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 piece of moonlight sharpened to a secret.
A ragged slash ran across her face, a wound that never stopped deciding whether it was open or not. 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, 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, it was 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 had a fight left in 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 screamed, 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 object. She poured every scrap of it into the air, let it hang around her like a storm cloud 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, and the gem on the back of it flared. It was a small, carved thing that drank light. The gem inhaled her Truewound like a lung.
The world narrowed. 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 detonated as 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 her, 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. He smiled like 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.
Marielle dropped a dome of ice around herself at once, instinct and training being what they were; My order had been a rule, and she followed it. The dome chimed with cold brilliance and glassed her in.
Greed felt something wicked and unholy brewing beneath the surface of the ice dome. 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 on a scale: I slammed my blade, and the force flung Hels aside like a rag. I redirected and leapt to intercept Greed as he 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.