A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law - October 2025 Update

A day in the limedark, so to speak.

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Weeks in the Past, but Not that Many

Hell

He was lounging with his head hanging off the arm of the couch when the voices out in the hallway drew close enough to become intelligible.

“- my words make you uncomfortable, oh Lord of Vampires? Remind you of the grand boasts you used to make?”

He idly swirled the wine in his glass while gauging the motions of the canvases floating high up near the ceiling.

“Bold words from the one who calls himself a soothsayer but didn’t see a single sign in advance that Hades was going to betray us – I thought you were supposed to see the future? I’ve half a mind to suspect that you conspired with him yourself!”

He’d watched the canvases plenty enough before and they never deviated from their looping roaming, but that was no longer the case.

“How dare you? Unlike everyone here, I never claimed that Starsend Moment was full proof, my conscience is clear, unlike yours!”

The pulse of energy had disturbed the canvases and set them on new flight and spinning paths, when the boy he’d borrowed from the Patsy Faction finally figured out how to do what he’d been brought here for.

“Ha! A devil preaching about conscience, and a Pillar at that! I have to hand it to you, Asmodeus, I consider myself an even-tempered man, it takes a lot to get under my skin, but congratulations – on any other day you might have managed to make me laugh!”

“Now now, my lords, remember decorum, we are all in Lord Lucifer’s house now.”

“Ugh, your servility is as disgusting as ever, Lucifuge.”

“I do only what is expected of me, Lord Beezlebub.”

“Unless you’re anywhere but here, don’t think we don’t know what you did to the dark horse of the last Rating Games, you owe me a mutation piece for that.”

“I must disavow any such claims, lady Leviathan, the wagers made by others with others are none of my business.”

“Careful, all I’m hearing is that I have no choice but to resort to the old way of settling things.”

“And all I’m hearing is you being a sore loser.”

“Nobody asked for your opinion, vampire.”

“When I need permission to do anything it won’t be you I ask for it, you…”

The so-called Impaler trailed off. Nobody said anything else either. The fools had finally gotten around to looking around the room they’d just walked into. Terrible situational awareness, that.

Truly, only three things were better than living in luxury: stealing that luxury from someone else, keeping that someone else around to gloat at, and having all your entertainment brought straight to you without having to put any effort. “Don’t mind little old me,” Rizevim Livan Lucifer said with practiced indolence, tossing a pomegranate seed into his mouth. “I’m just providing today’s venue after all. Please, act as if I’m not here.”

He didn’t mean a word of it, and everyone knew it. Rizevim knew they knew it, and he made sure they knew he knew that they knew. What would they do? Take him at face value, or not?

Both, it turned out. Some played along, some pretended to play along, Tepes scoffed as if nobody could see it for the pure bravado it was. None of them were able to pretend indifference at the sight behind Rizevim. He could see the questions burning inside them, but they were too skittish to actually come out and ask. All in all, a full gamut of reactions and thus more entertainment for him.

The room they were in was actually a painter’s atelier, inside a manor which Rizevim had had ripped wholesale out of the ground in Paris, a little while back. Transporting it to the Underworld had been quite the adventure, especially since he wanted to keep it intact. Happily, Grauzauberer had provided ample manpower to perform the teleportation. The fact Rizevim had to bully that upstart Mephisto into providing the necessary magicians made the affair all the sweeter.

Almost sweet enough to make up for the annoyance of having to put so much effort into getting the translocation done entirely from the Overworld, and thus without those four, even bigger upstarts getting wind of it. They surely would’ve, if he’d sourced casters from this side instead.

Rizevim wasn’t afraid of the Four Usurpers in the least of course, but if he wanted his life to be full of hassles he’d have fought in the Civil War instead of sitting by.

Euclid Lucifuge had founded Nilrem largely to ensure they wouldn’t need to outsource expertise like that again, but Rizevim sometimes wished Lucifuge had created his magician organization earlier. Only a little, though. Getting Euclid to report on all the different ways he tried and failed to subvert his unwitting sister’s own patsies had been the highlight of Rizevim’s weekends for the entirety of the past century.

Lucifuge had been having slightly more success than before at that, though, finally. It had played some small part in Rizevim offering to provide this new meeting venue for the leadership of Khaos Brigade, now that the one in the Dimensional Gap had been destroyed by Hades. If his old entertainment was drying up, he had to get something to fill that time slot.

Despite all that, he’d been half expecting this wouldn’t pay off anyway. He wasn’t one to second guess himself, but it was hard not to doubt this pack of shlemiels. To his amazement, though, the vampire’s rants proved much more engaging than Rizevim expected.

“He must be hunted down immediately!” Marius Tepes pounded his fist on the table as he ended his progress report on the upset in Romania. “Him and those upstarts who helped him, they must be found and made an example of, and my sister returned post haste! I trust I don’t have to spell out how much of a setback it is to lose Sephiroth Graal, I expect all of your cooperation on this!”

“That certainly sounds compelling,” Katerea Leviathan said in a dry tone so overdone that everyone could tell she was just pretending indifference. The tall bespectacled woman always showed off her figure too much when she was rattled, it wasn’t her most obvious tell but it was the most amusing. If her skin wasn’t so damn tan Rizevim might have taken her to bed, but it just didn’t do it for him when paired with that hair. Rizevim could forgive the drab brown, but that bun was such low effort – pretending she didn’t feel inferior to her usurper in looks was all dandy, but there was such a thing as overcompensating on overcompensating. “But I fail to see how that’s any responsibility of ours. Aren’t you the one who refused to let anyone else get anywhere near that girl?”

“To all our loss, it seems,” Euclid remarked. “I understand wanting to protect your research, but it seems to have backfired in this case.”

“Bah,” Tepes scoffed. “As if you actually got anywhere with the Progenitor before he got stolen from under your nose.” The bat man looked pointedly at Shalba Beelzebub, and when the latter only grit his teeth he settled down, no entertainment value at all, that one. “Anyone you sent would’ve done even worse anyway.” So saying, Tepes reached into his coat and pulled out a sealed case of lead over silver, which he opened to reveal another sealed case made of lead over silver, and then a third case out of that which he opened to-

The room’s air turned hot. The leaders of the Old Satan faction all jumped away from the table with exclamations of hissing pain. Rizevim blinked fast, eyes seeing spots.

Marius Tepes shut the case back closed. The holy energy didn’t stop seeping out until the case was back inside the case inside the bigger case. When Marius Tepes shoved it back in his pocket, he looked pained, but not as much as the Old Satans.

Rizevim sat up. He was still seeing spots. His face – his skin…

That holy power had actually warmed him a little.

“What in Lucifer’s name was that?” snarled Shalba Beelzebub, his long hair all askew.

“Scrap metal,” Tepes rasped, then cleared his throat to speak normally again. “From what used to be a sports car. Bastard was in it for less than ten minutes and left it a complete wreck. A wreck that we’ve had to rely entirely on our thralls to move and render down, because no vampire other than me and my elite can get closer than three meters without experiencing what you just did.”

My word, that was quite the little deterrent to unwanted advances. Was that a subtle warning not to double cross him now that he was no longer useful? Pulling that out would certainly ensure he had every chance to escape, Rizevim approved! Not enough to forgive the insult the vampire represented for embodying devil traits better than the devils themselves, but extracting retribution for that was clearly beyond the others, and Rizevim just didn’t feel like getting up. He’d gone from seeing spots to seeing implications…

“That is impossible,” said Creuserey Asmodeus, retaking his seat at the table a tad more warily than earlier. The red highlights on his black clothes were a bit less dark than earlier, and his cape was gray along the hems whereas it had been completely black before. “Unless it was no mere human at all. Such intense holy energy is not entirely unheard of, but as a by-product of mere exposure?”

“None but the higher angels themselves have ever achieved such a thing,” finished Beelzebub. “Them and… Is Heaven moving again?”

And Grandfather himself, thought Rizevim. But it’s not like life could ever take such an interesting turn, could it?

“That’s preposterous,” Leviathan scoffed. “The only moves ‘Heaven’ takes against anyone these days are the people we send to make it look like it.”

“Perhaps they’ve wizened up,” Asmodeus offered. “They’re not completely lacking in pattern recognition – maybe they just didn’t move directly, as usual.”

Tepes slouched in his seat. “You think they gave Hades something to make him turn on us?”

“Ridiculous,” Beelzebub stroked a bee crawling along his collar. “Divide and Conquer isn’t in Heaven’s playbook. Those glowing fools would fall the moment they even considered skullduggery, they’d never risk it.”

Would they? Rizevim hoped not, he could think of a whole bunch of things that should’ve made them fall since Grandfather’s death. Also, Hades turning on them out of nowhere had given him an adrenaline boost like nothing else had in the past two centuries. It was the first time he regretted not actually doing anything as part of this conspiracy that insisted it couldn’t exist without him. Dare he hope something even better might be coming along?

“No vampire can even touch that wreckage without going weak in the knees,” Tepes reasserted his point. “Worse, our thralls keep having their domination broken whenever they do, some have gone so far as to cling to the remains and refused to detach from them, even while being whipped! After we put chained collars on them, they started cutting their wrists on the sharp edges in an attempt to commit suicide rather than return to their previous lives. I’ve had to hire independent human contractors and refrain from using any sort of hypnosis on them just to have it moved before it caused a thrall revolt. A fucking car wreck!”

“That sounds like more trouble than some of the more famous holy relics out there,” remarked Beelzebub. “Some real Shroud of Turin nonsense.”

“You think that’s bad? The night club in Timisoara is all hallowed ground now! And the way he escaped me...” Tepes looked about to tear into someone’s neck just from rage, but he abruptly forced himself still. “I expect you to help me come up with new options.”

“This can’t be a coincidence,” Leviathan stated the obvious, that wet fish. Or not so wet anymore, her skin was even darker now, bet she regretted wearing such a low-cut dress to this meeting, the new tan lines on those breasts and legs were going to be murder on her social life. “First Hades turns on us and then this happens the very next day? Since when do the Greeks have holy power like this?”

“They don’t,” said Euclid. “Apollon used to, but he lost it to Him a long time ago. I suppose we can’t rule out Helios, but that doesn’t really say much.”

“Accursed mythics,” Beelzebub spat. “They just love lording history over us, don’t they?”

“Though no devil has yet died of old age, our species is young compared to most others out there,” Lucifuge grimly agreed. “There are blind spots in our knowledge of things before. We’re not even sure if daylight is inimical to our species because of qualities inherent in sunlight, or if those properties just get imbued into it by Heaven’s System.”

What’s this? Did Euclid just skirt around insulting Lucifer himself?

“Impossible to us, at least,” Asmodeus mused, tapping his fingers on the table. Which was also a shade lighter than before, where Tepes sat. “Perhaps it’s time we extended our patronage, as we previously discussed.”

Beelzebub tsked. “No, I am still opposed. It would be a curse upon the Underworld. I don’t care about the devils who declined us, but to hand our birthright to a foreign creature? And a dragon at that!”

“What’s the matter, Shalba?” Katarea taunted. “Abandoning our ways when it’s inconvenient?”

“If strength was really all that mattered, Leviathan, we would’ve submitted to Him from the start, our sire himself would never have rebelled.”

Good grief, how bold!

“Strength? Him?” Leviathan scoffed. “Strength that He used to make prop-ups and crutches for the weakest species on the planet? If you go and waste your strength on that, it may as well not exist.”

“As opposed to bowing to a dragon?” Beelzebub scowled in distaste. “Even He had only hate in His heart for them, and honestly, I can see His point.”

“A dragon who actually provided proof of power before actually expecting us to bow, instead of expecting blind faith.” Leviathan refused to drop it. “The new world order cannot dawn without a new god at its head, why not the Dragon of Infinity? It’s fine if it’s just a symbol, isn’t it? The laws and the doctrine will be constructed by us.”

“Will they?” Asmodeus grunted. “Hades cost us our only bargaining chip.”

The base in the Dimensional Gap had only been possible thanks to the Ophis Snake that the Dragon of Infinity had given them as a token of what could be, but the use they put it to was entirely a Khaos Brigade accomplishment. Dimension Lost had played an essential role in setting the foundation, but everything else was devil work, down to substituting the Sacred Gear’s power for that of the Ophis Snake, and subsequently reverse-engineering the dimension creation process so they could potentially replicate it without the Sacred Gear at all. Even Rizevim could admit that was a masterstroke of craftsmanship on the part of Shalba and Euclid.

It all was supposed to be a proof of concept that Khaos Brigade actually could help Ophis retake the Dimensional Gap from Great Red, which was her one and only goal for allying with anyone. It would even have served to leverage a more equal partnership rather than vassalage.

All ruined now because Hades decided to turn on them out of nowhere. All when they hadn’t done more than talk about freeing Kronos from Tartarus, even.

“This is all very riveting,” Tepes clicked his tongue in distaste. “But unless one of you has figured out an entirely new way to overcome the Dragon of Dreams – which would make patronage by its lesser kin redundant, I might add – we can’t fulfill our end of that bargain anyway. That was the whole point of my research, I’ll remind you.”

“I’ll handle it.”

The vampire and Old Satans all blinked and turned to Rizevim in astonishment.

“Whoever this mysterious homewrecker his, I guarantee he’s not going to lay low for long. Since you’ve failed to even begin figuring out how to start tracking him, we’ll just let him act first. When he does, I’ll drop by to apply the necessary corrective measures, if you follow me.”

Rizevim was never going to submit to anyone regardless, if he were so inclined he would’ve taken sides during the Civil War. But now he’d have to pretend to submit to that autistic loli-serpent, which wasn’t his idea of a pleasant hobby. If he didn’t still lack half the Holy Relics, he might have gone and released Trihexa right now just from spite.

For the first time in a long time, someone had made it so none of Rizevim’s low-effort options were entirely pleasant. Rizevim was going to make Hades pay for that most of all.

The others all just looked at him, then back at each other, so Rizevim snapped his fingers with enough magical force to conjure a small thunderclap. “People, when I said to act as if I’m not actually here, I didn’t actually mean it.”

“Apologies, sire,” Euclid gave a bow. “We are merely surprised you would bother yourself with such a middling issue.”

“That’s because you don’t know all I know.” Which was nothing in this case, dare he hope one of them called his bluff so he had a reason to put them in their place? No, they weren’t dumb enough to do it, more’s the pity. “In the meantime, why don’t you come up with something actually useful? Besides prostrating to another higher power as if I’m not right here in the room with you.”

The Old Satans fell over each other to bow and beg pardon, which Rizevim waved off just so he could decide later if he’ll play it as acceptance or contempt. If you didn’t leave others obsessing over your actions, you weren’t fit to be called a devil.

“With Hades gone, all our agreements with him are void, aren’t they?” The vampire pondered. “Written and implied.”

The devils looked at each other.

The meeting continued with the Old Satan descendants giving their own, half-incomplete updates that were as much intelligence exchange as they were power plays. It was all eminently dull, so Rizevim tuned it all out until they were ready to leave.

“Hey Marius,” Rizevim called just as his guests were getting up. “Leave that scrap metal here. I’m gonna play around with it a while.”

“… Fine.” The vampire took the box and dropped it on the table. “I have more anyway.”

On him, or at home?

The devils didn’t start a fight to find the answer, more’s the pity.

Finally, they left.

None of them had come out and asked what in the abyss the whole deal was with what Rizevim had behind him, more’s the pity.

Rizevim glanced at the boy standing in front of the large canvas with one arm out and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. Devils were incapable of astral projection, it was the small price they paid for being a fused existence from birth, a perfect unification of flesh and spirit instead of the hodgepodge of moving parts that humans were.

Watching him now, Rizevim lamented lost opportunities. Despite all the effort he went through to set it up, the boy hadn’t come out of his trance when the Old Satan leaders could see him, and he could see them in turn. Thereby finding out in the most dramatic way, possible that he and his fool friends had long since been duped into becoming the patsies of the same creatures they thought themselves aligned against. Rizevim would greatly have enjoyed the resulting histrionics, but alas, it was not to be.

“The vampire did not reveal everything,” Euclid reported to Rizevim after the others were completely gone from his property. “The damage to the grounds and the loss in manpower has left some holes in the security of the Vampire Forest that my familiars were able to exploit. I was also able to insinuate one of my Nilrem among the independent contractors he mentioned. The teleportation circle couldn’t have been how the infiltrator escaped, it was incomplete. But what was there was actually better than what Nilrem’s own knowledge of rituals could have attained.

“More important to the matter at hand, it would have taken days to write for a single person, or weeks, even months if it was done in small bits and pieces to prevent discovery. Doing it beneath the upper surface of the soil added a considerable layer of difficulty as well. This speaks to either stealth capabilities superior to anything we have, or long-term infiltration possible only with high-level traitors in the vampires’ own highest echelons.”

“So little Spikey Boy can’t even control his own court.” Rizevim laughed. “How precious! Good on him for not admitting it I suppose, and shame on those three for not seeing through it. I swear, you just can’t get good help nowadays.”

“As you say, sir.”

“Go on, get on with you before the kid wakes up.”

“Very well, sir.”

Soon, Euclid Lucifuge had also left the grounds, and Rizevim was left with no other way to fill time than drawing rude gestures and third legs over the paintings in the manor. He’d already done that to all the ones in the atelier itself, so he was working on thoroughly debasing the ones in the den now.

He had just finished adding the good old testicular torsion to the painting of the black wall thing, when he felt the change in the magical energies of the atelier.

He shifted into his false persona and arrived to greet the brat just as he awoke from his astral projection in the canvas.

“Well?”

“It’s completely useless,” the boy said with utter disgust as he dispelled the barrier he’d used Dimension Lost to put around his body, to keep it safe while he was gone.

Rizevim fancied he could still break through, but only with brute force – his Sacred Gear Canceller didn’t work on the boy once that barrier was up. It had been a most fascinating conundrum until Euclid figured out it wasn’t so much a barrier as the boy stepping half-way out of this dimension entirely. “Report.”

“I can’t exclude the possibility that I missed some hole in the ground, but I don’t see how. There’s indeed a fake dimension in there, a dream realm. But it isn’t that large, barely the size of a small town. None of these people are inside, just a bunch of fake ones that some girl is using to live out her fantasies of a normal life, it’s repulsive.”

Aw, little baby was lying, or maybe he really believed it? It could easily be both, humans could be so bigoted to each other, it was always a treat to witness. Rizevim glanced up at the unhappy couple nailed to the canvas frame in a parody of Grandfather’s crucifixion, but only briefly. He had to mind his disguise after all. “A dream realm, you say? Not an actual space?”

“Indeed, sir, Dimension Lost won’t be any help here.”

“Pity. What of this girl, then? What does she look like?”

“Like you’d expect a daughter of these two to look.”

“Describe her for me.”

The boy did one better and conjured an illusory seeming of her. It looked nothing like the woman who took half of Grauzauberer down with her when they stormed the place on Mephisto’s – and thus Rizevim’s – orders. So… The other daughter hadn’t, in fact, died with her in the fire like the long-haired harpy had fooled them all into thinking? With – what? Painted marionettes? And she’d destroyed all the family portraits and almost every record and personal correspondence too, preventing them from finding who the other ‘Painters’ were.

If Rizevim had known that bitch was so formidable, he’d have joined the attack himself and taken her alive to make into his concubine instead. Or maybe the opposite would’ve been better? Order a more moderate assault and let her get away? A proper drawn-out war between her ‘Painters’ and their ‘Writers’ would’ve been a most engaging immersion, no doubt about it.

Still, though. A second daughter. Two daughters, and a son going by that tomb in their maze garden. With the parents it made five. Five cases of walking hubris who presumed to call themselves His match just because they could paint fake dream worlds on fabric and paper.

At least Innovate Clear had an excuse for his delusion. “Do you think you can pull her out?”

The boy grimaced. “I’m afraid not, Lord Satanael. If we had her body I might be able to use the link to reel her back somehow from this side, but I’m not sure how I’d go about it. From inside, I’m afraid I stand no chance to overcome her control of the lucid dream. Maybe if there were still shamans out there we could find to teach me proper dreamwalking, but-”

“But if any traditions still exist, their practitioners must be hidden by pagan patrons, if not wholesale moved to their hidden realms.” ‘Satanael’ grimly sympathized. “The church and the devils have been entirely too successful at eliminating them.”

Just because astral projection was a small price to pay didn’t change that it was still a price. The human spirit was weak, but annoyingly quick and stealthy when it knew what it was doing. Shamans and sages used to regularly discover and conspire against Hell’s plots back in the day. And not just them either.

The War of the Three factions would’ve happened much sooner if the Church and Hell didn’t find themselves so often on the same side when it came to those pagan pests, all those centuries leading up to it. Not that the Church ever believed it, they were always so certain every witch was a diabolist and every wizard a warlock. Hell barely had to put the work to convince them so, most times.

You’d think Grandfather would set the record straight, but Constantine and Charlemagne proved otherwise very early on, and they were just the two most infamous. For all His benevolence, His Church was dead-set on destroying independently powerful humans from the very beginning. The only reason there were still some left was because all the ‘Holy’ Empires always collapsed from internal rot before they could conquer even a tenth of the world.

Of the pagans that endured, the celts of Albion had been the worst. It was why Hell’s old guard had made a concerted effort to eliminate and impersonate every ancestor ghost and mound fairy they could get away with. One never stopped at mere genocide when it came to worthy opponents after all, at a minimum you had to also destroy their legacy. If you could destroy it in their own descendants’ eyes, all the sweeter.

They didn’t finish the job. Grandfather came down on them before they could. It was very strange, it wasn’t like the Church was ever any less zealous in eradicating the druids and what else. The Brythonic powers had just about joined the war on Heaven’s side in retaliation, when the Norse went and attacked them in turn. In the end, it all worked out for Hell anyway – with the breakdown of world order during the War of the Three Factions, Angles and Saxons invaded the islands and finished the job for them.

Later, after Father and Grandfather both died, it only took a handful of seeded contract magicians to ignite a new pagan panic amidst the Church. They were so busy with their witch hunts and trials after that, they couldn’t find the time to even find out Hell was having a civil war, never mind interfere in it!

Rizevim was not at all ashamed to admit he’d never have come up with such troublesome plans, it was why he didn’t join either side in the devil civil war – watching it all from the sidelines was infinitely more satisfying.

As ever, humans were so ridiculously good and creative at screwing each other over. He could see why Grandfather would be so fascinated by them. Such a shame their other qualities weren’t anywhere as redeeming.

Seeing those qualities now cropping up among devilkind was the most disgusting thing he’d ever had to witness.

“Well, at least we know she’s still alive now,” he told the boy magician. And wasn’t that a feat? She’d have to be over a hundred years old by now, was she in some kind of suspended animation somewhere?

“Unless these canvases allow the spirit to endure even after death,” the brat had the gall to correct him. “Which I cannot categorically rule out.”

Rizevim could, the harpy might have managed to destroy all their records and correspondence, but letters arrived in their mailbox all the way until he had the manor teleported away. If these canvases could extend life beyond death, those letters wouldn’t be filled with so many of those disgusting condolences for their fool son.

A shame the letters proved so useless in tracking down other ‘Painters’. They were a paranoid bunch who never put identifying information in writing, and divination was something Heaven’s System interfered with everyone on. Gradfather was every bit as selfish as the rest of them when it came to things like that. It was why the Asmodeus Starsend Moment trait still failed them so often, and even the usurper Ajuka Beelzebub hadn’t gone around that one.

What wonderful mysteries just fall into Rizevim’s lap! He couldn’t wait to sick his minions on them while he sat back and gave them self-defeating advice. Gaslighting your own minions was a bit gauche, granted, but he had to stay in practice for when the War restarted.

“Well, you’ve done your job,” said ‘Satanael.’ “You’re dismissed. You know where the teleport circle is, you can see yourself out.”

“Yes, sir.”

The teleport circle was in the entry hall, and took the boy about ten minutes to charge it up. For all his supposed talent he was still a human in the end. Rizevim almost didn’t wait for the kid to vanish, letting him feel demonic power being worked here would cast the fox among the chickens and then some. Then he’d only need to drop a worm in Mephisto’s ear that the one and only contractor to make a fool of him had a spirit inheritor, and all Rizevim would have to do is watch the unfolding disaster from a comfortable vantage.

Ultimately, though, he decided against it. One didn’t eat the whole pantry in a single meal.

He’d already dropped plenty of breadcrumbs anyway. He wasn’t putting more than a token effort into playing the part of the late Satanael, for one. Also, there was plenty trace demonic energy from the outbursts of the Old Satans, if the boy didn’t detect them it was his problem. Then, too, this entire place was in the Underworld. Sealed, sure, but while the painted and shuttered windows could be explained as normal secrecy, the air here was proper underworld air, charged and filling, not the mana desert humans had up top.

Brat didn’t even try his luck slipping out with his sacred gear at any point, even just to scout around, it was ridiculous. Since when did human teenagers have self-control?

When he was finally all alone in the big half-burned manor, Rizevim shapeshifted out of his fake appearance. ‘Satanael’, honestly, to think that overambitious savage would keep the name after falling! The presumption on those half-rate guardian angels was truly unbelievable. To call himself THE Adversary of God was nothing less than a direct affront to Lucifer himself.

It was baffling how the fool survived long enough for Rizevim to run into him, when he decided out of boredom to mentor Diodora Astaroth’s peerage on one of their excursions in the Overworld that one time. Satanael had singled them out as a way to test his ‘Abyss Class’ of savage sacred gear wielders. Instead, he was now enjoying the pleasures of Rizevim’s dungeons while Euclid experimented on his minions.

Spies in Lucifaad had told Satanael where they would be in advance. For all that Astaroth knew not to mention things the Four Usurpers would find objectionable, he liked to boast about the rest. Those spies had also been trickling into the Khaos Brigade dungeons and laboratories in the time since. Scheming and rebellious reincarnated devils, one and all, just another unforgiveable mistake that the usurpers had done to devilkind.

Rizevim was amazed that his identity theft still held after this much time too. He never expected he’d get so much mileage from putting this act on in front of mere humans. The Grigori themselves would’ve sniffed him out, even if he had one of Shalba’s Light-Manipulation Devices, but Satanael had broken off relations with them completely so he didn’t need to meet with them at all. With humans it was as easy as pretending he was too far above them to bother calling on his power.

No doubt the ‘Hero’ Faction had someone courting the Grigori as well, openly or otherwise. Rizevim only regretted that he couldn’t be there to see what fantastic conspiracies Azazel and the rest of them came up with, to explain what that person told them of ‘Satanael’s’ actions.

He flew up to take a closer look at the man and his wife. He’d had to be sparing with the ‘torture them awake’ attempts until now, since the magic spells that Euclid and Beelzebub had devised to sustain their soulless bodies was finicky business. His familiars needed to feed them regularly too.

Now, though the bodies were still firmly nailed to the frame by their wrists, and were just as malnourished and desiccated, they seemed a tiny bit healthier. The paint-like stains around their eyes were rippling in slightly different patterns too.

He brought the vampire’s case close to them and opened it very briefly, just enough for the aura of the scrap metal to lick at their skin. Just a moment, he actually felt the energy’s attempt to suppress him. It wasn’t nearly strong enough, but the feeling was irritating and he didn’t want to be irritated so he shut the case back up. Still, even that one moment was enough to make their pallor become healthier. All this from just that brief exposure to that holy energy.

Rizevim smiled cruelly.

Oh, the games he could play with these parvenues now.

Earth

Georg Faust burned all his clothes at the first safehouse, used magic to burn off all his hair at the second one, used more magic to flake off his entire first layer of skin cells at the third, took twice as many detours and turnarounds as normal to dimensionally skim from one place to the next with Dimension Lost, spent a day in a random mountain glade to perform a scouring ritual, and finally reunited with his compatriots on the third day.

“You’re very late,” Cao Cao told him when he finally returned to the Shibamata Taishakuten Temple in Tokyo. This was the current Headquarters of the Hero Faction, lent to them by the Five Principal Clans while they worked against their mutual enemies in the area, the Ututsemi Agency. The Grigori were similarly involved, but the Five Great Families were hedging their bets. All of which they weren’t supposed to know about, but they did. “Jeanne was worried after she and the others had to fly in by plane, since you never showed.”

“That man is not Satanael,” Georg said, his mind too busy for niceties. He drank a potion that would regrow his hair over the next few days and then proceeded to tell his allies all he’d seen, heard, felt and otherwise experienced. Teleportation circles with more dimensional script than time and space combined, a host with a fake face and lackadaisical aura whose flavor was lost in the haze of Light magic from a concealed bracelet, a French belle epoque manor located in the Underworld no matter what its owner pretended otherwise, and that canvas- “A man and a woman nailed to the frame of their canvas like a parody of Adam and Eve put through the torment that Jesus went through on the Cross, no true Grigori would ever do something so gauche, renegade or not.”

“A devil then, it has to be,” pronounced Arthur Pendragon. “That begs the question, however – was Satanael already replaced when he betrayed the Grigori and took his students to form his splinter cell, or not?”

“We’ll let the Grigori figure that out,” Cao Cao decided. “It’s no concern of ours.”

“But we’ll tell them what we found out, I assume?”

“You can drop a bug in Reni’s ear, what she does with it is her business as usual. It’s not time for the Five Families to learn that we’ve seen through their double-dealing.”

“Very well.”

“Those devil freaks make me want to punch them in the face more and more every day,” growled Heracles, the two-meter man who carried the spirit of the Greek mythological hero of the same name. He cracked his knuckles with teeth bared. “They’re literally begging for it at this point.”

“For once I agree with the meathead,” said Jeanne. “But if Georg is right, this one might be too much for us at this stage. Especially if he has allies as strong as those other traces of demonic power suggest.”

“Bastard is taunting us,” Siegfried grumbled. “I dare you to say he isn’t. How much does he really know about us, do you think?”

“Less than he believes he does.” Georg was quite confident of that. “But more than what we should be comfortable with. We should settle matters here quickly and get back to our true headquarters as soon as possible. I am confident I was not followed-“

“-But who knows, in times like these,” agreed Cao Cao, hefting his sacred gear up to gaze at the reflective sheen of its blade. The True Longinus was an ornate spear with a dark blue rod longer than all but the longest polearms, and featured golden metal decorations in the shapes of arrow tips that spiraled around it in a double helix pattern. The decorations finished at the top of the rod with a white circle, which was completely empty save for a cross that filled it in. The silver tip was large enough to be called a sword unto itself, and its blue metal was smooth as a mirror. “The Truth of God is getting louder.”

“What does that mean?” Asked Jeanne, though Georg had already guessed.

“Change,” Cao Cao said gravely. “Something will occur that will completely change the world. Something big. Something soon.”

“Come on, man, anyone can spout that fortune cookie bullshit,” Siegfried complained, slouching in his seat. “How soon are we talking?”

“The time frame is unclear, I’m afraid to say, but the matter of where is slightly more indicative. I think it’s time to change our planned itineraries for recruitment. Central Europe has gained an all-new draw all of a sudden.”

If only that was a guarantee of good fortune. Unfortunately, the will of the Bible God moved in mysterious ways.

This became all the more apparent when Cao Cao interpreted whatever vagueness his spear blew at him, to mean that he should take Jeanne and Arthur to meet Unknown Dictator in the USA, while Georg went with Heracles to Romania, of all places. They were to follow up on some rumors about either a monster slayer or a monster layer, you couldn’t quite tell with the way Grigori intelligence insisted on being half pornography. Especially second-hand intelligence smuggled out by a clandestine relation that Arthur insisted was not romantic (the self-centered lout).

Good news, they found their guy. He was in either his late thirties or early forties, with blue eyes and shoulder-length dark red hair, and a full shaggy beard. He wasn’t as tall as Heracles’ two meters, but his frame was about as muscular in the limbs, and actually more so around the waist. It was the physique of an ancient Olympic athlete, which made his occupation all the stranger. Of all the possible things he could have been, the man was some random car repairman.

It was late at night when they finally found him, so they didn’t have to wait to approach him.

Bad news, the man wasn’t interested in anything they had to say. He only answered the door – dressed only in shorts – to tell them to leave, politely but more firmly than everyone else they’d ever approached. Worse news, he didn’t have a sacred gear, Georg’s spells and the smuggled Grigori scanner both agreed on it. Even worse news, Georg didn’t get a chance to say so before Heracles took the man’s refusal as poorly as he took everything else, and started a fight right then and there.

It was a disaster. The man turned Heracles’ first charge into a wrestling clinch that he won, and then threw Heracles so hard that he flew off like a cannonball all the way out of town.

Heracles crashed in the middle of the Danube river, completely confused about which way was which, having lost his spatial awareness to the point where he didn’t know which shore to swim for. He ended up stranding himself on an island. When Georg found him through a frantic grid-search with side-dimensional space-skipping, Heracles was cursing up a storm at his repeated failure to jump back to shore. The island was one of those delta types where the ground was all soft mud and humus that made for the worst footing imaginable. Every attempt to make a giant leap turned into a pratfall instead, the fool was so angry he was about to swim across from spite.

Georg had to use Dimension Lost to side-wind him back to shore, and somehow he guy was already there waiting for them.

Goerg made to speak, but Heracles charged roaring again, the blunderhead!

Heracles won the first clinch this time. He didn’t manage to throw the guy’s balance off, but he lifted him up and then slammed him down so hard he sank into the ground down to the ankles. In response, the guy easily ripped himself free and returned the favor, except he drove Heracles into the ground up to the waist. When Heracles ripped himself free in a rage, they met in a third clinch, which the guy won again and drove Heracles into the ground all the way to his neck.

“You know the difference between myths and fairy tales?” the man asked while Heracles was struggling to dig himself out. The soil was almost as hard as brick at the surface, but below was clay soft enough that every thrash just made him sink deeper. “Myths are stuff that’s been rendered down until they’re half-way plausible. Fairy tales are the stuff too fanciful to ever do that with. That’s why nobody believes them until we smack them in the face.”

“I’LL SMACK YOUR FACE IN JUST A MINUTE!”

A mighty glowing aura erupted from the earth, allowing Heracles to break free and haul himself out of the pit he’d been driven in with all the angry wrath of the sacred gear known as Variant Detonation

“Heracles, not again!” Georg shouted over the buffeting wind. “We’re here to recruit him, not kill him!” If he struck the man and that aura exploded with the usual force, he’d – How many recruits must he do this to?! Why even make him co-leader of their whole organization if they weren’t going to listen to him-

“Right, I’m putting you in time out.”

The man – they’d never managed to even ask his name! – pulled the biggest spatha Georg had ever seen from behind the tree he’d never once moved a step away from, wound it back like a baseball bat right as Heracles charged with a roar, and smacked him in the face.

Force, momentum, and the explosion of Heracles’ own sacred gear combined in a blow so devastating that the spirit inheritor of the legendary hero of Greece was send shooting into the sky like a ballistic missile.

In the wake of the mighty clash of strength against power, the only thing Georg could hear was a gong as loud as ten bells, which slowly, slowly wound down into a persistent ringing that didn’t seem to leave his eardrums.

“Open your mouth, take those hands off your ears, let the air pressure normalize,” the man instructed. “Now join hands at the back of your head, clasped fingers. Good, now use your thumbs to tap the base of your skull. That’s right, keep at it.”

Georg’s new case of chronic tinnitus miraculously faded by the fifteenth tap… and then he realized he’d automatically followed the orders of a complete stranger – an enemy who’d – oh no, Heracles!

“He’ll live, I used the flat side.” The outrageous man that was still only dressed in shorts stowed his sword away someplace, and Georg was seriously regretting not joining in on the fight with his spells from the start, what possessed him to-?! “Don’t come bothering me again, I’m already committed to someone else. Not that I’d ever join up with a bunch that disrespects their elders like this.”

The man walked off.

Georg stood there stupidly.

He stared after the man. He turned to stare in the direction where Heracles had vanished off.

It took him days to find Heracles again, the complete moron had been knocked out for ages, and when he finally woke up he couldn’t use any sane means of contact like, oh, a phone call because he was in some middle-of-nowhere place without reception or landlines. Then, instead of just finding a road to follow back to civilization, the oaf decided that the thing to do was leap from place to place randomly while firing flares up into the sky. As if he didn’t have two broken limbs and internal bleeding. As if Georg had any hope to spot such a thing! That man had batted Heracles all the way to Ukraine!

What possessed Georg to ever follow the lead of such a brainless oaf?!

He had to stop forgetting that he was not like the others. Cao Cao, Jeanne, Arthur, Heracles, Siegfried, Leonardo, his allies had each inherited the spiritual legacy of those same-name heroes of old, but Faust was not the same. He was no mere spiritual inheritor, he was a true reincarnation. He had no memories to prove it, it had been a true and proper rebirth by design, but he doubted any of the others had received a magically recorded message upon reaching age sixteen, with directions to magical caches and book stashes.

The original Johann Georg Faust hadn’t been a charlatan, he’d been a cynical visionary who saw the slow doom of man’s world and refused to go quietly. He recognized that the increasing ability of devil kind to cross over to the Overworld could only be done if Heaven was failing. When he summoned Mephisto and argued against the demon’s point that the devil’s existence proved the existence of God – just because one half of the story is true doesn’t logically follow that the other half must be – Faust didn’t really mean it. He wanted to see if Mephisto conceded the point, which he did.

Devils lie, this was known. Also, Faust knew reverse psychology when he saw it. Just because the term hadn’t been coined yet didn’t mean the method of manipulation hadn’t been in use since the dawn of speech. There was no way a devil out to get human souls would genuinely try to persuade him not to make a deal with the devil.

Then, too, there was the issue of how flimsy a retaliation the Church was managing against the increasing number of ‘damned’ like him – he wasn’t the first to make deals with the devil by far, but there were way too many around his same time frame, summoning them shouldn’t be anywhere near so easy. Coupled with the complete lack of response by angels to the same, or even to prayers (he’d successfully communicated with his guardian angel regularly as a child, especially in lucid dreams, but that abruptly stopped happening when he reached double digit age) Faust recognized that something had fundamentally broken in the world.

By the end of the first meeting with Mephisto, Faust had deduced that God was powerless, gone, or dead, and the man was in no mood to become collateral damage like destiny seemed determined to make of all mankind.

He didn’t set out to screw Hell over from the start, he made the deal in good faith because there were few other options to climb out of the fringes of society at the time. It was for the same reasons why he didn’t exactly have the best view of the Church to begin with. Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, it wasn’t the wishy-washy feel-good nonsense of today, it was all still prescriptive and oppressive then. Little wonder, seeing as it had been spread at the tip of a sword, which automatically invalidated it as a good ideology. He really did set out to live a life of luxury and hedonism, what else was there to do when you were born in a game that your forebears had already lost?

But year after year was a long time to watch the power of the Church break – because the relationship between the church and Heaven broke – and, more importantly, to run into fellow occultists with much more ambitious prospects than his own.

They gave him some much-needed perspective. Almost all of them agreed that having to put in appearances at every Sunday mass was small price to pay for devils to look elsewhere. Sure, they had to fast-talk around inquisitors and exorcists whenever someone reported them being up at night in their own home, but most of those investigators were such prudes that they immediately dropped the trail in put-upon disgust when someone ‘confessed’ to night-time liaisons. It wasn’t an instant pick-me-up, but consistency had a strength of its own, and again, year after year was a long time.

The common story of Faust said he asked Mephisto for 24 years of service, but in reality he only lived off the devil’s back for ten before he began putting the work to get fame and riches all by himself. What Faust really learned from Mephisto after that was magic. The original teachings that Merlin had given humanity had been stamped out by the Church by his time. Since that same Church – and Heaven – couldn’t be relied upon anymore to be a thorn in Hell’s side, it was imperative that someone re-introduce those magical arts to mankind so they could fend for themselves when society collapsed.

His other goal became to understand the mechanics of the soul. This he got from the Sami of Finland via astral projection, something Mephisto couldn’t follow him on, being a devil.

Combined, he used this knowledge to deliberately induce his own reincarnation through an exploit Heaven’s system – ironically enough via ritual suicide – just a day before Mephisto was due his payment.

The known story of Johann Georg Faust ended with an account of his mutilated remains being found in his room the next day, with his eyes in the bedroom and his body broken down in the yard after being thrown out the window. This was very probably true. Mephisto would have been very angry at him making himself a way out, and would have had nothing else to lash out at after his complete defeat.

Faust didn’t experience any of it because he was already gone by then, homunculus animation magic was actually running his body at that point.

Faust hadn’t expected that Mephisto would or even could stay in the human world, to insinuate himself as the leader of his magician organization out of petty vengeance. He hadn’t known that Heaven’s System had decayed that much, that devils could just cross over permanently instead of needing a human to act as anchor and intercessor like before. It was a dreadful irony that he was still there even now, at the head. The whole of Grauzauberer was corrupt now, a lost cause, as were all the off-shoots that sprung from it since.

If only Chaos Break was ready, Georg lamented after he finally delivered Heracles to their enclave in Greece, and doped him up on healing potions with a sleeping one mixed in, just to have some peace from his ranting. Just one injection would’ve made Heracles more than strong enough to beat – whoever that was.

Myth versus fairy tale. What a wording. What fairy tale would that man claim to be, if asked? What fairy tales did that backwater country even have?

Georg looked at the wall to the little room he had settled in, wondering how long an excursion it would be to trawl the Romanian public libraries for answers, if they even had them over there. He looked in the mirror. His hair had grown back with the occasional white thread and it was all Heracles’ fault.

He lay back on his bed and pressed his palms against his eyes with a groan, asking himself why he should even bother. This generation of humanity was an even more lost cause than the last one. It was why he’d advised Cao Cao and Jeanne to make sure Unknown Dictator didn’t leave their meeting without a geas, to keep him from speaking to anyone else of their meetings. Good faith didn’t exist anymore, hopefully they’d listen to him about that, at least.

He thought of his room back at headquarters, with his bookshelf and big, soft bed that infringed on all Japanese sensibilities. He thought about his own home in Austria too, where he had hidden the stuff nobody knew about, not even his allies. Most recently, everything he found in that canvas that neither the devils nor Grigori nor even his fellow heroes knew about.

Information. And substance, because he’d lied to ‘Satanael’, whoever he really was. It wasn’t just a mere dream world in there. Substance, what the Painters and their creations called chroma – it may not be physical substance, but spiritual substance was still substance. And, possibly, the key ingredient he’d been looking for to complete Chaos Break, perhaps even make it safe to use.

All he had to do was find that girl’s body and free her from that painted world.

He sat up with a huff.

There was no way he could do it all without help, but how could he even sell the necessity of his mission? They’d dismiss him as a lovestruck teenager besotted by a fantasy from a dream!

If only Cao Cao wasn’t so elitist with their human resources as to not realize the blind spots in his strategies. If only the others actually lived up to their ancestors’ examples, instead of hyper-focusing on one gimmick! Heracles didn’t complete his labors with brute power, he had to come up with clever tricks for almost all of them! Why the hell was his spiritual inheritor such an imbecile?

Georg fell back on the bed with a groan, then got back up again.

At least all this walking on eggshells meant he’d have more than enough time to design a new geas just for that paintress girl.

Terribly sorry for this oncoming betrayal of your so very poignant and desperate trust, fair Alice, but betting on trust and honor was entirely a fool’s wager these days.

Heaven

Michael called the other great seraphs the moment it happened.

“Sephiroth Graal has vanished from Father’s system.”

With the sole exception of the increasingly rare righteous souls that earned entry, Heaven had been sealed since the moment God perished, for the sake of preserving the last things in His orphaned design that were still true and good.

It didn’t stop the other Powers from perceiving that something had struck a crack in the foundation of the Pearly Gates.