The Sinner Hunting System

The figure in the clown’s mask looked up at him with an expression of eager anticipation, voice neutral as a still pool, as though prepared to answer absolutely anything he might ask.

That particular quality was exactly what made Raphael cautious. He didn’t return the warmth.

"I don’t recall signing up for any Blood Moon Game."

The clown produced a laugh with a slightly ridiculous quality to it and clapped both hands together.

"But you cleared one of the trial illusions I designed. That is the qualification. You have the right to participate, to become the final victor, to obtain a passage through the Endgame."

Endgame. The word landed with a familiar weight.

The Prophet had used it too, in that half-demolished coastal building, had said he hoped Raphael would be standing on the right side when it arrived.

He heard the invitation layered inside the clown’s words. He didn’t follow it.

Everything about the design of this castle said the builder was someone who worked in careful sequences, each piece feeding the next, and Raphael had no interest in moving at someone else’s pace.

"I don’t want to."

The clown paused. Apparently hadn’t anticipated complete indifference. A note of deliberate amusement entered the voice.

"You’re naturally free to refuse. Though I’m not necessarily obligated to accept that. You could come back next year, and I would tell you to submit a new application. And the year after that I still wouldn’t accept it."

A small laugh.

"Because in my view, you have no idea how valuable the final reward actually is."

Raphael shrugged with complete ease.

"My work is dangerous. I might die in some forgotten corner before any of that becomes relevant.

An Endgame is too distant a concern. And if the world ends and everyone dies, I don’t have any particular need to be the one still standing. I don’t have that kind of attachment."

He heard the words leave his mouth and felt something off in them. Thought about it for a moment.

That reflexive nihilism, the immediate reach for what does it matter, that wasn’t how he used to think. It was recent. It was getting easier.

He looked at Death Crow in his hand.

The clown was looking at him with a thoughtful expression.

"You have very little confidence in yourself, for a Hunting Ground hunter."

Another person referencing the System. Raphael had largely stopped being surprised by this.

The Hunting Ground clearly had multiple hunters, he’d already met one other, the Prophet, and the Prophet had called himself Hunter No. 9.

"The Hunting Ground isn’t a nursery. It doesn’t produce strong hunters unconditionally. If I’m not sufficient, I’ll die in one of the hunts, and the System will find the next candidate. Being a hunter isn’t a guarantee of anything."

The clown laughed again, that same absurd rolling sound, and climbed out of the chest, crossing the room to one of the walls.

A hand pressed against the surface, and a window appeared, hidden behind an illusion until this moment.

"You’re very clear-headed. Good. Hold onto that. It’ll take you further than you think."

The clown stood with its back to him, looking out at the view beyond the newly revealed window.

"But that same clear-headedness is exactly why I can’t let go of a participant as interesting as you.

As the one running this game, having more genuinely interesting contestants makes everything more worth doing."

Raphael moved quietly to the chest and looked inside.

Empty.

"Looking for this?"

The clown laughed softly, fingers moving with the ease of stage practice, and produced an antique badge from nothing, an old design, a wine cup fashioned from a human skull, a half-moon resting above it.

"The badge of Count Jestan of the Half Moon. A somewhat underwhelming final prize for everything this place put you through. Though I imagine you’ve already found something more satisfying."

A glance at Death Crow.

"But for the sake of entertainment..."

The tone shifted.

"I’ve decided to add one extra puzzle. Very simple. Might cost you a little blood."

The clown watched Raphael’s face, then flicked the badge upward, caught it, and when the hand opened again the badge was gone.

A bow followed, one arm extended, one pressed to the chest, body dipping in the formal style of a stage performer acknowledging an audience after the final act.

"The hint is: far as the horizon, near as—"

The body dissolved the way everything else in this castle’s illusions dissolved, into scattered points of fading light, and what remained was only the voice, carrying a slightly ridiculous cadence all the way to its last word.

"—Right in front of you."

With the clown gone, the revealed window behind where it had stood was unobstructed.

A harpy crossed the sky outside, moving toward a ridge not far from the castle.

Raphael pulled his attention back and felt warmth in his palm.

That familiar sensation. He looked down.

[Fate Mark — Game.]

[Description: Given by Hunter No. 11, the Jester.]

[Effect: If a Blood Moon Game qualifying trial illusion is present nearby, you will inevitably participate. If a Blood Moon descends, you will inevitably enter the Blood Moon Game.]

"So everyone else gets useful marks and I get a mandatory conscription notice."

He felt a wave of mild resignation. His fate-lines had acquired another permanent addition, and unlike the Prophet’s mark, which adjusted probabilities, this one said inevitable.

If the Blood Moon came, he wouldn’t be choosing to participate or not. He’d simply be somewhere else.

"Hunter No. 11. The Jester’s cardinal sin looks like Hedonism, total immersion in sensory experience, everything subordinated to pleasure and amusement.

Different from the Prophet’s approach entirely, but both of them are leaning toward pulling me in rather than removing me."

He turned it over.

"Hunters must be rare. And they seem to have something significant to do with whatever the Endgame turns out to be."

He set it aside.

There were only so many unresolved questions he could hold at once before he started losing track of the ones that needed action today.

He followed the clown’s hint forward.

"The hint overlapped with the harpy flying past the window. Difficult to ignore that coincidence.

If the badge went with a creature that lives and moves in the sky above this forest, finding it through direct search is basically impossible, too much ground to cover. Different approach needed."

He looked at the ceiling.

"When I came in from outside, there was clear activity on the roof, harpies landing and taking off. They may have made a nest up there. I need to get to the top."

No structural shaking since the corridor puzzle ended. The castle’s layout was probably unchanged. This bedroom had no obvious access to the roof.

"Can go around the outside. The ability suppression ended when the corridor puzzle did, climbing from outside should be straightforward."

He took two steps toward the door and stopped.

"Far as the horizon, readable as the harpy flying toward the ridge. But near as right in front of you. What did that mean?"

He turned around slowly and walked back to the window where the clown had been standing.

"Near as right in front of you... right in front..."

He reached out and touched the window.

Not glass. Not stone. His fingers met something with the texture of still water’s surface, yielding, cool, sending small ripples outward from the point of contact like a disturbed pool. It didn’t feel real.

"This is an illusion too. The clown’s gesture wasn’t casual, that was the hint."

He stepped through.

The sensation was of passing through a waterfall made of nothing in particular. The drops didn’t wet his clothes. His feet found solid stone beneath them immediately.

Then the world turned upside down, a brief spinning sensation, a low hum in his ears, and when his vision settled, he was standing in open air, a hundred meters above the ground, on the roof of the castle.

The forest spread out below him in every direction, dark and vast under the night sky.

"Teleportation. The other hunters have all been at this for a while, they each have their own remarkable abilities. I’m still the newcomer."

He exhaled, a little rueful, and looked around.

The rooftop was broad and open. Scattered across it, denser toward the center, were branches and other gathered materials, the accumulated construction of a large nest at the very middle, close to three meters tall.

In addition, there is a metal zipline that extends from the back of the castle into the forest, but it breaks in the middle and the end hangs on a very tall tree.

Several harpies circled above but hadn’t descended, watching him with the wariness of creatures that don’t recognize his right to be here.

"I’m looking for a badge, looks like— you know what, you can’t understand me anyway."

He crossed to the nest’s edge and climbed it, branches layered into something enormous, solid enough to bear weight, pulling himself up and over the rim and dropping inside.

He landed on something.

Crack.

He looked down. A thirty-centimeter egg, now broken open beneath his foot, red and yellow liquid spreading across the nest floor in a slowly widening pool, releasing a smell that combined the worst qualities of rot and something indescribable.

"Of course."

In the sky, one harpy broke from the circling pattern. A single sharp cry.

Then it folded its wings and dove, straight down, straight at him, talons leading.