The white line crossed the sky and people stopped to look at it.
A woman in the street lowered her phone mid-photo. A driver rolled down his window and leaned out.
Somewhere across town, music from a rooftop party cut off mid-beat as the guests turned toward the horizon.
Children didn't bother with explanations, they just closed their eyes and made wishes, the way you do when something bright crosses the sky at night.
The line descended. It found the unfinished high-rise on the city's outskirts and went straight through it.
Crack.
Raw concrete floors punched through on both sides, bricks dropping in sheets, the abandoned scaffolding collapsing into itself, wooden poles knocking each other loose, tangling on the way down, landing across the stacked cement bags in the construction yard below and splitting them open.
Grey dust bloomed outward and kept going, rolling past the fence line and across the adjacent road on the evening wind, the kind of cloud that made drivers choose between stopping and accelerating and mostly chose accelerating.
The white line didn't slow.
Crack.
It hit the idle crane next, shearing straight through the boom arm. Sparks flew along the length of the cut.
The arm buckled inward at the point of impact, the structural load redistributed faster than the metal could manage, and the outer section broke free and dropped.
A forklift was parked directly below.
The arm came through the cab, caught the fuel tank on the way, and the resulting fireball lit up the construction site orange for about three seconds before settling into a low, steady burn.
In a trailer at the edge of the site, the site manager jolted upright out of a dead sleep. He looked out the window at the wreckage, at the burning forklift, at the scaffolding distributed across the yard in pieces.
"Thank God there was no night shift," he said to the room. "Insurance is going to love this."
He looked up at the sky. The white line had reached the horizon.
Nearby, a red-and-blue helicopter sat briefly motionless, its searchlight fixed on the line's trajectory, running some kind of assessment. Then it banked hard and moved toward where the line had ended. Fast.
The site manager watched it go, then dropped back onto his pillow.
"Something serious happened tonight," he said. "Whatever it was, it's not my problem. Sleep first."
---
Two shapes fell through open air, one ahead of the other, both moving too fast for the tree canopy below to do much about.
Thud.
The werewolf hit the forest floor and the ground recorded the objection, a depression driven into the grass and mud, the momentum still carrying forward, the body dragging a long furrow through the earth before it finally stopped.
What lay at the end of that furrow was not recognizable as the thing that had been throwing Raphael through walls an hour ago.
Both arms at wrong angles. Bone ends visible at multiple points.
The grey fur matted dark with mud and blood, no clean surface remaining. The silver sword stood through the center of the chest, straight down, the blade buried to the crossguard.
The eyes were open but unfocused. The breathing was there if you looked for it, shallow and irregular, each one slower than the last.
Raphael let the Wraith Form carry him down and released it a few feet from the ground, landing quietly in front of the werewolf.
"It's over."
The werewolf looked at him. The mouth opened once, twice. Something trying to surface.
Raphael crouched and got close enough to hear it.
"...Trap..."
The hand made a small movement upward. Stopped. Settled back into the mud.
[Hunt complete.]
[Sin acquired: +24.8.]
[Mutation factor obtained: Weakened Alpha-class.]
[Current Sin: 63.4 / 80.]
Raphael exhaled. He pulled Lyndon's sword free, held it a moment, then reached down and closed the werewolf's eyes.
He stood and moved. The forest was quiet and he wanted to be out of it before the quiet stopped meaning anything.
The rotor sound found him between the trees. He looked up through the canopy, red and blue livery, IFSA markings, the searchlight swinging through the dark in long arcs.
"Eva's aircraft."
He started toward it, and his life band lit up with an emergency message.
'Raphael, run! There's a mole in senior command. We've been flagged. This mission was a trap! I'm on the helicopter, they're—'
The message cut off.
A red warning graphic replaced it, pulsing at a frequency designed to be impossible to ignore.
*ALERT: You are suspected of conspiring with unit members in the homicide of A-9 Unit Commander Evelyn Vigo. Return to organization headquarters immediately for investigation.*
The alarm disengaged the band's silent mode. Somewhere in its firmware, a location broadcast began transmitting.
Above the trees, the helicopter's search pattern changed immediately, swinging toward his position, the searchlight cutting through the branches and getting closer.
Something extended from the inner surface of the band. Fine, densely spaced barbs, driving into the skin of his wrist and locking there, the mechanism gripping with a deliberate, purposeful hold.
He understood what the werewolf had meant.
The chain of it was visible all at once, the standard equipment requisition, the team structure with no healer to fill the gap, the commission that had brought them out here. Each piece had led to the next.
Someone in the organization had set this up from the beginning, and the target had been A-9 from the start.
The same hand that had pointed the Tribunal at them. The same hand that had given Manson the Mirror of Self.
He activated the Jason domination without hesitating.
*Flesh Bishop — Corporeal Reformation.*
Then he picked up Lyndon's sword with his free hand, looked at his left wrist, and cut it off clean at the joint.
Blood came out fast. He pressed the stump closed immediately, packing flesh over the cut, the Reformation already moving to seal it from the inside, crude, painful, enough to stop him from losing too much in the next few minutes.
He picked up the severed hand with the band still locked around it, wound up, and threw it hard in the opposite direction.
The band's signal moved. The helicopter registered the velocity, cross-referenced it against documented Blood Frenzy movement speeds, found it plausible, and went after it.
Raphael moved through the trees in the other direction, watching the aircraft through the canopy.
Eva had said *attacked* before the message cut off. She was on that helicopter, almost certainly in person, her physical body, not a projection.
If the pilot had anyone else working with him, the mounted gun would already have been active. It wasn't. Which meant the pilot was the only problem on board.
He looped wide and came around behind the helicopter's current position, timing it against the search pattern.
The aircraft was hovering now, searchlight fixed on the location of the severed hand, looking for a body.
He snapped his fingers.
*Flesh Bishop — Tendril Branches.*