The Sinner Hunting System

The harpy folded her wings and dove like a bird of prey, talons driving straight at his face.

Raphael adjusted his footing and stepped back. The claws closed on empty air and produced a sharp crack of displaced pressure.

"Strong."

The harpy pulled up immediately, banking hard back into the sky, and in the moment of separation Raphael got a proper look at her.

The body was a woman’s below the chest, but feathers covered most of it, dense in some places, sparse in others, with thin arms and heavy thighs, talons larger than her own head, and a wingspan close to five meters when the wings opened fully.

The head was where ordinary anatomy stopped making sense entirely: human eyes but without whites, black from edge to edge, no ears, just two structurally distinct openings on either side of the skull, and the nose and mouth had merged into a single feature, a flesh-colored beak, large and sharp.

"God, you’re ugly."

He glanced at the others circling above. The group-dwelling instinct apparently hadn’t translated into coordinated attack behavior, the rest of them were still orbiting at altitude, watching, not moving to help.

"Just the one, then."

Keeping her up there indefinitely wasn’t useful. Raphael looked down at the cracked egg at his feet, then looked back up at her, and pressed his boot onto the remaining half and ground it deliberately left and right. The shell crumbled with a clear, unmistakable sound.

"AAAAAAH—!"

The harpy screamed at a frequency that went directly into the back of the skull. Some instinct overrode the wariness and she folded her wings again and came straight down.

Her trajectory was perfectly readable, and she had no thought of varying it. Raphael raised the revolver without expression and pulled the trigger.

Bang.

The silver round left the barrel wrapped in fire and drew a white line through the air. It punched through her abdomen and the blood came immediately, the shot stopping her dive mid-motion as though she’d hit something solid.

The harpy screamed again, clutching at her stomach, wings beating in broken, uncoordinated arcs as she lost altitude. She hit the nest floor hard, the sound of fracturing bone was clear, and landed a few meters from him in a heap.

The screaming continued. His ears rang steadily with the pitch of it.

Raphael unslung Death Crow from his back and walked toward her.

"AAAHH—!"

She thrashed, wings flailing without direction, the panic of something that wants to run and can’t. One arm had snapped at the joint.

The other wasn’t enough to push herself upright.

Her talons scraped against the branches below her, the instinct to flee firing without result, blood spreading slowly into the wood beneath.

He came to stand in front of her, put his foot on her neck to stop the movement, and raised Death Crow above her head, ready to bring it down clean.

He held it there.

"...Not right now."

He lowered the axe and looked up.

There were considerably more harpies in the air than there had been a moment ago. Close to twenty, and the altitude was lower.

Provoking one of them with a broken egg was one matter. Killing a grown member of the group inside their own nest, he thought about that math for a moment. His arcane reserves were at roughly one-fifth.

He put the axe away, pulled his fist back, and drove it into the back of her skull. She didn’t make a sound. She went limp immediately.

[Analyzing... Complete.]

[Lv1: Harpy.]

[Cardinal Sin: Dogmatism.]

[Type: Derivative.]

"Lv1. That explains why one silver round nearly finished her. Dogmatism, blind obedience, rigid hierarchy, unconditional command authority flowing downward. Fits a group-dwelling species."

He filed it alongside the others he’d encountered recently. Dogmatism, Existentialism, Nihilism, Hedonism. The new seven kept turning up.

He checked that the circling harpies were still holding altitude, then began searching the nest.

"These things eat everything."

He found the bone pile against the far wall, a white mound assembled from multiple species, buffalo horns alongside sheep hooves alongside fish skeletons. They ate the meat and left the rest to the open air.

He activated Death Crow, felt his remaining arcane reserves drop by another increment, and a faint crow materialized above the blood gem, glancing around once before lifting into the air.

A different layer of perception opened alongside his own, the crow’s sense of death, present within a one-month radius, reading the accumulated endings all around them.

"Let me work through this. Deaths every day, in volume, that’s the feeding requirement for a colony this size. Livestock from somewhere nearby, wild rabbits and rodents from the forest, and..."

He went still.

"Humans. Men, women, elderly. Children."

He opened his eyes and moved directly to the back of the bone pile, where the crow’s perception was pulling him. He crouched beside a human skull and examined it closely.

"Cracked. Four punctures in the pattern of talons closing. The brain was destroyed on impact and consumed. The head was separated from the body while they were eating and discarded here."

He followed the trail of death-sense and found more.

A small, slight skeleton lying across a set of clothes. Mostly intact, but covered in fine scratches.

"Around one hundred and forty centimeters. Small skull. Wide shoulder bones for the size, a young boy. Clothes are..."

He recognized the cut. School uniform.

"Damn."

He turned one of the hand bones over in his fingers and looked at the scratches.

"Inconsistent depth. Random pattern. Not consistent with feeding. This is struggle, he was alive when they were taking flesh. He kept moving because it hurt, which probably excited them further. He was eaten alive."

Raphael set the bone down.

"Painful way to die."

He checked the clothes. Tears at the shoulder, that was where he’d been grabbed.

In the breast pocket, a compact old-model camera. He pressed the power button. A sliver of charge remained.

Photos. A school excursion, classmates in a group shot, the mountain behind them, the same ridge, clearly visible in the background, close to where these things hunted. He scrolled to the last image.

It was blurred. Shot in motion, in panic. Classmates staring up at the camera with wide eyes. A teacher grabbing the boy’s legs. The ground falling away below the lens.

"The last photo. Taken in the moment he was taken."

The screen went dark. The last charge ran out. In the black mirror of it, Raphael saw a reflection of something approaching from behind him, moving in close.

He turned.

She was older than the others. The feathers weren’t brown, they carried the color of peacock plumage, patterned and layered, with long broad head feathers that rose like the headdress of a tribal elder.

She descended in front of him without aggression, landed, and opened her beak.

"Human." The syllables came out individually, like someone reading from a page. "You. Why. Here."

Raphael’s hand stayed near the revolver. He didn’t lower his guard.

"You speak."

The wings at her back began to close. Her eyes moved across him with equal wariness.

"I am. Elder. A charge. Was given me. A task. Required. I learned."

"Listening to you is exhausting." He kept his voice flat. "Someone gave you a task. Who?"

The elder shook her head. Not going to answer that.

"I. Cannot. Say. Your purpose. Tell me. Honestly."

He glanced at the air above. The circling harpies had come lower. They were waiting for a signal.

"Two things. First, I came for a badge. You’ve probably seen it. Skull cup, half-moon above it. Ugly enough to be memorable."

The elder reached into her feathers and produced it without hesitation. Count Jestan’s badge.

"You want. This. I. Can give. But you. Must leave. Tell me. Your second. Purpose."

Raphael was quiet for a moment.

He had two choices. Take the badge and leave and continue through his existing plan. Or.

He looked down at the camera lying in the nest, its screen dark, and his own eyes reflected back at him from the glass.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, only one choice was left.

He had already decided.