II-96 Assassination (IV)

I must say, you’re letting this boy play a bold little game. A bold game indeed. Making a move on a Duke of Hell? A Duke of Pride, no less. And all this to draw MacArthur closer to you, and potentially create a splinter faction within Wrath? You are in a hurry. Oh, you’re desperate, Sarah. 

And you are no less desperate than I am.

Oh? And how would you say that? 

Because I am merely allowing the boy to proceed. You are allowing me to maul your internal structures, to butcher your circles, to bring controversy.

Yes, that is exactly what I want. I want the world to be shaken up. I want the cleaned hells to be rattled and awoken from their stupor—to be aware that there might be a new firebrand or populist figure on the rise.

You want this assassination to fail? 

No, gods, no. I want him to succeed. For him to continue and be bold.

…I still don’t understand. Even after all these years, I never understand what side you’re on, what you’re trying to do. You betray even your own system, your own base of power.

Oh yes, that is the greatest virtue I have: my willingness to betray. My willingness to turn, and turn, and turn again. And besides that, power is… it’s such a fleeting thing. I prefer influence and access.

Why?

Because we all know—in the end we are not the ones who can open the vault. And after that, the ones that reach Earth first will not be the great deciders. It will be the one that can hold the planet, protect it from all comers, that will decide.

And you think that will be you? 

I think I’m creating options. And so are you. And besides… The Inheritors still haven’t got the message—this place is lost to them now. So they must lose more fools who serve under them.

-Conversation between Mepheleon the Harbinger and Sarah Moonscar of the Trespassers Lodge

II-96

Assassination (IV)

“So how many did you lose?” Duke Goldskull of the Circle of Pride asked, holding a small, struggling child in his hands. The boy squirmed and squealed while his parents screamed. The duke sighed and dangled the little rebel before them. They had the audacity to run, to flee from the Collectress’s Palace of Pleasure during the pandemonium.

Atop a bridge at highest point of the Collectress’s personal mansion, they were gathered on the edge to face their judgment. Not a few hours ago, the Collectress had been drowning those who displeased her in a nearby lake, making their families watch. Now, she would do something only slightly more brutal—and with a lot more families included.

The Duke pulped the head of the child he was holding. The family screamed. The Collectress punted them both off the edge thereafter, venting her rage as the other victims to be shivered and clung to each other.

“Too many,” the Collectress said, her voice calm but her Essence quivering. She was like a rattlesnake on the verge of snapping. The Duke, though he enjoyed the skins she sold and the flesh she offered, was only slightly amused.

“I must admit, to hear you boasting about your impenetrability—this place’s impregnability—and your many relations keeping you from harm, only to see you suffer this today… well, yes, it’s amusing, isn’t it?”

Her voice held no humor, yet the duke simply shrugged. “Well, these things happen. Pride cometh before a fall.”

She eyed him, the pink pinpricks in her irises dimming. “Is that a joke?”

“Well, I’m just trying to add some levity to the situation. Have you tried recalling your champion yet, or is he still embroiled?”

He sighed. “Of all the times to break his relations and get into a pointless brawl with that damnable boy.”

“The boy? The young master?” he pressed.

“Yes. He must have said something that offended Vendrian. That stupid fool, that angry ox.”

“An undying ox with a connection to the God of Death,” Goldskull mused. “Quite the ox, if you think about it.”

“I know he’s quite the ox.” The Colectress finally snapped. “That’s the entire reason I’m keeping him. That’s the entire reason he must be separated from me when he comes back—and he will come back into my custody, my care. But away from me. Because now I have no more protection—no more means to stop his death from claiming me.” Her venom dripped with each word.

Goldskun was enjoying it far too much. “Right, so he cannot be placed in this facility anymore. If he dies…

“I will be the next closest thing he has to kin.”

“Ah, funny how that works,” the Duke said. “After all, his loved ones are too far away. Hate is a decent substitute as well.”

“You will be pulled off in his place and given unto his father as a reward. It seems that this bond was designed specifically to avoid situations like this—enslavement.”

“I think it’s simply a relational bond,” the Duke countered.

“But the hound is not that sophisticated,” the Collectress shot back. “It’s a god—barely sapient. A set of patterns and rules it must follow.”

“You are being delusion,” Goldskull said calmly. “Your judgment has been affected by the Dying Queen and the time you spent under her thrall.”

The Collectress’s expression turned sour. “Irrelevant. The plan goes on. I might have been shamed in front of that scion of destruction, but soon she will learn that even after my setback, I can offer her things no one else can—safety and security.”

“We?” the duke prompted.

“Yes, we.” The Collectress sauntered closer, hands folded behind her back, hips swaying. She turned on the charm.

Tragically Desperation was an anti-fetish for Duke Goldskull. He sent a message to Lein the Last: “You were right, dear wife—she’s turned pathetic.”

A reply came: “Use her or don’t use her, but be done with her and come back. The Inheritors need us to secure the boy.”

“The boy… the boy… Is he truly still caught in that desperate struggle with the Collectress’s pet dog?”

“So it would seem.”

“You sound doubtful.”

“All convenience is suspicious in the Claimed Hells. And the way the fight is taking shape makes little sense to me.”

“Oh? How so?”

“They are both trapped in a cocoon of ice. Locked in at knife-fighting range. Tell me, who does that benefit?’

“The Bastard?”

“Quite so. But no one has died—and there has been no victor for several hours.”

Duke Goldmask had to suppress a laugh at that. “Do you think they’re jousting some other way instead.”

“No. The Scion of Death is quite adverse to boys—if not men in general.”

“Oh. A one-taste-pony. How droll.”

“There is something I wish to ask of you,” the Collectress said, running a single hand up the Duke’s chest.

Goldskull sighed. “You must make this worth my while if you want me to help you out of this mess. You’ve done much for me—pleasures, entertainment—but if I’m to ruin the life of a useful prospect and break up a set to seize a scion, I need a lot in return.”

“Don’t worry about that,” the Collectress said, lowering her voice by an octave, her Siren Skill activating, pulling at his lust and mind.

Shame it wasn’t strong enough. Still, he played along and leaned in. He enjoyed these little games. “Oh, but I do worry. As much as I appreciate your company— 

“I have more than company to offer.” The Collectress cut him off: “I have information. I can remove your wife from your life, protect you for good.”

He chuckled inwardly. She truly thought he was at odds with Lein. Their shared front to disguise their bond had proven most effective. He’d have a laugh with her about this later. It would all be–

Then he felt it: one of the portals below activating while all others remained dormant. Goldskull pushed past the Collectress and focused his Perception.

“What? What’s wrong?” he asked. Then, she felt it too. Together, they realized something was wrong—there shouldn’t have been any more deliveries coming through. As they looked down from the edge of the bridge they saw a swirling rift expand about twenty levels down and a few hundred meters away—a blossom of shadows that spat out a new Essence Signature, cold and familiar.

“No,” the Collectress whispered, stumbling back. But that was the exact wrong thing to do.

An explosion of frost congealed and crusted the walls of her mansion. A rising column of ice lifted Vendrian, Death’s Bastard and someone who was supposedly still locked in mortal combat with a certian young master, high into the air. His blade gleamed with life at the hilt, but his form shone with the chill of oblivion.

He roared and lifted his blade high, shifting his grip to pierce hismelf. The duke launched two beams of cleaving force at the scion’s body, aiming to cut him down first. Yet, even his prodigious speed was a moment too slow, his reaction crippled by surprise.

Vendrian plunged the blade into his chest and twisted to let the Duke’s bolts strike him in the head and through the torso. The Duke winced thereafter as he realized this was probably want the Bastard wanted: To die. Blood and Deathly Essence erupted out from Vendrian and painted existence with a spreading hue.

Then, it was like something tore open, like reality’s fabric had burst wide, pulling them across to some place else, somewhere else.

A gushing chill washed over the mansion and through the Duke himself. A river of frost slammed into Collectress, who was just standing beside him, wrenching her under the waters into the frigid depths. Between blinks, the world had changed. They were no longer in the land of the living—they were now in the domain of death, the Final End. She tumbled screaming toward her former slave, the newly manifested Hound of the Withered Moon, who materialized around the once mangled body of his Scion.

Duke Goldskull found himself alone in a desolate wasteland. The slaves were gone. Spread from this kidnapping. Rivers ran alongside him. He heard the Collectress’s cries for aid and charged to rip her from the depths. He used his Sovereign Grasp Skill to manifest a gleaming gold hand, plunging it into the waters to protect her.

But even as his Essence fought the realm, he grappled with a god. The Hound’s voice echoed: “Pitiful, impotent, inevitable. You cannot keep her from me. You cannot keep her death from the Final End.”

The rivers pulled the Duke’s supposedly invincible hand along, the ice crusting its exterior, sending waves of pain pulsing through his spirit. It was supposed to be an impenetrable Skill that lasted for but a second. Yet, even as a good fourth of his Essence was sacrificed, he achieved nothing, could stop nothing. He had to run. There was nothing he could do for the Collectress. But before he could teleport or try to find a place to feel, a splash of shadow and light emanated from within the Hound, and he heard a cruel amusement in the god’s voice: “You cannot protect yourself from him either.”

Then a new figure emerged, carving the world with a scythe of shadow and light. The boy—That nuisance and annoyance—blinked before the Duke and rammed an object into Goldskull’s chest. And fired.

A small bullet stabbed into Goldskull’s chest, and he stumbled back, more baffled by the weapon the young master used than anything else.

“MacArthur sends his regards,” Wei An Wei said, before dismissing his rifle. An old rifle at that.

“Did you just… shoot me with a Lee-Enfield?”

Wei sneered. “Wrong model, I believe.”

Then, the Duke felt something else. A deep pain welling in his chest, a spreading of blood, and burning… the burning of his very spirit. Blood drooled out from his lips, and he could feel himself combusting from within. “You… you…”

But Wei spoke no more, and was upon him. 

Goldskull snarled and unleashed a spiralling beam to unmake the damned fool child. Yet, an armored figure manifested where the boy once stood, and somehow it dashed—dashed through the Duke’s skill, and appeared just behind him.

“How—”

A whirlwind of cuts tore through Goldskull, carving pieces of his already ignited spirit away. Drowning in agony, the Duke unleashed a blast of wild essence, but it hit nothing. He felt something pass through him again—pass through and cut. The Duke turned, tried anticipating the young master’s position, but the boy seemed to dash through every blast he had, and Goldskull’s Essence was bleeding out from him as if blood from a vertically slit vein.

Goldskull’s spirit boiled, felt death approaching. Water bubbled up around his feet, the ground beneath him cracked open, and a river lapped at his knees, pulling him forward. With each stroke Wei painted, the realm’s hold over the Duke grew stronger. He wasn’t just at war with the boy; the bullet and the Final End were both gnawing through him, taking him apart piece by piece. He felt the Hound’s breath at his nape: “I told you there was no escape. This is futile. You are mine.”

He tried to call to his wife, to use any skill he had, but every effort bled more essence from him. The cuts kept coming, the water kept rising. With each second, he became less himself—until he, too, was pulled beneath the waters, tumbling into the winnowing dark.

As the last of his spirit burst away into sparks and embers, Goldskull gurgled a final mouthful of blood, and reached for the fading light.

He thought of Lein.

He thought of her alone.

And before the endless dark crept over his eyes, he wept, for he knew he would never see her again.

***

As Wei watched both the Collectress and the Duke tumble over the edge, he felt a surge of satisfaction—and yet, beneath it, a restless need for more struggle, more fight. He’d expected some last-minute twist, a desperate counterattack, but this time everything had played out perfectly in his favor. He’d killed the Duke of Hell with his special bullet, watched him burn and shatter into shards until he was rich with power and ready to advance.

“Does this satisfy you?” the Hound asked, its voice like grinding ice.

Wei turned to face the God of Death. “I… partially,” he admitted. “I had wished for more of a challenge.”

“And why do you wish that?” the Hound pressed. “You think it gives this meaning? It does not. He’s bound for me. All are bound for me. And this execution was a success. A well done kill.”

Wei’s eyes drifted to the waters beyond the precipice. “So you say.”

“Doubt me. Do not doubt me. It is irrelevant.” The Hound exhaled softly.

Within the Hound’s chest, where swirling frost met shadow, Vendrian’s face glowed with defiant pride and feral joy—a far cry from the horrified terror that had once trapped him.

Wei approached the edge of the Final End and looked down into the abyss. In those depths lay all the dead, all the fallen: Duke Goldskull, the Collectress—his own mother—and countless others.

“Do you wish to see her again? To reunite with your family?” the Hound’s voice echoed around Wei.

Everything in Wei yearned to leap and plunge into that cold depth. But he forced himself back, breathing against the pull of the void. He had work to do—first and foremost, to extract Vendrian from the Collectress’s domain before anyone noticed.

“Perhaps another time,” he murmured, though it pained him to pull away when he was so close. Duty outweighed desire. This moment—this triumph—could not be squandered.

Once he had secured Vendrian’s escape, he would return to the Gala. Both of them would need to appear exhausted, spent, so no one suspected they had toppled the Duke of Hell. Then he would deal with the Old Man—crafting an alibi to deflect suspicion. Lying would be delicate, but the Master would understand.

For now, he had removed two potential impediments to the future. And there were the shards he now held—proof of his victory and currency for his next advancement, both of Class and System.

‘What will your next step be?”

Wei pulled up his advancement menus and grinned slightly. “More power for me first. Then, I think I’m going to talk about formalizing an alliance. I need a great many more guns, and I don’t care what I need to do to get them.”