Location: The First Axiom (The Ivory Archive).
Time: N/A (Temporal Stasis).
The silence of the Axiom was heavier than the gravity of a black hole. It was a silence that didn't just lack sound; it devoured it.
Valerius stood on a floor made of hard, suspended light, looking down into an infinite abyss of swirling geometric shapes. His hands were trembling. His crystal sword—his life's work, a blade grown from the marrow of a dragon—was gone. Shattered into atomic dust by a single chain from the entity floating above them.
To Valerius, Prime did not look like Dante. He didn't look like a god. He looked like a tear in the canvas of the world—a silhouette shaped like a man, but bleeding pure white mana into the void. He was a glitch in reality.
"Why?" Dante roared, his voice echoing endlessly in the infinite library, bouncing off shelves that held books written in light. "I paid you! Two Titans! That was the deal!"
"INCORRECT," Prime stated. His voice didn't travel through the air; it vibrated in their marrow, bypassing the ears entirely. "YOU PAID FOR SAFETY. THE TITANS WERE THE FEE FOR INTERVENTION. THIS..."
Prime pointed a long, white finger at Valerius.
"...THIS IS A TIP."
Chains of blue mana snaked around Valerius's limbs, lifting the Sword-Saint into the air like a broken marionette. Valerius struggled, his muscles straining against the bonds, but against the weight of the Axiom, he was a child fighting a hurricane.
"SUBJECT: VALERIUS," Prime analyzed, his eyes scanning Valerius with beams of grid-light. "GENETIC COMPOSITION: CHIMERA CLASS. UNIQUE MUTATION: HYPER-REFLEXIVE SYNAPSES. VALUE: INCALCULABLE."
Prime turned his cold, glowing eyes to Dante.
"I REQUIRE HIM FOR DISSECTION. I WILL MAP HIS GENOME TO IMPROVE YOUR COMBAT EFFICIENCY. IN EXCHANGE, I WILL OFFER YOU A BOON."
A screen of hard light materialized between them. It displayed a countdown clock.
"PRECOGNITION. I WILL GRANT YOU THE ABILITY TO SEE TWO MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE. ONCE PER DAY."
Dante froze.
Two minutes.
In the world of alchemy and bullets, two minutes was an eternity. In a high-stakes fight, two minutes of future sight was godhood. He could dodge every bullet before it was fired. He could win every gamble. He could become the perfect killer. It was the ultimate cheat code.
He looked at the screen, mesmerizing in its promise. Then he looked at Valerius.
The Sword-Saint wasn't screaming. He wasn't begging. He was hanging in the chains, looking at Dante with a mixture of profound humiliation and quiet resignation. He was a warrior who had lived by the sword, who believed in the purity of combat, and now he was being haggled over like cattle at a meat market.
"I am not... a currency," Valerius whispered, his voice cracking, his pride shattered more thoroughly than his blade.
Dante clenched his mechanical fist. The metal creaked loudly in the silence.
"No," Dante said.
Prime blinked. The white light of his form rippled. "ILLOGICAL. THE VALUE PROPOSITION IS HEAVILY WEIGHTED IN YOUR FAVOR. A TOOL FOR A LIFE."
"He's not a tool, Prime," Dante spat, stepping between the Entity and the Elf. "He's a warrior. We fought. I won. But I won't sell him for parts."
"SENTIMENTALITY IS A DEFECT," Prime countered, the chains tightening around Valerius. "IF YOU REJECT THE TRADE, I WILL CONSUME HIM REGARDLESS. HE IS IN MY DOMAIN. I AM THE AUTHOR HERE."
"If you eat him," Dante said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. His eyes burned with black entropy, the only thing in this realm that Prime didn't control. "I will stop hunting the Axioms. I will walk into a desert, sit in a hole, and rot until the Origin claims me. And you will be stuck here, alone, forever. No data. No upgrades. Just you and the silence."
Silence stretched. The threat hung in the air like a guillotine blade. Prime froze, calculating the probability.
"COERCION DETECTED. PROBABILITY OF DANTE FOLLOW-THROUGH: 94%. ACCEPTABLE RISK: 0%."
Prime lowered Valerius slightly. The chains loosened, but did not release.
"PROPOSE AN ALTERNATIVE."
Dante's mind raced. He needed something of equal value to a Sword-Saint. Something biological. Something unique. Something Sector 7 possessed.
"An Embryo," Dante said. "A Crown-Class Homunculus Embryo."
Valerius's eyes widened in shock.
"Gorm has them," Dante continued fast, selling the lie. "In the deepest vault of the Flesh-Cathedral. The prototypes meant to replace the Titans. Potential unlimited. Blank slates. You can mold them however you want. No existing flaws. Pure genetic clay."
Prime paused. The data streams around him accelerated, turning into a blur of light.
"A BLANK SLATE... YES. SUPERIOR TO A MATURE SPECIMEN WITH ESTABLISHED FLAWS."
Prime looked at Dante.
"ACCEPTABLE. BUT YOU DELAY MY RESEARCH. THE COST OF WAITING MUST BE DEDUCTED."
The screen showing "2 Minutes" flickered. The number dropped rapidly. 1:30... 1:00... 0:45...
It stopped at 00:30.
"THIRTY SECONDS. THAT IS THE NEW OFFER."
"Thirty seconds of future sight?" Dante asked, disappointed. "That's barely enough to reload."
"TAKE IT, OR I EAT THE ELF."
Dante looked at Valerius. Valerius nodded slowly, a look of profound gratitude—and confusion—in his eyes. He couldn't understand why the Scavenger was fighting for him.
"Deal," Dante said.
"CONTRACT AMENDED," Prime boomed. "GET OUT OF MY LIBRARY."
The floor of hard light opened up like a trapdoor.
Dante and Valerius fell into the white abyss.
Location: The Titan Pit, Sector 7.
Time: 16:00 (One hour has passed in Real Time).
Gravity returned with a vengeance.
The air shimmered, spitting two bodies out onto the hot sand. Dante landed in a roll, his coat flapping. Valerius hit the ground hard, tumbling like a ragdoll without his armor to cushion the blow.
The silence of the Axiom was replaced by the grinding of tools, the roar of wind, and the murmurs of men.
Dante sat up, spitting sand. He looked around.
The battlefield was calm. The sun was lower, painting the sky in deep purples and blood reds. And The Psychopomp was still there.
Silas was under the chassis, sparks flying as he welded a suspension strut. Around him, a dozen mercenaries—the survivors of the ambush—were helping. Some were refilling coolant, others were patching the armor with scrap metal from the destroyed tanks.
They looked up as the portal opened.
"Hostile!" a mercenary screamed, dropping a wrench and pointing his rifle at Valerius. "The Sword-Saint is back!"
Panic rippled through the group. Bolts were racked. Silas dropped his welding torch and scrambled out from under the car, holding a heavy pipe wrench like a club.
Valerius didn't move. He sat on his knees in the sand, staring at his empty hands. His white armor was cracked. His sword was gone. But more importantly, his worldview was gone. He had seen the Architect of his reality, and it was a cold, unfeeling machine.
"Stand down!" Dante ordered, his voice hoarse.
He stood up, dusting off his coat. He walked between the mercenaries and Valerius, holding up a hand.
"He's not fighting," Dante said. "Look at him."
The mercenaries lowered their weapons. They saw the Thousand-Yard Stare. Valerius looked like a man who had looked into the sun and gone blind.
Silas ran over to Dante. He grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him.
"You were gone for an hour!" Silas hissed, his eyes wild behind his goggles. "We thought you were dead! We thought the sky ate you! I was about to start drafting a eulogy!"
"It did," Dante said, rubbing his neck where the Axiom gravity had pulled at him. "Indigestion."
Silas looked at the empty space where the giant Tesseract had been. Then he looked at Dante.
"So..." Silas whispered, looking terrified. "When you said you had a 'roommate'... you weren't speaking metaphorically?"
"No," Dante sighed. "He's very literal. And very rude. And he hates rent."
"You have a god living in your head," Silas muttered, pacing in a circle, hyperventilating slightly. "A god that eats Titans and kidnaps elves. Do you know the logistical nightmare of this? Do you know the paperwork involved in housing a deity?"
Dante ignored him and turned to Valerius.
The Sword-Saint was slowly standing up. He looked fragile without his weapon, stripped of his purpose.
"Why?" Valerius asked softly. "You could have had the vision. You could have had power. Two minutes is an eternity."
"Thirty seconds is enough to win a fight," Dante said, shrugging. "Two minutes is just spoiling the ending. I hate spoilers."
Valerius looked at Dante. For a long moment, the reptile eyes searched the human ones, looking for deceit. He found none.
"I cannot return to Gorm," Valerius said, his voice hollow. "Not after seeing... That. The Garden is a lie. Biology is just...." He stopped, shaking his head to keep the madness at bay.
"Then don't go back," Dante said. "Walk away. The Ash Wastes are big."
Valerius looked at his hands, watching a tremor start. "I need the antidote. Gorm holds the leash. Without the serum, I liquefy in three days."
Dante tapped his silver jaw.
"I know a guy," Dante said, pointing his thumb at Silas. "He's pretty good with chemistry. Maybe we can figure something out. Reverse engineer the bond."
Silas stopped pacing. He looked at Valerius with horror. "Oh, no. No, no, no. I am not adopting a stray Sword-Saint! Do you know how much they eat? Their metabolism is a nightmare! I can't afford to feed a super-soldier!"
Valerius looked at Silas, then back at Dante. A faint, tired smile touched his lips.
"I have no money," Valerius said.
"Neither do we," Dante grinned, the Silvergrin glinting in the sunset. "But we have a very expensive book to steal. And an embryo to kidnap."
Dante turned to the mercenaries.
"Is the car fixed?"
"Suspension is at 60%, Boss!" a mercenary shouted, saluting. "But she'll roll! We patched the radiator with cactus juice!"
"Good," Dante said. "Load up. We're finishing the raid. We're going to the Flesh-Cathedral."
He looked at Valerius.
"You coming?"
Valerius stood straight. He didn't have his sword, but he still had his hands. He looked at the Citadel in the distance—the home he could never return to.
"To steal an embryo?" Valerius asked.
"What else?" Dante asked. "It's a Tuesday."
Valerius stepped forward.
"Then lead on, Pale King."