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, 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.
Greed moved like a predator that had learned every language of violence. His arm — already grotesquely unnatural from the things he had stolen and made his own- it was a serpent that strangled logic. A purple whip coiled into existence around him: a girthy, living rope of aura that narrowed around him and closed around his arm like a sentient sleeve. It had the circumference of a tower at its base and tapered to a whip's lethal kiss. It felt weightless and implacable, but wherever it struck, it left a taste of fracture.
Kariya met him in a flash of lightning and snarl. She was lithe to the point of being a blade in motion. She moved with the feral arrogance of a creature who had never learned to doubt her own limbs. Greed danced circling, taunting with a barbed laugh.
"You run like a picture when you're set on fire," he said, voice full of small cruelties. "Faster! Make me feel something!"
Kariya answered with speed — lightning braided around her bones, making muscle and bone sing like tuned wire. She matched greed's tempo for a while, and Verne's shields shimmered around her like glass around a flame. The shields held. At least they did until Greed found a rhythm and moved past it: The whip-slave around his arm cracked against the aegis and found that, like everything that touched Greed, it only amplified him.
The aegis shattered with the sound of a continent snapping. Kariya, mid-dodge, was caught, and Greed's boot arced into a roundhouse that hit like the planet had decided to recollect itself. She screamed in pain and flew, a human star flung into a wall that did not expect to be rent. The impact splintered stone that would have contained a hurricane, yet the wall only brone in a way that made men stare and count miracles. Kariya's body rattled inside her ribs; blood painted the air near her abdomen as she groaned in pain, clutching and rolling over.
The only reason she was still alive was due to Verne throwing another barrier her way to cushion her impact the last second before she hit the wall. The shield shattered once again like a lullaby, and Kariya's breath came thin and jagged.
Greed's attention slid like oil toward Verne. He found the pleasure in a new pairing, Hels's rapier and Greed's rancid hands moving as one. Verne had been the tunic of their line: defense, patient, and implacable. He countered, parried, held ground with a heart that had learned to hold ground even when everything wanted to leave it. But even his shields, the most durable made by spiritual energy, were being tested by an arithmetic of cruelty no one had prepared for.
Hels threw his weight into one shield until metal and spirit cracked, and that special shield — a trap as much as a defense — detonated in a stun-gray blossom that should have frozen him. It did — for a breath. Greed, who had learned how to ride explosions, leapt through the flare and hung himself above Verne like a coin you could not clutch.
The floor ran in waves. The hall shivered, and then a furrow of cut air opened like a mouth in the sky.
I came through it, a flash of motion that smelled of ozone and promise. Overdrive charged my limbs; it sat in me like a tide. I was a living piston of speed, a blade that wanted to rewrite gravity. I hit Hels on a breath so fast that the rapier hardly had time to realize it was seeing a blade. The clash of steel sang, and for the first time in a while, the tide of the hall shivered.
Hels parried, but my momentum threw his blade aside. I vaulted toward Greed with a predator's single-mindedness to save Verne from above. Greed met me; the whipblood wrapped and cracked. I met the lash and grabbed greed's arm and threw with such care that the air itself kept up with him. Greed, flung, and slid across stone.
Then Hels shoved, a backhanded shove that met my forward lunging intent and pushed me aside.
The new entrance that split the bones of the battle was not done with its theatre. A ripple of flame cut through the room: Ronan stepped from the flame, a blade of sunlight conjured between his hands, sent like a column of the sea. The beam caught Hels in the ribs as he turned and stung him out of breath. I tumbled, rolled, and skidded to my feet; I laughed at the world with no joy, just the sound of a man who had not expected to wake again.
"Thought we Lost you," Marielle said, her voice thin as paper and twice as strong. She stood then, blade in her hands, and the grey crystal drank the light.
"Save the speeches. We're still in a fight."
Marielle nodded with an absence of ceremony. She sent Spirit into me 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.
Across the opposite field, Ronan, Kariya, and Verne wove together. Kariya found a seam and axe-kicked downward with a lightning fist that ruptured the stone so deeply the hall trembled. Shrapnel flew. Greed danced around the debris and answered with a storm of ghost-daggers — slender, glowing knives inscribed with a language that looked like falling rain. Ranging magic. Greed's voice found space between shrapnel and breath.
Ronan's shoulder took a blade; he yelped. Then his eyes went white. He sank to his knees like a man turning into marble. Kariya saw it before anyone else: 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 was 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 Lucien and then at the throne.
Greed stopped making a game of it and pushed everything into fullness. He lashed a dagger with the stamina of the world behind it. Kariya tried to stand; the dagger found the aegis and sliced through armor that should have held. Flesh parted, and the void claimed Kariya's left arm. She gritted her teeth, but she did not drop into the kind of melodrama that made stories pretty. Her blood sprayed, but she saw an opening and tried one last time to take it.
Greed answered with courtesy: an uppercut that broke cages. The dagger, like a needle of apocalypse, shoved through her jaw and found a place no mouth should have to be held apart. She became still like a bell cut. Greed smiled and said, "It was fun." 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, 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 lives 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 motion 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 we 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.