VII


Two of Shinra's finest strolled into Don Santeo's lap of luxury, suited in black.

On the left was a surly, strapping individual. Ever the consummate professional, Rude straightened the frames of his sunglasses in anticipation of their message. He pinched them with fingers clad in Junon's finest leather, fashioned personally by a tailor he'd known since boyhood. Exuding the strictness and severity of his job description, his stern attitude was mirrored in amount only by the confidence that brimmed from his partner. Beside him was Reno, who was leaner, crowned by cerise locks drawn back into a ponytail, and had sheathed his silver tongue - for now. Upon the redhead's shoulder was propped his trusty telescopic baton.

Before them, the Don of Grimhaven feasted, chewing sloppily over the applause of the Turks' polished shoes.

"Yo." Reno's smile was sly, vulpine, and without an accent of sincerity. "This ain't so bad... but Shinra's made better investments."

"Piss off," Santeo growled, chewing into a Chocobo thigh. With the tough, cooked sinew pulled open, oil dribbled down his chins. "I haven't done anything to Shinra, and I don't want any of you here!" He pumped his fists against the arms of his throne, a child's tantrum. "You're spoiling lunch! Get out!"

"We'd love to," Reno's eyes shimmered devilishly. "And Shinra would love more of your old man's money, too. I guess we can't all get what we want. You see, you and I both know that he survived his... accident. We agreed to look over the rock he crawled under, so long as Shinra got the lion's share of his profits. But someone went and pulled the plug. Someone stupid. And now, that same someone is livin' large off what rightfully belongs to Shinra. We call that..."

"...Embezzlement," finished Rude, pulling his gloves taut.

"I haven't done anything!" yelped the Don, spitting grimy residue over his breastplate. The stained, bronze armour glimmered with the same peculiar lights as it had during his visit last night. That was a pleasant memory - or at least, Miss. Kisaragi had been. "My- my beautiful girls, you... Come! Come here!"

Reacting to the irresistible allure of their master's voice, the slave girls obeyed unconditionally. Once again their protective harem flocked around his swollen mass, each as clueless and braindead as the next. They moved upon intangible threads, personalities as wooden as their ill-exercised joints. They maundered around him in a carousel of mesmerised addicts, a roulette of the broken, the diseased and the pregnant. The Don lunged out and bundled onto into his sweaty arms, and she giggled absently, her desires mere ventriloquism. He was safe now, his giant slab of a forearm lumped across her boyish chest, so awfully malnourished her ribs jutted through papery skin like rake heads. Her mascara was dry now; it hadn't been earlier, and whiskers of it were still evident across her pointed cheeks. Don Santeo reclined back into his throne with a newfound conviction in his well-being.

"Now, uh..." the Don grappled onto the girl's jugular. "Now then, you wouldn't put a young girl's life at risk, would you?"

"Hey Rude," Reno cocked his head over to his partner, rapping his electric baton against his shoulder. "You hear that? The guy thinks we've got morals..."

"Hey Reno," his fellow Turk snorted wryly. "You see that? The guy's arm isn't broken..."


The passage led Vincent into an expansive circular chasm, which excavated deep into the planet. A rippling cyan radiance dappled the chamber walls, heavenly in appearance as it undulated as though alive, around which were stationed refinery arms. These were crane-like appendages that lowered into the Lifestream below, drank from its abundance, and purified its offerings into unrefined Mako energy. Threading them together were conversion cables that fed into the central crystallisation core, a large rectangular platform built upon a natural bridge of deep-pressured earth.

And yet, what captured his curiosity most were the emblems soldered onto the sides of each refinery arm, and onto the central crystallisation hub: Shinra.

These were Shinra's machines, Shinra's technology, and perhaps even Shinra affiliates, yet he'd heard only of the Don's presence. It was a passing thought whether they had been stolen, but from their comfortable foundations and visible signs of wear, they had been stationed here longer than the Don had even drawn breath. Age crusted across the mechanisms, not yet rendering them inoperable, but certainly having an impact upon their productivity. Apparently this underground affair wasn't only illegal and clandestine, but it was also parasitism of the most desperate and self-serving kind.

Vincent heard Gaia grieving for the sins of her children.
Each plant of his boots sent a sombre echo throughout the Materia mines, ostensibly deserted.

"Shovelling up all our dirty secrets eh, string-bean?" boomed a familiar voice. "Ha-ha. Soon enough, I'm not gonna have anything left to enjoy!"

Wrenching the crystallisation silo's entrance asunder was a man of phenomenal build, with a hairless, stitched head. Above his left brow was a white, tumescent burn mark impressed into the suit of clubs. Vincent identified him as one of the guards outside the aborted trafficking hive in Grimhaven - either Hawk or Kestrel - and pinned him with a vitriolic stare. He brought Cerberus in line with the brute's eyes.

"I know what you're thinking," the enormity chuckled, scuffing at his burn. "'Which one of 'em is he?' It's Kestrel, in case you were wondering. I know we haven't been introduced. Not directly, anyway, so I'm the asshole the Don assigned to oversee all the Materia production." There was a bright throb of cobalt to his irises, as if something else peered through him. "So, got anything you enjoy? I hear Wutai girls are all the rage these days!"

"I wouldn't know," said the gunslinger, his cadence slow and hostile. "But you were right: a night inside an interrogation cell will deprive you of everything."

"A cell? You're not done with the bloodbaths already, are you?" Kestrel roared derisively, "that was the most interesting thing about you!"

"Bloodbaths?" If Vincent was bewildered, the frigid tundra of his profile did not betray it. "It just sounds like drivel to me."

"You're a bit out of touch, aren't you?" snorted Kestrel, "oh, there's rumours about you! You're the bane of every mother in Grimhaven trying to get their kids to sleep, with the Red Ripper running loose! Although... they're not strictly rumours, are they? All those boys you gutted open, in Owl's shop of surprises...!"

"I'm not the one defending a ring of human slavery." Vincent was sharp to exonerate his actions, and even more so his thoughts. What this titan among men lauded and congratulated was offensive. It was a thorn that had pricked against his conflicted conscience, which was rapidly deteriorating against reason. Vincent had never been one to conform easily to society, nor had he any interest in doing so, but to be ostracised as the conductor of such butchery through the weapons of a few underhanded words had managed to enflame him - in part, despite all of his protests against it, because those words rang true.

Murderer. Ripper.
The bane of lives.

The unworthy reaper.

Chaos.

Sinner.

His enemy prowled closer.

"Nah. You're the one blowing the brains outta a bunch'a poor kids' skulls!" Kestrel quarrelled aloud with a flair of theatricality, addressing an audience of his own reckoning. "Here's a conundrum for you, string-bean: you shoot up a shit-ton of our guys, all of 'em runts and runaways with guns shoved in their hands for cheap pay. Homeless, starving rats we pretend to give some responsibility to so they can grow up. You leave a goddamn swamp of what's left of 'em behind you, and yet, you do it 'cause you think we're the ones ripping away lives from people? You're an arrogant fucking hypocrite, aren't you? That's hysterical!"

He moved closer still, their bridled, burning tension coiled, its fangs unsheathing...

"There's a difference between those who deserve punishment," Vincent preached, "and those innocents who are exempt from it."

"Careful now," Kestrel held a finger aloft, chiding his enemy. "Once you start deciding how and why the scales of all other people are weighed, you'll lose your mind! Unless that's already happened, of course. I'll imagine those frightened little rats aren't the only ones who die when that trigger's pressed, Vincent!"

When that trigger dragged another soul to Hell, pieces of Vincent Valentine - one after another - were torn away with them. The dreamless void beneath the Shinra Mansion; gurgling, fresh exit wounds upon Hojo's floor; the crystalline crypt of the woman he'd loved, however, these all remained, stagnant and damning. In all of his futility, every warm and precious memory had flaked away from him. Those he'd sought to shed were permanently carved into his psyche. No matter how many lives he'd judged, how many of the deceitful and vile he'd ended, he'd only grown more forlorn. The heads of Cerberus faltered.

Kestrel picked up on his moment, a rabid hound to a waft of blood. He charged Vincent with unprecedented aggression, driving a shoulder thick and packed with raw muscle past the barrels of Cerberus and into the gunman's chest. It struck with debilitating force, and Vincent careened back onto the rattling mesh floor with the limp weight of a rag-doll, spine ablaze. Kestrel was upon him, not sparing a fraction of grace for his stupefied opponent, pummelling him with huge fists that bludgeoned into the cadaverous-white sculpture of Vincent's face. Slick, crimson ivy surged from shredded cartilage, and cheekbones began to capitulate.

"So in this 'perfect' world of yours, I should be punished?" Kestrel dragged Vincent's head up by a fistful of hair, only to deck it hard against the platform with a juggernaut's punch the shiver of which was palpable in the Northern Cave. "So why aren't I getting punished, Vincent?! Why's my head still on? Why are my arms arching with ecstasy when they draw back to beat the SHIT outta you?! Why are you the one lying there, Vincent, bleeding to death all over my hands?!"

Blood bubbled inside Vincent's throat. His jaws hung open, croaked, unspoken words weak and unintelligible. He groped faintly for Cerberus.
His head swirled, absent in a dazed soup of abstract reality. His dead heart resuscitated, mortally threatened.

"No more shit to spew?" Kestrel popped his dripping knuckles.

Vincent's fingers latched onto Cerberus, but another brutal blow loosened his grip - together with the rest of his body.

"Yeah," Kestrel leaned up, admiring his handiwork with a satisfied groan. "Stains aren't so fuckin' righteous, are they? When you're the mess that's gotta be mopped up, suddenly your bullshit fetish for 'justice' is all gone!" He paused, hitching a brow at the clumsy shifts of Vincent's hand brushing up against Cerberus. Kestrel wondered to himself just how many lives that gun of his had reaped, and clutched around its triple barrels. The frail attempts of the beaten and vanquished Vincent Valentine were for naught. He had been caught, disarmed, and now he looked above, bleary and disoriented, into the grave once more.

Kestrel slung Cerberus away to his left, and it clattered out of sight and reach in among the nooks and crevices of the sleeping monitors.

"Oh, so close!" mocked the seven-and-a-half foot giant, tutting in revelry. "I don't know what you were trying to pull there, champ, but... damn, close one!"

Vincent's breaths were shallow and waning.
He hadn't felt this in a long time.

Desperation.

That dreadful, sinking sensation where every nerve left intact inside his body stood on end, alert and afraid. Downward he fell, through a bleak and vacuous abyss, his mind searching, hoping, clinging onto every thread of every eventuality and one after another, they frayed and snapped in his hands. The very last time he had been cast into this wretched emotional ravine had been before an entire generation of which he had been robbed. Conquered and desolate, Vincent savoured it all: the betrayal, the pain, the torments, the losses of that Hell. He manipulated the cold wires that plucked against his heart to electrify and animate it. Not idly would he allow himself to return to the soil again. Not so easily would he be overcome and thrown back into that unending, woeful underworld.

No more.

His life force wasting away, Vincent keeled up and mauled gilded talons into Kestrel's scalp. He poured every fading ounce of his stamina into ripping his arm back, cleaving through the sewn cleft that followed around the curve of the other's head. It gaped apart, and Kestrel reeled onto his side in screams saturated with throat-rending shock and horror. Vincent was too exhausted to accompany his act with remorse or pleasure, and collapsed back onto the floor in defeat.

"You... fuckin' bastard," Kestrel seethed, clambering around on the grated metal. From the yawning rift of skin that now folded down over his temples was a steady brook of luminous turquoise plasma. He lurched up onto his knees and bawled violently, "you retarded, lily-faced, string-bean bastard! FUCK!"

Kestrel rose to his feet unsteadily, the upper half of his face peeled down over the other in a grotesque simulacrum of humanity. Beneath was a synthetic black skull immersed within new, fluid flesh. Vincent eyed him in a half-conscious delirium, discerning the liquid that haemorrhaged over Kestrel's sputtering lips and corded neck to be Mako energy. Tics began to rustle throughout Kestrel's arms at random, his hands clenching without will or rhythm, his tendons growing rigid then relaxed like blades of grass against the wind. Across from him, the blood that matted across Vincent's features had started to coalesce, his brain mutating.

Murderer. Ripper.
The bane of lives.

The unworthy reaper.

Chaos.

Sinner.

"You pulled my damn face off," the thing that was Kestrel raged, "that fucking hurt! Ah... months of surgery gone to shit, how about that? Well, I guess you can't hear much. I've scrambled that pretty face of yours up real bad, so your ears are probably gushin' with blood."

Vincent wasn't listening. He wasn't alive.
The ruddy flow that congealed over his face had acquired a glossy, white appearance. Gored into by two indistinct, unearthly gorges where his eyes should have been, and pock-marked throughout, the bizarre mask that formed was nothing in comparison to the undead behemoth that Vincent was metamorphosing into.

Murderer. Ripper.
The bane of lives.

The unworthy reaper.

Chaos.

Sinner.

"So why don't I pull your face off, bastard?" Kestrel loomed over the convulsing abomination beneath him. "Corpse versus corpse."

The sound of a chainsaw shuddering to life bode the second round.