The pain was sharp and all-consuming. Bit by bit, Yamato carved up my soul, tearing out the portion twisted by eldritch light and dark magic.
It was startling, seeing the contrast so clearly. It was almost as startling as realizing I had been screaming.
People called out, but their voices were far away. Reality stretched and grew splotchy, like watercolor on paper. My stomach flipped, and suddenly I was back in that endless white place where I'd first met Shin.
He stood at the center of it all, dressed in his black hoodie, jogger pants, and Nike shoes. He looked up at me as I approached, naked as the day I was born, each step a fresh agony.
Everything hurt—every hair follicle, every cell. I was a walking bruise that grew bloodier with every step I took, and a pair of floating notifications confirmed what I suspected.
Error__You've Lost the Favor of Shin the Avaricious. The following features and abilities have been removed.
System Store
Your Class, Skills Associated, and all stats gained via level-ups.
All knowledge of purchased skills, even if they've been merged and upgraded.
Time Warp is now unstable.
Ancient Rune Magic is now unstable.
You've Endured Massive Soul Damage
-500 to all stats
-30% effectiveness to all affinities and skills
-Red Orb or Soul Containment rupture. 1000 lost/minute out of (800,543,521)
-Massive soul pain until healed
I had anticipated everything I read except the line about a soul containment rupture.
I hadn't realized that was a natural function Dante—or rather, I—intrinsically had. I'd always assumed soul absorption was something Shin facilitated somehow.
Did that mean I could absorb souls now like other demons?
Up close, the God of Gluttony didn't seem nearly as overwhelming as I remembered. No doubt that was part of the trick, something to get inside my head and make me lower my guard.
"Actually, it isn't," Shin said plainly. "Even with your soul gushing out like that, you're still too strong."
"Is this the part where you tell me to fall back in line or else?" I sneered.
"We're well past that point, don't you think?" he asked.
"Then why am I here?" I demanded.
"Nostalgia?" he offered, and my eyes drilled into him.
He burst into laughter, wiping a tear from his eye. "Alright. Alright. I brought you here to tell you, in no uncertain terms, that there was nothing you could've done to stop what is about to happen. Cut me out now or a decade from now, you always would've ended up here, cut off from everyone and everything, even your precious girlfriend."
His words hit me like a physical blow, and I instinctively reached out, trying to force open a dimensional portal and summon Rebellion, but nothing happened. A flash of panic crossed my face.
Reflexively, I activated Cloak of the Demon Lord, wrapping myself in wispy charcoal-black clothes, and formed a solid blade woven from flame and wind.
Four Astral Wings exploded from my back as a sheet of wind lifted me into the air. "I've beaten you before, and I'll do it again."
He laughed. "It's cute that you think that was what happened last time."
Shin snapped his fingers, and I was standing in Times Square, or what was left of it.
The digital billboards were dark and shattered, and the buildings had fallen into disrepair. Trees and shrubbery jutted from cracked asphalt and sealed-off buildings. Rusted, ruined cars littered the streets.
At first, I was afraid Shin had Samurai-jacked me, flung me into some distant future where he'd won, but then I noticed the small things that quickly added up.
The models of the cars. The faded storefronts. The street signs.
Earth had taken a technological leap forward in recent months, and New York had been at the tip of that spear. It made no sense that none of the new fixtures had survived.
It was like they had never existed in the first place.
"I'm not on my Earth, am I?"
The question came out as a whisper as my heart thundered in my chest. I shot into the air with a flap of my wings, pushing out my senses.
The city was the same for miles in every direction. It overflowed with plant and animal life, but I sensed no humans.
I tried once again to call on my Dimension and retrieve my weapons, and to my surprise, it partially worked. A portal winked open, connecting to a kind of dimensional static that felt familiar.
It was what I sifted through whenever I tried to portal somewhere outside my personal dimension or my version of Marvel.
With both anchors gone, it was substantially harder to navigate the vast multiverse. Intradimensional travel was still as easy as breathing. I knew I'd find my way home eventually, but likely not before Shin tried to break me.
Suddenly, the sky vanished beneath a storm of blaster fire.
I teleported instantly, appearing miles away in Central Park, where I barely dodged the decapitating sweep of one of Lauren's clones.
I retaliated with a palm strike to the chest, pouring energy into Cascading Carnage—my evolved Burst skill—and augmenting it with Density, Gravity Manipulation, and Anathema Fire.
A prismatic mana shield flared around Lauren and tanked the hit.
The impact ripped the forest to shreds and incinerated it in an instant. Trees vanished. Soil turned to motes of Anathema fire. Even the oxygen and pressure were stripped away.
The blow cracked her shield like an egg, and a flash of compressed Anathema Fire slipped through, burning her midnight-black armor.
Lauren gritted her teeth and retaliated.
Spears of shadow erupted from beneath her feet and from every patch of darkness in the still-settling crater.
I barely escaped in time, reappearing on the roof of a building in Brooklyn, my flaming cloak in tatters and blood leaking from half a dozen puncture wounds.
Before I could catch my breath, a greatsword the size of a skyscraper came crashing down on the tenement building where I stood.
With a desperate flex of Density, Gravity, and Telekinesis, I caught it.
The impact shattered every window for blocks.
Then I reversed the force with Phantom Riposte and sent the belly of the blade whipping back into Lauren's face.
The blocked it with another Prismatic Shield, of course, but the distraction gave me an opening.
I teleported forward, transformed the Nether Fire shortsword in my off-hand into an Anathema blade, and slashed, funneling energy into Dimensional Slash.
Her head came off cleanly.
But then somebody hit me from behind.
A fist slammed into me hard enough to make me see white.
The world blurred, and suddenly I was deep beneath what remained of the New York subway system, buried in a crater of shattered concrete and twisted rails.
My health had dropped by a quarter.
The hit would have done far more if I hadn't managed to create a skin-tight telekinetic barrier at the last possible second.
"And here I thought he said this would be hard," Lauren said with a grin.
Floating beside her was a burly man who looked like Scott Summers.
Vulcan.
His eyes burned with red kinetic energy.
And on a distant rooftop nearly a mile away, I spotted another mutant I recognized from the comics.
She wore a skintight bodysuit and overflowed with psychic—and more importantly, demonic—energy.
Psylocke.
Vulcan was an Ascendant, too.
"I'm frankly disappointed," Lauren said.
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