Notable OCs: Pegasus Lance's Saint Generation, Civil War Saint Generation, World War Saint Generation, Daemon Lucifer's Specters, Maiden Elisa, Priam's Black Saints; Cyrulian Refugees
Notable Original Concepts: Mount Olympus Training Ground, Sanctuary Court, Teos Cloth, Athenian Empire mythology, Isle of Gardens, Stardust Prison, Hades' Dark Princes; Desert Beyond, Sanctuary Town Layout & Buildings; Kido Mount;
Recurring/Cameo OCs of Jenny DeVic: Mrs. Schafurwatt, Cyrus
Recurring/Cameo Concepts of Jenny DeVic: Great Bodyguard Legend, Golden Line Heritage, Sanctuary Orphanages, Andromeda Island's Geography & Tests, Sanctuary Nobility, 88 Knights Festival
Author Notes:
-Story is past 1.25 million words! Yay. \ o w o / Getting these out as regularly I do is a LOT of work so, if you can, be sure to support the story however you can (reviews, sharing, posting, etc), since it's the only reward the story gets other than Jenny's Beta commentary;
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Please enjoy and review (^_^
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Specters and Skeletons are walking ticking bombs on the inside when you really think about it. Hades cruelly plucks us from amongthe world's most desperate and evil humans, promises us everything and anything in exchange for us to become cruel, empty husks… unrepentant beasts who torture and kill for brief pleasure, …and then to finish the hypnosis he just shoves a significant chunk of our old egos deep inside our hearts like a vault of incriminatory evidence. If we still cared at all about who we used to be, this becomes is the final stroke against our old lives.
And so, of course, all we're left with is the pain and the Evil Star. Even our old names are gone, only remembered in some forbidden page of the Book of the Dead.
What I can assure you, though, is that as hard as Hades tries to make us forget what's important to us, so he can make us better toys to kill with… he seems to have failed. I'm proof of it. I learned that there is something about our hearts that just retains certain things no matter what, so if you confront a Specter with something personal enough, something that used to be REALLY important to them… it will shake them, for sure. For Wyvern Rhadamanthys, music and whiskey seem to work… Maybe he was once in love with someone that he would think about while drinking and this is the way he punishes himself to forget. Or maybe he's just always been a cruel drunk…
What would happen if our repressed selves started rising to the surface all at once, like it happened to me? The Underworld would probably burst at the seams… I've given up on expecting any of the most ancient Specters to do it, though."
- 'Then-Future' Phoenix Saint Haisaku, to Altar Hakurei, being interrogated about the Underworld shortly after her cleanse in Death Queen Island
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Sanctuary,
House of Libra
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The night was even darker back in Greece and the mood incredibly tense at the 7th Temple, where Daemon Lucifer was accompanied down the stairs by his fearful, obedient men, which carried the blood-boiling hatred of someone whose pride had been offended.
"Prince, are you certain?!" Neferti asked. "Perhaps we could amass our efforts instead against the Cancer Gold Saint!"
"I AM! I'm dealing with this matter personally! Libra Dohko has dared to lie to me once again, and so the payment for his affront will be exponentially higher! Starting with the death of his new Pegasus student! OUT OF MY WAY!" Lucifer raged out, practically back-fisting a Skeleton out of his way as he re-entered the Hall of Balance. "Prisons damn me, I'm surrounded by wastes of space!"
Golem Treble with much hesitation wanted to point out the obvious. "B-but, Prince,… we expected Dullahan Hedron to only last so long against the Gold Saints, correct? Even if Virgo died, the Gold Saints would surely have slaughtered him. Our objective was to stall and demoralize them, which we have!"
The heat in Lucifer's head reached critical points, his mind rushing through the events of the recent battle at Virgo combined with that of his battle at Mount Rozan. He was absolutely sure of it now; there was only one person in the entire army of Athena that would know how to use the mythical Enraged Dragon Force; a student of Libra Dohko! It was a suicidal move that once defeated Bennu Kagaho that would not be entrusted to anyone, even a Gold Saint, unless they had that old tiger's absolute faith.
Which meant Dohko deceived Lucifer to save a Gold Saint's life at Rozan! The Cancer was probably caught by Alraune off his guard, wearing only his off-hand Pegasus Bronze Cloth, and not only did Lucifer fail to perceive it, believing the Libra's lies about feeding Pegasus lightspeed Cosmos, but the Daemon bought into Dohko's bluff about Pegasus Lance not being worth his time!
Was there no end to the affronts the tiger made to the Devil?!
"IDIOT! THAT'S BESIDES THE POINT! THIS ISN'T ABOUT VIRGO ANYMORE! IT'S ABOUT ME AND LIBRA DOHKO!" Lucifer roared, shrinking the giant to a cowering dwarf.
The False Specters exchanged bewildered looks, totally lacking context and not knowing how to make their commander happy.
The False Specters irked and shivered, knowing nothing worse than a Pride Star who found out he was lied to. Lucifer expected a certain atmosphere of terror around those he conversed with, where the promise of disproportionate punishment for deceiving him would deter any dishonorable or surreptitious attitude by those beneath him. Part of it came from the pleasure it gave the Specter of commanding the spirits of those around him to such an extent that they would dare not lie to him, as that's exactly what was expected of him towards Hades all his life, and another part was knowing that his commitment to directness and honor was what distinguished him from the Underworld God who deceived both False and True Specter alike with abandon, to various degrees.
As such, knowing that the Prince's fuse was a lot shorter than usual at this moment, Neferti tried to be direct. "Prince, are your orders for us to attack the upper Temples, then?"
"Correct! I want the House of Sagittarius fallen by the time I'm done with Cancer and Andromeda!"
"B-but… won't you want any men left behind with you?!" Neferti asked, concerned.
His blood-red glare was silencing, and so was the threateningly powerful energy mustering in his dark Cosmos. "Any of you who wishes to imply I need their help against a pair of Saints can stay to join them in the grave I'm about to create! Volunteers?!"
The entire sum of what was left of Lucifer's forces shook their heads. "No! We are confident in you, Prince!" one assured.
"We know you'll annihilate them!" another added.
Not daring to stay around to earn Lucifer's wrath anymore, the False Specters and Skeletons got their efforts together and were led out by Sphinx Neferti and Golem Treble. "Onward then! To SCORPIO!"
Centering himself, Daemon Lucifer's teeth gritted and his red eyes sneered towards the gate, where at any moment Cancer would arrive through. "I was going to destroy this House… turn this place into a crater! But now something much worse must be done to teach Libra Dohko, once and for all, that I am still the Blight of Sanctuary, the Archdevil of Despair, he who slays the Godslayers! He will be made to suffer the death of Tenma all over again, this time through Cancer Lance! ONCE AGAIN, THE DEVIL WILL DINE ON A PEGASUS' HEART!"
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House of Virgo
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The ruined Hall of Innocence was stormed and retaken by Athena's Papal Guards, who searched the Temple thoroughly for any hiding Skeleton or Specter only to find that all of them had been killed in the assault led by Cancer Lance. Taking back a House while defeating a Specter and his Skeletons was a reinvigorating triumph, all the more ameliorated by successfully rescuing Virgo Shaka, but the Gold Saint's weakened mental state was a cold shower of sadness darkening their night further.
It only got more complicated, not less, when Saga, Aldebaran, and Mephisto arrived at the Virgo Temple. "Hey, you saved Shaka?!" the Sicilian brat called.
Lance and Shinta perked up. "You guys!" Shinta rushed to their side immediately and gasped at the sorry state Aldebaran was in. "Aldebaran… are you okay?"
The Taurus Gold Saint looked anything but. His helmet was missing a horn, his face was swollen and bloodied, his Gold Cloth was smudged and cracked in several spots, though not torn or pierced in any place, and a countless multitude of bruises and injuries hid beneath the Taurus armor's surface.
Aldebaran lied with all the teeth in his mouth. "O-oh yeah! I'm p-peachy! No need to worry about m-me!"
Saga gently rested the Taurus down next to Shaka. "(The Behemoth Specter nearly killed him. I arrived just in the nick of time. We still have that guy to worry about, by the way.)" he messaged mentally, protecting Aldebaran's dignity. The blue-haired Gemini looked around and found relief in seeing Shaka alive and well, though his eyes were open. "What's the situation?"
Lance frowned. "Not good."
Once again, the Gold Saints shared everything they witnessed since their last separation, from the details of Saga's detour to Taurus (leaving out his encounter with his secret twin) to Lance and Shinta's battle up the stairs with the Papal Guards to retake Virgo, finally to Shaka's own account of the events of his fight with Daemon Lucifer and the False Specters.
However, while the sixth Gold Saint was physically saved, Andromeda Shinta realized that saving him emotionally may have been something they were a bit too late for. Moreover, as the blonde child succinctly recounted what he witnessed and discovered about the enemy as they battled him, the two Saints grew increasingly wary of the true size of the problem, with these strange stories of Specters being 'false', not tied to the 108 beads and being led by a stray Celestial Star.
Saga held his chin, recalling Deadly Beetle Gauromydas' strange words. "If what Shaka noticed is true, it correlates with some of their behavior throughout this night. Worse yet, it means that today we haven't fought or defeated any of the real Specters and Hades still has a growing force in the Underworld to threaten us with in the future."
Deathmask panicked. "You mean this crap will happen again?! Soon?!"
Saga nodded, expecting the very dead to rise from the grave should Hades make a direct move. "It will probably be worse."
"It will take years before the seal of Mount Rozan fully dies, so it's pointless to concern yourselves with that right now." Shaka added. "Daemon Lucifer is enough of a threat on his own."
Deathmask scoffed. "Why? Just because you got beaten? Big dea-" And he earned an immediate smack on the head from Lance. "OW!"
The Cancer Saint ignored the boy's complaint. "Regardless, we need to decide on our next move, Saga. We didn't take out any of their critical pieces here at Virgo, and four of the enemy elites still live. I'm sure that Papillion asshole is out there somewhere, still, given we can't talk to Aiolos yet." He then tensed up. "I'm pretty sure Lucifer is waiting for me at Libra."
Saga scoffed amusedly, recalling the green shooting star he, Deathmask, and Aldebaran saw flying off the Virgo Temple's gate being followed by a big fireball eruption that turned Dullahan Hedron into a pile of ash. "Yes, I think everyone in Sanctuary knows you are here now. You sort of gave yourself away pretty clearly."
Lance sweated nervously; with the urgency in saving Shaka and the emotions of the battlefield subsiding, the Gold Saint felt increasingly ridiculous with the risky move he took, even though he probably had no choice.
"A greater mastery of the Underworld Arts would have been a perfectly good alternative." Karkinos opinionated. "Deathmask is already capable of short-distance frog leaps by going in and out of the Well, while you on the other hand…"
"Not this crap again! Do you really think this is the time and place to talk about your creepy training methods?!"
"No true Cancer Saint has ever been made by worrying about the way he casts his dark brush! I told you, already, Lance…At some point or another you'll have to accept the nature of your zodiac… and forego your childish fears of the darkness involved in it."
"Worrying about it is what stops me from hurting myself or others with these powers!" Lance argued back. He would never have the reckless, amoral abandon with the Cosmos that Karkinos did. "I know you're more concerned about protecting this place and you'd replace me with another partner in a second, but I actually want to live to see the dawn, not have an irreversible out-of-body experience that gets me stuck in the Underworld well!"
"We'll attack Daemon Lucifer together, not one-by-one?" asked Shinta, concerned.
"I think tonight he has proven enough that he shouldn't be dueled, as much as it offends our Gold Saint traditions." Saga conceded. Kanon's words about his encounter with Lucifer had done their work on the older twin. "However, I have an important concern…"
Lance immediately guessed what it was. "The armors in the Temples."
A blue-haired nod. "Correct."
Shinta and Deathmask blinked. "W-what do you guys mean?" Deathmask asked.
"So you've realized," Shaka commented. "…With every armor off their Temple, the natural defenses of the mountain weaken…"
Saga shrugged. "I made an educated guess based on the events of Priam's assault on the Pope's Temple, but I had no proof until now. I assume you sensed it all along, Shaka?"
The blonde boy nodded sadly. "I did… But no more. I couldn't speak of it because it's not my place to do so… one thing about Daemon Lucifer;… he has the memory of an old friend attached to some of his moves, particularly his fire-elemental sword technique. When you battle him, you must expect to face as if there are two Cosmos in one body."
The Gemini Saint was naturally intrigued. "Two in one body?"
Shaka guessed his thoughts immediately. "It's not like the duality of a Gemini Saint, Saga. It's more like someone has entrusted their strength to this Specter upon their death. It is something that is quite possible with the Cosmos, provided the bond is powerful enough. Multiple Saints have done this throughout history…" Shaka then contemplated this mystery further. "I still don't grasp the story behind that… I can't picture a Specter who understands love or brotherhood."
This triggered a knowing look from Shinta, who shared similar puzzlements about the nature of Specters.
The Virgo Saint felt he should be more specific and addressed Lance directly, sensing that he would challenge Lucifer next. "He also has command over a divine technique… a spell of Hypnos himself called 'Eternal Darkness'. It's… a nightmare projection and magnifier technique similar to the Balrog Specter's Reincarnation technique, designed to strike you mentally and render you powerless. You must not let him cast it over you."
The Saints blinked, startled by a fear in Shaka they had never seen before, and Lance rubbed his head. "Alright, alright, I'll be careful… Geez, like that bastard wasn't dangerous enough as it was…. So how do we stop it?"
Shaka gulped. "It will be difficult without first-hand experience with this class of attack, but the move relies entirely on the Darkness Element, which has inherent weaknesses like any other. Moreover, Lucifer needs to take time to chant, cast and aim it, so it's susceptible to interruption… however, if he does cast it, your barriers won't filter it and your speed won't escape it. It enacts its effect on where you stand like an edict from a God, robbing you of agency against it."
Lance rubbed his chin, thinking about how he would proceed in such a case. "… That does sound bad, but I understand."
Aldebaran, whose horn had been cut by Lucifer's javelin, had to ask him. "W-wait… I faced him myself an' all so I know he's strong… but how does a guy like him know a move like that?!"
Shaka sighed. "… Techniques like these can be taught to those strong enough and have earned the trust of the divine… I once commanded the heavenly treasures of Gautama, after all. If Daemon had close enough contact with Hypnos, or someone else close to Daemon did, then it's entirely possible that with his power level he just mimicked the move."
The weight of the challenge ahead of him just increased on Lance's shoulders more and more. "Alright then… I guess it's time to do this."
Shinta nodded. "I'll help you!" he said. "Daemon Lucifer attacked my island and my students and I want to know why! I also can't let you fight him alone!"
Lance irked, worried. "Shinta, maybe it's better if Saga helps me inste-"
But the Gemini quickly intervened. "Wait, I think Saint Shinta is correct, Lance. Remember, Lucifer wants Gold Cloths to go up the stairs and engage him, and we still have to worry about Papillion and Behemoth… or better yet, I will worry about them!"
Aldebaran watched the Gemini walk towards the Temple's entry. "H-hey, Saga, are you sure?! You're just going to take on two Specters by yourself?! You saw how strong Behemoth was!"
"Aldebaran is right, this is risky!" Lance argued. "I fought that guy a bit and he's very strong. He's not like the rest of these fake Specters."
"He stands on our way to Papillion. It is far riskier letting Lucifer control what we do any further." Saga argued. "Right now, the lower Houses are emptied of defenders. Bringing the Gemini Cloth up to Libra will just play into their hands and give Behemoth and Papillion the chance they want to attack Shaka, Aldebaran, and Deathmask, and then surround us against Daemon. You know that, Lance. Also…"
Lance narrowed his eyes, suspicious. "Yeah?"
Saga's blue eyes glanced away. "The enemies got this far up partly because I was off my House. I want to teach that Behemoth he can't lay a finger on my Gold Saint neighbors and not expect the full wrath of the Gemini Gold Saint!" he vowed. "Afterwards… I'll be in a nice place to then move my armor back to the Gemini Temple before the enemy can seize any opening in the mountains' blessings."
Aldebaran lowered his head somberly. If he had prevailed over Behemoth, Saga wouldn't need to be taking this risk and he'd be able to help Lance fight the strongest Specter in the Libra Temple. "L-Let me come with you!"
Saga took one look at his injured state. "I didn't bring you all the way up here to go back to that guy with you, Aldebaran."
The Taurus Gold Saint forced himself to stand up, even though his body shook all over and dripped blood, making Shinta gasp in concern. "I'm b-better now! I can help you k-kick his ass!"
Deathmask was the only one uncaring enough to voice what everyone was thinking. "Dude, you don't even look like you can walk out of this Temple on your own, much less beat the guy who did this to you!"
The Gold Saint's arms spread out proudly. "I am the Taurus GOLD SAINT! I'll fight even if all my limbs are m-missing!" His vision then briefly blackened and he tumbled down.
Shinta caught him immediately and helped him sit back down. "… Aldebaran, I'm sorry, but you're staying here or I'm chaining you up."
The Taurus was willing to listen to an old sparring partner, but his pride was still a strong speaker. "Ah, b-buddy, …. you know I won't take that! What would Saint Daniel sa-"
The Andromeda Saint shook his head. "Saint Daniel wouldn't want you to do anything at this point but protect the needful. Shaka and Deathmask are going to be on their own, and the rest of us need to focus on our battles. I need you to be our bedrock, Aldebaran."
Distraught, the Taurus Saint eventually nodded. The last thing he wanted to do was get in anyone's way by worrying them, and it was true that poor Shaka was very vulnerable right now in a way Aldebaran never even imagined seeing him as. Fortunately, Shinta knew how to convey this to him without hurting his Taurus ego.
Agapethos approached the Gold Saints. "Lord Cancer, Lord Gemini, do we advance to Libra?"
Lance shook his head. "No, we've decided on a different strategy. Saint Andromeda and I will head up and battle Daemon Lucifer, while Saint Gemini will intercept the enemies going up the stairs further below. You guys will stay here with Saints Taurus and Virgo."
"Hey, what about me?!" Deathmask asked.
The harshness in Lance's tone shot up. "You will stay here, too! I might need someone to rush my armor down to our House for some reason!" he argued, knowing the boy was looking for a chance to sneak off.
The brat grumbled and folded his arms.
Shinta then added his opinion. "Wait, Lance, I think we should approach Daemon carefully, just stall him for time. Remember, Aiolos and the others are just above us!" he pointed out. "If we buy enough of it as Aldebaran did, then maybe Aiolos and the rest can join in and defeat the remaining Specters. Even Daemon Lucifer would have to surrender if he had to fight half a dozen Gold Saints!"
While this was exactly the kind of 'convince them to surrender' strategy he expected off of Shinta, in this case, Lance had to confess that Andromeda's input was way better than counting on Roshi's plan of blasting Lucifer with the Hyaku Ryu Ha. He still fully intended on smashing a couple of hundred dragons on the Specter's face, but if they could buy time for the others to beat the rest of the Specters in decisive enough numbers that they can afford to stop worrying about keeping the blessings up would be ideal, since it meant they could bring even greater number of allies to come help defeat the enemy boss.
The smile of relief and approval off Shinta's face was an upside-down rainbow. "Ah, thank goodness!" he sighed, resisting the urge to go for a hug and earning a strange look. "… Sorry, I expected you to resist my idea like you always do."
Lance sweated, remembering the power of Dark Revenge Blast. "No, I won't put aside my principles for Karkinos, but I will for you. You're actually worried about me, not about getting a good gravedigger to bury their skeletons." He then looked up determinedly in the direction of the Libra Temple. "Alright then… let's do this!"
A collective nod followed and the different Saints headed out, each with their own role in the upcoming battle.
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House of Gemini
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Papillion Ainsel looked towards the horizon, sensing the various cosmos moving around Sanctuary Town and the Aretias Forest. While Bat's Nightmare Sonar was long gone, he did not expect so many active signatures around. He counted at least half a dozen, including a large beast which was probably a horse. Specifically, in Sanctuary Town, he sensed a very odd cosmos next to that doctor that escaped him back at Jamir that was capturing his curiosity. It felt more like a strange blur, compared to Ophiuchus Iaso's Cosmos ember which was the same as everyone else's. Was there an anomaly in Sanctuary?
Heavy footsteps were once again heard coming out of the Temple and Ainsel chuckled amusedly when he saw Behemoth Torak rushing out of the Temple.
Encountering his bug-armored comrade, the Behemoth realized he was once again spun around. "BY PANDORA'S COBWEBBED THIGHS!" he found himself cursing out loud, having no lost love for Hades' liaison.
"Do you get it now what took the rest of us so long to get to Cancer? I had to hover it from the outside while Lord Lucifer dealt with the inward threats." Papillion confronted. "Though, it is strange, because the Labyrinth was inactive until now…"
Papillion was not incorrect; Daemon Lucifer's powerful Dark Revenge Blast had indeed disrupted the third Temple's defenses severely, nearly landing him and Gemini Kanon permanently in Another Dimension. Perhaps enough time had elapsed that the Temple's Labyrinth was naturally recovering, like a healing wound?
Torak started looking for ways he could circumvent the House somehow. "I'll knock one of these pillars out! And use it as a bridge to get to the roof! If that doesn't work either, then I'll BLAST this Temple to pieces with Mountainous Chaos!"
Ainsel scoffed. "What a terrible waste of stamina. These Temples aren't made of ordinary material, Torak. The cement in the marble is rippled with stardust. Even if you do break a path through, you'll be dangerously spent afterward."
The taller Specter groaned, frustrated, knowing Ainsel was right about these buildings. He felt it himself when battling Aldebaran at Taurus. It didn't make them indestructible, far from it, but it was just enough to render nuking the Houses a grotesque waste of precious stamina for someone trying to get through all twelve of them. Added to the fact that the Golden Zodiac was such a massive infrastructure, easily the largest in all of Sanctuary's properties, and some experts believed that a good chunk of the surface world's low supply of the precious Cosmos-absorbing material existed in the walls of the temples. It only took a well-circuited vein of silver-colored dust to make shackles and bars to hold people at the Stardust Prison jail cells, but it took much larger amounts to make a reasonably resisting wall in one of the palatial abodes of the Gold Saints.
But the Behemoth didn't let this stop him and he began studying one of the pillars to see if it had enough height for what he planned.
"Oh, would you stop being ridiculous?!" Ainsel urged, finding the whole thing silly. "The illusion can't be so hard. I'll help you through it in a minute, right after I'm done figuring out what's going on in the town!"
The tall warrior groaned. "What's so interesting about some low rankers that walked in?"
"One of them might be the one that killed Cyclops," Ainsel argued, his antennae twitching in search. His lips froze in surprise and then curved in elation as he closed in on a particular set of signatures. "And would you look at that! There IS at least one person of interest to the Prince! My, is that signal growing weak, too..."
The Behemoth raised his brow. "Really? Who is it?"
The insect-armored Specter gave him an expectant smirk, knowing Torak's past with this one. "It's one of the girls he visited in Rodario."
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House of Libra
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The Devil held a battle between patience and fury in his chest, waiting for his adversaries to arrive! He knew he'd come, because he knew what the warriors of Athena were like! It wouldn't be long now. He'd get to exercise all of his battle might on someone who not only wasn't too young to be fighting this war, but deserved Lucifer's full wrath.
As the minutes went by, the Pride Star's teeth sneered more and more. He couldn't stop the blue sparks from crackling in his fists. As the night advanced, he seemed to be uncovering more and more reasons to detest Shion and Dohko, if what they had done to him in the past wasn't serious enough as it was. Once he was done with the Zodiac and his coveted crown was on his head, the first thing he would do would be to claim the Libra Cloth back to Greece. That would surely draw Dohko out of the mountain, and he'd like to see that bloated Dragon God Seiryu oppose the authority of Athena over her own armors.
As he stood there, tense like a ticking time bomb, his thoughts raced around the clock, wondering what other insulting traps Dohko had laid out for him. He must have trained this Cancer in the ways of employing lifeforce into attacks, meaning the Pride Star should expect the Surplice weaknesses to be exploited. He must have also counseled these Saints against battling him on their own, so he should expect a fight against several Saints. Then again, maybe this Cancer would be too stupid to heed that advice. He was a Pegasus, after all. While he didn't seem as brain dead as Tenma back at Rozan, he still seemed somewhat in the same line of stubbornness and suicidal tactics. Time would certainly tell and Lucian was more than ready for the eventuality.
That's right. Lucian…. His real name was… Lucian.
It dawned on the Specter in that small pause from the war's fray that he had been thinking of himself more and more on the terms of who he used to be before being a Specter that night. Eurydice insisting on calling him this didn't help either. While he would always be proud of his Daemon title, as it was earned through a lot of training rather than solely Hades' curses, and while five centuries of habits would not die so soon, there was something altering about being finally free to express himself now that he has revolted against Hades. Specifically, It has altered his self-perception patterns, freeing his mind to remember things long gone.
Once the battle was over, though, he was sure he would have more than enough free time to explore these long-buried thoughts. Especially as soon as he was done punishing Dohko through his student.
Sure enough, the sound of metal steps rushing up the stairs was heard and the Cancer Gold Saint arrived inside the Hall of Balance. What a shock, he was on his own.
"Welcome to Libra, Pegasus!" Lucifer sneered, stressing the source of the lie thrust upon him as dark energies emerged from his body. "You're a bit too late to stop my men, but you're just in time to beg for mercy over your lies!"
Lance immediately recoiled, feeling the presence of Lucifer's massive, dark cosmos. He honestly didn't expect the Pride Star to just be there by himself. Even though Lance realized he pissed off the arrogant Specter massively just now at Virgo, he kind of imagined that the Prince would leave little to chance at this point and that scores of Specters would be coming out of the dark pillars around him to surround him. This didn't mean the situation was any less dangerous.
Lucifer could smell his fear, stoic as Lance seemed. It was stamped on his silence and worried look. "Do you regret stepping on this mountain to face me, now that you're here? You've recovered amazingly fast, considering that the last time I saw you, you were bleeding to death on the ground and that dwarf Dohko had to put his aged old body between us to save you!"
The Saint wasn't even one bit inclined to give Lucifer any explanations about how he was healed. "I got friends in high places. They picked me back up so I can come to kick your ass!"
Daemon laughed. From the strange look on the edge of his lips, it was a cackle full of restrained anger. "Oh really? Was it Seiryu again? Even if he healed you, I'm frankly surprised you've come back at all, after the beating I gave you! Then again, Pegasus Saints were always as hard to teach as winged mules!"
The Cancer Saint readied himself for confrontation. "This Pegasus is different from the last one you killed!"
This gave the Specter Prince pause for consideration. "So Dohko must have told you about it…"
Lance could feel the poison off the Specter's words dripping from his mouth. "Sort of… he told me you murdered that Tenma guy. It doesn't particularly intimidate me if that's what you're hoping for!" he assured. "And this time, you'll be up against someone with a Gold Cloth!"
And with this, Lance struck his fighting pose, adopting the familiar stance of the Dragon Style while his sharpening, flashing cosmos projected the stars of the 4th House in the air as his golden aura blazed high.
But Pride Star was unimpressed.
He lowered his head, smirking like he just remembered some bad joke. "Mm, mm….Tell me, Cancer… does it still bother him? Tenma's death, I mean. Oh Gods, I hope it does!"
Lance's foot instinctively dragged back in tension, feeling the sheer cruelty in Lucifer's words, a cruelty that would soon be fired at him with the force of a Dark Prince of Hades, but he refused to feed the Specter's delight by answering him.
Lucifer, however, could easily imagine it. "Even after all these years, I could just see it in his decayed eyes! The pain of it! It was my last pleasant memory from the Lost Canvas War, one of our last shared moments! Oh, and all this time after, how his pathetic heart must have wretched itself when he saw my foot over you! Does it make you feel loved, Lance, to know that your teacher, dwarf, that fallen genius of battle, looks at you… and just sees Tenma?"
There was nothing but a disgusted snort from Lance's part, more so about that Lucifer would resort to this than the words themselves. He, the Pegasus Cloth, and Dohko already dealt with this matter in private in the past (*), and quite frankly Lance wasn't the least bit bothered by it. Tenma was strong and their simulated battle had been difficult, but he was not the kind of idiot worth getting insecure about.
(*) Chapter 35
Instead, Lance confronted what he hated about the foe standing in front of him. "The fact that you'd still want to hurt Roshi like that after all these years is what brings me here, asshole! You're nothing but another cruel bastard in armor who thinks the world owes them everything! You wanted to hurt Roshi by killing another Pegasus?! Sorry! That's not going to happen!" he hated to disappoint, sweeping his arm to make his cape wave. "Instead you face the Gold Saint of Cancer!"
The Specter's red eyes looked him over and addressed the obvious for the first time. "So that's your real armor…?" He coyly commented. "Do you feel more comfortable in it…? Do you feel safer fighting me with gold instead of bronze? Do you know…" and his fists then immersed themselves in darkness and thunder. "- how many Gold Saints I've killed?!"
Lance sweated. "…I've got a good idea, from what I've been told… But if you think that will stop me after everything you've done ton-"
Lucifer's shoulders shook in chuckling, interrupting Lance's monologue. "Ah, ah, ah! What have I been doing?... Other than putting this entire mountain back in order?! Do you have any idea what you're trying to stop?!"
Lance's face twisted in anger. "I sure DO! You want to make yourself king of this place, like some sort of insane coup d'état! And you're using these weird fake Specters to do it!"
This last comment gave the Specter pause once more. He forgot that Shaka had deduced their status and losing him as a hostage would spill the beans on the False Specters to the Saints. This could become a problem, given that this teenage punk had in his possession several souls of Lucifer's precious few warriors.
"Mm…so Shaka has been telling you things." Lucifer calculated. He really thought the Virgo had gone catatonic, but perhaps the child was made of better mental fiber than he thought. At this point, though, Lucifer was still in a good position to kill all the witnesses. "All the more reason for me to go back down there and finish the job I started, then!"
"FUCK YOU! Your killing streak is over!" Lance roared, heating his golden flame aura as his anger increased. "AND YOU'LL PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID TO HIM! AND ALL THE PEOPLE THAT YOU AND YOUR UNDERLING FAKES HAVE KILLED!"
The golden heat of the cosmos was palpable to Lucifer's pale skin, despite the fair distance between them. The Specter was nothing but amused by it; his opponent was older than the other Golds, but still just a teenager short of adulthood. For Lucian, a quincentenarian, it was child's play to provoke these piles of puberty and prey on the created openings to teach them painful lessons in reality. This would be an easy battle.
Still, the attitude for his role was interesting. "Ah, ah, ah, what a novelty! A Cancer Saint who gives a damn about his comrades! You can forget about the offer I made earlier. I was interested in getting you on my side at first, but now that I know who you are and what you're about…" and Lucifer charged his aura into a larger size matching Lance's, welcoming the Gold Saint's challenge "… I'd rather crucify you and eat your heart out… right in front of your dear old teacher!"
With fear giving place to anger, Lance prepared himself for what was likely going to be one of the most important and difficult battles of his life! He leaned forward, aimed his left hand at Daemon's face, and held his tense, closing fist by his waist, charging a lightning bolt into his bones that would wipe the smirk right off Pride Star!
"LANCE!" someone shouted.
The two pairs of red eyes looked over.
Andromeda Shinta rushed inside the temple, panting. "Ah, what are you doing?! Why did you rush ahead of me?! That was not the plan!"
Lance kept his focus and charge. "…Sorry, but I was worried he had some ambush ready, and I'd rather trigger it before you got inside as well."
The Andromeda narrowed his eyes. "… I appreciate the concern, but you really make it look like you don't think I can take care of myself." He then beheld their adversary, recognizing him. "You're Daemon Lucifer… the monster behind everything that's been happening tonight!..."
The Specter just stood there staring at Shinta, his eyes open in shock!
The pink-armored Saint stepped up. "Are you surprised to see me here?! No more than I was when I found your goons with their weapons around my students' necks! Did you think I wouldn't come here to protect my friends and demand to know why you attacked my family?!" he confronted, driven to a fit of uncommon anger. Shinta burned his pink cosmos and his chains roused, forming a defensive circle. "I may be an Andromeda Saint, but I don't back off from people who put the ones I love in danger!"
The Cancer Saint kept his space, rarely finding Shinta in such a mood to beat someone up. At least he could be confident his pacifist friend would hold nothing back. "Alright, let's do this! I know how he fights a bit already, so I'll take the initiative for now. If things get rough, back me up."
Shinta nodded. "Yes!... You're just stalling him, right?"
While he hoped he could do more than that, Lance agreed. "That's the idea."
While the two Saints were the picture of readiness, though, the Pride Star seemed suddenly agape. Even his cosmos aura was shrinking, such was his state of disarray. He kept staring at that green-haired Bronze Saint.
To a point, it was starting to make Shinta very uncomfortable. "…W…What are you looking at?!" he demanded to know. His eyes were then sterned. "It's my armor, right?! Your Specters told me so! Why are you after Andromeda so badly?!"
But the Specter was unresponsive.
He only had one word in his mind, eyes pinned on the Andromeda Saint. "M… Michael?!..."
{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}
Chapter 60
Second Arc
Episode 21
Clash at the Scales
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Underworld,
8th Prison, Palace of Giudecca
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The largest building in the Underworld, the palace of Giudecca, was ventured into by Lady Pandora, who immediately headed towards the luxurious dining room located on the eastern wing, where her brother awaited her. It was closed behind a beautiful wooden doorway enclosed by scythe-wielding armor statues that magically uncrossed their weapons from the handle.
Her pale hand hesitated in reaching it, her breath cut short. Usually, she would be elated to be called by her brother, but she was now here because Valentine had told her Hades finally awoke from the grievous wound inflicted upon him by Daemon Lucifer. Would Hades punish her for her lack of foresight about Pride Star's intentions? She spent quite some time close to him, after all, and the Specters were her responsibility.
Or worse, would he display the signs of some horrible injury in his heart, broken by the stabbing from an otherwise long-loyal Prince?
Gathering her aristocratic dignity, she faced the unknown head-on, knocked at the door, and waited for none other than Hypnos' voice to signal permission to let her come in, which she did. She found her brother sitting at the table with the God of Sleep, beholding a mirror laid out on the wooden surface.
"My Lords!" she greeted, bowing. "I came as soon as I heard you were awake… Please, forgive me for my blindness. If I had any idea-"
"We'll discuss that later, Pandora," Hypnos assured. "For now, take a seat. Lord Hades would simply like the company of his sister."
Humbly obeying, she took the side seat on the table to her brother's left, thankful for the God of Sleep's patience for her mortal incompetence. Normally, she would have been wary of Thanatos's presence, but it seemed as if the two Lords decided not to importune the God of Death with whatever they wished with her. This didn't mean a harsh punishment did not await her, for Hypnos was capable of things more terrifying than mere death.
Hades smiled weakly. "Pandora, I'm so happy to see you. After I woke up from my terrible dreams, all I could think about was having you by my side." He merrily lied, causing the raven-haired woman's heart to palpitate with the honor of a God saying such things to her. "We prepared a special occasion for this evening and I wished for no one's presence but yours."
"Of course, brother!" she gladly replied. She regretted not bringing his favorite tea, but surely she could make some. "I apologize for my tardiness… but Sanctuary's forces are currently besieging my Earthly Castle, under the command of the retired Gold Saints."
"No matter, they will be dealt with in time," Hades assured her.
"You see, Pandora, something wonderful has happened and it requires our full and dedicated attention," Hypnos revealed.
"It has?" she wondered.
"You see, Pandora…" said Hades, as he caused the puppet's hand to rest on top of hers."…it would seem that, in the Sanctuary, the Saint of Taurus has made a rather reckless decision. Losing his battle with the Behemoth replacement but anxious to help his comrades in the fight against the Celestial Star of Pride, he left his temple and was marching towards the 7th one."
While she dared not vex her lord, Pandora still felt the need to press something vital. "My lord, your kindness is so deep, but I wish you wouldn't keep addressing a traitor by his Evil Star title. Those who turn their fists against you should not be considered part of your Chosen Ones."
The red-haired puppet's head shook. "On the contrary, my dear sister. Daemon Lucifer will always be my Evil Star… every Specter will, regardless of how they fall." He denied, with an odd stressing that got her attention. "They may make their mistakes now and then, but their souls are still forever mine, no matter what they or Athena think… My love for them is just that big."
While her purple eyes detected a sly smile from Hypnos at what her brother said, she had absolute trust in her brother's stance, naïve as she may have thought it was. Who was she to think a God was wrong? She, therefore, beheld her contempt for the subject matter and pled her brother to continue.
"My Lord, you were saying about Taurus? What about his departure?" she asked, ignorant of the False Holy War. Did this have something to do with the Saints currently besieging her castle?
The puppet got its bearings, feigning frailty. "Ah yes, well,… My Specters haven't been informed yet, but the current conflict in our hands with Athena has been escalated further… Daemon Lucifer has invaded the Golden Zodiac."
Her body froze and her eyes widened. "… What?!"
Her mind reeled at this revelation! The traitor had attacked Sanctuary? Was he insane, fighting a two-front war with Athena AND Lord Hades? Was this the reason why the Saints were outside, believing Lucifer's offensives to be their own?
She found herself laughing. "Ah, ah, ah! Has he truly gone mad?! He will be annihilated! What hope does he stand against a force that we have not defeated ourselves in thousands of years?!" she demanded to know, offended that he'd dare to take this initiative without Hades' protection.
Hypnos nodded. "Don't be so sure, Pandora… Daemon Lucifer was personally trained by my brother and tempered by two Holy War cycles. The False Specters, as he has taken to call the replacements, are winning their way through the Twelve Temples. They already made past Virgo."
Had she been serving her brother tea at this point; her hand would likely have dropped it! He had made more than half the way through to the Pope in a single night?!
Feigning a melancholic frown, Hades nodded. "I'd shed a tear of happiness for this, were it not for his betrayal. Alas, Lucifer likely seeks to implement his old mortal desires upon Sanctuary, rather than make the dream of a silent Earth every Specter has to become reality. Perhaps I can take solace instead in the weakening of my sinful enemies…"
"Brother, how do we know this?!" she asked.
"That's what we called you here for, Pandora." Revealed Hypnos, who then waved his hand at the mirror on the table, causing it to reflect a white mist instead of a reflection of the wood-plaque ceiling. "By Taurus' careless action, another Gold Cloth has left its Temple during Athena's absence. The defenses of the mountain have been weakening all night with every Gold Saint put off their Temple by Pride Star, and now it has reached a weak enough point that we can do this!"
The large mirror suddenly levitated off the table unto the air, flipping upright, allowing all three of them to gaze upon its murky glass. Hypnos then snapped his fingers and the white fog began to dissipate. For a while, several images flashed in it, as if it was looking for something throughout the surface world, but then it stopped and Pandora gasped with what she saw! The mirror now showed the insides of the Temple of Libra along with none other than Daemon Lucifer.
"But t-this is…Sanctuary!" she stuttered, shocked.
"Yes, it is, Pandora," said Hades with his velvet voice. "You would do well to pay attention to what is about to happen, for I have a feeling that, before dawn breaks, the House of Libra will become a place where the course of history will change."
Daemon Lucifer had to be wrong!
Two hundred and twenty years had passed! His memory had to be playing tricks on him, failing in the most catastrophic way possible!
This was too cruel to be true! Not even Hades would dream of doing something like this to him! What kind of insane twist from the Wheel of Life would land the soul of the fallen Specter, the champion of the Underworld, in the body of a Saint of Athena?! Lucifer had done the deed himself! He has cut down the condemned traitor to Hades' cause with Hades' blade, ensuring his very soul was destroyed and thus impossible to salvage.
But… he stood right there! Returned to his natural features, void of the blonde hair dye he'd style after his teacher Hypnos, with the previously red eyes uncursed back into their birth emerald, and the same face and look of someone disappointed with the world's cruelty but unbending in their will to make it better in their naïve, aspiring way! The height was the same for the age, the build looked similar enough and, most importantly… Lucifer recognized in himself the unmistakable sensation of standing in front of his old rival, along with all the mixed feelings of begrudging respect and ideological tension.
And… he was dressed in a Cloth of Athena! The blasted pink armor of the Godslayer Shun! This couldn't be happening!
Lance and Shinta blinked confusedly, wondering what the hell was going on with the Specter.
Indeed, the Specter's body was a pile of mixed feelings, ranging from confusion, to outrage, to denial, to the panic of someone who realized someone betrayed them in the vilest and violent manner, throwing their world upside down!
He needed some sort of proof, flimsy as it was. A warmth was felt in his stern and his hand reached inside his collar, searching for the star of silver. He took it out and beheld it, covered from the Saint's eyes. It was burning in his gauntleted palm, calling out to Lucian! The bead he hid in his arm plate also rattled! A far away feather burned in an unconscious Cerah's hand and a star above the Giudecca Palace, in the Underworld, shone with knowing evil. These were signs of the Princes clashing!
He nearly dropped the pendant, overwhelmed. Rattled, the Prince hid it back and pondered what to do… and what to think! Out of all the wrenches thrown into his plan, he never imagined encountering the modern Andromeda Saint would have been the biggest one. Did Hades and Hypnos know about this? Was this their intention, to let Michael worm his way into Sanctuary's forces? Or had Athena pulled a cruel maneuver and, not content with brainwashing Dark Angel in life, made him a Saint? Coming from the Goddess who routinely found ways to subvert the Book of the Dead, this was not out of her character.
The two Saints, however, had no idea what was going on, but also little reason to interrupt his thoughts. They needed to stall him, after all.
Shinta, however, felt deeply disturbed. "What do you think he's doing?"
"I don't know! Maybe he thought you were a girl like everyone else." Lance retorted, worried in his heart.
"I'm serious! That look he gave me… Does he know me?"
Daemon Lucifer forced himself to focus. He had to continue leading his assault, and this meant getting rid of these two as soon as possible! He was sure, though, that Shion knew of this! He had to! "Your Pope has committed another crime against me! I hope you're ready, Saints of Athena! I will have no mercy!"
Lance gritted teeth and recharged his aura. Whatever upset the Specter seemed now gone! "Come and get me!" And he began heightening his aura, knowing he had a few tricks up his sleeve that the Specter didn't know about yet, so he intended to start small! With a burst of cosmos, he performed a set-up step and then launched himself at the speed of light towards Lucifer!
Meanwhile, just outside the room, Terrestrial Weird Star Frog Zelos, who had escaped the fighting occurring at the 7th Prison between Rhadamanthys and the intruder, suddenly heard the voices coming inside the dining room. He saw the guarding statues with their scythes uncrossed and realized the doorway to the usually very private room was unlocked.
Leaping next to the door with indiscrete rubbery stomps, he crouched and slightly opened the door, doing his best to not be heard or seen. "My, my, what is this?" he wondered "A live show and I, the great Frog Zelos, have not been invited?" he then saw the backs of the two Gods and the mirror showing Daemon Lucifer with a shocked look on his face "Hee, hee, hee! What an interesting show! I wonder if Lord Hades is going to kill that wretched bat…I would certainly love to see that."
{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}
Sanctuary
House of Libra
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Lance crossed the Hall of Balance instantaneously and left a beam of golden light before his compacted Cosmos in his fist loudly swung at the Specter. He saw the distance between himself and his target shortening in the blink of an eye and readied himself to punch the confident stare off Lucifer's face, his body immersed in light!
Daemon Lucifer, however, would not entertain him, the blue cosmos in his hand focusing into a sharp shape! "You're not my target anymore! Out of my way, Cancer!" and his hand thrust forward, firing the powerful javelin beam of blue electrical Cosmos that had previously cut Taurus' horn in half intending to blast the reckless Saint to pieces.
But Lance was more than ready! "BARRIER: Negative Charge!" and he projected the ring layers of transparent cosmos ahead of himself. In the split second this occurred, a flow of negative electricity was countering the positive charge of Lucifer's thunder attack!
The result was the complete neutralization of most of the javelin's attacking power, causing the otherwise fragile shield to be more than able to parry it off like tank armor before shattering like glass pieces!
Startled by this outcome, Lucifer's red eyes widened and he hesitated, giving Lance the split second of reaction delay he needed to cover the rest of the short distance! "CANCER… CHARGE FIST!"
Lucifer crossed his arms while Shinta guarded himself against where he stood as the two fighters collided at the speed of light, raising an impulse with the force of Lance's strike!
The Daemon simply rose his arm in to block, the impact making the temple tremble with the blunt shockwave, the force of an angry Gold Saint pressed against his body making his dark cape waver and marble around them shake!
The battle was announced.
Shouting martially, the Gold Saint carried on with the combo, assaulting Daemon with a flurry of lightning-fast blows. The Specter silently moved away and parried each other, releasing fireworks of impacts that didn't so much as scratch his brilliant Surplice. A heavier kick trying to strike at the Specter's head but the experienced Prince just bobbed beneath it, leaving behind a huge opening to counter-attack the Cancer!
Gasping, the Saint made a blunt empty blast of cosmos in his hand to thrust himself away, but the Daemon didn't seem to have even tried to seize the opening, seemingly awaiting him to try something again. The Cancer obliged and rushed at him some more, burning his fire cosmos at a higher level. This time his combo of punches and kicks were so strengthened that they left in the air trails of burning orange and sizzle on Lucifer's parrying blocks. A cacophony of physical impacts was heard and Lance seemed to be pushing the defending Specter back.
For a moment, it encouraged Shinta's optimism, making him beam up. He expected a much harsher battle but the Cancer Saint seemed to be dominating!
Stepping down from a jump kick, Lance gritted teeth, alarmed! Something was wrong! He dashed forth and impacted Lucifer's stomach with a straight kick that loudly bashed him back, sending the Specter flying against a pillar that absorbed his crash without cracking. Seizing the initiative, Lance's hand tensed into a chop. "BLADE!" and he thrust it at the seemingly stunned Specter's neck, sick of his bluffing.
Muscles underneath Damascus bulged with dark cosmos and a dark grip captured the wrist that was powered with Blade before the other swung so powerfully that when it exploded on Lance's cheek the Gold Saint was knocked back across the Temple, hitting another pillar painfully with his back before falling to his hands and knees.
He coughed, head-spinning, and felt a tiny leg of the Cancer Cloth's headpiece fall off where Lucifer struck him. The first real damage had been caused to him. "There it is!..." Lance thought, finding the viciousness he felt lacking in the Specter. He got up in time to see Lucifer calmly approach him, red eyes locked on his. "A-Are you done playing?!"
The Pride Star was uncommonly silent and baited Lance with a hand gesture.
The blazing Gold Saint rushed back in with a Charge Kick that struck the Specter's shoulder before he could react, flipping him around. Swinging his body back down, Lance delivered a meteoric overhead punch that sought to stun the Specter but merely bashed his crowned head a bit. A reverse of motion and a battle roar then permitted a massive knee blow to rise and strike the Pride Star right in the chest, releasing some pent-up hate that seemed enough to knock the Specter off the ground a bit. Lance's fourth blow then came practically flying from the side in the form of a roundhouse kick.
That got caught by the ankle, startling Lance, before the Specter roared and bashed the Gold Saint straight through a trio of unfortunate pillars, painfully wrecking through them before smashing the Saint on the ground, cratering it. With darkness cosmos oozing out like a blood-drenched swamp, Lucifer quickly charged a threateningly large ball of cosmos in his hand, making Shinta gasp and scream out Lance's name in alarm. The whirring attack fired off and blasted empty crater ground as Lance swiftly rolled to the side, erupting in an explosion of vicious force that shook the mountainside, releasing echoes of rumbles.
Picking himself back up, Lance was truly alarmed. He was assaulting as fast and as hard as he could, but the Specter didn't even seem to be trying to fighting seriously. This fit his goal of stalling the bastard, but Lance was a bit proud of himself as a fighter and felt naturally bothered that his opponent wasn't taking him seriously.
"What the hell are you doing?!" Lance demanded to know.
The equally red-eyed Specter just glared at him hatefully.
The Cancer Saint sneered. "Do you think this is amusing?! You had no hesitation punching me around at Rozan! What's stopping you now?!" he antagonized. Deep down, he understood this was a terrible idea to be inviting Daemon to be fighting him full force, but he didn't prepare as hard as he did for this battle for his opponent to make him feel like he wasn't worth their time.
Even the pacifist Shinta who was more concerned about their stalling strategy found this weird. "He's probably preparing something. He didn't fire that blast nearly as fast as he could have!"
"I know! That's what's worrying me!" and he recharged his cosmos, ready for round three. "Alright, then if you're just gonna stand there and let me play 'easy mode', fine! CANC-"
There was a dark surge and then a silver-knotted fist clad in Cosmos exploded on Lance's face, projecting him right back against the pillars, reversing the flow of the fight. Beholding his knocked down opponent and considering him down for the count for a moment, the Specter clicked his tongue dismissively.
"I don't know what to think! First Shaka, then the rest of these kids, and now Andromeda… I feel like Sanctuary is pulling the rug beneath my feet! The more time I waste here, the more traps Arles will spring on me! I have to get to the bottom of this issue NOW!" the Specter thought to himself. He saw the downed Gold Saint beam right back into the fight with a Charge Fist and blocked it before successively parrying every single one of his follow-up strikes with a half-distracted series of arm movements.
Feeling his attention split, he groaned; Lucifer twisted his wrist to catch on the palm a powerful punch from the Gold Saint before pulling it aside to put Lance right on the path of a spiraling kick that sent the Gold Saint flinging to the floor, thudding around in the marble. Once again the Gold Saint's attacks were defeated unceremoniously.
Lance groaned and got up as fast as he could, fearing a continuation of Lucifer's assault, but once again the Daemon deliberately just stood there, head in the clouds, which was seriously starting to infuriate the teenager. "A-Alright, that's it! What the fuck is going on here?! I thought you were going to annihilate me!"
The lowering of Lucifer's chin was as tense as it was reducing. "Hm…Do you think you deserve me fighting seriously? Liars don't get the honor of that, they get punished! And you, Lance, are just some nobody that Shion and Dohko put between those kid Gold Saints and whoever's breathing down their necks!"
The Cancer staggered. "W-What?!"
That's right, the fourth Gold Saint was probably the most battle-experienced of the current bunch, but to Lucifer right then, especially after meeting Andromeda, Lance was nothing but just some poor sap put up to the role until Manigoldo's spiritual successor was ready. The Pride Star saw it clearly now; the new generation of guardians of Athena was part of a grand plan from Shion to restore the glory of the Lost Canvas generation. Knowing Athena, it was all also likely part of some grander spiritual scheme of hers to retain the upper hand in wars against Hades. She had no hesitation granting these kinds of honors to Saints who were just strong enough to be useful, but not enough to be a threat to her, after all.
Unlike his family, right?! Those could burn in their manor for all Athena cared, dragged off their homes by the mob!
The murky aura in his body flowed faster with the anger in his veins. Confusion was slowly giving place to even more hatred for the heads of Sanctuary, who dared to commit this affront of the highest order against him, giving the Lost Canvas Saints the gift that was denied his bloodline while robbing him of the most important friend he ever had!
The atmosphere in the Temple became darker as the Prince spoke further. "You heard me… unfortunately for you, there will be no glory in this battle anymore, even if by some impossible miracle you happened to beat me! Grander things are going on than you could possibly imagine, -" and his fists closed with threatening sparks that flashed the temple blue. "- so allow me to demonstrate how utterly out of your league you are, Gold Cloth or not, and dye Dohko's temple red with the blood beaten out of you before I mount Arles' head on a pike!"
Unwilling to be intimidated, the Gold Saint simply swelled his aura and prepared to go on the offensive once more, raising his fist. "We'll see about tha-"
Lucifer caught his wrist in the air, now standing by his side.
The blood in Lance and Shinta's bodies froze, their senses completely lost. Even Andromeda's laid-out chains hadn't reacted in time!
Scoffing in delight at the look of shock in his eyes, Lucifer took his powerful fist once more and exploded it across the Saint's face, definitely knocking off his helmet and leaving the two Saints with the first taste in despair. He then fired a gigantic blast of blue light, blasting Lance across the fields against the ground, loudly exploding in a shower of sparks and smoke.
"LANCE!" Shinta screamed.
{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}
Underworld,
Giudecca Palace
{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}
Observing the battle in the flat, reflective surface, the pale, raven-haired woman was taken aback by what just happened. One second Lucifer was standing far away from the Saints, the other he was deep inside their covered end of the Temple and trouncing the Gold Saint like it was nothing.
"Still as dominating as ever," Hypnos commented. "Quite frankly, it's such a shame he switched sides…"
"Yes." Hades somberly agreed. "With my Princes by my side, I could always feel certain that Athena's devious Gold Saints could not prevail on the battlefield, no matter what trickery they pulled. I miss that security."
Pandora was bedazzled, though. Her snake ring allowed her, an otherwise ordinary woman, to perceive things on the level of a Gold-rank warrior when necessary, which offered protection from any light-speed hand her subordinates may raise at her. No Specter, even Rhadamanthys, could ever hope of taking her trident away before she perceived their suddenly vicious movements and zapped them for the offense. What just happened there, though, while not directed at her, should have been under her range of perception to observe properly.
"My lords… what just happened?" she dared to ask.
The God of Sleep understood how illiterate she was in these matters. "It's simple, Pandora… our former Prince just gave a lesson to a Gold Saint about their own primary weapon; lightspeed. Gold Saints are defined by their mastery of the seventh sense and possession of a Gold Cloth, but, if to humans having the seventh sense is to have lightspeed…" he pointed out. "… how can any Gold Saint be of any significantly different speed from any other?"
She turned to him. "But… are they not all the same?"
This was an understandable assumption from someone whose functions were far removed from battling, but the reality was that many Gold-rank Saints could and were faster and slower than each other on the battlefield in significant portions. Hades and Hypnos were not primarily warriors themselves, and despised violence, but their vast natural wisdom as Gods granted them more than enough knowledge to understand the subtleties of employing the Cosmos.
And so Hypnos enlightened her. "When mortals unlock the seventh sense, they certainly raise themselves unto the stage of light speed, but the fact they inhabit mortal bodies, made up of cells and, on a deeper level, atoms with a mass, makes it so that achieving a full hundred percent use of lightspeed by a mortal's mere use of Cosmos is actually not possible. Even if excellently trained humans reach a very high level on the order of the nanoscopic percentage of approximation… a small, tiny photon will always be slightly faster than a human in a race just out of pure lack of mass weighting it down. This small range of speeds that exists at the border of true lightspeed… is where those who have unlocked the seventh sense exist."
"And as petty, vicious humans who do nothing but destroy, they all find those nanoscopic differences to be all-important in all-or-nothing encounters," Hades added, having nothing but contempt for human behavior. "Gold Saints are no different… Even though the range of near-to-lightspeeds is mathematically so tiny, with their senses at the level of a Celestial Star of ours, that range might as well go from the pace of a snail to the gallop of my carriage horses."
Hypnos chuckled. "In other words… Lucifer is just too fast for our poor Cancer Gold Saint!" he mocked. "He may be a traitor, but he's still a genius, and I'm afraid Thanatos has trained him too well… so he can push himself to speeds bordering light at a much closer point than the common Gold Saint can."
Pandora nodded humbly and paid attention to the battlefield once more, beholding the downed Cancer with a new understanding. It was amazing what the Twin Gods could accomplish when directly involved in raising a weak human like her, but while her little brother must be happy that another of Athena's filthy warriors was getting trounced by one of his, she felt disappointed, for she deeply desired the destruction of Daemon Lucifer, the man who betrayed them all.
"And should Lucifer acquire what I think he's after…" Hades pondered, the burning image of a hated legendary armor in his mind. "…then his already formidable abilities might grow close enough to a Godslayer's level that, at the helm of Sanctuary, he could become a problem like his cursed ancestor..."
"Isn't it amusing?" asked Hypnos. "Lucifer's lightspeed is so much more refined than the Gold Saint's he gave everyone the illusion of briefly appearing at two places at once! I don't typically enjoy fighting, but I will partake in a Gold Saint being humiliated."
Pandora sighed disappointedly. "In other words, the chances of these two Saints to stop the traitor are…"
"Absolute zero!" Hades assured his sister, sipping from the Asphodel tea his liaison made for him. "I'm afraid this battle will be less of a duel, sister, and more of a murder."
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Sanctuary Town
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Ophiuchus Iaso stood under the streetlight, faced with one of the least likely person he expected to see that night, especially in light of all the murders going on. "You… I know you!"
The look on her face was dazed and distracted, like under a drug high, gazing up at the silent moon romantically and resting against the wall with sighing fingers intertwined. She was young, had braided brown hair, and looked still dressed in her father's shop attire, which included a green apron and a hand-woven handkerchief tied around her head. A slight stench of fruit from someone who stood next to produce or frozen goods all day was detectable.
Her face turned to him slowly and a slightly worried look overcame her sleepy eyes.
The doctor, who had his medical coat over his plates of purple armor, carefully approached her and exposed a bit of his protection to identify his two roles as Saint and medic. "It's okay,… I'm Dr. Iaso, from the hospital, remember me? I've come to your dad's shop sometimes to get tobacco."
She just blinked, uninterested.
It crept him out, but they were in a dangerous situation. "You're the lady from the store down the street, right? Who works with her father? (*) I and your dad got into some bickering here and there because he can't keep his dumb racist mouth shut at the hospital consultations." he made sure to ask, which triggered a subtle nod of recognition from her. He felt comfortable mentioning this because he noticed the way her dad acted always bothered her. "Look, I know it's sudden, and you probably have no clue what's happening, but there are Specters around! They're the ones that made you go to sleep! You should go inside right now."
(*) Chapter 6
She looked away, seemingly reassessing things. "Asleep? Oh… I see…That makes sense. I guess they must be fighting the Saints, then…"
The doctor sweated. "Well, she can talk coherently, so I guess she's not in shock, but…" He then thought of his higher priorities. "There's a murderer somewhere in town… even if the Specters are all the Zodiac, it's not safe for you here."
But she smiled sweetly and gently shook her head. "Thank you… but I'll be okay…" she assured. Her eyes then surveyed around like finding relief in some new situation. "Yes, finally, I'll be okay."
He blinked, confused at her response, but pressed on. "Look, I'm sure you can handle yourself –" he loud-whispered, always finding Sanctuary Town patients irritatingly confident in how safe they felt under the shadow of the Golden Zodiac. "But I'm serious! There's some creep decapitating people on the rooftops and they could have lightspeed! Do you have any clue how much danger you're putting yourself in by just standing around here?!"
Once again, she seemed entirely uninterested. "A murderer? Is that so?... Well, thank you, doctor, but I don't care…" she confessed, lazily stepping away from the house door unto the paved street like, if anything, she felt freer than ever.
His brown eyes were stuck in affront. Was she actually on drugs?! "Are you listening?! I said –"
Elation filled her face. "I know! And I'm just so happy, ah ah, ah! I don't have to worry anymore!" she gladly assured, hugging herself and twirling around like a lonely dance. "I finally don't feel any concern at all for any of that garbage! I'm free..! Free from all this fear of some horrible thing happening at any moment, free from Athena, from that stupid church, from all these awful people filling this town to the brim…! It's so… fantastic!"
Iaso stood there blinking, not sure if he had stepped into the wrong Greece or something.
"This looks like a case of psychological breakdown. She must have somehow escaped the sleep spells and seen the enemy march through the street to kill them all. I advise restraining her until we can spare the time to employ the Thunderclaw. Shock therapy is quite effective…"
"(Shut up, you antiquated sadist!)" Iaso ordered his Silver Cloth, not sure who to be horrified with first. Admittedly he had no idea how she escaped whatever happened to everyone else that put them to sleep, but maybe it wasn't the time to figure that out. "What do you mean… you no longer feel that?"
She eyed him kindly. "You want to help me, don't you?... You must be a very kind doctor. But… I'm better than ever. I already got help. It took a bit because I didn't get it at first, but… tonight it made sense. I finally made it work…"
He stepped towards the woman like she was holding a bomb in her hand, careful to not show any hostility or intention to restrain her. "Okay… do you mind telling me who helped you? Where are your parents? You live with them, right?" and that when his brown eyes darted down unto the red trail on her sandals. "Hey, wait, are you hurt? Let me see th-"
But the Saint stopped himself when he noticed the moonlight shining on the footprints leading out of her house, which he then realized had its ajar door intact, with no sign of being broken into.
She stared at the distracted medic and clutched something in her pocket. "…Is something wrong, doctor?"
He faced her again. "By Apollo, what the hell did you DO T-"
The young woman lunged at him, drawing the large knife and knocking the doctor to the ground before he raised his cosmos, and her hand stabbed down on his face!
Blood spurted out, further wetting the street under the lamplights!
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House of Libra
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Blood dripped from Lance's head and he coughed, feeling buried in marble rock and having no clue what just happened. He brushed the rubble off and got back up aga-
"WATCH OUT!"
Shinta's shout came too late and Lance was struck along the neck with a powerful lariat that smashed him through support pillars, thickened by layers of darkness cosmos and tossing him through the ground. Leaping unto the air, Lucifer's hand shone with a ball of purple cosmos that he tossed at the rolling Saint, breaking in middle air into a shower of cosmic shrapnel that bombarded the Temple's ground like a cataclysm of explosions, forcing Lance to dodge and leap away in a panic, thrust around by the bursting forces. His whole body was struck, however, by a dive kick coming out of nowhere at incomprehensible speeds and he rocketed through the ground, feeling like his Gold Cloth had sunk into his flesh harshly before popping back out with the force!
Rattled, the Saint pushed himself as hard as he could to recover and get back on his feet, and this time his young red eyes managed to catch sight of a purple mass zipping left and right before a fist came from below to try to strike him in the jaw, which Lance dodged with a startled back step. He did his best to endure the following close-quarter assault, which came in the form of Daemon Lucifer pummeling his guarding arms over and over with ultra-fast punches and kicks that challenged Lance's understanding of what the seventh sense was.
"Are you afraid, Cancer?! This is nothing yet!" And Lucifer feinted a punch to give Lance the chance he thought he needed to counter-attack, but as soon as the Gold Saint swung at him, Lucifer dodged with a body bob and swing his might punch up at Lance's gut, exploding with brutal force on his abdominal armor, cracking the gold!
Lance gasped, letting blood out of his mouth with an incredible look in his eyes!
The Specter beheld his stunned opponent's shaking legs. "You never stood a chance, you fool…" A massive elbow strike then dash-struck the Gold Saint, firing him off through the air with an electrical shockwave. The background was set alight by the illusion of a pitchfork-wielding demon and Daemon's hand immersed in purple lighting. "FEEL THE PIERCING TEETH OF THE UNDERWORLD! DARK SPEAR BARRAGE!"
The blow exploded off his punch in the form of a barrage of long, thundering meteors with spearheads, each carrying the cruel killing intent of the Dark Prince. Lance flipped his body in the air, still recovering, and frictioned his heels on the ground just in time to see the deadly attack that nearly tore him to pieces at Mt. Rozan blasting its way through the Temple, breaking ground and pillars alike!
But that's exactly it! He had already seen this shit before!
With blood dripping around his body, his fire aura emerged, empowering him to his maximum level, and his hands were encased in large flames. Knowing the piercing tips to be too dangerous to take on, he leaned forward and struck each approaching javelin' thunder shaft, focusing his attention to yet untested levels so as to punch, kick, bash and hammer every single blow the precise manner it needed to be done so, all while applying the subtle electric counter charge he needed to further null the blows, causing the deadly combo to slowly be parried off of him towards the sides, which were punished like an artillery killing zone.
After getting used to the precise pace he needed to defend himself, he then dashed forward through the last stretch of Dark Spears in retaliation, fighting his way through Lucifer's continued barrage.
The Specter smirked and leaped backward, letting Lance give chase. "Already adapted, just like a good Saint! What exactly was your trick?! Come on then, you puppet!" he mocked in his mind, seeing Lance as nothing more than a piece in Shion and Dohko's chessboard. Blue thunder filled his left fist as Lance rushed at him with raised meters of flame in his hands. "I'll show you just how outclassed you really are!"
Letting out a battle cry and having his seventh sense firmly locked on nothing but Lucifer's Cosmos signature to ensure he would not miss, Lance swings his fire fists at him, but he struck nothing but vanishing after-images of the Specter that gave away to another image of Pride Star lightly off the side of Lance's attacks. Furious punches, kicks, and elbow blows repeatedly tried to catch the vanishing Specter, but he only sped away in after-images, blitzing left and right in utter mockery of Lance's attempts to catch him.
With a powerful step in that loudly crushed the ground, Lance swung his other leg faster than he's ever been able to, powered by sheer frustration, but Daemon Lucifer's armored body once again vanished into nothing, letting the Saint mark the pillar behind him with a fiery foot crash that crushed and melted its way through cement and marble, destroying yet another support for the roof.
Andromeda Shinta observed Lance landing with Lucifer reappearing right by him, cackling. "This isn't good! Lance's defense is doing better, but he can't so much as even touch Daemon! Our plan isn't going to work like this!" he thought, grasping his chains in anticipation. "I need to do something… or he's… he's going to kill Lance!"
Lance panted and backed away, having no clue what to do. "W-What the hell is going on?! We're both gold ranks!" he exclaimed. With a fighting style based around the Charge Fist, Lance had always been particularly confident in the acceleration levels he could reach, but his foe was effortlessly running circles around him as if Lance was back to being a Silver-Rank. "You can't possibly have that much more speed than me!"
A knowing laugh came out of the Specter's mouth, partly in amusement, partly in disbelief at the ignorance in these young fighters that Shion has allowed to perdure. He didn't have to explain anything to him.
"You remind me so much of Dohko right now! No wonder he took you in! He too would gasp and protest and raise a fuss about how impossible what I do is! It never even crossed his mind that Seiryu and that witch Haisaku failed to prepare him to face any opponent he liked!" the Pride Star mocked, utterly dominant. "It's going to be a pleasure to prove my superiority over Mount Rozan's pathetic martial teachings once again!"
The Saint practically backed away against a pillar, having no clue what to try next.
"(Lance, tag me in!)" Shinta demanded, shielding his messages. "(We'll take him on together! If we use my chai-)"
But Lance didn't like how little his mental clock had moved since the fight began. "(NOT YET! If we do that we'll force him to fight for real and we won't give the others any of the time they need to help us!)" He doubted the other Specters had even reached Milo yet. "(I still have things up my sleeve to throw at him!)"
"(Your Thunder element won't be enough, you know that! Not like THIS!)" Shinta argued, knowing exactly what his friend thought he was going to do. "(We need a way to balance the odds NOW!)"
Unaware of their conversation, Daemon calmly pursued Lance.
"What did you think, Cancer?! That I'd get this far by being the same as a Gold Saint?! Look around you! I've made it to the Temple of Libra, past half of Athena's champions! No Specter has gotten this far in several Holy Wars! And you came here with a Bronze Saint to fight me?! PATHETIC! You don't even deserve the consideration of me battling you seriously! Especially after all your LIES!" he derided as if the mere fact Dohko kept Lance's status hidden trounced all the suffering Lucifer got away with causing that night. "Now you'll suffer the most pitiable of defeats of this night; coming all this way from China, crossing all these Temples, getting past all those of my men… only to die without as much of a fist laid on my flesh! Isn't that just perfect?! Dohko will be so proud of you!"
Lance snarled. "You keep his name off your mouth! You think you're such a big shot, talking about imperial birthright and me lying as if anything you've done tonight is honorable?! What have you accomplished over killing a bunch of innocent people you say you want to rule over and scarring a bunch of kids?! Roshi is a THOUSAND TIMES more worthy of my respect and obedience than you'll ever be!"
But the Pride Star had more than enough ammo to counter this. "You have no idea what you're talking about, child! Dohko?! Honorable?!" he worded, counting Lance among the kids when compared to his own timeless age. "Even not mentioning how he's part of these cowardly, pathetic warriors that Athena has made Gold Saints, who do you think taught him to be this sneaky with me?! He was raised by a pagan Dragon God and his Master was a traitor to her CAUSE! A former Skeleton of Hades, Phoenix Haisaku!"
The two Saints staggered, especially Lance, who knew the cruelty of Death Queen Island personally. "Phoenix…?!"
Lucifer cackled, feeling this somehow struck his ego. "You must know something about that island, from the look on your face! I bet Shaka has been keeping some stories from you as well!" he pinpointed, being one hundred percent right. "Sanctuary is full of nothing but fake paragons who pretend to have no skeletons in theirclosets! Who are they to act like they deserve anything better than a tyrant like my ancestor?! But you should know that better than anyone, considering what you're wearing right now!"
The Cancer Gold Saint tucked his arm on his Cloth chest plate. "S-shut up! You think just because I'm a Cancer S-"
"I DO! It's your destiny now! You don't have a choice, not if you want to master that armor of yours!" Lucifer interrupted, utterly deterministic. "They've all been freaks and murderers, even the ones that start off nice! The Path of the Cloth, is what you call it, correct? Just like Andromeda, who had to get chained and drowned, you too would inevitably adopt the ways of death, Lance! That's how the Cancer Cloth is at its best! As a killer!"
Though Lance felt quite uncomfortable in Karkinos' hide all of a sudden, the two Saints held their tongues, refusing to engage this line of thinking. Not only were they not interested in entertaining a Specter's hateful ravings about his enemies, but letting him talk was a way to buy everyone else time.
But then Daemon added something quite penetrating. "Just like every Gemini Saint has become a two-minded lunatic! They call Akassius the exception, but frankly, I think he just hid it better! No one gets the kind of power he has in this place without scaring some people into line! And your current Gemini will become one too! In fact… hm, hm." Lucifer chuckled, recalling his encounter with Kanon. "After what I've seen, I think he's well on his way!"
This comment made Lance, who saw Saga do nothing but his best to help them all tonight, explode into a dashing meteor of thrusting fire, but Daemon Lucifer saw the trajectory of his fist swing come a mile away, so when he countered with a rising knee blow, he made sure to plant it on Lance's nose as hard as he managed to, nearly shattering it to pieces. Lance screamed and bled, but he had no time to recover before Daemon charged a ball of blue light and pressed it hard against his body, blasting him all over into the other side of the temple.
Shinta rushed in and caught his friend before he landed harshly. "That's it, I'm stepping in, too!" he demanded.
Lance coughed as he was helped up. "Y-yeah, this isn't going well for me!"
The Andromeda gritted teeth, grasping the the size of the challenge awaiting them. Not only was he experiencing the pain of his best friend, but he was seeing a Gold Saint, a championing figure of Sanctuary that he had made a point of becoming one himself one day, get utterly dominated in a one-on-one match against someone they had clashed with already that very day. It was all so disturbing that in other circumstances it may have lent credibility to some of Lucifer's claims about the reality of Sanctuary.
Suddenly, Dohko's short horror stories about the danger represented by a Prince of Hades fell very visually into place. A naïve understanding of an old man's tale had gone from a strange time of difficulty in the far-off past into a wise word of warning about the horrors the Pride Star could deliver, and they hadn't even gotten to the part where he supposedly gets serious or employs the terrible methods Shaka warned them about.
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Sanctuary Town
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Iaso's hand reeled in pain as he dragged himself against the house wall, his palm bloody as it got stabbed deeply by the knife the girl pressed down on him. He cursed himself, caught completely by surprise but, most of all, bewildered that some untrained civilian pushed an iron object through his silver Cloth gauntlet and onto his flesh. A big part of it was that she caught him off guard, but Cloths were useful because they made it so you didn't have to be. Fortunately, she missed the bones, as Iaso reacted just in time to aim his hand. He just had expected it to break the knife instantly instead of getting stabbed through.
The girl was stunned by the lamp post, having taken a rough blow when he kicked her off of him. He made sure to check if he didn't hurt her before taking care of himself.
He gently applied a green balsamic cosmos unto it, sterilizing and sealing the wound. "W-what the hell j-just happened?!"
"I'm not sure. That was an impressive lunge, even for how lazy your senses are. You should train more." The Ophiuchus Cloth mocked him. "She tore right through my micro-hedge comb fibers… A Bronze might have been murdered in your place."
The doctor had been through a lot in his career, as far as dealing with cosmos-wielding patients went; a lot of them were too proud to ask for help or admit they were seriously wounded and would violently resist medical approaches for one reason or another, expecting their flimsy bronze or silver levels of Cosmos to take care of the problem, or they would refuse to stay at the hospital so they could go do whatever they wanted, like attending Coliseum Games or, in Saint Lance's usual case, go off on another mission. It was said one-time Aguilon has broken through an entire wing like a juggernaut because someone tried to keep him from the next Coliseum game after one of his legs snapped to the side. They were all trained warriors, though, with the power to rip through steel vaults with their fingers, and this included the Ophiuchus Saint, so Iaso never needed more than a couple of soft wrist twists and the occasional punch to the nose to get them to behave.
However, never in his life did he expect to run into some murderous shop lady that could seemingly cut through silver-stardust armor with a kitchen utensil. His brown eyes set on the blood flooding out of her house door and he imagined terrible things inside. Things that had to get looked into in the morning. Things that were going to force Nam to write some long investigation reports and send some condolences letters…
What the hell! Was everyone insane that night?! He took the knife off the floor and saw it unaffected by having its weak metal go through his armor. The blood on it was the extent of the damage to the object. He didn't need to look over it too much to realize it really was just a dumb onion chopper and he only stopped himself from snapping it half as a test to preserve evidence.
Worried that she still wasn't the one going around killing Skeletons, he got up and gently took the girl to the shadowed side of the house. No matter how he looked at her, she seemed normal.
Her life was pretty much ruined, though. Iaso wasn't the type for it, but even if she hadn't murdered her parents, the Silver Saint Order didn't take kind to its members being physically assaulted, especially because a lot of its members felt people disrespected them as it was for being below Gold Saints. Pegasus Lance had learned that the hard way.
He saw her react weakly to his presence and her eyes open slowly. "Are you awake? What did you do, you idiot?!"
She dazed her eyes between him and the house and breathed out uncaringly. "…Are you going to kill me?"
He was exasperated. "Of course not!"
The look on her face seemed disappointed, of all things. "Mm, that's a shame..."
"Stop saying stupid things! How did you do that?!" he demanded to know.
She blinked. "What do you mean?".
Was she for real? "Cutting through my armor! Jumping at me like you wielded cosmos all your life! What do you think?! I can run at Mach 5! There are experimental jet fighters that can't catch up to me! I've taken shots from Sagitta, chain lashes from Cassiopeia, and crossed swords with Cepheus with my armor! Hell, I just survived a fight with a Papillion Specter today and saved a Gold Saint's child!" he called out, half-bragging, half exposing the ridiculousness of what happened with 'Kiki'. A possibility then occurred to him. "Did you feel controlled? Did someone puppet you, or send you cosmos?"
This was probably the best theory of what happened; cosmos sharing was a technique commonly employed by Saints and soldiers that demonstrated it was possible to give power to someone, even if temporarily, to achieve short-term goals or survive against a superior-ranked foe. The exponential factor was so great that it was said that combining the powers of the Bronze Saint Order effectively could raise a barrier strong enough to potentially stop a blow from the God of Death, though Iaso personally thought this was a bunch of unproven junk meant to make the Bronze Saints feel less useless.
However, there was a dark side to this; cosmos carried an imprint of someone's will, given that it was, after all, an emotionally and willpower driven ability, so giving someone else an incredible amount of your cosmos far beyond what they could muster carried the potential effect of brainwashing them, overriding their personality and making them think like you would. This was especially true if you had some kind of inclination towards manipulation already, like the Virgo Saint, but Goddess knew what kind of Specters were roaming around Sanctuary Town or who the killer was. If it was someone like the unknown Tarantula Silver Saint, whose webbings could transmit cosmic signals or even sap you dry, then Iaso could perfectly imagine this poor girl being taken advantage of by some puppeteering sicko when everyone else was busy saving Sanctuary.
He held chin contemplatively; it was just an example he thought of, but… what if Tarantula was around? No one knew who the guy was, after al-
"What do you mean?... I just did it." The young woman said like it was nothing important.
His brow raised sarcastically. "Uh, uh, right! And you play for the New York Giants as well! Cosmos isn't just used!"
Her small nose scoffed gently. "…Is that how you look at it? That's… so sad."
This time he was seriously alarmed. "Sad?"
She nodded, and her blood-stained face looked up, eyes lost in the stars and the moon. "Cosmos is such a beautiful thing… If you just understand it a little bit, your hand can just reach out and grab it to make wonderful things happen… I realized that tonight. It's… saddening that so many people don't grasp it. It just shows what the world does to us…"
His face paled and he felt like slapping her. "Wonderful?... You call butchering your parents for no reason wonderful?!"
She didn't react to what she thought was a silly way to look at things at this point. "I was struggling with it for a while… but I think something tonight made me understand it at last that it doesn't really matter." She mused, perhaps referring to the attack on Sanctuary, which Iaso warned her about. Her small hand reached out to nothing in the air. "All of a sudden… I just had to take a step forward… and I saw it!"
Something extremely uncomfortable crept up his neck. "…Saw what?"
Her eyes widened, frozen into some horrible horizon only she saw. "…The sea… full of stars!" and her body suddenly ignited in bright blue, this time in very perceptible Cosmos!
Iaso gasped and leaped away, expecting another attack! Instead, though, she got up and walked, her body shining like a blue torch.
"Stop! Where are you going?!" he urged. He felt, though, that if he even dared to touch her, the energy she was giving off could explode! "I need to help you!"
Her head shook calmly. "No. You don't. You don't understand anything… Those silly things don't matter anymore." She denied, seemingly lost in some dazed world of her own. "It's all around me… I feel it everywhere… the Cosmos! Like a wind under my wings I never felt before…I…I need to go to it!"
He sweated, not knowing what to expect. "To what?"
Her hand raised to the sky as if taking someone else's, her face locked in an expression of pure delight. "…My love!"
And before the Ophiuchus Saint's shocked eyes, her body combusted up brightly in a blue flame, instantly multiplying in temperature, and she screamed, feeling her flesh be consumed by the cruel touch of her rising power down to the bone where she stood before bursting into a shockwave, knocking back the doctor and sending startled night birds flying!
The Silver Saint was utterly lost! All that was left of the girl was a scorch mark on the ground. "B-by the Gods! Asclepius save me, w-what just happened…?!"
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House of Libra
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The spectacle of blitzing lasers at the House of Libra continued. It seemed to any would-be onlookers that a beam of golden light was zipping around between the pillars, powerfully impacting every surface it reflected off of, while pursued by a large murky comet of darkness. Every interception was punctuated by a loud series of shock-waving impacts representing earth-shattering blows being exchanged.
Lance was struck by an overhead kick that knocked him to the ground and Lucifer gave pursuit, but the Andromeda Saint stepped in and launched his chains. "NEBULA CHAIN!" and the lightspeed moving links impacted on the Daemon's guard, brushing him off to give Shinta's partner breathing room to recover.
The Gold Saint of Cancer's heels reeled on the ground after being struck, stopping his momentum. His body was increasingly bloodied, dripping red from temples, lips, arms, and legs, and his mind growingly numb. Fed by his sense of justice and his anger, he retaliated, launching himself back into the fray with a battle roar and a leg swing, but it collided on Lucifer's blocking arm that parried it despite its cataclysmic strength and was then countered by a hammer hand blow that smashed him to the ground! Furiously burning his cosmos, Lance rolled his leg as fast as he could in a ground swing to strike at Daemon's, but the insane speed of the Specter showed itself once again in an after image.
Lance practically cart-wheeled off the floor unto his feet, alarmed! He had to do something about this!
Reappearing on his side, Lucifer's fist aimed to his head, but chains wrapped around Lance's body and pulled him out of the punch path, making the Specter's blow miss. "CAREFUL!"
Caught by his friend, Lance was rattled by the speed of the movements they were working with. "T-Thanks!"
Laugh echoed throughout the building, its origin speeding around. "AH, AH, AH, AH! Are you lost, Saints?!"
Burning his cosmos, Lance did the only thing he could think of. "UNDERWORLD WAVE!" and he cast out the transporting pulse in all directions, hoping to funnel the Specter into the Praesepe Well, wherever he was.
A mocking snort was heard and the Daemon surged out of the corner, deflecting the purple beam wave with the back of his fist, unaffected, and then landed his foot right on Lance's face with a jump kick, knocking him through ground marble.
Daemon landed and contemplated his fallen foe. "Is that what we've come to? I'm shocked! I understand the idea, but my Surplice allows me to easily ignore the border between Praesepe and this world. Speaking of which, though… As soon as you're dead, I'll want my men's souls back!"
Coughing and bleeding, Lance got onto his hands and faced the enemy. "I-is that what you want?! To keep what you're doing from Hades?! Shaka told me about your fakes!" he confronted. "It makes s-so much sense now! Thinking back about that attack on Arcadia, everything that Bennu bastard did and said was fucked up and w-weird! But if you were behind that as well, then everything makes sense now!"
Shinta gasped, having not even considered this! This must mean that the attack from the Basilisk Specter on Andromeda was Lucifer's doing as well.
Daemon nodded. "Oh, you were involved in stopping Yakos?... You are half correct, Cancer. He was a replacement, as Hades calls these people, but you won't get to blame his incompetent rampage on me. Bennu and Shaman didn't take the news of their condition very well and rebelled against my rule…" he then smirked. "Thank you for getting rid of them so expediently, though. I was worried for a while they would expose the situation in the Underworld."
"BULLSHIT! He was going to call out your name like a g-goddamn banzai kamikaze!" Lance now realized, remembering the Bennu going out with a bang praising someone whose name began with L before Saga promptly shot his heart to shit.
This genuinely surprised the Pride Star. "Mm… I thought that report from Nasu was wrong… Too little, too late, though. I hope he enjoys his stay in Cocytus." The Pride Star mercilessly declared. "Frankly I regret Basilisk's demise much more, which I suppose your Andromeda friend had something to do with. I don't suffer traitors with regrets. And Yakos was a sorry excuse for a Bennu replacement after all, even as far as False Specters go…at least the distraction he provided got me the important intel I needed from Peloponesia. (*)"
(*) Chapter 7 – Foot Soldier chat
The Andromeda Saint gelt his heart wrenched even further by associating this man before him to another atrocity he witnessed in his life. He almost couldn't take it anymore, feeling the burning need to demand justice from the Specter. There was so much death that day… Alexis' crying face still haunted him.
The Specter calmly pursued Lance as he saw him backing away worriedly from the fight. The Pride Star was no fool; he could feel himself being stalled by this teenager. The two Saints came alone to him despite previous knowledge from Pegasus-Cancer of how powerful a Specter he was, plus likely advised by Dohko not to engage him rashly. They likely expected his False Specters to fall to Scorpio or Sagittarius while Behemoth battled Gemini or Leo, but after seeing the kind of fighters filling these temples and the motivation behind their picking, Lucifer was sure time was on his side, not theirs.
Moreover, he could finish this fight whenever he wished. Subtly, he began forming a tiny ball of darkness in his right hand, the starting charge for Dark Revenge Blast…
It didn't stop Lance from trying. "So you've been preparing this for years… It almost surprises me you didn't know I was Cancer, then!"
Lucifer chuckled. "Arles did a good job hiding his nepotism! It's not so easy uncovering specific Gold Saint identities without inside knowledge! If you were even a Gold Saint at that point, that is. Forgive me for saying this, Lance, but you don't come across as a veteran!" he argued, feeling supremely confident in his ability to take on any Gold Saint at this point. "Speaking of which, the Civil War Gold Saints frankly had me more concerned… They were nothing when they started out, but Priam's Civil War fashioned them into more powerful Gold Saints than I've seen in quite a while. It's amazing what extreme emotions will do to someone's understanding of the Cosmos."
Wiping the blood off his lips, Lance smirked provocatively. "Ah, so you were afraid!"
The experienced Specter paused and smirked back threateningly. "Is that what you think?"
"Yes! You waited for this generation shift to happen!" Lance accused, finding the timing of the invasion more than too perfect for the Specter. His aura burned and he launched at the enemy. "Cause you knew that if those guys were still around, we'd crush you! CHARGE FIST!"
The Specter boringly took on the impact with a guarding left arm before dodging a successive series of combos"HA, HA, HA! Do you still think I need to fear any Gold Saint?" Lucifer asked mockingly, watching Lance writhe on the ground. "Make no mistake, Saint Lance… if it had come to it, I would have fought this Zodiac anyway if the older generation still stood. That they went away and gave rise to a kindergarten garrison is no one's fault but Arles'. He spent years convincing those Gold Saints to leave."
Shaking, Lance gradually got back up. "T-That's all you fucking do, excuse your cowardice and greed with what the Pope does! Do you blame Shion for the shit coming out of your holes, too?!"
Snorting amusedly, Lucifer charged a beam in his free left hand and retorted. "It's the truth! Who do you think put all these aristocrats back in power?! All these concessions to their council and the so-called Seven Allies… So many young men faithful to Sanctuary lost their lives in the Civil War that the Golden Zodiac has lost its grip on power. I'm merely returning it! In the days of the Empire, these nobles would be the first hanged!"
While Lance would usually not give a damn about these people, Lucifer's words made Adriana's face flash to his mind unexpectedly, which made his teeth grit.
"So that's all you would do?! Replace violence with more violence?!" Shinta accused, reminding Lucifer he was standing there. He hated nothing more than hypocrites who used good intentions to disguise cruelty. It's what Cetus did to his teacher Guardnia and Saint Cassiopeia. "And how many would you hang until you had your perfect Sanctuary?!"
Lucifer scoffed. "Oh, by Hermes' trumpet! Spare me the third-grade debate arguments, Andromeda. I'll make no pretense; my Sanctuary, if it will be even called that, won't be the pacifist Utopia Athena tries to convince you it is! You and Cancer shouldn't let your loyalty to Dohko blind you to his friend's colossal mistakes! They've raised these Saints and soldiers to die to protect their decadent vision!"
He then focused his aim on Lance!
Seeing the light of the beam firing at him, Lance leaped away, dodging it, allowing the blast to destroy the part of the temple he was one, causing a massive fire on that side. He landed with a pained cough, feeling toyed with!
"Their m-mistakes?! NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING WITHOUT YOU! Those people in Tibet that Saga saved did nothing to you, and neither did Shinta's students!" he yelled out. Goddamn it, Lance had his problems with Shion, but none of this was his fault! This was nothing but the evil of one greedy man! And he was standing there before them!
The Specter read the firmness in the Cancer Gold Saint's voice. At this point, with all the pummeling he's been getting, he should be showing off more frailty. Lucifer had been striking him with electrically charged punches and kicks all throughout the fight, after all. Was the Saint somehow counteracting him, as he did with the javelin at the start?
His older red eyes tensed suspiciously. On top of being a fire user, was this Cancer an ele-
"Lord Lucifer? I need to speak to you!" a familiar voice suddenly called.
The Specter held his temple. "Ainsel?! What is it?! I'm in the middle of something important!"
"I'm afraid this can't wait, Lord Lucifer. I'm at the Gemini Temple with Torak and we've detected a small number of cosmos moving around Sanctuary Town and the fo-"
"YOU TWO CALLED ME JUST FOR THAT?! TELL TORAK TO GO GET RID OF THE GEMINI SAINT INSTEAD!" Lucifer roared. He then took a deep breath. Usually, he would not deny important information about his enemy movements, but encountering Shinta had him, quite frankly, rattled, and having to deal with Dohko's stubborn brat made things worse. "…Give me ten minutes. Then my hands will be free!"
"But Lord Lucifer, I think… one of them is your agent. The Cyrulian's younger sister, Cerah."
The Daemon paused in his tracks, his cosmos even flickering weakly. "WHAT?!"
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House of Gemini
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Still at the gate of the Gemini Temple, Behemoth Torak beheld his comrade having his secure mental conversation with the Lord far up above and could tell by the body language of the bug-armored Specter alone that it wasn't going well.
The matter of Corvus Cerah, the Silver Saint who secretly lived in the Underworld for several years right under the nose of countless False Specters and Hades himself, was sensitive to all of them who knew of it. Daemon Lucifer, the conspirator behind the girl's presence, seemed to have some sort of fatherly sentiment. Ainsel and Erika, on the other hand, were both privy to details about her because not only were the Papillon and Nasu False Specters the primary spies in Lucifer's forces, but Ainsel spent years undercover at Priam's small contingent of Black Saints to monitor their actions on Lucifer's behalf, and naturally found out the relationship between them.
Meanwhile, Torak himself was fuming, feeling his big fists clenching at the memory of the girl. He knew she was over the night he let that girl flee with the Nymph… a choice that led to Gryphon Urial's death. Now they had a chance to figure out where the Prince's priorities truly lay.
"What makes you think she's down there?!" Lucifer demanded to know.
Ainsel gulped. "Forgive me, but you had me cover for you when you visited their house. I could not help but briefly feel their energies.." he covered up, having just mentioned Cerah's presence to Torak. "…and she seems wounded, based on her cosmos levels. I fear she may be the one Cyclops went after."
"What?! But… She…!" Lucifer unwillingly messaged, his confused emotions leaking into his transmission. The possibility of Cyclops storming out because he saw his brother's killer would explain too much to discount this.
Torak held out his hands impatiently. "Well?! What are his orders?!"
"I know this is sudden, Prince, but if we are going to make a move about this, it has to be now. Torak is with me and battle-ready…" Ainsel urged, voicing these thoughts out loud as he sent them so Torak would be in the know.
But thankfully Lucifer seemed to make the logical choice. "… Behemoth is one of my most precious battle pieces. He's not leaving this Zodiac! Tell Torak to find the Gemini Saint and crush him!"
Ainsel nodded at Torak, who seemed to snort out a sigh of relief for all of them. There was a very tense moment in which the two former warriors of Hades were worried. Whatever Lucifer picked could determine what his most intimate thoughts about the situation were, and the two False Specters simply had to know. Would Lucifer send forces away from this important battle for the False Specters just to rescue a Saint girl? A Cyrulian even?
"Thank the Evil Stars, he hasn't completely lost his mind! He's still our Prince." the Behemoth gasped.
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House of Libra
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The silver-haired warrior was the end of his patience at this point! He didn't have time to worry about so many things simultaneously!
If being in the most important battle of his life and encountering fucking Michael as the Andromeda Saint wasn't enough, now Cerah had gone disobeying him, left Eurydice's safe house, and almost got killed by Cyclops! If he was talking through a phone at this point, Lucifer was pretty sure he would be struggling not to crush it in his fingers!
He paced furiously towards Lance, his blood pumping to get the battle over with!
But the Andromeda Saint slid between them and pulled his chain. "STOP! SPIDER WALL!" he casted, creating the defensive fence to stop the Specter.
Lucifer roared, grabbed the fence, and broke it apart with fingers clad in claws of darkness that murked the links' metallic white, weakening them and tossing them aside before blasting Shinta's crossing arms with a knee strike that made him recoil all the way back to Lance!
But the teenager's resemblance to the Absolute Star made him unsure of what to do. "Stay out of this, Andromeda! Bigger men than you have tried and failed!
A revolted look flashed through Shinta's green eyes and he stepped up his pink aura burning. He saw Lance shaking his head over his shoulder, telling him non-verbally to stand down, but the normally pacifist boy was incensed at the Specter's lack of care. "You brought me into this when you attacked my island! Do you think I'll just stand around here watching you hurt my friends?!"
The Specter scoffed and turned towards his original target. "Then try and st-"
A golden figure zipped towards him "BLADE!" Lance shouted, aiming his chop hand at the specter but having the powerful cutting blow parried in the nick of time by the Pride Star's arm.
The Specter grunted and stepped back with the weight pressed unto him. "You little bastard! Prepare to-"
"NEBULA CHAIN!" A lightning-fast chain lash was heard and metallic, zapping links locked themselves around Lucifer's left arm, halting him. Shinta tugged the chain with both hands, warning the Specter not to make a move.
A frustrated sneer went through Lucifer's lips, like a dog snarl. He couldn't stop thinking of Michael and Cerah…!
Landing from his parried strike and holding his hurt side, Lance watched curiously as Lucifer seemed to hesitate once more. The Gold Saint didn't believe for a second that he was that bothered by Shinta's weak chain on his arm; he seemed more like he was personally frustrated by the Andromeda's interference.
Why? Even when confronting Lance, who bore the armor of an old enemy of Lucifer, the Pride Star had not hesitated a single second while delivering the most severe beating the Pegasus had ever taken in his life.
"I'll deal with you AFTER Cancer, Andromeda! I promise to dedicate my full attention to you then!" Lucifer practically ordered his enemy, commanding the battlefield with his strength lazily resisting Shinta's tugs. He then took a small ball of electricity on his finger and rested it against the chains. "But for now, SIT! LIGHTNING FANG!"
The ensuing current carried the force of a heavenly bolt and coursed through Shinta's chain instantly, igniting the Bronze Saint with a frightening shower of pale blue sparks that sent him into a screaming fit!
Lance was horrified and launched at the Specter, hands in torches of cosmos. "S-SHINTA!" The Bronze Saint collapsed, fuming all over, and Lucifer returned his attention to Lance, catching his fists with his hands, the collision of Lance's body unto him barely pushing the Specter back and initiating a brutish power struggle between the two.
Feeling more anger off his foe, the Specter chuckled. "Ah, ah, ah! Did that anger you?! That was just the start! Imagine what you'll feel like when it's Dohko's turn!"
Driven insane with rage, the Cancer Gold Saint's body became a bonfire of flame cosmos, powering his push into the Specter's firm palms. At this point, the powerful Specter winced and felt pushed back for once, his heels dragging, but he patiently absorbed this loss in the struggle, knowing the Cancer to be wasting his strength. With a forceful twist of his arms, he twirled the maddened Lance all around, launching him to the side against the floor, crashing it. Lucifer summoned another lightning javelin for the kill!
But a sharp, pink armored leap-kick struck his face with the force of a fully charged Cosmos strike, sending him flying far away from lance with a startled gasp. Shinta didn't even spend any second celebrating the first hit drawn on the Specter and helped Lance up. "A-Are you okay?!"
Lance coughed and saw the shock marks on Shinta's armor. "I am! I should ask you t-that! How did he not dodge your chain?!"
"Listen, Lance, I think I figured it out!" Shinta urged, drawing on his experience training at the Taurus Temple. "It's like fighting Aldebaran! You need to watch out for-"
He then widened his eyes when he saw Shinta's defensive chain reacting and he pushed him off. "WATCH OUT!"
The Specter came out of the smoke and rubble like a speeding bullet, but Lance was ready this time, and his arms raised once more in blocking, taking the impact of the devil's lightning fists with a blunt pain to his body but firm resistance. Sparks of electricity flowed between them, contrasting blue and gold colors and making obvious the source of Lance's resistance.
The Pride Star sneered. His cheek had the mark of Shinta's kick. "Another lie! I knew it! You hold the element of thunder as well! Do you think that'll save you?!"
But the Gold Saint, shockingly, held his own and burned his cosmos to match Lucifer's. He wasn't nearly as powerful, he knew that, but he had one thing on his side. "Along with Roshi's training?! You BET! This is the Rozan fighting style!"
He then pulled the Specter onto himself while dropping to his back and striking the enemy's chest with his foot, launching Pride over himself against a pillar and using the momentum to flip himself back on his feet. He barely had time to reassume his pose before the speeding devil came rushing again with a renewed lighting assault, but Lance's dragon-fanged fingers took him on, parrying the sparking jabs with a series of well-trained blocks, carefully backing away with his feet.
An angrier punch was thrown by Lucifer, but Lance side-stepped and caught the wrist as hard as he could, stopping the Specter on his tracks. The two eyed each other hatefully as Lucifer recognized Dohko's secondary way of fighting in him, the defensive-minded Dragon style that contrasted with the Libra Saint's primary Tiger.
"Shinta is right! You're incredibly fast… but you're not unstoppable! And even you have patterns and limits!" Lance affirmed. "Aldebaran's Great Horn is the fastest attack in Sanctuary! If I treat every single one of your attacks like his, then I'll know what to do!"
The Pride Star was incensed at the comparison. "My attacks?! Like that House's simple-minded sumo tricks?!" And his left arm became as if a huge spear of lightning. "SEE IF THAT'S SO SIMPLE! LIGHTNING FANG!"
But Lance was ready for this as well, having seen how it works, and he unexpectedly tossed himself at Lucifer's waist, hugging it. This allowed the initial arching range of the cataclysmic storm of lighting whipped by Lucifer to hit everything around them but not the Gold Saint while Shinta took cover away from its cruel thundering. Roaring, Lance bashed Lucifer through a pillar, tossing him back, before his aura exploded in preparation for his next move.
Lucifer coughed and recovered, feeling pushed back in a direct battle for the first time that night and seeing Lance readying another pathetic Charge Fist. "You miserable S-Saints! I'll teach you a lesson in stopping techniques!" Holding back the sphere of Dark Revenge Blast just yet, his free hand summoned another dark and electric aura, fully charging his signature move. "Let's see you parrying a full-powered DARK SPEAR BARRAGE!"
Lance's aura sparked out with golden electricity and he focused as hard as he could, seeing Lucifer's punch explode into an unstoppable barrage of thick, spear-headed beams, each blasting effortlessly through stardust-enforced marble around them and traveling at speeds bordering the limits of photons themselves. His body would have no time to keep up with their pattern this time!
But this wasn't the first move like this he faced! "CANCER… LIGHTNING STORM FIST!" and the technique he learned battled Pegasus Tenma counter-attacked, unleashing a multitude of thundering darts electrically attracted to Lucifer's multiple meteor move.
Not expecting this solution, Lucifer gasped as each and every single Dark Spear was assaulted by ten smaller thunder fist darts guided towards them, bursting each blow into loudly-snapping bursts of sparks between the two foes. He pressed on, too proud to admit defeat to such a weak move, but every new spear launched was outnumbered and outflanked, repeating the earlier exchange of fists on an electric and Cosmic scale. Such was the battle of energies between them that their Evil Star and constellations shined once more and light flashes consumed the insides of the Libra Temple, blinding the three fighters.
Eventually, the clashing sparks accumulated into one central collision point that swelled up like a ball of blue and gold thunder before exploding into a shockwave, knocking them all back! Lance, however, knowing from experience his technique would create this effect, reacted faster and braced his fall with his fingers and feet, allowing him to launch right back into the fray with the speed of light.
The Specter also recovered, but only in time to see his adversary closing in the distance with a raised fist of lightning!
"LIGHTNING CHARGE FIST!" and Lance's signature move struck the Specter in the chest, smashing what seemed like a hammer of Thor himself unto the enemy, rushing past the target and leaving behind a punching, swelling sphere of electricity that burst unto the enemy, shocking and stunning him.
Lucifer screamed and gasped, covered with lingering golden sparks, stepping back in disbelief and looking at the darkened spot on his Surplice. "I… was struck?!"
There was a congratulatory cheer from Shinta and an alarmed turn from Lance, who dared not drop his guard to even the most successful of injuries delivered upon his foe. "H-How do you like THAT?!"
The silent enemy took the damage in, refusing to even drop to his knees despite the numbing sparks going through his body. The Specter was now realizing how Lance had been resisting so far, nulling the electric current the Specter put into his many attacks with an opposite-charged electric current of his own. Lance refused to believe the powerful lightning fist blow didn't have any effect on Lucifer! The move was birthed out of the need to put down someone as stubborn and enduring as Pegasus Tenma. Daemon Lucifer would have to be out of the realm of monsters to resist this.
Soon enough, the sudden numbness in his body overtook the Specter and he dropped briefly onto his left knee, before picking himself back up immediately, fueled by indignant rage. "You… damn… pathetic welp!... How dare you?!..."
The air went darker inside the Temple, raining on the two Saints previously optimistic mood, clearly affected by the powerful Specter's mood.
Shinta, however, was now feeling a bit more confident. "Maybe we can take him down!"
"IS THAT WHAT YOU THINK?!" The Pride Star roared, raising himself back up, silencing the Andromeda. And then he laid out his hand that he had been keeping aside. "Now you'll see… the horrors I can unleash! There are no Saint eyes that can stop this move!"
Lance's red eyes widened in terror, seeing the familiar dense orb of blackness sparking with its surroundings. "SHIT! Shinta, take COVER! That's his big attack!"
The Specter turned to Lance, his dark aura brightening up, first in a thin layer of cruel, blood-thirsty red, and then into a raging swamp of darkness. "You wanted me to play seriously?! Fine! Then I'll utterly annihilate you here and now, Cancer Lance, as you deserve! It's only a shame that I won't have a body to show Dohko!"
Feeling his hair raise with the increasingly charged atmosphere and marble pebbles around him lifting off the ground into the air, Lance felt returned to Mount Rozan, when he first witnessed the Dark Revenge Blast. Once more he witnessed it; the ridiculously powerful technique of the Specter being charged, first by Lucifer holding the tiny orb in his hands and raising it to the air above his head, then firing off blue sparks of electricity from his fingers that were sucked like light off a black hole unto its unseen vortex pull, causing it to swell and radiate its massive power in destructive phenomenon all around them!
The temple began to shake!
The air grew darker and even more charged, sparking blue light!
Small rocks began being pulled off the ground into the orb, utterly destroyed upon contact and adding to its mass!
The red markings on Lucifer's armor began shining off of the purple, in particular the evil monster smile on his chest charred by Lance's strike, imparting unto the move the power of the Star of Pride.
The Specter himself eyed the Cancer with unprecedented fury, picturing nothing but his destruction as the ball above him grew denser and larger, interacting with his surroundings in even more dangerous ways. "Do you see this?! The blow that Dohko saved you from?!"
Lance backed away, unsure what his strategy would be. Good as Saints were at figuring out counter moves, he hadn't thought of one for this! He was as likely to get nuked as soon as it was fired as he was to figure it out now! "D-Damn it, should I use the Hyaku Ryu Ha now?!"
"THIS… is the expression of my power! Not even the currents of Another Dimension can contain it, as one of your allies discovered tonight!" the Pride Star declared, confusing them with the reference to Kanon. The ball then tripled in size suddenly, spreading electrical chaos all over the palace of the seventh zodiac. "I created it in emulation of Athena Exclamation, using my elements of Darkness and Electricity to fashion a spear with which I could scar the very face of the world! With this technique, my will is made upon it! And now for besmirching my Surplice, for being the object of another one of Dohko's lies, you shall be made into ash by it!"
Lance had to cover his face from the raging cosmos. "Shinta, stay out of this attack's way! Your Rolling Defense won't block it!"
The Andromeda had plenty of visual reinforcement of this afterward; the ground itself began cracking around Lucifer, set ablaze by the heat of his cosmos! Shinta tried to run around to get to Lance, but the powerful currents raised by the attack knocked him to the ground, pinning him against a far-off wall! Lance himself had to resist the pressure emanated off of Lucifer, keeping an eye out on the moment of launching!
This time, however, he knew what he was up against! And he had plenty of space to maneuver! A basic ball of cosmos began forming in his hand…
Then the moment came. Lucifer lowered his hands, causing the ball to hover down and aim, and then he fired it with a spark trigger. "GO! DARK REVENGE BLAST!"
The force of the ignition was immense, further wrecking the floor and shattering pillars close to Lucifer, causing a section of the ceiling to crack! Shinta screamed and saw the gigantic sphere of destruction fly towards Lance, threatening to swallow him into a black hole of destruction!
The Cancer Saint was quick to action, firing off the large beam of cosmos to the side to thrust himself out of the way into the air at top speed! The gigantic attack furiously flew past him, missing!
Shinta gasped in happiness. "He did it?!"
Daemon's finger flickered with a spark. "Naïve!"
The signal crossed the distance at pure lightspeed, connecting with the raging attack before it flew off the temple, and Lance widened his eyes in horror as he saw it suddenly shift direction to the right, swinging right into the sea of pillars! There was another discrete spark signal from the Specter and the Dark Revenge Blast corrected its furious flight further, this time angling right at the still-airborne Lance!
The Cancer Gold Saint alarmingly fired off another blast, thrusting himself to the left to dodge the blow once more, whose mere transparent outer layer wrecked through rock and tore the ground despite being high above it. Rolling his body so his feet would land against the high side of a pillar, Lance leaped off of it towards Lucifer. "Damn it! LIGHTNING CHARGE FI-"
Lucifer cackled and sent the blast more electrical signals, boomeranging it all the way back unto himself, aimed at the speed Lance! The Gold Saint sensed this and halted his move, instead speeding past the Specter with hopes of the attack striking him instead. No such luck, though, and the attack intelligently glided around its owner's body to go pick up more angling at the far-off end of the Temple.
Lucifer guided it the whole way like a maestro, his sparking finger the baton. "Did you really think that would work?! NOW DIE!" and he swung his hand at Lance, conducting a much faster shift of direction in the blast. It flew up above, as much as it could without touching the ceiling, and then swung back down like a hammer on Lance!
The Saint gasped and did the only thing he could think of, thrusting his hands in the attack's direction. "BARRIER!" The casting of the rings, this time, instead of being around Lance, was done so at the attack flying at him, encasing Dark Revenge Blast in transparent shielding.
The Pride Star widened his eyes, realizing his sparks were blocked off, jammed by Barrier. "Well, mm, mm, good job, but too late! My attack is coming right at you!" and he leaped away, not wanting to get caught in the explosion of his own move!
Meanwhile, Lance's seventh sense reeled, feeling the terrifying destructive capacity of the attack going at him like an oncoming train, wrecking through ground and air. It would surely detonate on contact, which given how sensible the raging surface of the blow looked, could require just a grazing to then absolutely reduce Lance's body to dust! Shinta screamed his name.
With no time to move away or stand back up, Lance then put all his hopes into the only thing he could think of. Timing the distance, he leaped back unto his hands, seemingly to try to dodge underneath the flying ball, but then instead ignited his body with the aura of the dragon. "ROZAN… SHORYUHA!" and instead of the massive force of the dragon constellation being channeled into his arm, the stars of the drake shined upside down on his body, empowering his left leg which then bike-kicked the bottom of Dark Revenge Blast as hard as he could!
The galactical impact of the two enemy cosmos was immense, occurring within the compressed timespan of a nanosecond and triggering dark, sparking shockwaves that failed to detonate the barrier-layered Blast and reflecting on the skies the clash between demon and dragon that had once put an end to the previous Holy War. The Barrier cracked under the pressure of the terrible forces it was being subjected to, being meant for much weaker attack forms, but with a roaring effort, the Cancer Saint leveraged enough strength through the technique to finally kick the gigantic sphere of destruction off of him, making it fly off the temple's length towards its caster!
The Pride Star widened his eyes in horror and took the attack on with his hands and was instantly run over by its massive hurling force, his body dragging through blue-tainted floor rock. Barrier shattered instantly now and Dark Revenge Blast screeched angrily against its owner, digging unto him like any other foe and threatening to blast him not just out of the Temple, but straight of Sanctuary itself! Seeing this, the two Saints gasped in happiness, their hopes shooting to the sky.
But a furious, maddened roar of a beast was heard and Daemon Lucifer flipped the huge sphere of Cosmos over himself at the last second, the force of disconnection still launching him in rolls through the floor, and Dark Revenge Blast shoots out of the Temple at the speed of light towards the dark skies, seemingly vanishing…
The three warriors found themselves paused for a second, hearing the angry sizzles of the attack fading away. Lance got up, expecting the battle to resume, barely believing his tactic worked as well as it did.
His smirk was bloody. "AH, h-how did you like that, you son of a-"
Shinta saw Lucifer suddenly dropping to the ground once more and he too tackled Lance to the dirt "WATCH OUT!"
THHHHRRTTOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!
The shockwaves felt apocalyptic, echoing down on the mountain like the voice of Zeus, and initially, all many of them saw was just pure white light with a light tint of purple. Dark Revenge Blast exploded so far up in the sky that they had lost sight of it, yet it's inevitable detonation, far up in clouds where cosmos was in no way contained, filled the night sky briefly with purple daytime, surpassing even the flash of Orion's Ray. The three Saints, and undoubtedly many others up the Golden Zodiac, endured teeth-gritting air-quakes like being inside a very turbulent aircraft, many of them having never felt anything half as environmentally devastating.
By the Gods, Shinta thought as he held his friend down, if anything was going to wake up Rodario and Sanctuary Town, this would be it.
Capes and tapestries on the walls set on fire by the Skeletons and the fighting were the first to begin to become visible as the light vanished. Then the dark blue surfaces of the shattered pillars and walls. Then Lucifer's angry snarl and shining red eyes as what just happened down on their terrible foe.
The Andromeda Saint helped his friend up. "S-sorry, I saw him hit the ground!"
"Y-yeah, that's fine… Jesus Christ! That fucking a-attack!..." Lance groaned, feeling his body shake under his Gold Cloth. "If that thing had detonated on me… my god! And he doesn't even look winded!"
By the Zodiac, thank goodness it worked. The truth was Lance hadn't really thought of a way to deflect it until he was backed into the corner, or better yet the floor. Something in that moment, maybe the adrenaline, made him try something radically different, like trying to execute a Shoryuha kick, and honestly, Lance was 90% sure it would just get him killed, so his mind went instead to trying anything with Barrier.
Just as Lance noted, however, Daemon Lucifer indeed did not look in the slightest tired. If anything, his disposition looked more engaged than ever, tightening his fists angrily at Lance as he fully absorbed how this runt of Dohko just nearly struck him with his own move! Not just any move, either, but Dark Revenge Blast, his exclamation of power! The move whose destruction even Dohko would beware!
Shinta saw this and felt fearful. "L-Lance, I know you won't like it, but I think we should drop the round-robin plan and fight him more closely together!"
Cleaning his bloodied and dirty face with the back of his gauntlet, Lance didn't put up much resistance. "R-Right!... But goddamn it, after what he did to me last night, that felt good! I bet he won't fucking play around anymore either!"
"That is the power of the cosmos when you are at peace with it." Karkinos mocked his thoughts, always urging its owner to be less narrow-minded. "It's a shame such life and death situations are needed to make you understand it."
The Specter beheld himself. His Surplice was scratched in several places, having suffered the superficial bite of his own terrible move, and he felt slightly rattled, but he was more than ready to punish the Cancer Saint for this terrible offense to him. "They say… a move does not work twice on a Saint… You've taken that to heart, haven't you, Cancer Lance?!"
Charging his energy preemptively, the Saint noticed the lack of emphasis this time. "No more sniping my title, uh?! That will teach you to underestimate the Rozan arts!" he shouted. "This isn't enough… we need to fight to get a clear shot with Hyakuryu Ha at him!"
Said charge was countered by Daemon Lucifer unleashing an absolute nightmare of energies around himself, frightening the two Saints with what felt like their visions funneling on his expanding dark aura, like an abomination suddenly turned the corner on them.
"That's right… but don't take that acknowledgment as a good thing!" Daemon Lucifer warned. His voice was uncharacteristically low when he would usually shout out how superior he was, which just frightened Lance even more. "Because, from now on, you'll face the true horrors of the Celestial Star of Pride! I, too, will repeat my oath not to commit the same mistakes…! Like any once-faithful of Athena would."
The two Saints noticed this last comment and compared it in their minds to Dohko's words about Lucifer, and Shinta had to ask. "Daemon Lucifer… you were once a man who lived among Saints, were you not? It's why you're here?"
The Specter nodded, lightly scoffing to himself in further recognition. An emotional appeal, just like Michael would often make.
"You and I will have our time to talk, Andromeda… Sanctuary has had its chances to make peace with me, and you won't be the one to bridge that gap." Daemon assured. Angry sparks of blue lightning coursed through his hands. "For now, we battle! Prepare yourselves, Saints of Athena… I, Daemon Lucifer, will give you the honor of learning about a whole new class of warriors with the Cosmos, the power that was born to render Gold Saints helpless! More than just simple speed or strength, the power that brought terror to your benefactors, Aries Shion and Libra Dohko!"
His red eyes shined in the dark with hate, warning the two defenders of Sanctuary of things to come, and they felt as if the darkness of his cosmos swallowed the temple whole, leaving them alone in the dark with a terrifying monster.
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Chapter End
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Next Chapter: Chapter 61 – Episode 23 – Eternal Darkness
Deadline: August 25th
Description: After so much fighting since their last encounter in Mount Rozan, Cancer Lance catches up with Daemon Lucifer at Dohko's House. The Pride Star is waiting for him, but not for the other Saint coming with him…
Author's Notes: Since beginning this new pace of work of having 1-2 chapters done ahead of schedule, it's actually been tough for me to remember what I wanted to write down as notes about this chapter. Usually I talk about the writing process of getting it done, but that info's gone from my memory cause it's been two months lol
I guess I can talk about the characters. The obvious elephant in the room is the twist involving Shinta revealed in this chapter, especially to anyone who may remember how the story originally went at this part in V2. Somewhere along the way I decided to make him the object of that twist because I realized that it would ultimately be a better fit and a better economy of characters for the story. If you're wondering about what that means for Lance, who was originally the aim of this twist in V2, rest assured that there is more than enough stuff left over for his character's history. Some of it will be explored over the next year of writing.
Make sure to check out the Saint Seiya Reddit Discord server, where I'm currently one of the co-admins. Other writers like Jenny DeVic also can be found in it. You can hang out with the rest of the English-speaking SS community and we host several weekly events, like episode streams, games and now a whole new Horror Let's Play themed after the Underworld.
And review, share, etc, I'm always open to conversations with my readers.
See ya ._. /
