In the few seconds they spent talking,
a skin-crawling rustle came from the darkness at the end of the alley.
A cold wind swept in.
Evan looked over with his one still-normal eye. His pupil widened sharply.
Pulis was back.
But he was no longer the elegant professor in a black silk shawl.
On either side of his human torso, darkness had condensed into enormous bat wings veined with bone spikes.
The wings stretched more than three meters across, dark red veins running through their membranes.
His entire face jutted forward, and his mouth split back to his ears, exposing two uneven rows of fangs.
The creature rose from the ground and dove at Richard and Evan.
"Kyen!"
Richard clenched his right hand.
Half a meter from them, Pulis slammed into an invisible wall and stopped dead. The gale from his wings whipped Evan's hair wildly.
But in the next instant,
Pulis opened his mouth.
From that monstrous maw, split all the way to his ears, shot a barbed scarlet tongue two meters long.
It moved almost too fast for the eye to follow.
Like a red-hot steel needle, it pierced straight through the invisible shield Richard had just raised.
Richard reacted with inhuman speed.
He shoved Evan far away, but the motion cost him his own best chance to dodge.
The barbed tongue punched through his chest, entering from the front and emerging from his back.
Black liquid sprayed from the wound, splattering across the alley's cobblestones.
Yet Richard showed no pain.
He looked down at the tongue through his chest as if inspecting a nail caught in his clothes.
Then he moved.
His unnaturally thick left arm shot up like lightning.
Five sausage-thick fingers, covered in fine scales, seized the tongue lodged in his chest.
His right hand curled into a fist the size of a sandbag, its scales as hard as armor, and smashed toward that exquisite, terrifying face.
"Dragon Blood Potion? You succeeded?"
Pulis caught sight of the scales on Richard's fist and froze.
A rare flash of shock crossed his blood-red eyes.
"Die."
Richard spat out the word.
Bam.
The huge fist struck the left side of Pulis's face.
His once-handsome face caved in as though a tram had hit it head-on. His cheekbone, nose, and jaw shattered at once.
The upper half of his face snapped backward like a lump of rubber someone had crushed.
But the tongue through Richard's chest was still attached to Pulis.
Richard gave it a savage yank.
Pulis's body, already flying away, was dragged back by his own tongue like a fish on a line.
"Get over here!"
Bam.
The second punch destroyed Pulis's jaw. Skin tore from half his face, exposing the white skull beneath.
Bam.
The third punch caved in the left side of his head. His eyeball squeezed out of its warped socket and dangled against his cheek.
Evan stood at a distance, watching the counterattack turn into a slaughter. The shred of clarity left beneath his pain made him reach into his jacket for two bottles of Blood-Burning Potion.
He had kept both bottles on him whenever he went out these past two days.
He had been afraid he might need them when they weren't close at hand.
"Nice one, Richard! Beat the shit out of that bastard!"
"Leave him breathing, Richard! I want to punch him too!"
As Evan babbled, the relevant demon-hunting knowledge surfaced in his mind again.
"When a Bloodthirsty Species is wounded in battle, it enters a state of extreme bloodlust."
"Demon Hunters often poison enemies with their own blood. It's an advantage unique to their profession."
Evan watched Pulis struggle despite his ruined face. Without hesitating, he broke the wax seal on a bottle of Blood-Burning Potion.
He tipped his head back and downed it in one gulp.
The burning, chili-oil-like liquid scorched its way down his throat into his stomach, then exploded through his blood.
He knew he couldn't help Richard fight.
But he refused to become a burden to him.
He had no intention of becoming the handy blood bag Pulis grabbed to heal himself after taking that beating.
When Jotaro and Dio were brawling, the old man needed to stay the hell away!
My blood's already poisonous. Let's give you something stronger.
[You consumed an Incomplete Blood-Burning Potion. Duration: 5 hours.] [Effects: Physique permanently +0.2; while active, self-healing reduced by 300%, Blood Quality reduced by 50%.]
Evan struggled to throw the second bottle of Blood-Burning Potion to Richard.
Just then,
a soft breeze brushed past his ear.
It wasn't the November night wind.
It was a deliberate movement of air, guided by something with intent.
Evan's pupil dilated.
A figure appeared silently behind him.
Evan recognized her.
Pulis's female assistant.
The plain-faced woman in white who always stood in the Laboratory's shadows.
She had never told Evan her name.
Shit.
Evan's mind raced through the pain.
They lured Richard away.
He hadn't even finished turning around
when both of the assistant's shoulders burst open. Two blood-red, paddle-shaped tendrils of flesh shot out at blinding speed and wrapped around Evan's torso from opposite sides.
Their grip was terrifyingly strong.
Despite his Physique exceeding 2.3, Evan was as helpless against them as a chick bound with wire.
She turned and ran.
Her speed was absurd. Evan's feet left the ground, and she carried him over her shoulder like a sack seized by a kidnapper.
"Richard!"
Evan twisted back and shouted.
At the other end of the alley, Richard's fist halted in midair. His face, murderous a moment before, turned furious, but he gave Evan a wink.
The instincts he had inherited as a Demon Hunter told him Richard seemed to have another move in reserve.
"Fuck!"
Richard made a show of cursing, flung Pulis to the ground like garbage, and gave chase.
Then Evan saw exactly what he had expected.
Richard was bad at running.
For all his terrifying explosive power and extraordinary strength, his inverted-triangle build looked straight out of a comic book. When he ran, his lower body had to bear more weight than it should.
With every step, his torso swayed dramatically from side to side, like a ship with its center of gravity in the wrong place.
In less than two seconds,
Evan looked back and could no longer see Richard.
The November chill swept over Bolton City and poured into the alley.
Evan fought to break free of the two fleshy tendrils, but it was useless.
Every struggle made them constrict harder. His ribs even began to creak under the strain.
The assistant spoke beside his ear, her voice perfectly even.
"Stop struggling."
She sounded as though she were reading meeting minutes.
"You chose the wrong side."
"Adolf's branch of the Demon Hunters has only five active members in all of Bolton City."
"We've already drawn four of them away."
"And you think one person can stand against us?"
While the pain churned his head into a mess, Evan clung desperately to every scrap of inherited memory seeping from his Demon Hunter Characteristic.
The murmurs of old Demon Hunters around a campfire surfaced again.
"One of the signature traits of the Bloodthirsty Species: Flesh Mutation."
"Those possessing this trait have bodies capable of extraordinary stretching and growth."
"Their high-quality blood supports the formation of tough tendrils of flesh or wing membranes."
"But these structures are not indestructible."
"They function much like erectile tissue, becoming hard and strong when filled with blood."
The instant Evan recalled that, he nearly choked on the taste of blood in his throat.
Those crimson tendrils looked as viciously cool as something out of a ghoul comic...
And now he was being told they were basically erectile tissue?
If I get this trait, can I make mine as big as I want?
Shit! What am I thinking?
If it relies on blood filling it...
Evan's mind raced between the pain and the sheer absurdity of it.
Then the blood inside must circulate through the rest of her body too.
At that thought, Evan ran his tongue over his teeth.
Traces of the Blood-Burning Potion he had just downed still clung to them.
The next instant, he jerked his head sideways and sank his teeth into the crimson tendril around his shoulder.
Crunch.
The tendril's surface was tougher than he had expected.
The first bite felt like biting an old leather shoe sole. His incisors couldn't sink in.
But with his Physique above 2.3 and a streak of reckless madness, Evan refused to let go.
A second bite. A third. A fourth.
He ground, tore, and scraped at the same spot with his incisors.
Finally,
the outer layer broke.
A gush of dark red blood, foul enough to make him gag, sprayed into Evan's mouth.
It tasted a hundred times worse than a sewer. His stomach heaved.
But he didn't spit it out.
Evan seized the chance to spit his bloody saliva, mixed with remnants of the Blood-Burning Potion, into the wound he had bitten open.
Once. Twice. Three times.
The assistant felt the pain in her back and frowned slightly, but her expression soon went still again.
She didn't even slow down.
"A wound this small,"
she said from ahead, her voice cold and indifferent,
"means nothing to me."