Disclaimer: DMC and its characters belong to Capcom. Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. R for some language.
Kikoken: I'm liking DMC 3: Successor, of course!
A bright moon-glow replaced feeble candlelight as the library ceased to exist.
Trish responded with devastating violence of her own.
Her powers burst its banks in answer to her angry call, hurtling together with her furious need to survive. Under less stressful circumstances, she would have concentrated her energies through her hands. Now, she used her entire body as a conduit, becoming a living livewire as she released all her ire in a swelling globe of searing, sun-yellow light, instantly undoing the soaking from Griffon's final storm.
The light continued to expand, encompassing her and the ground where she stood. A slicing gesture stumped its growth as the blonde devil admired her handiwork within the five feet of clearance she had left herself. Trish practically seared with pride. As a result of her instinctive outburst, the small island beneath her feet had suffered, becoming more akin to gravel than broken tile.
Comparable to the refuse of an infant universe, the heftiest debris' were dominating, irregular, sharp-edged. Titans that dwarfed her by dozens of feet or more, each traveled at extreme velocities.
What was that saying about Kansas...?
Red lips broadened into a self-satisfied smile as a legion of stones pulverized themselves against her nebulous globe; smash, halt, and break apart in less time than it took to form a thought. Anything less than man-sized was ionized. Even the ones that grazed the luminous skin careened away as the first stages of disintegration devoured them.
Serrated snakes of electricity curled and leaped and hissed from her sphere of power, mowing into the rubble cloud as if starved of things to destroy.
Trish threw her head back with an exhilarated, if feral, grin that stretched her painted lips thin. Long honey-colored tresses whipped and danced to her beat as she flung her arms to her sides, chest puffed out, a low, chuckling growl rising in her throat. Even with the barest beginnings of strain tightening the corners of her eyes, she felt like she was straddling the world. Trish seized her anger, caressed it, nourished it with the predatory joy of pushing back a threat and succeeding wholesale. This felt good.
...Royally pissed off and ecstatic beyond words...! Dark God, this is better than sex!
She couldn't remember the last time she was allowed to cut loose so completely with her arcane abilities. These feelings of invincibility and immortality, they were the same with every creature who shared her unholy blood; anyone with the power to subjugate or destroy deserved this pleasure.
In a brief - brief - splinter of thought, Trish wondered if Dante had ever felt what she felt now. The question quickly died with a long, giddy howl of laughter, the maelstrom and her arcani competing against themselves with primal snarls of windless gales and destruction. The discord of meteor-like bodies crashing into one another was a constant din, thrumming so loudly in her ears they slowly filled with a cotton-like numbness.
Don't care.
Eyes ablaze, her sight pierced through the shifting layers of her barrier, at the cataclysm of a never ending storm. The projectile-cloud was so thick there could not possibly be anything left beyond the shattered ground on which she stood.
Gazing deep into the frenzied gray nothingness, Trish dared it to touch her. But of course, it could do nothing. No, it couldn't get through her defenses at all, though it tried to with a fierce will. Trish thrilled at her unstoppable rage, her diabolic nature, fully reveling in her rare moment of supreme arrogance -
- when the void stared back.
All good feelings fled in stark terror. There was no transition between her joy and the fear that followed, just the sensation of something very heavy, and very cold twisting in her gut. Though there were no physical eyes to speak of, they blasted her with their presence all the same. Her eyes fluttered as if just awakening, losing most of their fire. Her shoulders straightened at attention with her spine. She was shaking inside. The power which kept her hair aloft faded in degrees, allowing her mane to gather lifelessly at her back.
The shield wavered before she realized it.
It shimmered in hues of amber, growing too flimsy to serve as anything more than a strong buffer. Immediately she was assailed by stones the size of her torso or bigger, everything smaller simply veering away with the sound of a gun report. All debris had fine edges from constant collisions - chip after chip after chip - becoming as sharp as freshly whetted knives. And even as sizeable as they were, they cut the air with supernatural speeds. The shockwaves of crashing bodies alone were enough to quiver her insides and make footing considerably difficult to maintain. Trish didn't stop to wonder what may be waiting for her beyond the edge of her island if she fell...
Trembling, the blonde spy still had enough of a mind to reestablish her defenses with post haste. In half a thought process, her shield was up and crackling again.
However, in that time, an unseen stream of comets had buzzed within centimeters of taking her head along with them. At least eighty more deep-toned bees had blurred by, creating a nightmare freeway all around her. Countless dozens had been larger than herself, leaving her breathless in their wake. She felt her hair respond to every pass, and it had been hard to keep her nerve - and her knees - from turning into putty. Blurred by distance and great speed, a host of shapes the size of small houses collided against each other with tremendous force.
Her brain was still processing the brutal impacts when the cloud of heavy shrapnel whistled shrilly toward her - suddenly around her!? - like buckshot. But now she was safe behind her cocoon of light. Relatively. Her breath rasped harshly against her throat. She couldn't blink. She couldn't stop shaking. She wanted to sit down but didn't move.
Holy fuck Satan help me I'm dead I died I'm...! N-no...still here? Still alive...
Alive and unscathed. Odds like that did not exist. Slowly budding relief soon found itself rudely quashed by another emotion: urgency.
Oh...Hell. Sssshhit what is going on!? Who could have...? Was it...? No, girl! Pointless guessing bad! Just get out!
When she was safe again would she begin to speculate who or what attacked her.
Outoutout!
Discarding anymore visions of herself as a corpse, Trish reigned in her scattered arcani, focused it within her, and condensed it into a restless thing.
Lids half-closed in grim concentration, she sensed the sulfuric beast welling up inside her in obedient swells. The energy began manifesting itself long before it fully matured, seeping from its mistress in pulses of golden light that outshone her sphere at the birth of each throb. The metallic light charged and charged, suddenly throwing off madly hissing sparks that instinctively sought out the churning limbo, their orders half-formed but their need to destroy already driving them. Eventually the globular beats of her latest trump card met and merged outlines with her barrier. Her barrier was instantly assimilated. Trish's eyes snapped fully open, burning pits once more.
This ends now!
Her beast fed as she sundered its leash.
The unknown presence still watched, unfazed by any emotion.
A soundless explosion of molten light flew outward from the small frame of the woman standing at its center. Dust and the smallest debris were repulsed by the intense, radiant heat. Things of greater mass were stoically consumed by the main body.
And then the shockwave brought with it an awesome, tolling thunder that was more felt than heard. Not one, but two, flat rings of light - traced with white-hot edges - raced ahead of the destruction, expanding rapidly in diameter as they sliced into any obstacles in their path. More than one fair-sized hill was cleaved in two. Nothing seemed to exist that was larger than a small planetoid, and those were gashed, then ponderously nudged away. Anything that wasn't blown apart, diced, or scorched simply became fuel for a maturing blast radius.
And in its reactor-like core, was Trish.
Exertion and wonder had wiped away the trivial thing called fear, the former quaking throughout her body, the latter dulling her senses in a kind of shock. Half aware of the lights and sounds that swirled like velvet sheets all about her, and the persistent tug of unruly locks writhing wildly above her head, it was the feeling of power - pure, hot, not-quite-unbridled-but-pretty-damn-close power - that she would never forget.
Never had she unleashed so much all at once! This was an incredible first! Eyes that mirrored infernal torches were flung wide, her face exuberant again but unable to fully hide the pain of effort. Sweat ran freely down her temples and neck, between her breasts, and between her shoulder blades. Her arms were rigid at her sides and slightly held back, her hands were splayed as if to welcome back the power she freed in brilliant surges.
Trish hated it, but she was reaching her limits.
The blonde was slow to react when an impossible sight met her eyes.
Through her arcani she could perceive the world with altered senses; the experience was not unlike her perceptions while morphed into pure electricity. Trish saw through the 'eyes' of the blast sphere - the outer reaches of it almost a mile distant - and still - Dark spirits! - still the nothingness waited for her! Just a world of shifting grays that stretched to eternity!
She had thought she was making progress finally...
A blind charge into the unknown would probably have produced better results than this! But...maybe not; Trish felt particularly defeatist at the moment. With an agonized moan, she struggled against the logic of surrendering to the futility of it all. Slowly, she reversed the globes momentum, drawing it back into her. Conserving strength was a must.
Where was she? Another dimension, but why? She wasn't dead, therefore, this couldn't be literal Limbo. She sure as Hell wasn't hallucinating. But there was no way this could be part of the mortal realm, unless...
Unless something had gone terribly wrong while opening the Gates...? No. No, that was even less of a possibility; her Emperor would never allow the total destruction of the world he so coveted. Then what of Mallet Island? And Sparda's avenging son? Had Dante been plunged into oblivion's clone along with her?
Trish relaxed a bit. It was a selfish comfort, to believe she wasn't suffering alone. She tried to touch his mind with hers, convincing herself he was probably more reliable help than a posse of Mundus's unwilling servants, and better looking, too.
Her heart skipped a beat. Her telepathy was blocked.
The presence. It was there, watching her.
Retreating from her.
And it left a present floating mere inches from her nose. Trish nearly jumped out of her skin in surprise even as revulsion curled her upper lip. It was a ball of force, no bigger than a human eye. It smelled fiercely of death and ancient blood, so tainted was this thing, this distortion of the ambient light. Colorless, save for what refracted in its depths, ridiculously small, it was hungry.
Suddenly, the thing gave vent to a banshee wail.
Trish screamed in pain, though she couldn't hear herself. Her arms instinctively flew to her head; whether to shield it from agony or try to keep it from exploding, synapses firing within her brain only told her to flee. Her barrier crackled once, then died, unnoticed. The blonde whipped away from the pain machine, staggering heels scraping across butchered tiles. And then there was sickening freefall...
It saved her life.
Glass-like distortions flared bloody red as the ball continued that terrible, mind-piercing howl. It dove full tilt into the island she once stood. It passed clean through tile and foundation bedrock as if it were air, literally eating a perfectly spherical hole from end to end. Instead of pursuing the falling Trish, it veered around sharply for another bite, and another, and another, mindlessly trying to fill its bottomless hunger. Something else came at Trish just then. Something fast. Something glaring white. The shrieking faded, the pain followed. The world was overcome by swift movement and the white light that filled her vision....