Of the number of dunes V had climbed thus far, he no longer had an accurate count, but he was keenly aware this was the fourth on which he'd stumbled. He was halfway down the slope before Fern arrested his fall. Normally he would brush her away, but he had neither the strength nor the energy to do more than sag in her grip and stare dully at the sky.

A mess of unpleasant textures mingled in unpleasant ways beneath the translucent film his shirt had become, slimy sweat and moist grit battling against the baking heat for which could annoy him most. Shadow would have made this a significantly simpler journey, but despite a deep and restful sleep, the color of his markings remained faded, and she remained slow to answer his call. Best to conserve he strength if he could.

Griffon had not answered him at all.

"You're sure we're headed in the right direction."

"Yeah. It's really distinct after spending so much time near you." She hoisted him back to his feet, sparing him the fight against the shifting incline, and offered him water. When he waved it away, she gave a disapproving frown. "We'll be out here for another four hours at this pace. I have speed chips and auto-stabilizing legs. Please just let me carry you before you overheat."

V's mouth tugged to one side, but without the same vehemence as the last two times she'd made the proposal. Fern wasn't especially persuasive, but the desert was proving adept at making its point.

Soon they were moving again with him draped over her small but formidable back. She ran parallel with the mesa that separated the more expansive part of the desert from the ruined housing complex. The jostle as she climbed the hills was miserable, but the slides down were as smooth as riding Shadow.

He withdrew beneath the hood of his cloak and pretended that's what he was doing.

Since waking, he'd thought about the connection between the appearance of demons and his failed devil trigger. It had been brief. A misfire that was over before it made it past his forearms. There should not have been any way to open up a gate from that. More than the DT itself, he believed it had something to do with what had happened in the aftermath. The bite of cold cobblestones against his cheek, the sight of his spent and fragmented body healing itself right before his eyes. Cracks and crumbling pieces turning to cuts and bleeding wounds. It wasn't until he was passably human again that he rose to vomit salt and blood, and if there had to be one definitively strange thing among all the others since he arrived, that was the one he chose.

The basin did not think, so it did not care about what became of him once he left it. Maso itself might not think, but the gods did. They didn't care if he died in hell, but they were smart enough to know that while he walked this world, he needed to survive. Presumably, until he either passed through a portal or opened one large enough that he no longer mattered.

The interstitial period was likely what they needed. Too little maso and he wasn't human enough to carry them, too much and he was demonic enough to shrug them off.

In the end, it was just another self-styled deity seeking to make a marionette of him. Was that a petty comparison to draw? Perhaps and perhaps not, but he'd been denied the opportunity to express his more vindictive sentiments about his time as Nelo Angelo. As soon as the means were in his grasp, these would learn the same lesson Dante had taught the last. By his own hand, when he strangled the song from their throats.

The sunlight dimmed to a golden brown. The sandstorm was far off to the east, but the prevailing wind carried grit far enough to scour at his skin and darken the sky. The wind almost sounded like it was screaming.

Fern lurched to a stop. It wasn't the wind.

Blinking red lights appeared in the strange bronze haze. First a few, and then easily a dozen. V could just make out small square shapes like pods running toward them. Every single one raised an unending scream that sounded worryingly like android screams played through faulty speakers.

They skidded down the nearest dune and raced up the next. "Pod, a little help! I can't outrun them while I'm carrying V!"

"NEGATIVE. UNIT FERN DOES NOT HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO COMMAND THIS POD. ADDITIONALLY, ATTACKING AT THIS RANGE—"

"Windmill."

The bomb program launched a volley of electromagnetic globes from Pod 042 with a deep, thunderous thrum. Explosive detonations raised the sound to a cacophony that soon outnumbered, drowned out, and then silenced the screams.

It worked a bit too well. Fern was launched over the top of the next dune and sent both V and the rest of her gear flying. Only Pod, tasked with carrying Humility, floated peacefully down with himself and his cargo undisturbed.

"—IS NOT RECOMMENDED DUE TO LARGE EXPLOSION RADIUS."

Fern swiped sand at the support unit, but it rolled ineffectually off his chassis.

V rubbed grit from his mouth and brushed it from his body with a short but lethargic sigh. From the top of the next dune, domes were visible in the near distance. He remembered seeing their silhouette before and not really giving them any more thought than fleeting curiosity. That was where they were going. The grumble beneath his ribs and buzzing that seemed to radiate from the sensitive nerves within his teeth all the way down his fingertips told him as much. Whatever was over there, it was something he could (eat) use.

When they arrived barely fifteen minutes later, the bizarre sight before his eyes dampened his eagerness. There were over a dozen of the domes, ranging from the size of a beachball to ominously towering spheres whose eyes were bigger than V was tall. They all had faces. Very familiar faces.

"Is this… Emil?"

"THESE ARE DEFUNCT COPIES OF THE ORIGINAL EMIL."

In brief, dead. In as much as a grinning stone head could be.

He strolled around the side of one of the largest. A machine wearing a mask brandished a spear at him, but Fern neatly threw one of her blades through its chest the moment its eyes shone red. He kept strolling. If the heads were like the Emil he knew of, they lacked memory of their lives. Yet something had called them to this spot. Most likely the same thing Fern sensed.

She yanked her sword from the machine's body and re-holstered it at her hip. An intense frown wrinkled her brow, and her weight shifted rapidly from leg to leg. V paid it no mind—until she took Humility from Pod.

"Something amiss?"

"I don't know." She looked around and rubbed at her shoulder despite nothing catching her eye. "I think they just creep me out. There's so many…"

"Focus. Do you still feel magic here?"

"Y-yeah. A lot of it." She tilted her head and passed between the heads until she was nearly at the center of them. "Below us, I think."

Not what V wanted to hear, as much as it made sense. If 9S found a gestalt-era home underground, there might be other things down there too. He experimentally ran his fingers along the baked stone and trailed around the curvature to follow her.

He looked up at Pod. "I don't suppose you have digging equipment."

"NEGATIVE."

A distracted hum answered. A gravesite, even one filled with grinning stone heads, was pedestrian for him, but goosebumps were rising all over his body. There was a strange sensation around them, but there was one from inside him as well. A twitch and slither just beneath his skin.

Tarry strips of his tattoos rose from his body without his command. They took no shape, instead moving in amorphous, twisting cords. They spattered and crept down his fingers to the stone dome, and V's spine let out a staccato of pops and cracks as he went rigid. The heads were dead but not spent. The magic was not of hell, but it sucked through the syrupy veins formed between his body and the (food) stone and filled him much the same as the red orbs had. Cracks formed in the grinning face, one after the other until it crumbled.

In the faint gust of the almost immaterial remains falling, V noted his hair blackening before his hooded eyes as the ink settled back against his skin. A thought of lunar tears bloomed bright in his mind but wilted just as quickly.

"Holy SHIT!"

The outburst earned a familiar smirk from V, and he raised his arm. "Well, well... Had enough lazing?"

Griffon perched on his arm with his wings stretched wide and his feathers in a bulging blue mass around his neck. "Lazing my ass! I told you that Umbran voodoo was nothin' to mess with and what happens? You almost die! Then for good measure, we make it back by some fuckin' miracle and you almost die again!"

V tilted his head away and scratched in the ear nearest Griffon's beak. "You're noisy."

"And you're a dumbass!"

The cane's handle waggled up just below Griffon's face, but for once V didn't go so far as to shove it in his familiar's beak. "What was that you just did?"

"It's this little thing called scolding, and you clearly didn't get enough of it as a kid."

V retracted his small show of grace with a twist of his wrist. "Try again."

"Agh aughay, oghay!" After V obligingly removed the cane, Griffon stretched his jaw and shuffled his wings down against his body. "Thing is, I'm not totally sure, but if I had to say it when you took your little soak in the basin you sort of… changed something."

"Helpful."

"I'm not great at the technical bits! Look, even nightmares like us could have survived in hell; trouble was we didn't really have a way back and you were human so you'd probably have gotten served to some demon on a gold tray if you went down there." He hooted with unusual energy, even for him. "Well, even in hell we wouldn't be able to kill anybody so we would've been in a tough position too. Point is, we got a nice drink in the basin but I think it did something to us—the four of us."

V tapped his cane against his chin. The difference between energy in the basin and the ambient magic in the rest of hell was akin to the difference between a vat of boiling acid and a glass of orange juice. Coming back different wasn't surprising, but he hadn't exactly been afforded the time to think about anything but not freezing to death after his return.

"And now you find yourself hungry," he guessed.

"Starvin'! You know how maso feels after being in the basin? Like I've been drinkin' that Virility shit you found in Nico's truck for a year!" He took off and perched on the nearest medium-sized head. "Gathering magic that isn't from you seems to be a thing that's on the table now. By which I mean I really couldn't help myself once you started touching these things and it happened to work out that stuffing my face actually did something good for you."

V looked down at his fingers and slowly flexed them. Feeling the hunger of his familiars wasn't ideal, but it was a small price to pay if they could actually replace the magic they required. "What fails to kill us may prove its use. I'll consider it an upgrade to our contract."

Griffon dissolved with an animated cackle and V took a seat in the center of the gathered Emil heads. Black strands stretched from his skin like systems of sagging veins, attaching him to the inert sources of magic. The more of the magic siphoned through the connecting strings, the more V was inclined to agree with Griffon about the nature of maso.

It felt like oil sludging through him; thick, heavy, crude and nothing like the demonic energy that had restored him in the basin or the magic flowing through him now. The headiness of the power, not so different from when he first arrived, was no longer enough to cover the more nauseating aspects of its presence.

The remains of the second and third heads joined the sand. Again, he thought of lunar tears—a wreath of them carefully woven in a place where the grass was still green. He dismissed it and focused on what might lie below the sand. Whatever had drawn the heads to this place, he wanted.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noted Fern pacing a short, jerky line in the sand. Her head swiveled but never settled, the target of her tensions invisible but not beyond her other senses. She looked like an animal impotently stalking along a fence. The strands reached out for the fourth stone. One of the larger of its kind. Fern's head snapped toward it just as V felt his tattoos flinch away and whip back against his skin. Loose sand shifted and fell from the head. It rolled sluggishly and made a sound not unlike the whimper of a prematurely awakened infant.

Then it shrieked.

The sand kicked up around it, whirling into a vortex around the site of the fallen heads. Fern snatched V from where he stood and rounded the largest of them, a hand pressing to his chest and then his face in a frantic check for harm before an impact threw them both to the ground.

The living head was laughing as it bashed itself against its dead clones.

"What the hell is it doing?!" Fern shouted over the roar of the sand.

"EMIL IS A KNOWN MAGICAL WEAPON OF THE OLD WORLD," said Pod 042. "HYPOTHESIS: COMBINATION OF MEMORY LOSS DUE TO REPLICATION AND UNKNOWN PERIOD OF ACTIVE COMBAT HAS CAUSED SEVERE PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERIORATION."

Their refuge rumbled and rocked as the assault grew faster and more intense. They both scrambled to their feet and split up as their cover cracked and finally shuddered to rubble. V glanced back and his heart clenched. All he could make out was the grin and two glowing red points in the haze. The beams that issued would have shamed the machines. The air around them shuddered and the sand parted in towering columns. To make matters worse it rolled and spun seemingly at random, spraying beams and obscuring sand with no discernable pattern.

The only constant was the hysterical voice, vast yet still identifiable as belonging to a young boy. V was only able to cling to Griffon and listen to Emil's voice as his laughter broke down into raw, deafening wails and rose once more into screams.

The head rolled. V felt the beam before he could see it. Griffon wheeled. The sizzle of the beam passed like the buzz of a chainsaw, and V felt the talon dissolve from his hand. He whirled and reached out, but the blue core was already falling away from him. If it took another hit, V would lose Griffon.

Permanently this time.

Nightmare came at the snap of his fingers. At V's command, he gripped Emil, turned his beams down into the sand, and readied his own. But before he could fire, V's head swam. Nightmare rumbled feebly and began to lose his magic was draining away. There wasn't enough, not for Nightmare—his stomach was rumbling, he was so hungry. They were so hungry.

It wasn't enough that V was being assaulted by a weeping child on the outside; this day could only be complete now that his familiars had made a nest of his body and squawked like unfed chicks inside him as well. He clicked his tongue and leaped from Nightmare's fading form, his cane piercing deep into the stone head. Ink spiraled down the length of it and threaded the surface as hungry roots.

IT HURTS ETERNITY HURTS IT HURTS WHY US WHY ALONE WHY WON'T IT END WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO US WHY IT HURTS IT HURTS —

Those thoughts were not V's. Nor was the pain branded itself deep in his gut and stole his breath away. Both belonged to an entity left alone to fight for so long that he no longer remembered anything else but his own desperation.

Fern leaped through the sandstorm with a war-like cry and drove Humility down into the stone right beside V's cane. Emil screamed and thrashed backward in a tantrum and began to spin in place, tossing Fern and nearly tossing V if not for Shadow tethering him down. The beams cut off, and in their place, hundreds of miniature heads launched up and began to rain from the sky.

The only thing available to V was Nelo Angelo's sword, glowing faintly blue and violet in his presence.

The light spread up his arm the moment his fingers touched it. He didn't know what power he called out to, but it was Shadow's roar that answered. She cloaked his body in her own, and in a dizzying collision of their senses, both her hunger and her power prowled sinuously under the controlling hand of his will. V felt himself split apart around the falling heads, amorphous and liquid and doggedly latching on not with fingers or his cane but with claws.

The pain was gone but the magic was fading fast. The burn of maso licked along the parts of his body that must have still been his own in this state. There was no time to think—only to push toward its logical conclusion. He bared teeth he knew were not his own, sprouted mouths too numerable to be his own. He was Shadow or Shadow was him and they were a single thing, but that thing was all mouths, all hungry lamprey teeth on tethers of ichor that bored into the stone beneath them.

It was a precarious balance. On one end, Shadow sank her fangs deep into the essence of the Emil head. The pain came with it, but she persisted, devouring what they could not hope to kill and fueling the trigger in the process. Elsewhere, the siren fire of the maso pushed to fill the gap between the amounts of power a devil trigger needed and the amount his body contained.

His mind wavered, consciousness threatened to fade at the sheer strain of it. The less he could hold against it, the more he felt the maso encroaching, firing through him like the revving of a distant engine.

Emil screamed and released a burst of energy that was too much for even Shadow to consume all at once. It burned her back, and in that moment of yield, the maso surged. He severed the connection between Shadow and himself and was immediately sent flying.

A pinching pressure filled the atmosphere, pushing against it like a membrane while he lay in wheezing in the sand. Maso thrummed through his body. He could feel thunder in the air. Smell the rot and blood stench of hell.

Fern blurred by him, both her remaining swords in hand. He saw her leap. Saw both the swords pierce dead center between Emil's eyes. V shielded his eyes from the eruption of harsh golden-white light that followed.

A final, weak sound that may have been a laugh or a sob vanished with the settling of the sand.

When V could finally look, there was nothing. Just the blue sky above and Fern draped over one of the actually-dead Emils like forgotten laundry below. He reached his senses out for the signs of hell's presence he'd felt only seconds before, but there were none. Everything was... alright.

His eyes snapped to his arms. Not everything. "Griffon...!"

The sand rumbled beneath his feet. Fern's head snapped up, but this was not a threat that could be fought. The sand was flowing down toward a growing indentation. The slopes of sand melded together into a single valley running directly through the center of the remaining heads.

"Pod—"

"WARNING: SUBSURFACE INSTABILITY DUE TO MULTIPLE HIGH-INTENSITY MAGICAL DISCHARGES. PROPOSAL: EVACUATE."

Fern slid carefully down the sucking sands, her hand extended. "Come on!"

"No." Shadow materialized at his side, her red eyes looking attentively to his. "You said that what we came here for was below us. That's where I will go. You will go with Shadow. Find Griffon, and bring him to me unharmed."

In a vast cloud of dust that gave the sky back its bronze, clouded hue, the earth gave way and the Emil heads sank with wordless grins. The valley split into a crack in the earth, and sand spilled down into its depths like waterfalls. V tucked his cane beneath his arm and held tight to Pod 042 as he hopped down. Beneath the top layers of sand and stone, the hole opened up into cavern walls lined with Emil heads. There were dozens or hundreds baked into thousands of years of sand and stone, staring out from the cavern's walls. Whatever was down here was much, much stronger than the Emil heads, living or dead. He could feel it growing thicker on the air as they descended.

The only heads at the bottom there were the ones that had fallen in with him, already half-buried by sand and by either other. A pile of funeral stones unto themselves.

As V had seen a nightmare for each familiar that carved itself onto his body, so too had he seen the frantic, jumbled remains of Emil's nightmares when they drank of his magic. Emil was powerful. Eternal. And alone. A boy for a mere ten years, a weapon for ten thousand. Aside from the Emil that called 9S friend, the only memory he had was the persistent ghost of a lunar tear whose meaning he did not even recall.

"And alas I live to weep out mine eyes," he whispered, pressing his hand against the nearest rictus grin. "While Death sits laughing on their monuments…"

Pod's light clicked on to reveal the cavern wasn't natural. It was the rotted remains of a building far more ancient and decrepit than any of those in the ruin. The rusted remains of iron gates were indented into the stone like fossils. There was an impression that there had once been wood, but it had long since rotted away and left only a hint of stonework. V stood well below these details with the remains of steel and cement beneath his feet. The sinkhole had opened up to a basement, perhaps. Or, by the remains of right-angles, into a tunnel.

Shadow's rumble echoed from above, and V looked up to see both his familiar and Fern in free-fall. She held a distinctive blue orb under one arm.

"Sitzfleisch."

The gravity field formed right beneath the hardening lines of Fern's shadow and she Fern fell right into it. V took the liberty of taking Griffon's core off her hands and re-absorbing Shadow. The program soon faded and Fern collided with the sand with a heavy thud.

"Ow…"

"You know," he said, clicking his cane down and watching her extract herself. "I would have sent Pod back up for you, had you been patient."

She stood and skidded clumsily down to him. There was a dark look in her eye, and she was shielding her midsection with one hand. The other was twitching at her empty hips, where she normally kept her weapons. Blood streaked down the back of her pants.

"You're injured."

Her expression flickered, limbs tightening. She swallowed. "That YoRHa kid was there…"

A bolt of tension tightened V's grip on his cane. "...And you fought him?"

"He didn't give me much choice. But I-I didn't hurt him," she added, eyes flicking to his as much to provide assurance as to seek approval. But just as quickly, she dropped her head. "He took the sword though."

"He's carried it before. He can be trusted with it." Provided his concern didn't cause him to rashly indulge his curiosity, of course. V took a deep breath that was nearly a gust in the echoing cavern. "I must keep moving. You can rest here."

"No!" She floundered toward him, and he couldn't tell if it was the Emil heads or the thought of him vanishing into the underground that made her eyes so wide and wild. "Please. I'm fine, so please…"

V shrugged, but let her stick much closer than he would have if not for the dark and the dubious stability of the stone beneath and above. The light from the surface grew dim and faded until there was no sign of light other than what Pod 042 provided. They crept cautiously around a listing slab and peered through the opening its fall created in the ceiling. V identified the remains of a foyer, complete with a chandelier still clinging on for dear life.

"A mansion…" V mused. "Pod, did we encounter data that matches this place?"

"SCANNING… REPORT: SNOW WHITE PROJECT RECORDS FROM 2026 DISCUSSED THE DISGUISING OF THE LABORATORY'S ABOVE GROUND FACILITY AS A MANSION. HYPOTHESIS: REMAINS OF FACILITY WHERE OLD WORLD MAGICAL WEAPONS EMIL AND HALUA WERE CREATED."

"So this is where they made those heads?" Fern asked, clutching at V's coat. "Is the real one down here? The first one?"

From beneath V's arm, a voice groaned. "Just the one was enough for me, thanks."

Fern started. "Griffon? Are you alright?"

V gripped his familiar's beak before either of them could make a conversation of it. "Quiet. I haven't come this far to die in a cave-in."

Fern clamped a hand over her mouth, and Griffon dissolved back into tattoos with only a thin, obligatory huff.

Whatever they were growing closer to took them through strange corridors with dozens of doorways both intact and not. Fern was able to guide them when the way was unclear, though he condition grew worse every time. There was a skittering around them in the dark at times. Nothing ever appeared.

After what felt like hours, they came upon a final door, not before them but below them. Built into the floor. Unlike so many others they'd encountered, this one withstood the test of time. Both it and the alloy walls around it.

Fern obligingly stomped at the solid metal. After three more, it had bend enough out of the way to reveal a stairwell leading into the dark. At the bottom was a small room, entirely empty save a single canister behind the remains of a shattered pane. A grimy keypad beside the enclosure suggested it must have been heavily secured at one time.

"Pod, a scan if you would."

Pod's antenna spun, and he floated a little closer. Then a little closer. Finding himself apparently stymied by whatever the canister was made of, he eventually flew directly to it and opened it.

V's hunger spiked as soon as the seal was broken. The tattoos squirmed and twitched and bubbled up from his skin. He cleared his throat noisily, and they snapped quickly back into place.

Pod returned with his digits pressed together, giving him the look of a mousy man come to announce a problem he did not feel qualified to be even tangentially involved with. "REPORT: ...BONE."

V stared beyond him at the canister without a word, so Fern asked the obvious. "Really? Just... a random bone?"

"AFFIRMATIVE."

"How can a bone feel like that?" She sagged back against the wall and clutched her head. "Like my head's gonna split open..."

"Fern," V said firmly. "Go with Pod and wait at the top of the stairs."

"W-what...?"

"It's a strong source of magic, exactly as I wished." He pushed the cane below her chin until her eyes met his. "You've done well."

Her eyes watered. She blinked far too often like she was looking at something unbearably bright, but for once she did not avert her gaze. Her lips hung open, grasping for something to say, and finding nothing. How simple it was. 9S had similarly succumbed to sweet words but had at least put up the resistance of pointing out it was an unfair trick.

Even if he meant precisely what he said. "Upstairs," he repeated solemnly.

Pod drifted by, and Fern followed after him, hesitating only briefly to call back into the gloom. "Whatever happens I won't leave. Even if you don't come back for a whole month. I'll wait."

V stood alone in the pitch dark. He didn't need to see. The hunger of his familiars had truer aim truer than any arrow, and as his eyes adjusted to the murk, he noted a red aura in the dark with him. It was coming from the canister. And if Emil had been any indication, he would have to bear the burdens of that which his familiars consumed. Strange bones in the place where Emil was made that radiated power all the way to the desert surface; no doubt an unparalleled vision awaited him.

He let his cane fall and slouched down to the floor. Alone, in theory with the power he so desired, he allowed himself a moment to hesitate. His fingers trailed the curvature of his mother's bracelet at his wrist. The wrong wrist, he noted and swapped it from his left to his right with tired but tender attention.

It did not matter to him if it had power in it or not. His half of the perfect amulet was lost, and if by chance it was in Dante's possession, it would invariably go to Vergil. She had poured so much more than he ever understood into giving him the chance at humanity, and yet the pains of losing that life had seen him go to greater and greater lengths to shed it. V was the one who bore the weight that Vergil could not. He was the one who righted their wrongs and bowed his head for their sins.

Whatever happened, this memento would be his and his alone. As would her final words, so dolefully spoken though they were filled with menace.

A mother does not ask gratitude of her children, so I ask only that you don't throw away your life. Should you return over-quick to this place, I will show you what an elevated craft the Inferno has made of Punishment.

Goosebumps rose on his skin and he laughed. Eva did not make idle threats. She surely wanted him to think of them the next time he did something to foolish...like devour strange bones found in ancient places. Truly, his mother was a woman who could make a demon think twice.

Alas, he was human, and he had hungry demons to feed.

"Go."

They nearly knocked the canister over in their greediness. The red aura vanished as they converged on the contents. He could almost feel the shape of it through them. Not a whole bone, but segments, as brittle as they were sharp. A red pulse appeared in the dark, trailing back toward him.

He wondered briefly if Urizen had felt this way, sitting in the heart of the Qliphoth with a dozen umbilical roots feeding concentrated blood into his body.

Then it reached him and he ignited, and wondered nothing at all.