Chapter 15 | Of Bonds & Bullets
“Ready?”
“Always.”
A summoned Yamato—their version of Yamato from their time—for V, and he armed himself with it. V’s younger brother Credo had inherited Red Queen.
They tore into the demons ahead of them with a careless abandon, but there was always that undercurrent of worry between them. Her familiar connection to him was keener than most.
At first, A had captured V into a familiar’s contract; but when he had had his chance to break it, he chose not to do it.
Her coven (well, her relatives that even bothered with acknowledging her half-breed existence) had told her that it couldn’t be done—that there was no contract stronger than pure subjugation. They had to keep their demon (or, in her case, half-demon) familiars tightly under their thumbs.
But, interestingly enough, she had found that her and V’s bond of trust far eclipsed the familiar bonds of other witches. Even full-blooded ones of ancient pedigree.
Because of that, it was sometimes hard to tell which feelings were hers and which feelings were his. They were both worried, that was clear.
Indeed, they were both worried about getting back to their own time; they were both worried about what could happen if they meddled too much with this timeline.
But, mostly, Vergil was worried about his brother Credo.
Vergil feared that Moros had radicalized him.
Auntie had been one of the founding members of the Order—derived from the Order of the Sword—an organization that observed most of the Order of the Sword’s original principles. But this Order didn’t worship Sparda as a god; they upheld his ideals and the ideals of his sons. They created an international network of benevolent demons and magical creatures of all kinds to combat the resurrection of evil at every turn.
It had been Auntie herself, with magic not as naturally powerful but far more refined than Aurelia’s, that had defeated Aurelia to release Vergil. Though she didn’t see it herself, and still to this day thought he had been so stupid to trust her, Vergil attached himself to the spark of goodness in Aurelia and refused to let go of it…even if it meant his freedom. She would be forever grateful to him for it.
And Moros? Well, he hadn’t always been Moros. He had been a good man once, a man named Elpis. Elpis had been like a father figure to Vergil and Credo. Credo adored him.
Like most of them, Moros was a half-breed—half-demon, to be exact. He had been one of the longest living members of the Order and renowned for doing his job with pride and excellence.
But, like all of them, it wore on him after a while. It was endless, thankless, and full of suffering.
And then Elpis found out the truth of his ancestry. He was the great-grandson of the Demon Emperor Mundus.
To be the progeny of someone who had so consistently plagued humanity finally broke Elpis. He took on the persona of Moros and swore his revenge on all supernatural beings, himself included, and vowed to destroy every last demon and demonic relic that resided in the human world.
And that included the Order.
Most of those who had served under Elpis sided with him immediately, and it didn’t take long for other members of the Order to defect. Insurrection and terrorism, quite suddenly, became the norm. Friends were fighting friends, and now…brother was fighting brother.
And how Moros had found the power to throw them back in time like that…it left her deeply uneasy. Had he found some way to resurrect the Qliphoth tree, though the original Dante and Vergil had destroyed it all those years ago? Had he found a way to tap into the pure unbridled power of a Nexus? They were struggling to figure out how to get back, yet he threw them back in nothing but a fit of anger.
“A?”
V pulled her back into the present with a gentle touch of his hand to hers. He ran a thumb soothingly over her knuckles.
“Sorry, thinkin’.”
“I’m worried too.”
She gave his hand a squeeze and released it. “The stakes are higher for you.”
They fought like cats and dogs, and he pissed her off in a way that no other living being on earth could, but she would truly give anything to keep the look he was wearing off his face.
“The stakes are pretty high for all of us.”
A’s lip curled back. “Alex and Dante need to hurry the hell back.”
“…It’s still super weird, you know…calling her Alex.”
“I don’t disagree.”
When they returned to the office, they found Dante napping at his desk.
Dante woke up to dainty little A hovering over him with serious look that didn’t match her young face.
“Where’s Alex?”
“Still in Rome.”
A scoffed and swore.
“Look, little lady, slow your roll. She sent this back with me.”
He reached into his duffle bag (still by his desk, as he immediately dropped dead asleep in his chair when he got back to the shop, after Lady picked him up and promptly stripped him of all his money) and tossed the package to A.
The magic seal on it disintegrated when it came into her possession, and A immediately marched downstairs to assemble all the new parts of their plan.
V gave Dante a two-fingered salute. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” was Dante’s withering reply.
Once V descended the stairs, he found A already taping notes to the whiteboard Alex had placed in the corner of her room. She was already scribbling notes of her own, but he had to say...he definitely didn’t like the look on her face.
“What is it?”
“...I don’t like this plan already.”
“Okay...what’s wrong with the plan?”
“Well, for starters...we’ll be stuck here ‘til Halloween.”
“Shit.”
“And...well. It could kill me or Alex...or both. My death is one thing, but hers? Well, maybe we wouldn’t have the whole Moros problem, but—”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”
“There was a time I’d would’ve wished for it, but not now,” A said very softly.
“At any rate,” she began again more strongly, “it could have some serious consequences.”
“Is there nothing else we can do?”
“If there is somethin’, it’d take me a while to riddle it out. Theoretically, Alex’s plan is pretty solid. She’s accounted for things I haven’t even thought of. It’s just...there’s a lot that could go wrong.”
“Maybe...maybe the fact that we’re still alive is proof enough that this works.”
“I can only hope so.”
Vergil had been working his way through his old haunts; he had explored a little more of the remains of Fortuna after he had departed from Nero’s home, then traveled back to the shell of Temen-Ni-Gru. He found it...razed and ransacked.
It wasn’t mere wanton destruction; the objects used to control parts of the tower had been surgically removed, key bridges and mechanisms had been utterly destroyed. The Leviathan Dante had killed...its bones had been picked practically clean. This hadn’t been done by normal demons—he could tell by the fine markings left on the bones.
This reeked of the jinn.
As he had been traveling, he had been gathering intel about Dante and the hunters and persons of interest he had surrounded himself with. Their names seemed to inspire equal parts awe and anger. Just as he had expected, Dante’s name in particular seemed to be the most polarizing.
“But what about the boy?” Vergil asked one bartender when he stopped for a refreshing libation. “The boy that Dante’s taken under his watchcare?”
“What was that kid’s name? Ah...Nero? From that funny town, Fortuna. Got a little infamous after the Savior Incident. He’s curt and a little mouthy, but he’s good for getting the job done. Doesn’t blow shit to Kingdom Come like quite Dante, that’s for sure.”
Vergil smirked. “I’m assuming you’ve had a run-in with...Dante?”
“Not me personally, but word gets around quick. Most of it’s pretty unflattering.”
“I imagine so.” He slipped a bill under his empty glass.
He then borrowed a boat to Mallet Island, and the closer he got the island, the more physically tense he felt. Most of the island had been destroyed when Dante and Trish escaped, but he could still feel how thin the veil felt here. This place felt so impossibly familiar that it made his skin crawl and his hair stand on end. He felt nothing but shame and anger as his eyes scanned the rocky shores.
Not only had he been defeated by Mundus and subjugated under his control, he had had his entire identity stripped from him. He remembered very little from his defeat at Mundus’s hands until his defeat at Dante’s hands once again—just snippets, impressions, nightmares. Flurries of wings, golden-eyed shadows, and miasma screaming itself into being.
His second defeat to Dante had destroyed most of his physical body as Nelo Angelo and sent the tattered remains of his soul hurtling back into the pits of Hell. It took him years to reform enough of himself to claw his way out of Hell, and all the while, he planned his revenge.
Then he found the boy rumored to have his weapon, tore the required limb from the elbow down, and took no heed of the face that looked so like his own.
But, as he studied the blurred-together memories of V and Urizen, he found that his Demon had no name for Himself. The Demon recognized Dante, that much he could remember, but the Demon hadn’t...recognized himself as anything.
Only V called him Urizen; the Demon was...nothing. No one.
Only when he fully reformed as Vergil did he come to the stinging realization that he wasn’t himself without his human weaknesses. Without them, he wouldn’t strive to be better, to be more powerful, to be perfect.
Without the inferiority and the pain, without the complexity and nuance, the Demon had one simple-minded goal: to consume the Qliphoth fruit and obtain perfect power. Then the Demon, in his unfathomable apathy, would have perched on his throne and watched it all crumble into dust—
Vergil’s brooding immediately halted when his skin erupted into goosebumps. Fundamentally, this whole island felt wrong—a strange clashing of time and space. But, here, the feeling was almost oppressive; it was almost as if the very fabric of reality itself was splintering to pieces.
He could see the ghosts of soldiers past and apparitions of a future yet to come, and he realized that V and A’s entrance into their world had created hairline cracks in their reality.
In his bones, he knew his family was in danger.
