The Sinner Hunting System

Raphael looked directly into the elder’s eyes and stopped hiding the hostility in his.

"My second purpose. I’m going to kill you, and make sure your kind can’t hunt here anymore."

The elder shook her head slowly, the long head feathers swaying with the motion.

"Foolish. You. Cannot."

She didn’t wait for a response, muttering on at her own pace.

"You humans. See my kind. As monsters. You hunt us. We hunt. You. This is. Fair."

Raphael made a short, contemptuous sound.

"That’s a false equivalence. Though I doubt you’d follow the distinction. It doesn’t matter which came first, your hunting or human hunters coming for you.

What it means is simple. Different sides, different species, different standing. There’s nothing between us except killing each other."

He turned his wrist and gripped Death Crow. Blood Frenzy ignited, the red flooding into his eyes.

"I’m not going to argue against bounty hunters killing monsters. But hunting and torturing aren’t the same thing. And neither is being eaten alive."

The elder shook her head with what looked almost like regret.

"A shame. I had thought. We might. Find common ground."

Raphael was already moving, a red blur crossing the distance between them.

"We never will."

The elder felt the threat in her bones and reacted immediately, throwing her wings open, trying to take the sky.

He’d already left the ground, Lv6 launching him upward like something fired, fast enough to close the gap before her wings caught air.

He got his hand around one of her talons. The whole body lurched downward with the added weight, the ascent grinding to a halt.

Her other claw snapped at his head, hard enough to cave it in. Death Crow came up and caught the talon, sharp edge against sharp edge, metal shrieking against keratin, sparks cutting through the dark air between them.

Raphael shifted his center of gravity and used her talon like a bar, pulling himself upward in a single motion, body rising above her level. He found the angle and drove his boot straight into her abdomen.

Thud

. The impact caved her stomach inward. Blood left her mouth in a thick spray.

Her entire body curled around the point of contact, the wing rhythm collapsed instantly, and she went down, taking Raphael with her as he stood on her.

She hit the roof on her back. He had one foot on her abdomen and Death Crow raised high for the finishing blow.

Wind behind him. The diving sound of something large coming fast.

One of the others.

He spun without stepping off her. Death Crow swept through a clean arc, and the harpy that had been dropping in from behind couldn’t change course in time.

Shhk.

The blade took half a wing off at the root, then continued upward and came down again onto the shoulder. Feathers scattered. Blood came in a hot arc.

The harpy screamed. Raphael tightened his grip, dropped his weight, and Death Crow continued downward through muscle, through bone, through everything in its path without slowing.

Shhhk.

The axe came free from the other side. The blade was clean.

The harpy’s eyes had gone blank before she hit the roof, her body separating into two halves that fell apart from each other and were still.

[Sin acquired: +3.2.]

[Current Sin: 10.16 / 160.]

The sharpness of it surprised him. Cutting through a full-grown harpy had required less effort than splitting firewood.

But the moment he’d spent on it was enough. The elder had recovered.

Her four wings, two pairs, span close to fifteen meters combined, opened fully and drove down in a single enormous beat that hit him like a wall of compressed air.

"Ngh—"

It felt like being struck by a car. He was airborne before he could respond, rotating, and when he hit the roof his boots dragged two long lines across the stone before the momentum bled out.

He looked up. The elder was already at a height he couldn’t reach even at full jump.

"Foolish human. Now I have. The sky. You. Die."

She screamed once, sharp and sustained, and the sound carried across the whole rooftop.

Every harpy locked onto him.

What followed was different from before.

The elder’s influence was visible in every movement, they came in ordered sequence, not wild dives but controlled passes, one at a time, a strike and an immediate retreat, the next one already descending before the last had cleared.

Deliberate. Calculated. Each pass designed to accumulate damage while staying clear of a serious counter.

A rotating assault, patient and coordinated, run with the precision of something directed from above.

Raphael worked through it, Death Crow in one hand, intercepting each pass as it came. He wasn’t in trouble.

But he wasn’t breaking through either, and he couldn’t keep the elder at altitude indefinitely.

He watched her in his peripheral vision as he moved.

Her four wings were fully extended, blocking the moon behind her.

She was speaking constantly, a low murmur, and in the center of her chest, beneath the parted feathers, something was glowing, a crystal, purple, smaller and more refined than the lantern’s but the same fundamental construction.

The light in it was building in slow pulses, climbing steadily toward something.

He knew what that looked like.

"That’s exactly what I looked like when I was charging the lantern."

The thought cost him a fraction of a second. A harpy caught it, drove one talon into his shoulder and tore outward a wound that went to the bone.

"Tch."

He watched their attack pattern reset. Always a V approach, always a direct withdrawal after the strike.

He let the next one grab him. Both talons locked onto his shoulders.

He seized her claws, pulled down, and slammed her into the rooftop, a shallow crater, the impact stunning her, the coordinated behavior breaking apart as her body registered something outside the pattern.

She screamed, flailing, no longer listening to the command.

The harpy behind her, already committed to her own pass, pulled back hard. She aborted the strike entirely.

Raphael raised the revolver behind him without looking and fired. He’d tracked her arc, the silver round went up at the calculated angle and found her in the air above him.

A white line through the dark. It went through her heart.

She clutched at her chest and spiraled, crashing into the castle wall and leaving several bloody impact marks before spinning down and hitting the ground far below.

[Sin acquired: +3.4.]

[Current Sin: 13.56 / 160.]

The third harpy in the sequence stopped her dive entirely.

Wings beating frantically against her own momentum, eyes wide with the animal instinct that says this is death regardless of what the hierarchy demands.

But the physics of her dive were already in charge, the braking force and the downward force fighting each other, freezing her in the air for a handful of seconds.

Raphael gripped Death Crow at the very end of the handle, stepped forward, dropped his center of gravity, and threw.

It spun through the air like a blade with no axis, a brutal rotating arc, and hit her in the skull.

The weight of it drove straight through without stopping, splitting her to the waist before the momentum finally ran out.

The headless body dropped and hit the concrete far below. It moved twice and was still.

[Sin acquired: +3.1.]

[Current Sin: 16.66 / 160.]

The harpies scattered. Whatever order the elder had imposed dissolved instantly, they spread across the sky above the castle, circling at a distance, not one of them willing to come back in.

Raphael exhaled slowly, feeling the blood thirst climbing steadily, and walked to the nearest body to retrieve Death Crow.

"No use. Too low-level, too little intelligence, the soul won’t meet the standard for what the gem needs. And a Demon this weak won’t even leave a Core."

He looked up at the elder.

The feathers on her chest had spread open.

The crystal embedded there caught the available light and pulsed purple, the same fundamental design as the lantern’s crystal, but smaller and more refined, clearly higher quality.

"That one. Was given to me. Not only as a charge. But as the power. To guard. The illusions!"

She screamed it and the forest below answered.

From the trees in every direction, harpies rose. Dozens. Then more.

They converged on the castle from all sides, filling the air above it, the sky going dark with the density of wings, the sound of them like approaching weather.

Rough count: several hundred. At minimum.

"How is this possible?"

The enemies flying everywhere seemed to have gathered in the sky in an instant, just like soldiers preparing for battle receiving orders and assembling in an orderly manner.

But how could that be? They’re monsters, beings whose animalistic instincts outweigh their rationality.

They shouldn’t, and couldn’t possibly, have such an exaggerated level of organization.

In an instant, the situation became extremely unfavorable to him.

"Damn it..."