Sullen wind settled on V, leaving a pervasive damp absent of any actual rain.

The castle walls weren't more than fifty paces behind him, but it may as well have been a different world compared to the near-impenetrable tree line of the northern woods. The last time he'd come to this threshold, his head had already been pounding in time with the sound of bells. This time there were no tolls. The sounds that reached him were of birds and beasts and the muffled screams of machines all mixing together beneath the dominant roar of the three or four waterfalls in the area. The woods could pass for normal, with no gods or creatures pretending to be gods to be found within. Even the maso in his body was unusually quiet.

It wasn't without pleasure that V wondered if the gods were capable of fear.

Griffon soared down out of the darkening sky. "Still right where we left it, and still makes my feathers crawl. So, nothin' out of the ordinary."

"Then let's be on our way."

The wall of gnarled roots and mountainous trunks did not prove the same hindrance it had once been. The dragon's power had proved as much a boon to his stamina as his physical strength. The way he took was the same path of least resistance that 9S had forged previously, but he was able to navigate it largely unassisted by either Shadow or Griffon. He may even have been able to carry Humility if its very presence wasn't still so souring that he refused to touch it if he could avoid it.

In truth, V didn't want to take the sword with him. It could rot in the bottom of the ravine for all he cared. But there was always that possibility that it would fall into the hands of fool machines that would treat it as some emblem of kingship. The possibility of androids using it was equally unacceptable. It was the sword of a thrall but for better or worse, it was his. If it must exist at all, its fate was no one else's to determine but his own.

For now, that fate was to be carried by Pod 042.

"I wonder what's gonna happen this time if you end up getting sucked back into Vergil," said Griffon, wheeling by him. "We never did figure out why the gang all came back. You think we'll just cease to exist? Or maybe that shit in the basin means you're stuck with us now?"

"Who knows."

"Real helpful. Guess it doesn't matter, but it would suck ass if we end up getting left behind again. It's not like Dante's around to have another rematch with. Boy-bot's nice and all but I'm pretty sure if the three of us went all out on him we'd find out if you can turn metal into a paste."

V's lips pursed. Nightmare would have no cause and Shadow treated 9S with nearly as much care as she spared for V. If they had thrown themselves against Dante before, it was because he was as an enemy to Vergil, or they remembered him as an enemy of the demons they'd once been. Griffon, on the other hand, had funny ways of thinking. "I would not underestimate him. When he has a goal in mind, his tenacity can be surprising."

"Aww, you getting sentimental, Shakespeare?"

"Merely adjusting your assessment. If you wish to die, I'm sure that woman you were flirting with would be happy to send you to hell with a bomb in your beak."

"Not a bad idea!" Griffon cackled. "If this fancy vacation's over, can't be a much better way to go than that!"

"Do not lay all your eggs all in one basket," V said with a raised brow and a hint of a smile. "Whether this works or not, the main event must come first."

Griffon half-grumbled some protest that he didn't lay eggs, but as they rounded a bend, V cut the rest of the conversation short with a swipe of his cane.

There was an android nestled into the bend of a tree root.

Her nose was a smooth hill dragging the rest of her face mercilessly toward its slope, the peak of which was buried in a book. Her eyes were similarly consumed with its contents. Time had stripped the ruddy leather binding of any titles or authors, but V associated the sort of exasperated determination on her face more with the balancing of a deeply red ledger than with the stressful turns of a novel.

They passed her by without incident. She didn't look up at them or give V any reason to mind her beyond keeping a reasonable distance. If she came there to work, it was no business of his. However, as he crested the next route on the path, he did glance back at her.

She was the only android he'd ever seen wearing glasses.

The scent of flowers grew dense as they forged further in. Spring was only beginning in the area claimed by the machines as the forest kingdom, but in these unpopulated woods the air was swampy with heat and humidity. Blooms too high up in the canopy to see snowed pollen that made a yellow haze almost too thick to see through. By the time V made it to the church, he, Griffon, and even Pod were thoroughly encrusted with it.

The clearing was not. Minus the deafening peal of bells, it was exactly as V remembered: Flat and unreal, more like a photograph than a physical space. The unnatural stillness of the grass and the absence of birdsong were even more obvious now that they were joined by the lack of a pollen haze. Even the dusting V shook and swiped from his body fell limp and inert to the earth, unable to float under the tyrannical pressure of the gods' presence.

From the bottom of the steps, V stared up at the iron bones and blackened stones of the church. The 3-eyed relief stared back. From beneath his skin, the dragon stirred and rumbled.

He tugged the glove free and tossed it aside into the grass. "You should return to 9S, Pod. You cannot go where I am going."

"NEGATIVE. WHILE I CANNOT BE OF ASSISTANCE IN DIRECT CONFRONTATION WITH THE UNKNOWN ENTITY, I WILL REMAIN IN ATTENDANCE IN THE EVENT THAT V REQUIRES FURTHER SUPPORT."

V smiled and patted the silver case. If he had to miss anything about this world, he thought he'd miss the straightforwardness of the support unit. "If I don't return, bury that sword somewhere it will never be found."

"AFFIRMATIVE."

Ascending the few crumbling steps and passing through the threshold sent a current running through V. He didn't have to hear the bells. The low boom of them resonated in his blood. But as he came to the center of the sanctuary, there was no activity. No sign of the beings that had been so eager to meet him before.

"Feeling shy, are we?"

Watcher. Seed. Song. The words took the shape of memories the dragon had bled into him, tinged red with rage at the presence of a foe that should have been dead so many millennia ago. She perceived as he perceived, but this matter was written somewhere deeper than her thoughtless mind. Violet flame engulfed his arm and his thoughts slid sideways.

He perceived as she perceived.

His body was amorphous terrain. The marks of his contracts brilliant leylines scored into a burning violet landscape otherwise lacking in any markers or true boundaries. Maso was neither the salt it made of humans nor the sludgy, heavy substance it felt like to V once he finally had pure demonic energy coursing through him again. To her, it took the form of rings. White and black rings with a repeating sequence of four letters in a language V did not understand.

Shatter.

It was neither a command nor a desire nor a perception—more rudimentary than instinct, and less rational than impulse. It was just things as they must be. A reality made true through an emanation of her own rings whose appearance mirrored those of the maso. The two identical forces shattered against one another and the pealing of bells answered.

V snapped back into himself, his perception again his own. The sky had turned to blood. The church fell away, black stones yielding to black flowers. The clouds roiled and sparked, and a phantom roar rumbled in answer along the back of V's neck.

Like a premonition coming to life, white infants descended from the red sky on wings of electricity.

The Watchers.

"Eugh! And here I thought empusa were fuckin' ugly!"

V grinned and held up an arm for Griffon to perch on. "Glad you could make it in a timely fashion this round."

"I took the express flight," said Griffon. "Didn't wanna be fashionably late and miss the part where we crash the choir rehearsal. But what the fuck are those things supposed to be?"

"Unexpected guests," said V, twisting his cane to the ready as the Watchers closed in. "Let's give them the welcome they're due."

Vergil, as a general rule, did not feel things when he fought demons. Not things he didn't already feel when he wasn't fighting. Focus. Superiority. The security of his own strength. To swing Yamato was to employ a practical solution to being approached by insects. If they were strong, perhaps he got a little motivated. If it was his blood, well, that came with many things. But fighting demons, for Vergil, was a means to keep the world around him in the order he thought it should be in, and power was simply a another means to that end.

It was in this regard that V was furthest from Vergil.

The Watchers were not demons, but they may as well have been. They giggled and cooed in distorted imitation of actual infants, belching wisps that clogged the sky. On Griffon's wing, he soared through the tangle and past the Watcher that had drifted closest to him. As it turned to look up at him, Shadow pierced through its cheeks and V skated easily down the steep incline, a trail of violet light bleeding from his altered arm as she struck his cane into the grotesque creature's eye. It fell to the flowers, casting up a cloud of black petals.

V remembered what it was to crawl and struggle. He remembered powerlessness and the frustration of being helpless. He was a stripped-down shade of himself and his body, frail as it was, was all he had. And these things had the gall to choke his veins with their poison and attempt to use him to their whims while he had no power to do anything about it.

But now the shoe was on the other foot, wasn't it?

"Thou, mother of my mortal part." He planted his boot against the dead Watcher's neck and wrenched his cane free. "With cruelty didst mold my heart."

There were still a dozen more. Rows of flashing bolts fried the dark earth in a marching wave that brought several spiraling dizzily down to V's level. He reached out to Shadow and found her waiting to wrap herself around his being a second time. She melted along one half of his body in inky wisps and reddened swirls, close enough to give him speed and separate enough to find her own targets as he found his. Between bright flashes of electricity, they pierced and sliced and sent the Watchers crashing to the ground one by one.

All the while the dragon chanted in time with V's exhilarated heartbeat: Shatter. Shatter. Shatter.

This was what he remembered. This was the common thread that had brought him and Urizen back into harmony with one another. To be held captive by power was a mistake he would not make again, but that did not change how he hated going without. Weakest of all his aspects, V held both joy and appreciation for his new power. His ruthless delight sang in every abruptly cut off giggle and gurgled death cry.

When he finally landed and found all the Watchers mere broken statues already disintegrating into the field, he was almost disappointed they had perished so quickly.

"Didst close my tongue in senseless clay," he incanted, letting Shadow fall away from him. "And me to mortal life betray."

The ground rumbled and the sky grew bright and sickly red. His surroundings flickered, and he saw the shape of the church he still technically inhabited as a phantom around him. If he understood, this was the moment. He could force a crossing somehow from this juncture—all he had to do was kill her and ensure he crossed alone.

At his snap, Nightmare rose, a deeper shade of darkness than even the flowers could produce. Before his purple eye, a white-hot light gathered and shot through the clouds. There was a shriek like the sound of those wretched bells and they scattered, revealing the full form of the white giant as it fell from its glorious heights.

V let the red dragon's power overrun him and scales the color of old blood crept rapidly up over his arm. An urgent hiss of Heart! came with her and he leaped into Nightmare's open hands to be catapulted into the air. Griffon caught him at the peak of his ascent and carried him further still, laughing coarsely and cursing in the face of the distorted salt-carved creature. Its mass was too great to defend itself in time, and when V reached her, he drove the dragon's claws into her chest unimpeded.

The white giant's body disintegrated around him, and with it, the already tenuous dream ended.

V landed back inside himself, kneeling on the stones in the exact same place he had been before. The church had not survived the battle and lay freshly razed with its stones scattered across the clearing. Pollen drifted in lazy swirls through air too still to be natural. The pressure had diminished, not vanished, and he could still feel the oily stir of maso beneath the heat of the red dragon.

He drew slowly back to his feet and curled his fingers over his chin. "I've missed something…"

"You've missed a lot."

The android he'd seen in the forest was at the bottom of the church steps with Pod. This time she sat atop a hefty white briefcase with a pattern that could have come off of Victorian-styled wallpaper in a cheap hotel pretending at luxury. She still stared down into her book with the annoyed expression of a teacher wrangling a difficult student.

From the threshold, he leaned on his cane to consider her more carefully, but it was hard to know where to begin. Nothing about her resembled other androids. Not the sleek black pigtails hanging from her nape or the ring of keys on her wrist or any of her clothing. Even compared to YoRHa's unusual choice in combat attire, it was abnormal. Just like the clearing itself, it was too clean. Timeless yet slightly out of place.

"A friend, Pod?"

"Just a traveling weapon salesman," she answered, frowning up at him. "And you are an anomaly that should not have appeared."

"Ah, finally. Someone with answers." He kicked up his cane and snatched it from the air, centering its point on her. "So? What'll it be?"

"Take it easy. I only sell the weapons." She clapped the book shut and flicked the end of the cane aside so she could stand. "You went and got yourself entangled with 9S, so my only job here is to observe you. Well, I did take the opportunity to clean up your mess, too."

A flippant kick and the suitcase popped open, spilling far more red orbs than should realistically have been able to fit within its dimensions. They rattled through the grass and seeped into the nearby blade of Humility while V peered at her from beneath a wary frown.

"You fought demons."

"I corrected the dimensional error you caused most recently." She placed a hand on her hip and tilted her head at him. "This is the part where you should say thank you, but that's probably too much to expect from you, isn't it, Mr. V?"

He chose to ignore everything other than the fact that she knew about hell and had apparently closed whatever small gate must have opened as a result of his 'proof' to Theta. "You said you couldn't interfere because of 9S?"

"He was directly involved in the local singularity that occurred here recently. It created a few temporal fractures, but there was no evidence of any associated dimensional events, so it was labeled low-priority. When the tower fell, that should have been the end of any need to observe this branch. But then you showed up." She waved the book reproachfully under V's nose. "I had everything all stamped and done with and then suddenly we had not one, not two, but five dimensional events! Do you know how embarrassing it was to have to an emergency re-investigation of a case I had already signed off on?"

"If you've been observing me," V said flatly, refusing to be caught up in any of what she was saying. "You should know I did not arrive here by choice and have been searching for an exit."

"You certainly have. Like a bull trapped in a china shop."

That was a complicated (and extremely antiquated) metaphor for an android, but he hadn't met a machine yet who could have said something like that. She didn't look YoRHa, but she didn't look like one of Theta's group either. "Do you have anything useful to tell me?"

"Sure. You will not be able to create the circumstances you're hoping for."

He rolled his eyes skyward. Was this what it was like for androids to speak with him? "You seem to desire me gone at least as much as I desire to be gone. Don't tell me the door is locked—either open it or tell me the location of the key. If you cannot do that, what is the point of your presence?"

"To see if you were going to create another dimensional event." With a flourishing sweep of her legs, she kicked her suitcase closed and reclaimed her seat. "We typically neutralize the source of those if the threat spirals out of control or creates too many dangerous branches, but the ones that follow you have been more of a minor annoyance so far."

"And?"

"And you seem to want the dimensions to stay separated as much as we do. So I'd like to put a little faith in you and see what happens." She crossed her legs and leaned forward, staring up at him over the rim of her glasses. "You can't kill the gods, Mr. V. They aren't really here in this dimension with us. As you may have noticed in your encounters, they're sort of elsewhere, and that's where we like them to stay. But that doesn't mean waiting around for humans is the only way they get in. Let your dragon finish their job in the church, and depending on what happens to you, maybe I'll give into temptation and offer you some advice so that we can all get what we want."

"And what is it you want?"

"A girl has to have some secrets, Mr. V."

V stared ice at her, but she didn't flinch or shrink back from him. Unless he wanted this effort to be entirely fruitless, he had little choice but to do as she suggested. But he'd already brought the church down its foundations and there was nothing he could do differently assuming the gods were even still able to be challenged after his attack.

He focused on the presence of the dragon instead. He thought he'd done exactly as she desired when he fought the gods, but he could still feel her chanting somewhere in the back of his mind. Whatever it was he had missed, she knew what it was and what had to be done. He closed his eyes and followed her senses, feeling his arm grow hot and scales creep to his shoulder as he grew closer. When he opened his eyes, he was standing at a place that must have once held an altar.

It wasn't his style, but he dropped to one knee and drove his fist into the weakened stone, pummeling into the foundation of the church. The deeper he dug, the more he felt it. Another thing as it must be, this time in the form of hunger. A compulsion to consume that did not stem from his demons but from her remains taken into him.

A hole opened beneath his assault and light shone down on a strange black orb sitting in a bed of fine salt littered with the solid white shapes of once-human fingers. It looked like a poppy seed grown several sizes too large.

He looked up at the strange android. Though she wore the sort of aloof expression that he might have expected to see on his own face, her nod was slow and tense.

When he reached down to grab it, his tattoos yanked backward as if repelled by magnetism. The red-violet light coursing through his arm flashed bright and the dragon's hunger spiked insistently. Fully exposed to the light and rolling in his palm, those same four letters shimmered faintly across its surface, repeating over and over.

Seed. Heart.

The scales raged past his shoulder to his chest and up over his throat. His tongue felt hot and he was certain the teeth in his mouth were not his own. The dragon did not await his permission. Pain surged through his jaw. It felt like she was reaching up from inside him to force his mouth open by jamming phantom claws between his back teeth and prying them apart. His arm stiffened as it went deaf to any impulse but hers. And the only one she had was to clap the hand she'd bestowed him to his mouth hard enough to knock his head back and send the seed tumbling down the back of his throat.

The pressure in the clearing vanished. Pollen blew naturally on the rising wind that swirled around his motionless body. His half the deal was complete and so was the dragon's mission. Control had returned to him immediately, yet he was pinned in place by the sensation of maso curdling and shriveling within him. It gathered like bile high in his stomach. An upsettingly familiar tingle spread from the bottom of his back and worked its way up, but when he wretched, it wasn't salt that erupted from him.

It was lunar tears.

Their petals tickled his throat and tongue and lips, forcing him to cough as much as he wretched, but they didn't stop coming. He heaved and coughed and convulse and they piled in his lap and spread across the dark stone, taking root as though they had always been there. Soon they were climbing up over his body as well. He raised his head as though he could escape being drowned by them where he sat, but it made no difference. They consumed him in their velvety hold.

He caught one last glimpse of Accord sitting in wait with her open book and a quill in hand before the petals crept over his eyes.