~A machine watches hope be left behind. Devilish images dance in shadows cast by the black flowers.~

The lunar tears were gone. So was the church. So was the forest.

A white expanse stretched in every direction toward the razor-straight horizon where it bled into an unclouded crimson sky. Was this...? No. A flat desert of salt without visible end wouldn't be out of place among the more surreal of the underworld's landscapes, but it was too pristine. It lacked the grime and excessively grotesque aura of hell. No stench of rot and old meat. No demons. Not a drop of blood in sight. Even the sky cast no hue on the salt.

V checked his hands. No tattoos either. Only his black-scaled arm and the brand in his palm.

~'We'll be together again' whispers the prophecy. Time bends and births black and white intonations.~

If this was still the domain of the gods, it must have been far deeper in than before. The singing was human and intelligible if not especially melodious. A whisper ran under her voice that V could only make sense of as metallic, but not in the same way he would have attributed to an android or a machine. Beneath her song was the steely whisper of a sword being unsheathed. She sang the words syllable by syllable, as though there was a physical distance to cross between them and she had to carefully make the leap from one to the next.

Swiveling his head to try and locate the source, he saw a small crowd of white flowers stark against the red horizon. It was too far for him to be able to hear anyone singing from there, but just like hell, it would likely be best to lay down his human sensibilities as long as he was here. The salt slid and crunched beneath his steps. The air was too open and too still and they all lingered a little longer than they should. The swish of his coat, the slip of his hair against his ears, even the tapping of one finger along his tightly clenched cane—they all reached him as dull, lifeless sounds.

He told himself it was the dragon that set him on edge and not the subtly wrong nothingness. He could feel her focus increasing the closer they came to the flowers.

~Ancient and merciless voice. A prayer for solace answered not by god but by revenge.~

The cluster was made of six flowers: five as tall as he was and a larger sixth that towered over him like a tree. He circled them with a frown, took a running start and leaped atop what he gauged to be the smallest, and bounded from its edge. He didn't quite make it, but he managed to dig his cane into the petal of the sixth flower. The sudden addition of his weight didn't cause it to move or sway, and he was able to pull himself up on top of it.

He exhaled, short and sharp through his nose as he looked at the distance back to the ground. Heights were still a hassle without Griffon.

A woman sprouted where the stems should have been. Hair as white as his own fell over her shoulders and pooled at her hips where she was fully melded into the flower. Most of her left arm was missing. Her right eye was consumed by a flower that closely resembled a lunar tear, save where the petals were stained in shades of pink.

V held up his left hand quizzically. "Is this your enemy?"

The dragon could not be bothered with the pleasantry of a calm answer, and simply yanked him forward like a too-large dog on the too-small leash of his arm. Not only did she take him much closer than he preferred considering he had no idea what he was up against, but she wasted no time wrapping his talons around her neck.

Whoever or whatever this woman was, she was the source of the song. Her mouth wasn't moving and his grip was tight enough that he could feel the bones of her spine pressing into the curve of his fingers, but it was nonetheless her voice that whispered on the air, so close it was nearly inside his head.

~A crimson night blooms. Wings and feathers unfurl and gaze down.~

Watcher, the dragon flashed at him with sizzling intensity. Giant.

"I see."

The woman's eye opened as he lifted his cane. A curious color, identical to the hue bleeding into the center of the flower nesting in her other eye. Her mouth parted and her scowl was just beginning to take shape when he shoved the cane through her. A choked grunt gurgled from her lips and her eyes flashed murderously as they locked onto his.

In other circumstances, the look might have thrilled him with the promise of a challenge. She had the look of someone who had spilled blood and would spill it again given the right motivation. As it was, this was business and he preferred to finish it quickly before the android with the suitcase decided to disappear just as mysteriously as she'd appeared.

He kicked off against her shoulder, using the extra push to yank his cane free from her chest. Blood cascaded down her body and wet the weapon's edge. Perhaps absence did make the heart grow fonder. Such a constant part of his existence and it had almost become a novelty to see so much of it again.

As he flicked the cane clean, the woman split completely in half from head to hip. The stream of heart's blood was replaced with a violent spray that shot into the air, gushed across the flower in bright splatters and showered down on V. His nose wrinkled and he raised a hand to shield his face from the more excessive splashes.

A completely new body sprouted from where the old one had already melted down into a red, soupy sludge as the center of the flower.

The woman was fully awake this time, face pinched by lines of pain that were mostly swallowed by her flinty glower. For a moment, they simply exchanged contemptuous looks. Him, looking down at her with the kind of annoyance even Griffon had not managed to arouse in him when they first met and her, somehow managing to look down her nose at him like something she wished she hadn't stepped in despite being half his size. Fresh blood dripped from both their faces and streaked their hair and was already drying on their bodies.

Without exchanging a word, V knew he was going to hate her and the feeling was going to be mutual.

"Was that fucking necessary?"

He drummed his fingers along the head of his cane and considered how long it had been since he'd been covered in gore. It came with the territory of killing devils, but he truly hadn't missed it.

"Don't ignore me! Who the fuck are you?!"

Impatient. Foul. Loud. He couldn't tell if it was better or worse that Griffon wasn't here. At least he could've taken on the task of speaking her language with no need to involve V. "No one you should concern yourself with. I'm here to kill you. Nothing more."

"You're doing a shit job so far." Though she said as much, V noted her features soften and her shoulders drop as though the world had been lifted from them. "You got the tools to do it properly, or are you just gonna stab me for the hell of it again?"

"I wasn't expecting you to regenerate," he said, watching a trickle of blood run by his feet. "Much less so…spectacularly."

"You're telling me you made it all the way here and you have no idea what I am or how you're supposed to kill me?"

"The former is irrelevant to me and the latter…" He shrugged. "It's part of an agreement with a dragon. It's by her whim that I'm here."

"Ohhh, I get it now…" Her lips drew into a sneer. "You're an errand boy."

He tapped the handle of his cane against his chin and cocked his head at her. "Was your regeneration painful?"

"What are you, a fucking idiot? Of course it—"

He pierced the cane through her a second time, in the exact same spot. Fresh blood spilled from her mouth down over her chin and neck. Between gurgles, she cursed him in combinations of expletives he'd never even considered before. She tore the cane out of her own chest with brutish strength and no regard for her own pseudo-mortality and immediately thwacked him across the face with it. He darted back enough to not be hit by her second swing, letting the handle smack harmlessly into his left hand.

Her eyes traveled the black ridges and violet valleys. With a ragged breath, she raised a single pointing finger toward it before she split in half and showered him afresh in blood.

Again, she was reborn.

Again, they stared at each other, all narrowed eyes and flattened lips.

He drew a long breath and pushed his fingers through his soiled hair. "Shall we try this again or—"

The screech she loosed shattered the air like the collapse of a glass skyscraper. Wind and a burst of pink light blasted him back and sent him tumbling over the edge of the flower. He righted himself in time to land on his feet in the salt.

The woman stood on the flower's edge. She'd managed to tear herself free from the flower's core and stared down at him, naked and drenched in blood. She tucked a strand of slick hair back behind her ear. "What's your name?"

"…V."

She was on the ground before he knew it, leaving spatters of red and kicked up salt in her wake. His cane took the worst of her strike, but it was no less explosive of a hit. He slid back so forcefully he had to drop to one knee and dig his claws into the salt to slow down.

She wagged her hand and set it on her hip. "Pretty stupid name."

No point arguing that, since it was never supposed to be a real name. He stretched his fingers, working the buzz of impact from them and wiping at his split lip. "You used to be human once, I take it."

"Long time ago; what's it to you?"

"How'd you end up here?"

"Poor life decisions," she deadpanned. "Look, I'm not real interested in giving you my life story, cane boy."

All the better for him. Both that she didn't want to weave the tale and that Griffon wasn't here to latch onto the opportunity to adopt that name. "Do you know an android that claims to be an observer? Black hair, glasses, carries a suitcase?"

"Accord's still around, huh…" She smirked in a faint, nostalgic way. "Yeah, I know her."

"She advised me to come here." He raised a brow. "Is it possible she was hoping to save you?"

"That's a good joke." She marched across the salt until she was standing over him. "I don't need to be saved. I don't need your pity. I don't even need you. What I need is your dragon. So stop fucking around and kill me or I'll split you in half and spill your goddamn guts from here to the horizon."

The mark in the center of his palm stung. Red energy swirled along the empty lines of his tattoos and stretched up from his fingertips in long, wicked talons.

"That's more like it," she said approvingly, tapping at the flower in her right eye. "Come on. Don't fuck this up or I'll just regenerate."

The conclusion that this place was too clean to be hell may have been premature of him. The death she was asking for was a gruesome one. But he recognized the sort of profound exhaustion buried beneath that coarse exterior. She said she didn't need to be saved, but he suspected this place was no different than the inside of the Nelo Angelo armor, and death was very much her way out.

He rose to his feet. "A final question if I may?"

"Sure."

"There are flowers out there that look exactly like the one in your eye, but they're white and harmless. Is that your doing?"

"I have no fucking idea what you're talking about."

"...I didn't think so."

He drove his talons in through the center of the flower. Something squirmed against his fingertips and they snapped closed around it like jaws. A faint but piercing screaming shot through his senses and then faded away. He withdrew his hand quickly. She sank down and sprawled on her back in the sand, a red smear on a white landscape staring in the direction of the flowers as they twisted, blackened, and wilted into salt.

"Finally…" she whispered, her rose-colored eye rolling back as her last breath escaped. "It's quiet…"


V wasn't covered in blood, nor was there a split in his lip, though he felt a faint ache in his jaw.

The church was buried under a carpet of lunar tears glowing in the light rain. The threshold had collapsed, but Pod was still right where he had been before.

"GOOD MORNING, V."

"Where's the woman?"

A light feminine voice cleared its throat from just inside the snarl of roots at the clearing's edge. She was sitting out of the rain, her book held mindfully in her lap.

"The task is done," he said curtly. "Your advice?"

"You don't mince words, do you? Come have a seat, you've been gone a long time."

He trotted down out of the church. "How long?"

"REPORT: 68 HOURS."

He sighed and joined the android under the arch of a root, leaning heavily on his cane. "Well, Accord?"

She smiled approvingly. "It's the nature of a demon to be able to reach the soul of a thing, Mr. V. Congratulations on destroying this branch's only active Queen Beast."

"You told me I couldn't kill the gods."

"You can't. What you fought were Watchers…or Grotesqueries, depending on who you ask. Their relation to the gods is probably best understood if you think of them as angels. They work on behalf of the gods, but they aren't the gods, themselves."

His head tilted back and he closed his eyes. A headache was forming right between his brows. "And let me guess. Dragons are demons?"

"Dragons are dragons. It doesn't suit you to try and be cute, Mr. V, leave it to the professionals." She opened her book and flipped carefully through the pages. "I'll try to keep this short for you as a courtesy, but you should listen carefully."

"11,089 years ago, in the dimension your dragon originated from, there was an unexpected and catastrophic dimensional event. The same way you suddenly appeared in this world, a city suddenly appeared: The Cathedral City. With it came monsters, the dragons, and human access to magic. 150 years later, a major magical accident would reveal that an entity known as the Black Flower was also within the city. While it was mostly contained, a fragment did manage to escape. That fragment…" She plucked a lunar tear and held it up over one of her eyes. "Parasitized on the body of a freshly dead woman and made her an Intoner with the power of Song—the singularity Zero, who you had the pleasure of meeting."

"Not the word." Far from it. From the moment she opened her mouth it was like someone was trying to start a fire by grinding together two shards of unglazed porcelain. "You've never actually met her if you think it was a pleasure."

"Correct. The recorder in charge of her case made a sacrifice to ensure one of the timelines reached a successful conclusion. The Flower is an infection mechanism that spreads the power of Song. The immature form, the Intoner, can summon a single Watcher. The matured bloom causes the birth of a Queen Beast, whose song is limitless and can only be silenced by a dragon." She dropped the flower. "Unfortunately, the trouble with managing multiple timelines is that deaths can be sudden and a quarantine request does not always arrive in a timely fashion."

"In short, the Zero I met is the result of your failure to properly contain her."

"Blunt, but correct. Zero was aware of the danger of the flower. She considered it her responsibility to secure a path to her own death before it could fully bloom. There were certain obstacles. Defense mechanisms from the flower and in several cases, unexpected complications." She flipped a page in her book. "We are at the end of a timeline in which Zero died. Only 100 years after that is when your dragon and her original pact partner crossed to this dimension and caused the 6/12 incident. I've had suspicions for a long, long time that the giant who appeared was the Zero from a failed timeline, who was consumed by the flower."

"And you used me to be sure."

"I didn't have to. You and the dragon are part of each other now. They're the natural enemy of the Flower, you know."

"I don't, and you'll pardon me if I also don't understand how this information gets me back where I came from."

"This part is just to impress on you what you shouldn't do." She held up a smooth black object he at first mistook for another seed, but upon closer inspection, it was merely a black pearl. "To put it bluntly, Mr. V, as long as the dragon exists in this world, there will always be maso and the gods will never be too far away. Because the gods made the dragons and the Black Flower. So this goose chase where you try to re-enact the 6/12 incident? I needed you to lay Zero to rest for good and neutralize the Flower before you accidentally caused a cataclysm."

She threw him the pearl. He rolled it experimentally in his fingers. "So?" he said patiently. "What is my alternative?"

She clapped her book shut. "If you want to get home without ending this world, I propose that you do some digging and find the rest of the dragon's body."

His brows knitted. "It was lost thousands of years ago. No one knows what became of it."

"You knowing your history really does make this a lot more pleasant." She rose and lifted her suitcase. "Unfortunately, you know human history, and this has been an android world for many, many years. In 6230, 'dragon' weapons were tested in the kingdom of night. Surely someone in the Army of Humanity must have some record of the endeavor?"

"How is finding the dragon's body going to help me?"

"You want to create a tightly controlled opening to a specific dimension. It's not that it's impossible in this world, you just don't have that kind of magic. The dragon alone doesn't have that kind of magic either, but together you'll be able to make something happen."

"I don't favor endeavors that call on so much blind faith."

"It isn't faith. I already know it can happen. It always does."

He raised a brow and squinted down at her book. "Some wisdom from your records?"

She clicked open a pocket watch. "That conversation will have to wait. You have a message incoming."

His eyes flicked to Pod 042, but the support unit was quietly hovering right where he'd been the whole time. When V looked back, Accord was gone.

"Damn..."

"ALERT: HIGH PRIORITY TRANSMISSION RECEIVED FROM POD 153."

V pinched at the bridge of his nose. This day—these last three days, apparently—had gone so exquisitely off the rails he found it hard not to laugh. A part of him hoped this transmission was 9S excitably calling to say something benign, the more banal and ridiculous the better. But life had taught him much better than to let hopes like that linger long enough to turn to disappointment.

"What is it now?"

The screen clicked open, but no video appeared in the usual space. It was pitch black, and V felt his shoulders tighten well before the message came through. It was an image of 9S, slumped lifelessly on the cobblestones of the throne room with a single line of text at the bottom.

'Change of plans. Meet me in the throne room. —8E'