Panic? Henry didn't panic just then. Nope. It was everyone else around him who were actually the ones panicking at the vampire screaming bloody murder just above their heads. Everyone else who started rushing about like headless chickens, shaking people awake with absolutely no regard for the previous self-imposed silence while the vampire kept screaming, screaming away.

His movements were slow, steady and even, he kept repeating. Others might call them 'mechanical' or that he was 'moving like he soiled himself', but don't listen to any of them. They're all just panicking! Perfectly excusable to make a few inconsequential mistakes in the heat of the moment.

We're in for it now, Henry thought to himself in the wake of his delusions. I give it about twenty seconds before that wolf arrives.

There was no time to give orders. He needed to get on top of this nightmare scenario immediately. Otherwise, people were going to die because of him. All because he slipped up, and allowed for a moment of sentimentality.

A quick peek out the window confirmed his suspicions as two copies materialized in lockstep behind him. The prone form of the sleeping werewolf was, indeed, showing signs of waking. It's ear twitched, and it raised its head for a big yawn that gave a full view of the rows of jagged teeth inside its mouth. First with one muscled forelimb, then the other, it began to rise.

There wouldn't be enough time to wake everyone up, at this rate. He needed to buy some.

He handed off his gun and bag to the copy at his left. "Silence that damn vamp!", was the last order he gave before taking a running start at the glass windowpane.

Don't wing the edges, don't wing the edges…

His aim held true, and he sailed bodily out the second story with the cacophony of shattering glass. Strange how frequently his fights with wolves involved dropping from high heights, honestly.

At least this time, it's not my arm that will be breaking…

A rain of glass shards hit the ground a split second before he did. The roll he made to break his fall was textbook, but less than ideal in outcome. The height alone forced him to rely on his reactive shield absorbing most of the impact, and he felt the sharp fragments scattered around him dig into his skin as they got caught between his center mass and the pavement. While his shield didn't quite shatter after the rough landing, it was visibly straining to hold together as he got back to his feet. A paper airplane was liable to pierce it, given the state it was in.

But, he was able to recover in the nick of time to gain the werewolf's complete attention. It snarled at him, naturally. While he wasn't typically one to snarl back, everything he could do right now to keep all eyes on him would help.

So, instead, he snorted up a big wad of spit and spat on the ground at his feet. In a blur, the knife at his hip flashed into his hand, and he circled around to the side to get the fight lined up with the street, rather than the house he'd fallen out of.

"Come on, you mangy bastard… Dinner's right in front of you now…"

He was most certainly about to die here. That was fine. He fully intended on winning the war, even if it meant losing the battle.

The beast lunged, and Henry juked to the side in hopes of slicing open a weak point or two. Might as well put some work in before he went down.

< -|- -|- >

What the copies found going on in the attic bordered on ridiculous.

Actually, scratch that. It was ridiculous, no two ways about it. The first one up nearly fell off the ladder he was climbing when he saw the vampire desperately clawing at its own face, where the little robot toy currently had a death grip over its ghastly visage. The claw-like fingernails of the monster, which normally could cut through skin like it was rice paper, failed to find purchase on the smooth plastic shell of the figurine, apparently unable to damage what should normally have been a somewhat flimsy material.

Typical artifact resilience at work. The 8-Ball had been the same way.

The copy readied the revolver the moment he had both feet planted firmly on the ground once again. Crouching to one knee for stability, he lined up the irons with the vampire's torso, and put two rounds clean through. Oily black blood spattered against the wooden beams of the attic, and for a brief moment Henry got a glimpse of the other side of the enclosed space through the holes in its torso. The vampire writhed in agony, as both the creature and Henry himself felt their eardrums start bleeding from the overpressure caused by the sound.

Like he had so many times before, he ignored it. The vampire did not, and the figurine finally let go as it started clutching its ruined ears wracked in pain. With one final, clean shot, he put a third round between the pale monster's eyes.

The body of the vampire crashed to the ground soundlessly. Henry panted as his brain caught up to the lack of auditory feedback. That wasn't good. He should have heard an impact if his ears were in any shape to listen.

Well, that answers that question, then. I finally went deaf with that one.

He hoped the clone behind him on the ladder had the sense of mind to cover his ears. Right now, he was out of contention for making new copies unless they were really desperate.

Holstering the gun, he walked over to where the figure had tumbled to the ground, stooping low so as to not bang his head against the low ceiling. It was coming back to him now exactly why he'd thought burying this thing was the best option.

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Fuming internally, he grabbed it by the legs and stuffed it back in the satchel, wholly ignoring it's squirms of protest. Probably was shouting at him, too, but he had no idea. A scowl was beginning to etch onto his face.

One crisis down, he told himself. Only one much bigger one to go.

< -|- -|- >

By the time Henry's clones returned to the fray, the mages were mobilized and out in full force. Everyone was throwing everything they had at the beast in hopes of taking it down quickly, while Henry frantically ducked and dived past both the werewolf's attacks and the lines of fire of his own allies.

Sometimes literal lines of fire, in some cases. Martin's signature attack seared through the air like a flamethrower, scorching patches of smashed concrete into brittle gravel and asphalt into bubbling hot tar. Where the werewolf was unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end, several patches of burnt fur pockmarked its body. The smell of burnt hair lingered on the battlefield as the beast pressed on heedless of the incremental damage it received. Relying wholly on its unnatural resilience to see it through, it soldiered on through the plethora of scrapes, scratches and cuts it accumulated from every other magical attack under the moon.

From the front lawns of the houses they'd hid in, spells in both a volume and variety he'd never seen before in his life pummeled the beast from multiple angles. That it was still alive and roaring was a testament to exactly how damn resilient these creatures could be when they wanted to.

It lashed out at Henry again, this time catching him on the arm with a swipe from its claws. Barely a glancing blow from the perspective of the towering creature, and yet it was still enough to both leave deep gouges in the skin as well as cause the elbow joint to bend the wrong way with a snap of ligaments.

He seethed in pain, biting the inside of his cheek to deflect attention from the much worse wound. His molars ground against the layer of skin inside, eventually proving the soft tissue to be no match. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth, causing him to spit on the ground for a second time this fight.

Though, obviously, there was a lot more red in it this time around.

Got to hold out… just a little bit longer!

Despite how bad things were looking for him, personally, this was actually proving to be a winning strategy. Slowly, gradually, he was seeing definite signs of the wolf being worn down. Movements that were once snappy and responsive were just a beat more sluggish than they used to be. It was blinking more and more rapidly, blood trickling from a wound on its brow through slicked-down brown fur, splashing into its face at inopportune moments. Even as it growled, he could tell it was panting heavier and heavier as time passed.

The wolf was losing, and it knew it, too. Which was why it was trying to finish the fight as quickly as the rest of them were. Every so often, it would fully abandon its prolonged duel with Henry to rush at the mages, only making it about a half bound closer to them before being responded to with more defensive spells.

Rammed earthworks sprouted from the ground directly in the path of the beast, while the stone it tread on turned to thick mud. Blinding flashes of light disoriented it whenever it looked directly at the mages, causing it to stagger and whine as spots danced in the pure yellow orbs that were its eyes. Now that the clones were present to fight, too, one flanked it from the opposing side and summoned fresh reinforcements while the one carrying the revolver peppered it with deeply penetrating accelerated bullets.

This time, something changed. It yowled in agony, as for the first moment since the beginning of the fight it stumbled under the withering firepower of concentrated spellshot. The whole scene was a far cry from the sheer overwhelming dominance these creatures held during the first Witching Hour. Sure, it was taking an extreme amount of concentrated effort to win a fight against just one wolf, but that didn't matter. What did was that they were winning in the first place.

And all it took was enough powerful mages to run a Fortune 500 company.

Henry didn't stay idle. He saw a chance to turn the tide in their favor just a little bit more before he perished.

Blitzing forward with as much speed as he could muster, he took a flying leap at the broad back of the werewolf. Knife tip extended forward like a spearhead, which he stabilized with his free palm resting against the bottom of the pommel. The blade sank deep into the muscle surrounding the spine, deep enough that only the guard on the hilt prevented it from embedding further. Henry grabbed a fistful of fur in one hand and held on as tight as he could, wrenching the dagger free using his busted-up arm to twist it out. He readied himself for another swing, fully expecting his reckless offensive would make him a target too easy to pass up.

He underestimated just how little a werewolf actually cared about being stabbed by a plain knife.

Instead of, say, reaching a clawed hand over its shoulder to peel him off, it shook of its moment of paralysis and charged up over the summoned earth wall, leaping high into the air and taking him along for the ride. Soaring through the air like a meteor to crash down on the ranks of mages from above, it howled with an almost rabid fury on the way down.

It was aiming for the mages closest to the buildings. The ones who hadn't fought it openly yet, who'd busied themselves with supporting the rest or passing out handfuls of Domain crystals so that the combat-focused spellcasters could keep pace with their mana consumption.

From down below, the florist girl who everyone had come to appreciate stared up at the maw of the beast, staring back like a deer caught in headlights.

Oh, Hell no!

In that split second, Henry decided he'd prove exactly why you shouldn't discount the small threats, even in dire situations such as these.

Knife plunged in to the monster's other shoulder, providing him enough leverage to pull his arm up and around the creature's neck. His entire arm barely fit around the damn thing, but from there he could get a better angle to slit the beast's throat with.

As he struggled to lift the beast's chin the few centimeters of width he needed, he realized it felt a little strange that both he and the beast he was grappling shared a similar weakness. Perhaps it was just something universal to animals. Regular wolves, apparently, knew to go for the throat when they hunted, too. Not sure where he'd heard that from, but that little factoid decided to randomly float to the forefront of his mind as he heaved his arm upward and ran the blade along the small seam that formed. A fountain of blood stained it red almost immediately, and now both of them knew that there was only seconds more left to this fight.

The beast retaliated. Jaws clamped down on his arm and tore, shredding the limb to ribbons and splitting through the bones like twigs. Henry screamed in pain, louder than he had ever screamed before.

Below, the other survivors had started to back away from the impact zone, giving the falling meatsacks in the making a wide berth. They fell to the ground with a resounding crash, sending loose rubble flying every which way with their landing. Henry's entire skeleton vibrated from the landing, cushioned by the hulking frame of the beast beneath him only in the sense that the fall hadn't killed him outright.

He could supposedly be considered lucky, on how things shook out on that front. The corpse of the werewolf hung bonelessly beneath him, meaning he had just a few seconds more left to live before the blood loss did him in for good.

Christ… that was… too close… at least nobody else will die, now…

Looking over his shoulder, the Flora mage was on the ground, obviously freaking out as was well within her right to do, but otherwise unscathed. She stared back at the lumbering corpse, eyes shaking in fear as-

Wait. She wasn't actually looking at the corpse. Her gaze was sweeping somewhere past it.

He turned his head to peer over the other shoulder, and immediately saw why.

Lying on the ground was one of their own. Still a kid by every right, but treated as a full-fledged survivor regardless. He was motionless, and a large piece of stone that might once have been a cinder block had launched through the air at dangerous speeds with the werewolf's crash landing.

His face had been caved in. Blood was everywhere.

"My son," the florist sobbed, reality sinking in as Henry's consciousness began slipping away. "My…"

She never finished her words. The three existing copies watched on solemnly from the sidelines, as Henry died regretting that he'd failed to meet his own standard.

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