, reversed it, and pointed it at its own chest.

"You’ve got some nerve."

Raphael clicked his tongue. The black knight’s chest could be perforated without consequence. His could not.

He threw everything into the struggle for the sword hand, and the black knight’s grip stuttered, finger by finger, each knuckle trembling against the resistance before reluctantly opening, until the sword fell to the floor with a clang.

The black knight froze entirely, locked.

They held like that, neither moving.

Then Raphael lost focus for one moment, and the black knight snatched one hand’s worth of control back.

The gauntlet found his throat through the gap in the neck guard and clamped down, full crushing force, the kind intended to grind the bones apart.

Raphael seized the control back almost immediately, but the grip had already locked into position.

The thumb was pressing his windpipe flat regardless of who was nominally in charge of the hand.

The neck guard cracked under the pressure. The plate split open, exposing his actual throat, and the gauntlet fingers tightened further.

"Damn it!"

This wasn’t possession. It was a tug-of-war from the inside, each of them fighting for individual limbs, whoever had more strength in the moment winning each small battle.

From outside the armor pressing inward, from inside his own body pressing back, and the outside had more mass behind it.

Oxygen was becoming a concern.

He waited for the Wraith Form cycle to finish, watching the progress tick forward with the specific desperation of someone running out of time.

The white knight finished reassembling while they were deadlocked. Without the sword nailing it down, it simply stood back up, retrieved the steel blade from the floor, and swung it at the black knight’s neck.

It was going for a decapitation.

Shhk.

The neck guard, already cracked through, came apart in one clean strike. The helmet dropped, hit the floor, and rolled in a slow circle before stopping.

Empty inside. No head.

"Idiots."

Raphael exhaled from somewhere above them both. He’d completed the Wraith Form at the last possible moment and slipped free before the blade arrived.

He didn’t try fighting them again. He tested the walls, the projection builder had anticipated this too, the surfaces refusing to let him pass through regardless of how he angled the approach.

He pulled back into invisibility, broke away from their search patterns, and ran the full length of the corridor back to the entrance near the stairwell.

The Wraith Form expired.

He hit the wall, pushed off, caught the ceiling angle and bounced between both walls to climb, wedging himself into the upper corner where the walls met the ceiling.

He looked at the crystal strip above him. Raised his claws and raked at it.

Nothing. Not a scratch. Not even a surface mark.

"...This is probably an illusion too, isn’t it."

He hung in the corner and felt the specific exhaustion of a situation that keeps refusing to cooperate.

Down the corridor, the two knights were moving back and forth in their search patterns, not finding him yet but narrowing the area systematically.

He didn’t have long.

He closed his eyes and thought about the crystal.

The texture of it when he’d pushed energy into the lantern, the way it had taken arcane energy in and stored it as something adjacent but different, a converted form that his own internal channels couldn’t interface with.

"It stores what goes in and it can put energy out. Battery... Battery!"

If it could receive input, it could produce output. That was the definition.

Which meant the energy already inside the ceiling crystal could be drawn out, it just needed something with the right structure to accept it.

He pressed his hand against the crystal again. He could feel the stored charge beneath his palm, dense and active, converted into a form his arcane channels couldn’t use directly.

But the lantern could.

He dropped from the ceiling, landed, and looked at the dead lantern sitting exactly where he’d left it by the corridor entrance.

Where Sam had left it, as it turned out, carried up this far and then abandoned when it ran dry.

The corner of his mouth moved.

"The lantern uses the same crystal. It has to have the same internal structure, which means it can take in the same kind of energy the ceiling crystal is storing."

He grabbed it and went back up the wall, pressed the lantern’s crystal face against the ceiling crystal, and fed just enough of his own arcane energy to trigger the charging function, a brief spark to start the process, then cut the input immediately.

The lantern began drawing on its own.

Slowly at first, then steadily faster, pulling the stored charge out of the ceiling crystal and into itself.

The lantern’s glow built from nothing to dim to bright, climbing in stages. The ceiling crystal went the other direction, bright to dim, dim to faint, faint to the trembling edge of extinction.

The two knights registered the change and moved.

The white knight came fast, its speed crossing the full corridor in seconds, launching itself upward toward him.

Raphael raised the revolver and put silver rounds into it on the way up.

The shots punched through the armor and interrupted the jump, the figure sprawling back to the floor. It got up. He fired again. It went down again. Got up again.

By the time it reached him, the ceiling crystal was flickering, the long pulse of something about to go dark.

The white knight’s outline flickered with it, matching the frequency, stuttering like a signal going in and out.

The last round from the revolver’s cylinder caught the white knight mid-lunge and dropped it.

The crystal went out.

Down the corridor, the black knight’s footsteps stopped mid-stride.

The corridor went silent. The silence of a place that had been sealed for a very long time, the silence it was supposed to have, settling back in like it had never been disturbed.

Raphael dropped down from the wall, killed the lantern’s light, and exhaled.

"Finally."

He stood there for a moment and thought about Sam’s notes.

Sam had survived the black knight and the white knight, or at least had gotten past them far enough to reach the doors, but he’d left the drained lantern on the second floor.

Even if he’d fought his way through everything, this final step would have been closed to him.

Raphael looked at the lantern, then looked at the door at the end of the corridor.

He walked to it, took the key from the cloth bag, and turned it in the lock.

The door opened.

Light hit him immediately, bright enough to make him blink after the long dark of the corridor. When his vision adjusted and he saw what was inside, he went very still.

"What?!"

[Relic detected.]