Lucien
"Mary Vale is just going to have to live in the shadow of another man who abandoned her." That's what most thought, but that wasn't true. Ronan never chose to abandon her. None of us decided to leave anyone. Ronan was going to be a father, but now, he might not ever get the chance to be.
His fingers tightened around the handle of his staff. In his mind, he thought, "Mary… if I don't get back, I'm sorry."
I knelt beside him, his breath a cloud of frost. We'd searched for our comrades, no bodies, no echoes, no nothing. Only the shifting afterimages of Hels's laughter.
The soul crucible reeked of slow dying. The walls, if they could be called that, were sheets of ice that breathed in and out like someone's lungs. Sometimes they shimmered with faces — hollow-eyed things gasping for release. We just stepped past them. Ronan and I, alone.
We had done our part. Now it's time to leave.
"Ready?" I asked.
"Now or never." He responded.
Ronan raised his staff. Flames ignited like a friend too loyal for its good, spiraling and furious. My Overdrive flared. The black longsword gleamed white at the edges.
CRRR—ACK!!!!
The ice ruptured, and reality bled. The crucible shattered like spun glass, and we two great angels broke back into hell, in the throne hall of Satan.
The throne room was a wound in the world, a cathedral of obsidian and ruin, its vaulted ceiling lost in black smoke and the distant indifferent stars beyond. Light fell in shards across cracked tile, across broken banners, across a dozen bodies already too still to count.
At the far end, on a dais that dwarfed continents, a throne ate the light around it. Satan hunched in that throne like a king with a fever, hair falling in damp ropes over his face. Bandages unraveled down one arm, and where those wrappings came away, the skin beneath was not skin at all but a map of void: black trails running like spilled ink from his fingers up to his jaw, where veins bulged as if something inside were trying to claw its way free.
Marielle stood several dozen yards away from the open field of carnage, still like a statue in the middle of the storm. She gripped her sword like a thing that anchored her to the world, a long double-edged blade of grey crystal that glowed faint and terrible. The hilt was dark as thunder; It caught the little light the hall offered and smoked it inward, making the blade look like a pierce of moonlight sharpened to a secret.
A ragged slash ran across her face, a wound that never stopped deciding whether it was still a wound or a map. Her jaw clenched. Around her, the world screamed and moved. She didn't move towards anyone. She couldn't. My voice rasped in her head: never go near Greed. Don't fight Hels without me. I had said it like a command and like a prayer, and she had obeyed both. She could only watch as the world kept breaking.
Satan's eyes lifted. His irises were a tired crimson; the pupils burned a strange orange. He met Marielle's look without expression, and for a terrifying heartbeat,t the entire throne room felt like a lung holding its breath. Behind Satan, embedded into the stone like a placenta of late gods, a vast crystalline egg pulsed faint blue. It was unnerving in its prettiness, beautiful and indifferent, a promise of growth. Support struts ran from its sides into the architecture, and when the camera of the mind lingered there, you understood that the blue egg was meant to incubate something or feed something. It hummed like a machine too patient to stop.
On the floor, the fight took voice.
Kariya tasted metal on the back of her tongue, and it took everything in her not to puke. She straightened as best she could—back bent like a broken bow, legs trembling—and forced herself to look like she still fought her. Her right arm was a theater of pain: skin blackened and raw, nerves singing under translucent tissue. Third-degree burns. Each breath was a small ration of oxygen that had to be budgeted.
Across the arena, Greed moved like hunger given a body. The purple serpent—more rope than beast, an aura-whip with girth enough to strangle a tree—uncoiled through the air, its glow slithering over flagstones. It lashed toward her like a living tide.
Kariya staggered, found purchase, and the reflex that had kept her alive so far took over: she folded at the waist and jumped clean over the purple coil. The whip hit the ground with a sound like thunder wrapped in silk and continued its path, a trail of violet smoke marking the arc Greed wanted it to carve.
He bolted—sound and speed and arrogance—and she bolted, too. They made halfway across the blasted courtyard like two planets on crashing trajectories.
"You run like a picture set on fire," Greed called, voice amplified by something more than breath. "Run, darling, run until the moment the frame melts!"
He threw his voice forward, then screamed with a hunger that trembled to the marrow, "Make me feel something! Let me taste something real!"
The shout was an invitation and a dare. Kariya answered with a sound that was half a laugh.
"Feel this!" she spat, charging the last syllable with everything she had. "You empty-eyed, hunger-drunk incubus!"
Greed's mask, a black mouth-guard he sported like a gentleman's grin, slid off. The sight of his mouth, bare and wrong, made her stomach sharpen its hatred. The mask didn't hit the stone—fate kept it hovering as if it were waiting for applause.
Kariya gathered her Truewound: the black-and-green law-sheen snarling against her skin like a living thing. She poured every scrap of it into the air, let it hang around her like a stormcloud of onyx and viridian. The aura splintered into thin threads, and she slung them at Greed.
"Bring it!" Greed shrieked, thrilled. "You stimulus-hungry power-slut!" He raised his right hand,d and the gem on the back of it flared. It wasa small, carved thing that drank light. The gem inhaled her Truewound like a lung.
The world narrowed. Kariya moved a hair too late. In the blink of an eye, she was behind him with the speed that used to mean victory. Her fist swung for the small of his back.
A shield bloomed gold and pure, stretching out from nothing like a sun-scorched membrane. Her arm smashed into it, and the impact sent a white-hot pain up into her shoulder. Blood peppered the surface,e and bead after bead slid like black glass. She forced air into her chest and thought, This stupid shield!
The plate cracked. A split that pulsed with golden light. To anyone watching, it might have been nothing. To anyone who knew shields, to anyone who'd broken things that weren't meant to break, the crack told a story: she had hit something that was supposed to be absolute, and she had made it break.
Greed laughed like the sky cracking. The sound was a thing you swallowed. He spun his wrist; blades unfolded across the knuckles like a predatory clock. He swung backward in a brutal arc meant to catch Kariya's ribs.
She saw it in the same instant he planned it.
Her hand rose in a fast, ugly karate chop toward his forearm, where the bone told the meat how to move. For a second,d she thought she could do it.
The golden shield winked back into perfectness.
Her arm slammed into it again, and the shield cracked again like a mouth.
Kariya tasted iron and dirt and the memory of every time her hand had hit something that fought back. The jolt hurt, but it also lit something in her chest. Good. She flexed, felt the phantom threads twitch like teeth.
Greed's grin widened,d and he rushed again.
Kariya's spirit sparked; she split her spiritual core and sent a twin of herself into being. Not a copy of the flesh, but an Echo, thin-limbed and violet, a ghost that moved with a reverb of intent. Two Kariyas were not the same. The mirror-thing—Kariya's Echo—was a blade of light and memory that could mirror her speed and close a gap. It struck from behind the shield, a purple comet that hammered the golden plate where Kariya could not.
While the Echo assaulted the shield, the real Kariya slid around to Greed's blind side.
She felt the Echo like an extension of her spine. The shield could only face one vector at a time. If she hit the other side hard enough, the golden membrane would not be able to hold both assaults. She planted her feet and punched his flank as hard as she could.
Greed budged. Something in him shifted the balance of his stance weakened, and a sliver of triumph flared inside her. Perfect, she thought, breath ragged. But it's not enough.
Her Truewound needed time. Her gift hummed with the exact number of one second to reach full melee saturation, or the energy dissipated into pretty sparks. She had used it half a second ago, and the gem had gobbled the rest. It twitched in her like a cheat code half-entered.
Greed roared, and his laughter scraped at her ears as she spun up into a twisting down-kick aimed at his shoulder, a move designed to topple. The kick landed, and Greed went down in a ruin of stone and dust. He hit so hard he took part of the floor with him, building a miniature canyon of rubble.
Kariya vaulted and honed her Phantom Threads, the blue line amassing like a rope pulled tight. She dove into the dust, driving those threads like nails into Greed to bind him into place; if the ground held conductive particles,s the electricity would jump, and she used that principle like a cunning practice in war.
She thought her web had him.
And then white eyes opened in the smoke. Two pinpricks are emergent and wrong. something in the back of her head flipped a gear. She spun. A hand flashed faster than thought and seared the air at her throat.
She dove aside, but no dodge was fast enough.
Greed was already there. In a breath,h he was face-to-face with her, and his fugitive speed had changed the rhythm; he was a new hunger.
She tried to slip. A kick arced; she braced to meet it.
A green aegis, a shield of Verne's creation, popped into place around her. A distant shout: "Kariya, get out—!"
Greed's foot smashed into the aegis. It detonates like a bell struck with a hammer. The shield exploded in a sound like breaking glass, and the force threw Kariya, still in mid-air, back into the arena like a rag doll. Stone shattered where she had been. The mythology of Verne's defenses had just been reduced to confetti.
Greed was a machine when he moved his hands. He did not hesitate. While she spun out of the shock, he closed, and where his hand found he,r there was a spear, red-hot, runed in light, the shape of a thousand war-fevers. It drove through her abdomen with the focused, obscene intent of a man used to turning living things into resources.
Kariya's world inverted.
She hit the wall with the force of a body thrown through a kiln. The wall did not give. It only accepted the impact and flung debris into the air like a cough. She coughed blood, felt it break up inside her like a storm trying to find ground. She folded around the spear that had wedged itself in the hollow between her abs, and then everything narrowed to the bright sting of iron and the distant sight of a mask hitting stone.
Greed stood there, breath steaming, his leg smoking from where the shield had tried and failed to stop his momentum. Hsmiled atof a man who had eaten very well and now wanted dessert.
He moved toward Marielle at a leisure that made him repulsive. "Entertainment!" he said, low and soft.
Marielle dropped a dome of ice around herself at once, instinct and training being what they were; Lucien's order had been a rule, and she followed it. The dome chimed with cold brilliance and glassed her in.
In response, Greed turned on his heel and leapt, a violet streak of motion, toward the far side of the battlefield where Hels and Verne were scrapping teeth and wills. Verne had forced a trap and then used it as bait, Hels had moved into it, and for a breath the pair had reached an equilibrium: Verne's shields and Hels' rapier. But Greed's entrance made measured chaos of that little pattern. He slipped into Verne's blind spot with the practiced arrogance of a man who'd made stone bleed before.
Then everything changed.
The air split with a blue and purple wound that opened like a door. A slash of color—then a body through it. I came through like motion given teeth, my speed a cruel geometry that pronounced a different rhythm in the air. I hit the ground and moved like light with edges.
Hels turned, rapier up, as I converged. The clash was a scale: I slammed my blade,e and the force flung Hels aside like a rag. I redirected and leapt to intercept Greed as Greed tried to finish Verne.
Greed's parry sang, and the two bodies locked in, a furious ballet of blades and muscle. I reached out, grabbed Greed's torso, and heaved—slamming him into the ground with the force of a falling moon. For a heartbeat, Greed lay sprawled beneath my weight.
I moved to finish—one clean strike to the throat would have split laughter into nothing—but Hel's counter pushed, elbowed, shoved; Hel shoved me out of the window and away from the killing blow.
Greed rose like a bad memory. Kariya, somewhere in the debris, was bleeding out but breathing. And then she reassembled herself.
Kariya's eyes found the scene, and she felt a heat surge up the spine of her figure. Around her, the Echo shimmered, no longer an afterthought but a plan that had been executed with cold mathematics. The clone shimmered, winked, and the real form shifted; the Echo folded itself into her and, like sleight of hand, they switched corporeal roles. Where the body that had been impaled now was a shade, flickering with the afterimage of pain, the other, her living self, was whole in the place where earlier the spear had driven.
She punched Greed in the face. Her fist carried the Truewound this time, the concentrated tooth of her gift, and it landed with a volcanic sound. Greed rocked back, stunned for the first time by a bruise that wasn't easily cleaned or soaked up. The smell of oil and copper filled his mouth.
Something else struck the field: a serpent of flame, bright as a judged sunset, ripped through Greed with a force that felt like tectonics. It shoved into him like a plumbing failure in a building the size of a world. Ronan stepped through the portal, flame like a blade in his hands, and the battlefield gasp-heard-'round the ring broke like a held breath.
Marielle shattered her ice dome and screamed, relief and fury high in her voice. "Lucien, Ronan, you're back!" she bellowed, and the three exhaled at once into a single plan.
I ground my jaw. "We celebrate later," I said, voice like stone. "I'll take Hels with Marielle." I slid right, away from Verne, eyes hard. "Ronan, Verne, and Kariya take Greed. Don't let them adapt."
Ronan nodded, flames licking his palms. Verne, still shaky but burning with guilt like a second fire, tightened his shields and rushed forward as the three of them converged on Greed.
Greed, wobbling but not lost, found himself between two faiths: the old, brutal hunger, and the joined force of those who would not be swallowed quietly. He sneered, teeth catching in the corner of his mouth as the field closed on him again, and the surge of dopamine, the terrible, growing rush demons fed on when the fight was good, rose in his chest like a crown.
Marielle nodded with an absence of ceremony. She sent Spirit into us like bread: with a pulse, and a refill. Energy threaded into my limbs and lit my muscles once more.
I moved like an apology in motion. I patched my breath to the fight. Marielle and I stepped together at Hels, our blades meeting a rhythm so old it felt like wind. For all my speed, I drew the demon's attention; Marielle played the second to that song line, water slipping through metal. Teasing Hels, I flipped a line of words at him.
"Beautiful trap you set," I said. "Almost had me on a string."
Hels smiled with the mouth of a man who never had to sleep. "A hen should thank the farmer for every day she lives," He offered, venomed and simple. Then we were teeth and steel again.
Hels moved like hunger given legs. He did not use the full measure of demonic trickery; he did not need to. He let the sport do the work for him.
His rapier flashed. I felt its point and slid under, slashing upward; I found a nick on Hels. Marielle joined in, and pure blades carved across the demon like two hands trying to lift him from the earth. Hels pulled a parrying dagger free to use both hands, and the fight multiplied.
"You lucky girl," Greed from across the battleground purred, amusement dripping from every syllable. "Blessed with tricks like your Echo. So useful. So entertaining."
"Shut up," Kariya spits. Her voice is jagged, but it's a weapon. The right arm still burns under raw skin,n and she tastes iron on her tongue. She knows what people expect from her, fury, flashes, the show, but she can't let emotion ruin the calculus. Not now.
She and Ronan move together like two parts of a machine. Ronan's flame-katana hums warm and vicious in his hands; Kariya's Phantom Threads Here Echo is ready to split, and the Truewound slithering under her skin is coiled like a snare. They das,h and Greed answers with a blink of posture, and then a shield folds up around him: gold, perfect, a sun-smear of defense that breathes light.
Ronan rockets forward, fire-sword arcing like commitment. He slams into the shield and squints; the flame bites, but the plate holds. "Damn it," he grunts, feeling the blunt truth: Greed's protections reconstitute in increments, and the gem devours any power that spills into the air.
Kariya moves through the gap; Greed's back is the target. She slams a Truewound into his flank, a fist of black-and-green law that should have buckled lesser things, and Greed stumbles. For the first time in the duel, the smile leaves his face. He turns on her, eyes narrower, teeth bared.
Kariya doesn't wait. She slides into his blind angle and threads Phantom Threads through the space between his ribs. She punches with Ronan behind her, two impulses hitting the same center, and for the instant they think they have him, the gold shield reappears, and her hand meets sunlight-forged steel. Pain fans up her arm; a smear of her blood marinates the shield's gleam.
This stupid shield, she thinks, tasted like iron and annoyance. But the crack from earlier, the memory of the crack, hums in her gut like a promise. She knows, bone-deep, that the thing can fracture. It just takes the right vector.
Verne appears where Greed's attention flicked, a sentinel arriving like a second wind, and he lunges. Greed blocks with brute angles; his arms meet Verne's with a clang. Kariya uppercuts into Greed's chin, and the demon launches into the air like an animal thrown by a fist. Dust explodes; stones sing their own little mortuary hymn as he slams down.
Kariya launches after him. Ronan rockets up in tandem, the flames at his heels singing like wings. Greed's shield blooms again, an automatic reflex that eats space and time, and Kariya slams into it first. The gold tastes like nothing on her fist; it is sound and silence and wrong.
Greed turns to Ronan, face-to-face, the spark and the hunger measuring each other. Greed winds his wrist for the blade-stab.
Ronan doesn't breathe. He focuses between the eyes, that narrow, impossible center. He fires a spiritual bullet, a second skill that flares like a cry from the place behind his brow. The beam tears through the air and carves a thin white hole in Greed's wrist. Greed jerks back as though the jewel itself has been punctured.
"Die a thousand times, Greed." Ronan's katana slices the air in a clean arc that catches Greed horizontally, a blade that severs tide and bone. The demon's torso cleaves; his body falls in two, flesh smoking, and for a mad, brief second, their triumph feels like a bell ringing.
The field goes quiet for the breath it takes to notice dust move.
Spirit motes, Ronan's flame-ash and Kariya's purple threads, whirl, attracted by the void. They gather, glittering and obedient, and then begin to descend in an almost tender choreography. Light inverts into a shape, and Kariya's mind freezes as the dust refocuses, the glowing powder knitting flesh like embroidery. Where Greed's corpse hit stone, a new figure stumbles up, gasping, blinking, Greed, restored, laughing as if the ground had taught him the best jokes.
"This isn't fun," he sighs, flicks hair from his forehead, and smiles that malicious, hungry smile. Dopamine floods him, the battle high. He dashes at them like a spear made of shadow.
Kariya feels the tilt in the air: something fundamental about the fight is cheating. They have just learned why airborne energy is a trap. Greed's gem is a vacuum for spirit in the atmosphere; anything poured into the open only fattens him. The particles that reassembled him were proof. They had given him a resurrection.
"We can't feed him the air," Kariya says, short and sharp, breath cutting. "Stop putting energy into the atmosphere."
Ronan's face hardens. He throttles his flame back, pulls the heat inward until it changes character, from pyromancy into raw augury of muscle, strengthening tendons and coiling his katana strike with literal weight instead of loose, showy flame.
Kariya kills the spark in her threads; the purple lightning doesn't leap into space. Instead, it hums close, a powered coil around her tendons. She uses the Echo to augment her kinetic output rather than throw static into the world. Her split is not a showy clone anymore; it's a body-bend used to reframe direction.
Greed thrusts his arm blade at Kariya, a spear-slice of dark metal. She grabs the shaft, feeling the pulse of something alive and wrong under the surface. He counterstrikes, the other arm hammers down toward her head.
Ronan lunges, a foot smashing into Greed's flank. The demon goes skidding for dozens of meters on his belly and rights himself in a vile, practiced way. Kariya augments her legs witha taut violet aura and closes the gap like a coiled spring. Greed tries to stab, Kariya is inches above ground with a quick flip, and she splits into two: the Echo drops one angle while the real Kariya becomes the other. The move buys her time and space; Greed's blade rips through ghost and air.
Ronan reappears behind the ghostspace, and his fist slams into Greed's jaw. He knocks the demon back; Greed lands and finds the world is not a mirror; it resists. He smiles, a little less sure now.
Greed spreads his arms like an altar and claps in front of him. A shockwave detonates, wind that wants to be teeth, and it slams for Ronan and Kariya. Verne is a step late to the geometry, and for an instant, they think the pulse will fracture them.
Verne throws aegis shields around them like a living barricade: two plates, a pair, light knitted into stops. The shockwave hits and rolls off. The shields throb and tick like a living thing startled. They hold, and Ronan breathes a raw laugh for a second.
Kariya threads her Phantom Threads again, part of the combo; the echo goes wide, hitting Greed's flank while she tries to pin and rake. He dodges, devilish machine, and maneuvers between them with a sinusoidal grace. His hand sweeps, and a slash of void arcs toward their defenses. It hits Verne's aegi,s and the sound of it breaking is a white, metallic scream. The shields shatter into sparking fragments; they slam into the ground like broken stars. Verne's face is a map of disbelief: the shields are on cooldown.
"No—" Verne hisses, the word a prayer and a threat.
Kariya pivots, silent calculation running like water in her skull. Phantom Threads strike again; the echo blitzes the shield from the other side. Greed's reflex reappears: the golden membrane blinks into existence and swallows the echo's strike like a beast swallowing a song. Ronan moves in, staff snapping a wide arc and connecting with Greed's ribs. The force is true and blunt; it pushes him. Kariya banked into the shield anlandedds an impact that sounds like a gun.
It breaks.
Her fist punches through the golden membrane, ane and it fractures, splintering away in a chime. Greed staggers like a puppet whose strings were jerked; for once, he is truly staggered.
Kariya and Echo synchronize and hammer into him. Two punches in the stomach, a double impact that sends Greed flying. Stone erupts where he lands. They follow. Kariya charges her Truewound, feeling its terrible countdown: one second to full bloom. Her lungs count the heartbeats.
Greed smiles, and then the world sprinkles little knives. Tiny black blades appear, each etched with runes. They leap like insects, a swarm of little death. Kariya sees them functionally, an engineer seeing a wiring hazard. She and Verne dodge, and Ronan turns his body into a wind that catches some blades and detours them. He takes one in the shoulder, a white-hot sting that he covers with a curse and a howl, but the strike doesn't stop his motion.
Kariya tastes the warmth of her Truewound, wanting completion. Half a second. Another half and it would be the meat of the damage.
"Hold him!" she barks, voice a snapped wire.
"On it!" Ronan roars back, heat coiling like a wound. Verne hunts for a seam.
Greed, recovered enough to laugh, watches the trio with the serenity of someone who knows the answer to life and how to keep it. His gem pulses blackly as his mouth curves into that patient grin. The battlefield feels like a coin balanced on its edge; they all know who the coin favors if anyone drops a single soul into the air.
Kariya breathes the moment in, calculation, timing, muscle memory, and the echo of the earlier crack in the shield vibrates in the back of her mind. They have learned how he eats the skies; they have learned to bite into his seams. They are bruised, but they are not yet broken.
She thinks, ragged and hot and bright: Keep it close. Burn from the inside. Teeth, not breath.
Greed snarls, and the fight folds into motion again — a map re-drawn in blood and lightning and the stubborn hard geometry of people who refuse the obvious end.
Kariya saw it before anyone else: Ronan's eyes went white, he sank to his knees, a siphon curled from Ronan's golden orange spirit and ran straight to greed. It was a drain. The stolen dagger that lodged in Ronan's shoulder had been a siphon, and greed was feeding off of him.
Kariya could not watch his soul be sucked away. She moved like a meteor of courage.
"Ronan!" She cried and left the protection of Verne's aegis. She tore forward and, with claws of spirit that flamed like truth, she did a thing no one expected: she tore Greed's right hand clean from its socket. Her Truewound Claws made the wound honest and final. Greed's hand flew, a thrown planet of ruin.
Greed did not scream. He smiled in the way of coinage.
"You think ripping a glove off a god will do anything?" He said, lifting his spare hand to Kariya's face, "Have you ever heard of the absolute currency? Destruction energy?" The void flashed then, not a beam but a smear of night that took and burned. The flash found Kariya and should have matched her existence with a void scar. But something moved farther than the dead thing: Ronan pushed in between, as if a man could be a wall.
Kariya flew to the ground as a cloud of smoke rose. Waving clear her vision, her eyes lay upon a horrible view. What was left of Ronan answered that physics with a terrible surrender. The beam struck him. For a single impossible second, he remained upright, the right side of him was a statue of bone and ruin, his head was gone as if someone had carved him in motion and not finished the sculpting. Then the body collapsed. The hall was filled with screaming.
Greed's laugh came out slow and pleased. He picked his hand up, and with a trick like a magician and a theft that felt obscene, cupped his face and let a shadow mist unfurl over it. Where the mist cleared, a face had changed: hair shorter, eyes different, features twisted into an imitation. Greed had stolen not only power but persona. He wore Ronan's face like a souvenir.
Kariya, coughing dust, spat words that were blood and denial. "You bastard!" She said. "You can't take him. You can't—"
Greed only smiled more softly and turned back into the fun of the battle.
Back at the center, Marielle and I fought Hels in a dance that escalated into violence so pure it felt like a song. Blades flashed; the hall bent to each strike. I slashed and sent a board ribbing of overdrive wind at Hels, and Hels rolled, a dark comet, and then I surged again, each step a promise of momentum.
Marielle — the blade she held a symbol more than a weapon — charged like a priestess of winter. Ice-spirit energy chased her edges; every swing left frosting on the air. Lucien found a seam in Hels and slashed. He felt it — that pregnant, ringing certainty of a true cut — and then the world caught the shape of something wrong: Hels flickered where the strike landed and disappeared from Lucien's strike before the wound could finish.
Marielle was exposed.
Time lost the small soft things it needed. There was no time to reach over; Lucien was still mid-flight. Hels appeared at Marielle's flank like a draft and attacked with speed so clean it was obscene. She danced with it for a breath. The blade took her throat with cruelty that felt accidental to the world's design: a clean severing that made the sound of a single fragile thing being unmade.
Marielle's head went flying like a comet of sorrow. My feet hit the ground, and my knees wanted to give in to the loss; I could not catch the falling thread of events. In that final exhalation, Marielle chose something that looked, from the way the air moved, like will: She filled herself with spiritual energy until she was a sun and detonated.
The explosion that tore from her body was not a scream but a hymn. It washed over the field like a blade that never stopped cutting; it left the room empty of sound for a beat, as if the world had to remember breathing again. When the dust cleared, her body was not there. The grey crystal sword, however, had been thrown from her hands by the force of her explosion. It skidded and struck and stopped at my feet. Cracks spidering in the crystal as if the world's memory had scarred it. For a moment, the blade smoked — A shard of moon cracked by god's temper.
The blade, cracked, seemed to look up at me and then at the throne. Fullness. Kariya snapped.
Greed instantly appeared in front of Verne. A single kick was all it took to crash through Verne's Aegis shield and send him flying.
The word bastard tore out of her throat as she vanished, the ground rupturing beneath her heel. Rage drowned out the pain in her ribs, the scream of her soul, the quiet absence where Marielle's presence used to be. There was only Greed. Only that empty-eyed thing floating there like it couldn't even be bothered to respect her fury.
"I'LL TEAR YOU APART—"
Spirit Energy screamed as she summoned her Echo, its shape peeling out of her like a shadow ripped free. At the same time, Truewound ignited along her arm, purple light crawling over bone and muscle, condensing into something sharp, final. The recoil alone made her vision tremble.
She blurred behind Greed.
No—
He'll turn.
She felt it before she saw it. The subtle shift of his aura, the lazy pivot of his shoulders.
Kariya snarled and redirected mid-dash, Phantom Threads snapping into existence and yanking her trajectory violently forward. Space folded around her. One heartbeat, she was behind him—The next, she was right in front of his face.
"Too slow."
With a Phantom Thread–guided punch, she drove Truewound straight into him.
Greed's shield bloomed into existence—translucent, golden-orange, smug—
—and shattered like glass.
The impact screamed up her arm. Bones cracked. Fingers bent the wrong way.
She didn't care.
Her fist punched through the collapsing shield and buried itself in Greed's abdomen.
His body jerked.
His weight left the ground.
"Yes—!"
Greed was lifted cleanly upward, feet dangling, eyes widening just a fraction. And then her Echo appeared above him, elbow cocked back, Truewound flaring.
"DOWN."
The Echo slammed its elbow into Greed's spine.
The shockwave cratered the ground.
Greed was driven into the ground like a meteor, stone exploding outward. Kariya was already moving, Phantom Threads latching onto debris, air, nothing, slingshotting her backward to build momentum. Her heart slammed against her ribs as she twisted midair, condensing everything she had left into one attack.
A Truewound spear formed along her arm, longer, denser, screaming with destructive intent.
"STAY. DEAD."
She fired.
The Phantom Threads snapped her forward like a railgun shot. Space blurred. Sound vanished.
She slammed into Greed's abdomen—
—and instead of piercing, the spear compressed, buckling against him and launching his body backward in a violent arc. He tore through rubble, gouging a trench hundreds of feet long before finally smashing through a broken spire.
Kariya skidded to a stop, panting.
Her arm trembled.
Her fingers throbbed, half-numb.
"…Are you kidding me?" she gasped, disbelief bleeding into hysteria. "What does it take to kill you?!"
Her Echo didn't wait for an answer.
It surged forward, Phantom Threads flaring, Truewound reigniting as it followed up with a spinning kick that caught Greed mid-recovery and blasted him even farther back.
For a moment.
Just a moment.
Kariya thought they had him.
The Echo pressed the assault, blows chaining together, movement feral and relentless. Greed staggered, forced on the defensive, then his wrist blade flashed.
The Echo froze.
A blade was buried clean through its chest.
"No—!"
The Echo shattered into motes of light, dissolving into the air like ash.
At the same time, Kariya's nose started bleeding.
Not a trickle.
A warning.
Her breath hitched. Her vision blurred at the edges.
…Right.
Marielle's gone.
This is what empty feels like.
"Fine," she muttered hoarsely, wiping blood away with the back of her hand—only for more to pour out. "I'll do it myself."
She summoned dozens of Phantom Threads.
They snapped outward in every direction, anchoring to air, rubble, and Greed himself. The strain hit her instantly. Her skull screamed. Her heart felt like it might burst.
Then she moved.
She didn't dash.
She disappeared.
To Greed, she was gone.
To the battlefield, she was a storm.
Kariya hammered him from every angle—punches, kicks, elbows, each strike amplified by Phantom Thread momentum. The world stuttered as she crossed it again and again, impacts detonating across Greed's body.
Move.
Break.
Kill.
Greed tried to track her. Tried to turn.
She saw the opening forming—and she smiled, feral and bloody.
She summoned her Echo again.
Pain lanced through her skull. Her nose gushed blood freely now, dripping down her chin, staining her collar.
"I don't care," she whispered. "I don't care if this kills me."
Echo and original converged, hammering Greed together, blows overlapping, rhythm perfect. Greed's footing faltered. His posture broke.
It's working—
Kariya pulled back, drawing everything she had left into one final motion. Truewound condensed down her arm, heavier than ever, screaming like it wanted to devour her whole.
"DIE!"
She leapt, winding up a downward slam—
—and Greed's eyes locked onto her.
Sharp.
Focused.
Aware.
Her blood ran cold.
…He can see me?
Too late.
A giant glowing orange skewer erupted into existence, forming and firing in the same instant. Lightning-fast.
It impaled her.
It impaled the Echo.
Pain exploded through her chest. Her breath vanished in a wet gasp as blood sprayed from her mouth.
Still—She smiled.
Insane. Broken. Refusing.
"Not… enough…"
Using Phantom Threads, she slid along the skewer, dragging her torn body forward toward Greed. The metal burned. Her organs screamed. Blood poured from her nose like a faucet.
She raised her arm, Truewound flickering weakly.
"I'LL—TAKE—YOUR—EYES—!"
She lunged—
—and Greed's blade flashed again.
Her arm was gone.
The world tilted.
Before she could scream, she grabbed one of his horns with her remaining hand and ripped.
Bone cracked.
The horn snapped off in her grip.
Greed's eyes widened—shock and fury crashing together.
Then his wrist blade came up in an uppercut.
It caught her under the chin.
The sky spun.
Her body went limp.
The skewer exploded.
Orange light swallowed everything.
When the dust settled, a massive crater yawned where she had been.
What remained of Kariya Orvelle fell lifelessly to the ground, her torso torn open, blood soaking into broken stone.
The broken horn was still clenched in her hand.
And for the first time—
Greed looked down at a corpse
with something close to anger in his eyes. Then he watched Kariya's soul rise and reach like a moth toward the ceiling.
I went for it. Activating my Soul Sight, I saw the soul like a thread and lashed at the hand in the air that had reached. The soul fell into Satan's great paw for a mere second before I cut. The arm that tried to steal Kariya's soul lost something. Satan looked at Lucien then, and even in that vast, legless-for-a-moment glance, his expression did not change so much as acquire a sleeping grief. My blade bit into the thing that fed the room and came out whole. It may have been the first time an angel had felt the satisfaction of a true cut against a thing that was not supposed to be cut.
Satan did nothing more than place my blade in his hands and stare.
The blade did nothing to him.
Satan's fingers took the sword and curled like a man who held ice. He drew back,k and his slash was not a slash but multiplication; Lines of slashing energy that spread like a renovation across my flesh. The cut across my face multiplied into three bright furrows; each marked a kind of inheritance. One of the slashes found my Achilles tendon with a stone snap's precision, and I fell. Suddenly and irretrievably lame. Pain blossomed in me, and my breath became ragged.
I could feel the world changing its angle, and I am on my belly while it does.
My leg is a useless thing beneath me. The tendon that should be tethered and torque — the small rope that lets a man stand and become a machine — is a clean, burning absence where satan found it. Pain screams in one little, perfect place; everything else goes out on strike, I try to push, to roll, to wedge my weight into the motion; my body answers with betrayal, a flat refusal. The stone under my palms is cold and absurdly indifferent.
Across the broken field, Verne stands like a statue carved out of shame. He's supposed to be the hulking calm, the man whose shields were made of the patience of a thousand afraid people. Instead, he is a thing with a human face that is too small for the weight in it. His shoulders tremble once and then not again. His eyes are wide and empty as if someone has taken the notes from them and stapled the blank paper back in.
Hels and Greed are coming. They move like the ends of a blade closing. Hels, lithe and cruel with the rapier's geometry in his hands; Greed, all smug and soft with his purple coil, the whip that belongs to no normal anatomy. They take their time because why rush the ritual of breaking a good thing?
"My shields weren't strong enough," Verne says, voice like someone testing an old hinge. "Not strong enough to—" His words splinter. He looks at me — little, sharp, accusing — and the thing that claws at my gut is not surprise so much as precise, patient horror. He thinks he failed them. He thinks he failed everyone.
My tongue wants to spit back the answer. Move. Run. Be more! Use the one good thing you have left.
"Verne, move!" I force it out. It sounds thin, a child's bark, but it is an order, and I mouth it like a prayer-rattle.
He doesn't move. The man's body is a lectern of regret. His hands are fists that have learned how to hold the world and not let it spill. Now they are useless knobs.
Hels walks the last ten yards like a man admitting a guest. Greed hums as if the world were an orchestra arranged to his liking. They circle, and the air tastes of copper and old paper. The hall holds its breath and then lets out a sound like breaking.
I hate the sight of them laughing.
Greed stops and looks up with that ridiculous mimicry of Ronan's face — a theft that is both obscene and intimate. I want to tear the imitation free. Instead, my lungs make sounds, and my fists make nothing.
Hels moves first. Rapier, like the needle of a god scanning for a seam, he comes in. Greed steps in, the purple rope unfurling like a serpent with a practiced smile. Verne finally speaks again, and it is not to beg. He says something that sounds like a confession: "I thought the shields would hold. I thought—" his voice breaks "I thought they were strong enough."
You can call it a pause or honesty. I call it the moment the world decides to take what it wants.
They impale him.
The geometry of that violence is obscene in its neatness. Not a messy tearing but an insertion — a cold, efficient punctuation. Hels's blade slides like a final sentence; Greed's stolen spear finds the soft angle he has been waiting for. The sound is not cinematic. It is the small, final click of two mechanisms meshing.
Verne lets out a short scream. It is the sound of someone proud for too long — like a bell that was not supposed to be rung. The scream has people inside it: the men he saved, the nights he spent awake, the measures of himself that were never enough. The scream is not the end of him. The shields he bends around his ribs flare and flare again — his spirits holding him like wire after the body has been punctured. He is alive in the terrible way someone is still alive when the world has said no.
Satan turns. It is the small movement of a god changing his focus, and time becomes a thin ribbon. When he walks, it is not with a stride but with decree; the floor takes his weight and rewrites the way light should bend. He comes across the room like someone approaching a ledger with a pencil. Verne's eyes, goggled and glassed and wild, lock onto that movement and find nothing there but inevitability.
Satan's voice is a thing I've heard before in the backs of men's heads when they lie to themselves. It is soft and patient and full of rotten mercy. "Useful," he says, and the syllable falls like a coin being appraised. "He might be useful."
He lifts Verne's chin with one finger as if he were straightening the portrait of a child. I want to throw myself at them. I want to lurch, to bite, to do anything to make the motion stop. My body will not obey.
The thing he does next is slow and surgical. He presses his palm into Verne's chest and the black blood of his spirit — not blood but that inked, cold corruption — slides into the wound like oil into earth. It seems as if it tastes of old promises and iron and machine. Verne convulse. The expression on his face turns into a map of things being rewritten.
Horns erupt.
They don't sprout like the dramatic flourish of legend. They tear up, two ridges breaking skin and skull like someone chipping a sculpture. The pain is a rounding scream that folds into itself and loses form. I hear it as if underwater. My mind reaches for the shape of what is happening and keeps finding surfaces where they do not belong.
His eyes go blind, and in their place new pupils open: the black of a thing that wants other things, the thirst that is not sorrow but appetite. At first, there is the fight, reflexes flaring like old ghosts; then the wet, slow slide into the demonic. The man who had been Verne leaves like a shadow pulled from a wall.
I am still on the ground. I can feel my breath in the soil. The world is a tilted painting, and my face is at the bottom frame. Thoughts come then in a kind of fevered line, too many for the little body I have left to carry.
How could I have let this happen? How did my leg betray the effort at the worst moment? I remember the shout from Marielle — a bell that had no echo, now only a memory. I see Kariya's face splay in the instant before she is still. I taste blood in the mouth like a promise of failure. Ronan's laugh — the small, bright, ridiculous thing — floats across the rubble. This is my life boiled down to falling alleys. I am the man who could not stop the thing that should have been stopped. I am less than the measure of the friends who fell.
My body keeps trying to translate grief into motion, I think, desperately, that if only I can find the right angle, the right number of steps, the physics will forgive me. If I could only stand.
The memories of decisions I made in the other world stab me. I recall promises with the clarity of a fresh cut. We said we would make it back to Earth. We had sworn we would not let the world become a ledger.
There is a little private life still whispering in me. It is a name. It is the face of someone who trusted me. That trust is a taut string that tightened toward snapping.
The grief wants to break me down into a million small regrets. The grief wants to be something that folds me in half, so I can no longer be used as a weight on the world. I let it roll through me and find it is not the end but the raw material for a different thing.
Anver follows — hot, immaculate, a fuel that does not compute with rational thought. It is less the neat, clean fury of a plan and more the elemental thing that kills to stop more killing. It is a soundless animal rising from the inside.
I feel the overdrive answering like a hungry engine. It is swelling in my limbs that is less mobile and more demanding. The color in my vision flickers. Heat blooms behind my eyes, and it is not sweat. The world narrows to the edge of a silgne red tone, and behind my eyelids the world counts like a hammer.
I hate them. Every small polite part of me gives way to the need to hurt them back until their faces are nothing but alveoli of pain. Greed's smirk is toothy, and I want to strip the grim from his face like rotten rind. I want to tear every single tooth from his noggin one by one until he never smiles again. Hels — the elegant cruelty — I want it to be undone like a seam being pulled apart.
Tears come, unbidden. They are not for the dying but for the stubborn, ridiculous fact of being human: we feel, and that feeling makes the world both worth protecting and impossible to keep. I let the tears slide, and they make the salt-and-iron taste in my mouth real.
My breath shortens; my vision flames red at the edges and crosshatches like a warning on old glass. Overdrive responds to intent and rage with a cruel generosity. The rush is not my friend; it is a turning key. The inert muscles in my ankle scream for blood, and then something isolates the pain into a single note, and the rest of the world becomes what the movement needs. My eyes change. The blue of the sky would look at me and know that the man in me was back to being the original Lucien. The three slashes across my face — the lines that had been written earlier like maps of sorrow — flare like reading lamps. Red is not a color anymore, but a set of instructions. The world slows to a tenderness at the edges I can bend.
I feel the overdrive's red bloom take me like an answering drum. It is not the clean overdrive I trained with; this red: animal, reckless, the kind of overdrive that costs what it touches. Force without calculation. The kind that gives you the feeling of being something other than a man.
Thoughts draft themselves into a last, terrible clarity: I will not watch another hand be taken and become a tool for the sky. I will not be a ledger-keeper. I will not stand and count the corpses like sheep.
Slowly, as if I am tripping a fuse and the room itself is about to be rewired, I make a new promise — not in words because I cannot afford them — but in the motion that answers the flame in my vision. A gravity of intent gathers in my chest. The broken tendon is a detail now; the harness of will is the mechanism.
The red washes everything. My hands find the air, and the feeling is not that of claws but of engines. A soundless tearing begins in my bones as if I am rearranging the scaffolding of my own body. I am a man, and I am not; I am the machine that moves because grief said so.
I do not get up as the world would expect. I unmake the shape that held me. I gather the noise of revenge and portray it into motion. My breath is quick. My face is a mask they will remember.
Satan watches like a connoisseur sampling wine. Greed flicks his tongue like a man tasting new money, Hels stares with the narrowness of someone who had never had his pleasures interrupted.
They do not see the thing that is being born where I lie: a focus that will not measure the future in neat papers and ledgers. The world is an instrument, and my hand is a new strike.
I do not move yet. I am still a bruise on the floor. But inside the bruise, the engine is humming, and the red is spreading. The room is about to learn what happens when someone who has repressed too much wrong finally decides that wrong must be let loose sometimes.
I get up. Clapping my hand to the thing that was my song and attacked again — because horror makes a kind of armor and because the air itself was angry now. I ran and vanished in tremors, leaving dust where my need had been. I reappeared by Greed and put my fist through the Aegis that the demon had stolen from Verne. The impact turned my arm into a lattice of bone and scream; the Red Overdrive I had let loose gave force, but not flesh's staying power. My right arm shattered. I screamed, grabbing greed with my left and gurled him like a boulder into the wall; Greed's neck snapped with the nonchalant horror of the damned. He crumpled against the wall, and it looked at him and found nothing ot say.
I reappeared again at Hels and did something I did not know the meaning of until later: I plunged a hand through his solar plexus and launched him like a missile into another column. His neck broke against the architecture, and he hung there, a ragged thing. I did not dare to celebrate. The room had an appetite, and I was furious, and the rage kept me moving. Turning to go at Satan, I was a ruin with intention now, like a man with his last rent money in his fist. He locked eye contact with me and unfurled wings the color of rot and twilight. Feathers charged at their quills with violet light. He watched me, and then poked as if he were curious about a strange soup.
"I wonder," he said, slow and learned, 'From what cauldron does a soul as you brew?"
The wings screamed a violet glass. Beams poured toward me, each a little law. I had one breath of clarity and then my foot — the one that had been whole a moment before — betrayed me. The world tilted, and the overdrive that had been thrumming inside me sputtered red like a dying star. I felt the last reserve of hunger, and I crushed it into motion. I summoned my blade and moved like a thing that understood the geometry of consequences: I went toward him and toward the place he wanted to be unmade. I wanted to end it. I wanted to stop everything. My sword made contact with his chest.
Before I knew it, Verne, broken and remade into something I could no longer recognize, was between us. He choked in the way a man does when learning a new body. When I saw him, despite everything, he punched me out of the path before my blade could cut into Satan.
He hit me like the last thing that was human hitting me, and I flew. The shock sent my Red Overdrive sputtering like a candle in the wind. I hit a stone and rolled, and something inside me felt closed off and empty. I was low on spirit in a way that meant everything was a dull weight.
Satan didn't hurt. He stood, wings folding like a book. The violet beamed, aimed, and was waiting to be pulled with a string. I could have tried to rise. I could have collected the fragments of myself and found a way to finish what we had started, but the body that had been mine would not obey. My hand found the cross at my throat without a thought, a familiar weight. I thought of names that no longer made sense and faces that would not be summoned.
As soon as Satan fired, I drove the cross through my chest. There was no other language left that could speak for all the things we had failed.