Richter almost laughed. Almost. "You think dignity matters? She drank the blood of a Sekhmet. She controls the night sky. Maria's beasts can't scratch her. My magic is like throwing firecrackers into an ocean." He looked down at his own hands. The hands that had failed to save his mother. "I'm not the Belmont she fears."
He didn't turn. He knew the voice. It was the whisper of steel on leather, the scent of old libraries and older blood.
And the night screamed back.
"Alucard." Richter’s breath fogged in the air, though it was summer. "You're late." Castlevania- Nocturne
"No," Alucard said quietly. "She fears what you represent. A lineage of spite. A family that would rather burn the world down than let the night win. That is a terrible, beautiful thing."
Richter's hand flew to the Morning Star. It hummed, sensing the presence of true evil.
"My family is dead," Richter whispered.
He stood alone on the dock, the Morning Star coiled at his hip, heavy as a coiled serpent. Behind him, the city slept in terrified ignorance. A few candles flickered in windows. A dog barked somewhere in the dark. They didn't know that the sun was being unmade.
"I stopped to watch the sun set," Alucard said. His voice was a low, musical baritone, stripped of irony for once. "I thought it might be the last one."
The rain over the Boston wharf was a lie. Richter almost laughed
It felt real enough against Richter Belmont’s skin—cold, sharp, and smelling of brine and rotting wood. But so had the illusion of his mother, Julia, standing in the parlor of their burning home. So had the vision of the Abbot, praying to a God who had already closed His eyes. Richter had learned that his whip could cut through flesh, bone, and even the mist of a nightmare. But it could not cut through memory.
"Try not to die before I do," Alucard said.
"I was helping." Alucard gestured vaguely toward the east. "There are other horrors. The Forgemaster's disciples are digging up the graves of every battlefield from the Rhine to the Pyrenees. While you fight the queen, I fight the pawns. It is... undignified." She drank the blood of a Sekhmet
"She's here," Alucard said, not a question.