Lance's Role

by Thrudgelmir2333

A 'shonen' fic that sequels Next Dimension and Lost Canvas. In 1960, the Pope of Athena receives three prophecies from an old enemy that irremediably set the course of his reign over Sanctuary's tragic history and almost two decades later a Saint of Pegasus finds himself put through the unfolding of a new age of violence caused by the Pope's actions. Please enjoy and review.

26. 1A: The Goodbye - Part 5 of 5

Notable OCs: Pegasus Lance's Bronze Saint Generation, Heracles Aguilon's Silver Saint Generation, Gemini Akassius' Gold Saint Generation, Daemon Lucifer, Maiden Elisa, Priam's Black Saints

Notable Original Concepts: Training Ground, Sanctuary Court, Teos Cloth, Athenian Empire mythology, Isle of Gardens; Stardust Prison

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:

-Finally, the fic has officially surpassed the 400,000 words milestone, yay (^ ^

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Please enjoy and review (^_^

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"Alea iacta est."

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Cepheus Castle

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The whole castle shook all of a sudden, throwing Lance off balance and distracting Kastiel from his work on the locks in the pillar.

"What the hell was that?!"

"Don't lose your nerves, 'was probably just a volcanic quake. Guardnia must be battling your friend and throwing his island's temper off whack." Kerberos Kastiel explained, completely oblivious to Kirin's arrival on Andromeda Island.

"Also, not that I like your dirty dogs or anything, but why did you leave that mutt staying outside? He could be helping us sniff out Guardnia faster!"

"I'm not gonna put Mr. Aguilon at risk for a job I can do myself. He's done his part." Kastiel retorted before his fingers slowly slid the chains of his maces through the mechanisms hidden inside the walls, which mace end made its way to disarm yet another pitfall that would kill them. "I wouldn't be putting myself so much on edge if I was you or you won't even handle fighting a tempered Silver Saint as well."

"I don't need your stupid warnings; I beat you to a pulp fair and square so Shinta's teacher won't be a problem!"

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh yeah?!"

"You beat me, but then you lost to Aguilon, didn't you?" Kastiel confronted, taking a brief second to glance at his surprised face before resuming his task. "That's right, I know about how you tried to get the Silver Cloth. Word of it traveled fast among the rank, just like my loss at the Coliseum did."

Lance narrowed his blood-red eyes angrily. "So-the-fuck-what?! That doesn't mean anything!"

"It means you still haven't matured a bit and that you don't stand a chance against a Silver Saint that doesn't take your rank for granted." Kastiel simply remarked as he finally unlocked the trap, causing another secret wall to open up and reveal the true path to the Court of King Cepheus. "I hate to admit it, but Guardnia is leagues above me despite being of the same rank. Even if I can catch up to him in a race, his experience and technique doesn't even compare. We'll be lucky if we get there before he beheads your friend."

This made the Pegasus Saint squint. "Shinta won't be beaten that easily! You don't know that kid and how determined he is to get his way out of these messes. Besides, he's been trained by a Gold Saint for the past few months."

"Guardnia was trained by two." He revealed, though he actually didn't find out about Priam's true rank till the after the war started. He pointed at the uncovered path. "Let's go and don't touch anything suspiciously convenient, like trip wires over chasms or door knobs. They'll probably string you up!"

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Guardnia's fingers finally managed to squeeze between the Andromeda chain wrapping and his whole body went tense. "Because I'm unworthy and my time as an Athena Saint must come to an end!"

His dark blue aura flared up, sparking the chains with a power surge that made Andromeda scream in Shinta's ears and the chains loose for a fraction of a second. His knees bent and he dashed across the room in that timespan before rolling across the side when Shinta's lightspeed elbow countered was detected. His hand grabbed one of the weapons littering the floor, a knife, as he splashed through the water, before rising with a kick that struck the Bronze, untwist the chain wrap with the blade, freed himself and bob his head just in time to anticipate Shinta's desperate chain lash from the side.

The Bronze Saint's teeth gritted in sudden alertness and he desperately tried to retake control of the situation, blitzing around the Silver with light speed, setting up his attack a safe distance away with a step on the wall and-

A Mach five punch struck him straight in the stomach, interrupting his movements and launching the Bronze across the room. The boy instantly recovered, just a bit dizzy, but shockingly the much slower Silver, as if aware of some game rule Shinta wasn't, was already right on top of him with his liberated sword despite Shinta's overwhelming energy advantage.

The decapitating blow was dodged but something about the trajectory still allowed Guardnia to graze the pink helmet.

Shinta stepped back terrified, chains dangling, not understanding what was going on.

The Cepheus Saint merely assumed his pose, lassoing his star chain and holding his sword at the side. "You're a Gold Rank, so congratulations, Shinta, you've reached light speed bursts, I am very proud… but you obviously don't know what you're doing. Any seasoned Saint, 7th sense or not, can tell very easily when you make your inexperienced cosmos explode all the way to lightspeed. I can simply adapt defensively to your punctual energy peaks."

Backing off with heavy breathing, Shinta barely remembered to assume his pose. Light speed was so overwhelmingly superior to Mach 5 it completely dazzled him that even someone as skilled as his teacher was just playing around with him like this.

"You still won't dodge this technique, though!" His round pointed chain twisted into geometrical angles, triggering Cepheus to pull for his own. "Search him out; THUNDER WAVE!"

Guardnia squinted, noticing the attack's supersonic speed. "Like I thought, you can only use light speed in sections of your combos, not the whole." The metallic sting was at first dodged, as predicted by both fighters, with Guardnia prematurely rolling over to the other side of the room and the attack immediately changing trajectory through perfectly commanded angle turns. "As soon as Thunder Wave positions itself in an angle that can't be dodged, you'll boost it into light speed!" This was just, however, to give him the chance to cast his counter. "SPIDER NET!" Both his sword and star chains were thrust in counter cross patterns, forming a net of metallic links that expanded over the Thunder Wave chain ."Now CONTRACT!"

The much slower chains all of sudden were pulled back, closing their square gaps around the attacking Thunder Wave just an inch away from the Master's face.

Shinta gasped, seeing his weapon caught in a trap.

"Cepheus Saints are taught to use the attacks of their enemies against themselves, Shinta, and I can use much more advanced versions of the techniques I taught you! Now that you've made yourself open to a counter, I'm sure you see what that means!" Guardnia reminded before, with a seemingly simple wrist flick, detach his sword chain from the wrapping so he could keep Shinta's round chain under wraps just with his own star chain, freeing himself for an attack. "Thunder WAVE!" A blast of electric shock then coursed through the intertwined chains, zapping the Andromeda into a screaming spaz. He dashed forward, re-forged his sword chain into an axe and pulled the sparked Saint to himself. "THUNDER BREAK!"

Shinta's eyes widened, recognizing the attack pattern as a cloth shattering move. He burned his cosmos to reassert his confidence, "NEBULA –"

Cepheus anticipated once again, got within enough distance, unwrapped his star chain from Shinta's and twirled it back into a corridor format. "SPIRAL DUCT!"

- CHAIN!" Shinta's offensive chain lashed like a tentacle, but its lightning fast trajectory was completely caught up in the spiral tunnel of blue links created by Guardnia, harmlessly hitting a nearby surface "W-what?!"

"You can't use your own light-speed properly and I can anticipate all your attacks! I don't need to be faster than you if I can counter just before you make your cosmos explode!" Cepheus then once again phased into his shadow dash form and his axe reshaped into a sword. "CEPHEUS SHADOW GLAVE!"

"I won't give you your opening! ROLLING DEFENSE!"

The defensive chain rose and dropped in the usual whirlpool barrier, but the Silver Saint's attack simply went sub-space and completely skipped the chain's physical obstruction, instead striking Shinta directly with a multitude of angled slashes, splattering blood, sparks and metal pieces around the room.

The Rolling Defense dropped helplessly and Shinta almost dropped himself as well, stopping his own fall with a hand to a knee, but the gliding shadow in the room was already twirling around for a second assault!

His eyes narrowed determinedly. "BURST OUT, NEBULA STREAM!" The shockwave of wind forces came out instantly from his entire body and even Cepheus' sub-space phasing wasn't immune to this immense force, causing the Silver to grind his offensive to a halt with a screeching feet.

Guardnia gritted teeth, seeing the boy turn into a force of nature for a second, before the streams began winding down due to the Andromeda Cloth's sealing. The force finally dissipated, letting the wars rest and the walls stop their crumbling. It was just a warning, but the full force would come out soon.

Shinta panted, feeling his heartbeat go crazy. "Master, you know what will come next. I will give you one last chance to explain yourself and come quietly! If you don't…"

But the Silver Saint merely pointed his sword at him relentlessly. "The only thing that will come next, Shinta, is the inevitable conclusion to the fight we should have had three years ago, and if you can't bring yourself to deliver the final blow, then the only conclusion to this duel will pan out."

The Bronze Saint was sick of the mystery. "What are you talking about, Master?! Why are you doing this because of that other man searching for… this Teos Cloth?! What is it?!"

Guardnia's eyes narrowed. "It's a weapon, Shinta, a myth of desire and destruction unlike the world has ever seen! And it doesn't matter how close Priam is to it; if he's searching for it, then the cogs of war have already restarted!"

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One Hour Earlier

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Priam closed his eyes and leaned back. "You've heard of the Teos Cloth, right? It's one of the many theories regarding the –"

"-the possibility of a thirteenth Gold Cloth, I know!" Guardnia interrupted. "Priam, you can't be serious about this. You're going after an alchemical myth?! It's not even the most likely theory! You'd have a better chance to prove the Ophiuchus theorem correct! I knew you were out of our mind, but-"

"It's not insane, Guard', the legend is true." Priam asserted, narrowing his eyes. He hesitated for a second, unsure if he should share this story, even looking around as if he worried someone was listening in. "And it's far more powerful than people think it is from the stories of the Poseidon wars and so on. If my theory is correct, not only is the Teos Cloth real,… but it's a tried-and-true game changer."

"Your theory?!" Guardnia shouted mockingly.

"Just let me explain it to you, give me that chance!" Priam asked. Guardnia exhaled loudly but offered him the floor with a thigh slap. "Have you ever heard of the 'Battle of the Monster'?"

Guardnia searched his mind. "No, never, what is it, another Sanctuary secret?"

"Umm… In a way yes, but this time with good reason, it was covered up by Sanctuary in 1962, fourteen years ago." Priam confirmed, to which Guardnia responded only with a stunned look. "What about Kaiser II, the Titan Slayer? I'm sure you've heard of him at least."

"He was your generation's Leo Saint." Guardnia snorted, but was so taken aback he couldn't really express his anger. "Yes, everybody's heard of him, what of it? No one has seen the man since the war ended! Some people say he's gone rogue like Scorpio Paris over there."

The lighting in the room got darker and Priam dragged his chair closer to Guardnia. "Listen closely, Guardnia… In May 15th, 1962, a brutal creature of titanic proportions and powers appeared near the German-Austrian border, causing a widespread rampage that killed over 100 people. The incident was covered up as a flood by Sanctuary, taking advantage of the North Sea floods of earlier February to link up the incidents. The truth of the matter was that the Gold Saints moved out in group for the first time since WW2 to contain and eliminate the problem. I don't think I need to explain that any incident requiring the attention of more than a single Gold Saint is noteworthy to say the least."

Priam continued. "In the ensuing Battle of the Monster, me, Kai' and three other Gold Saints of our time surrounded the beast and waged battle with it for three whole days, but even Leo Kai, our most powerful member at the location, couldn't fight it head to head. The creature was unstoppable, Guardnia." Priam stressed. "It stood over one hundred feet tall, had an armored exoskeleton spiked all over its back and arms, its face was a beastly skull of fanged mandibles, of yellow eyes seething with power and possessed a body like a great ape yet nimble like a reptile. No matter how we attacked it, how much we damaged it, it got back up again and again and again, seemingly mutating into ever stronger and more dangerous forms."

"Wait, what kind of enemy are we talking about?" Guardnia demanded to know. "How come something like this hasn't leaked out? How is it that a Gold Saint squad didn't take it out over the course of three days?!"

A fear stemming from memory itself filled Priam's face, making it pale and sweat over the burns. "When we struck its belly, blood would gush out and turn into swarms of monsters. When we sliced of its armor scales, light would tear apart from the flesh below and scorch our skin before sealing back up. Its wounds would heal and heal and heal, unrelenting. Fire would be eaten to feed itself and then shot off its mouth, the earth would shake every time its fists closed and its long mandibles grew stronger with sharper teeth the angrier it became. And when Virgo casted Tenbu Horin…" Priam's eyes widened at the image of so many years earlier, the look of sorrow and fear on the young boy's face. "… The man closest to god merely saw a reflection of hell casted back at him!"

"If you fought a creature as ridiculously powerful as that, how did you take it down by yourselves?"

"We didn't… I certainly didn't manage to contribute much." Priam recalled, almost with shame. "Perhaps it was the fact that then we lacked the Civil War experience that eventually made us so remarkable, or maybe it was the simple fact that Kai' was never the leader Akassius was, so it was only with help of a certain person that even Kai managed to eventually take the beast down.

Guardnia detected a drop in Priam's tone. "… Help? From whom?"

"A powerful, resourceful Specter of Hades employing the Daemon Surplice and calling himself… the Celestial Star of Pride."

The sheer mindboggling absurdness of this tale couldn't help but stun Guardnia and make him

"That's not a real Celestial Star, Priam, or a real Surplice for that matter!" Guardnia bit. "Every Saint learns of the 108 different stars in case they have to fight one someday. I've never seen mentions of a Pride Star."

"This wasn't a Specter like any I ever read of either, Guard', even the Pope threw me aside when I told him about my encounter, but he was there!" Priam shouted for the first time, tired of being taken as stupid. "At the time he happened to comment the only way we could take the monster down was if we had the Teos Cloth with us again. I didn't take it seriously then, I thought he was provoking us, but… the years passed; Kai took down the monster against everyone's expectations, Cancer went nuts and killed Virgo, … and right before the war started I found this Specter again…

"… Wait, what?" Cepheus' mind rushed like a race car. "You sought a Specter's help for the war you were gonna cause?"

"Uh? No, it's not like that, I didn't need a two front war with Hades at the time. Just before the Civil War, however, I was on a certain mission. Pope Arles III asked me to find… a certain amulet before the Holy War with Hades would come. It's dangerous to just talk about it, but it would supposedly lead to the discovery of Hades' human vessel."

This truly took Guardnia by surprise. "An amulet… of Hades' vessel? Like a necklace or a ring?" he tried to guess "What does this have to do with this Celestial Pride Star and the Teos Cloth?"

"It's simple; the Daemon Specter was the first owner of the amulet that I came across." Priam revealed. "After a long search it occurred to me that the Specters would hold a hint to the location of this object since the Pope seemed to be interested in it in the context of the Holy War, so I planned an incursion to sneak inside Hades Castle and steal information. I never thought, however, that I would be captured and placed face to face with its owner."

Once again, a surprise to Guardnia; he never knew Priam had taken part in this sort of mission, especially considering how it all occurred while still being his teacher. And to be taken by the enemy at that, but did this mean it was here that Priam was brainwashed against Sanctuary?

"How did you escape?"

Priam chuckled. "He let me go."

"What?!"

"The Pride Star caught me… and then I was released." He saw the look of disbelief in Guardnia's face "Strange, is it not? Especially considering these are Specters we are talking about."

"Why? In Hades' name why would he ever do that?!"

"Haven't you guessed already, Guardnia?" asked Priam, truly taken aback his student hasn't connected the dots; especially with how accusatory he had been all day. "He wanted me, a Gold Saint inserted into the circles of the Twelve Temples, to owe him. Of course that with this comes a double-edged sword. He had a Gold Saint on the inside and I had a Specter on their side."

Guardnia slapped his thighs in exasperation. "Everything you're saying… you're talking as if we're part of the Cold War or something! How do I know he's not the one that put you up to betraying Sanctuary to begin with?!"

"Cause Daemon doesn't WANT Sanctuary destroyed!" Priam shouted, raising his voice for the first time.

And once again Guardnia had to blink. "W-what?..."

Priam exhaled out his frustration, glancing over at the doors again discretely. "Things are changing rapidly, at neck-breaking speed even. Arles's actions as the Pope have caused the tables to turn irreversibly. Who to trust or not is not up to you to decide anymore, Guardnia, because, as far as this matter goes, the old traditional rivalry between Hades and Sanctuary is completely irrelevant!"

Guardnia blinked, stunned. "Completely irre… how can you even say that?! Everything we've ever done, that you've EVER done and trained for, has been for this conflict!"

Priam shook his head. "Not anymore… I told you, this situation between me and the Daemon Specter is a double edged sword; he used my naiveté to discover how Sanctuary was training its current Saints, but in turn I also discovered a lot from him, including that the Teos Cloth is real and it HAS been used in the past by Sanctuary to decide wars! Not only that, but taking in consideration Arles' prophecies, something is about to come that will render all previous conflicts a footnote in Sanctuary's history, something that might change the reality of the whole world as we know it FOREVER!"

The mystery finally started unraveling itself in Guardnia's head. He stepped back, horrified. "That's right, the prophecies, in the midst of all this I forgot what the Pope ended up telling me. A war that will destroy Sanctuary, and it's already being validated by the current Gold Saint generation's rise to power. This means that…" His fist tightened and he decided to confront Priam with his conclusion. "You want to use the Teos Cloth to win this whole war that is about to come for your own goals."

Priam's hand extended itself one last time.

"That's right, a Sanctuary World War!" he declared. "A battle to end all battles, involving all the great powers of this world and the next, that will decide the new order in these turbulent times where nations can instantly annihilate each other with nuclear bombs instead of cosmos! The one who prevails in it will hold the power to either turn the world into the paradise we set ourselves out to create as Saints, to render it into the wasteland Hades craves or to leave it as the treacherous, blind autocracy that the Golden Zodiac has accommodated itself to be! If you help me, Guardnia, you can help make this paradise come true!"

"… You're crazy!" Guardnia slapped Priam's hand away stronger than ever. "YOU'RE JUST AS INSANE AS ARLES IS! Paradise?! Who the hell do you think you are?! Only Specters think they can turn this world into some Garden of Eden like that!"

Priam stared at him seriously. "You know paradise is just a metaphor for peace and what if the Cloth is real, have you thought about it? And what if we can get Athena on our side if she resurfaces? What if there is something out there that –"

"That you can use to kill Akassius?! To kill your friends, the people who saved the ones you left behind?!" Guardnia guessed. "Don't you see how ridiculous this all his when you're hinging all your hopes on a FAIRYTALE CLOTH?!"

The Sagittarius lowered his head, not breaking eye contact, his template darkening even further.

The Cepheus Saint stood tall and proud, having gained the upper hand in the argument. "That's what this is all about, isn't? You want revenge. Everything you're doing is to shove in the Pope's face that you had your way in the end and now you want to pay back your old friends too. You're just as bad as they are!"

"…I'm not the one who started the doomsday clock."

"Well I'm not the one who'll help you speed it up!"

Priam, however, was tired of the pretense, too. "Maybe I am just as bad… or maybe the morality of this conflict has escaped our hands a long time ago. It shouldn't matter to you, though, right? You're clearly not going to come with me."

The Silver Saint turned his back on him. "No, I am not. You and your spiteful campaigns can go rot in Hades! I'm going back home, and I'm setting things straight with my student, something you would never know about."

Priam sighed and combed his own hair. "Alright, thank you for at least hearing me out for a bit. I'll take you back to Sanctuary-"

Guardnia raised his hand to stop him. "I wasn't talking about that."

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Present

Cepheus Throne Room

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"The person who took me away intends to use the Teos Cloth as a secret weapon, something he can use against Sanctuary. It would be the equivalent of having the atomic bomb before the war even started." Guardnia elaborated to Shinta. "However, whether the Cloth is real or not is inconsequential, because it's just an object to his insanity. His intentions are to extract revenge on Sanctuary and carve out his own victory path on any means necessary. I won't abide by it."

The Andromeda Saint stood silent, bewildered, never having expected an explanation so beyond his understanding. "Then I don't get why we are fighting."

"It's because I won't abide by Sanctuary anymore, either." Guardnia's eyes closed in sadness for a short while. "Many years ago my own teacher abandoned Sanctuary and left me behind to take the blame for him. I took the path of this Cloth, even though it would condemn me to years of having to be the judge, jury and executioner of countless hopeful youths training for a Cloth, because I believed it was my duty to repay Sanctuary for his mistakes. Despite this, I had to endure humiliation and punishment from others I wouldn't wish on anyone. I won't let you have to suffer the same fate because of my mistakes. I won't stoop to my teacher's level!"

"So I failed, then." Shinta concluded. "You wanted me to beat you in a lawful duel and take you in cause you wanted to protect me from Sanctuary's reprisal? That was your intention?"

"… All I have in this world is my word and honor. It's the only thing that will protect you from Sanctuary, so yes."

Shinta's green eyes cried out. "I'm… I'm so sorry. I didn't know things would come to this. If I had any idea –"

"What could you have done? You're immensely strong, Shinta, but what would that have gained you in this? Nothing, because this situation has escaped our control long before we met each other on this island." confronted Guardnia "As soon as Priam made his plan to kidnap me, as soon as the Pope called me up to that temple, my fate was sealed. No one in Sanctuary will ever look at me the same again once they find out the Pope was attacked by my teacher again… and I can't live with the thought that all I've ever done, all I ever sacrificed to set things right, just escalated this hidden conflict even further."

"W-what do you mean?"

"I can't tell Shinta what the Pope told me. It would just turn him into another victim and spread the insanity even further, but nothing about this secrecy changes the fact that the Sanctuary I thought existed isn't real." He then resumed his monologue "My purpose in this place has become void; I have trained my successor, he has surpassed me in rank and now I lack a personal reason to believe in Athena and her mission. She might be real and really coming down to Earth in a few years… but by then I will be useless and the longer I stick around the more I am vulnerable to becoming a pawn to either Sanctuary or its enemies, so I told my kidnapper to go away and that I wouldn't be returning home, either. Do you understand, Shinta? Either path I look down on leads to moral bankruptcy! I will not allow that! So… there is one thing I must do so that I can leave this twisted game with a clean conscience."

Shinta's eyes widened in terror. "N-no, DON'T!"

"If I am to leave this place with the honor it has tried to deny me and at the same time prevent people like Cetus from getting my armor, then it must pass on to YOU, and that can only happen if you kill me in this duel, Shinta! So put aside your pacifism and let me, the person you've so often said you love the most in the world, DIE standing tall!" He saw the horrified tears stream from his foe's eyes but Guardnia only doubled down on his determination. "Fight me, Andromeda Shinta Akiyama! Either become the Cepheus Saint I could not or perish here like countless other men abandoned by fate!"

"I WON'T!" Shinta screamed, sweeping his arm.

"This is for your own good! This is so you can save even more people in the future, Shinta, so you MUST earn my Cepheus Cloth or people like Cetus will torture countless more innocent people for years to come! If you bring me in as a prisoner, I will be incarcerated and my Cloth will default to him!"

"FORGET IT!" Shinta screamed, bursting out his aura in preparation for the Nebula Storm release. "I will not kill you or hurt you just because you arbitrarily decided I MUST succeed you right now! Even if things look desperate to you in Sanctuary, I'll stop you and we'll find a way to save you from your situation."

The King's face twisted into an angry frown. "If you won't fulfill your fate then you will DIE, Andromeda!"

Shinta took off his helmet and tossed it aside. He then touched his chestplate to trigger its removal. "BURST OUT, NEBULA STORM!" But the Andromeda Cloth then just clanked loudly and refused to disassemble, causing the sudden surge of energy to be sealed back into Shinta and strike him with a punishing countershock that made him scream and fall to his knees. "AGH! W-WHAT?! My C-Cloth…. what h-happened?!"

"THUNDER BREAK!" The axe edge struck Shinta's chest like an hammer, unleashing a pulse of dark-blue lighting that coursed through his body and Cloth to its extremities, cracking the greaves and arm guards while also delivering a huge amount of damage to Shinta's body. The protective pieces of the arms lost the link to the Andromeda Chains and they dropped helplessly on the flooded ground.

The completely disarmed Bronze Saint fell to the water, body smoking but chestplate and shoulder-pads still intact to seal him up.

"The Andromeda Cloth seals the massive cosmos you possess in, so if you can't take it out, trying to use Nebula Storm will just make the exploding energy implode right back into you. Painful, isn't it? It's like being defibrillated while still awake." asked the Master, who then showed off the edge of his chain sword. "When I struck you with 'Guillotine Cross' earlier I purposely grazed the links between your chestplate and its adjoining parts, melting the pieces together. I'm afraid that you can't disassemble your Cloth, Shinta, and so no Nebula Storm for you!"

"Yes, and now finish him off!" gloated the Cepheus Cloth. Whatever happened now the King's spirit would pass on to a worthy Saint.

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The Pegasus Saint growled ferociously but tried to not bite into the bait. He tried to distract himself by making his red eyes go around the dark rooms for hints in the path about their two targets. Unfortunately metal boots didn't leave a lot of markings on stone brick floors.

"You seem to have picked up a tracker's skills." Noticed Kastiel as he used his chains to disarm yet another tripwire on the ground "And you say I didn't leave you a thing…"

"I had to teach myself to be a hunter or I wouldn't survive. The best you ever taught me was that I wasn't worthy enough to live and how to tell apart lowlifes."

The grey-haired Silver felt the occasional sheer look of hate on his back as he guided the Bronze through the hall. "Why don't you do yourself a favor and forget what happened in Mount Olympus? You deserved it anyway for being a stubborn brat."

"Forget it?! Do you have a fucking clue what you did to me?! Leaving me abandoned without food, medicine or survival skills in a goddamn mountain in the sky filled with cold, wolf packs and cliff drops?!"

"Here we go again..."

A pair of white gauntlets suddenly grabbed his collar from behind and painfully bashed him against the brick wall and holding him high up against the low stone ceiling. The Silver Saint gasped and struggled against Lance.

"Now you listen to me, asshole! The only reason I'm not breaking your neck right now is because I need you to get to Shinta and Guardnia, so don't push your fucking luck! I don't care how high you rank above me, you hear me? I've made my time on that mountain AND in Sanctuary, so I WILL KILL YOU LIKE A DOG if you shove under the rug what you did one more time!"

Kastiel grabbed his wrist helplessly, shocked at the strength the kid seemed to possess after two years. "All I did was teach you a lesson, like a Master would! And you need me to take on Guardnia cause otherwise he'll twirl you around like a winded top, so if I were you I would keep those hands to yourself! If you can't handle that-"

"ALL YOU DID was to take away four years of my life, you negligent fuck! I know for a fact that Masters don't behave like you! Guardnia surely didn't abandon Shinta to die!"

The older man coughed. "S-sure… Sure he d-didn't! R-remind me one more time who are we t-tracking again?!"

The memories of his days spent in China with Dohko jumped up at the youth's mind as a counterargument, but unfortunately this wasn't something he could divulge just to win an argument with the Silver Saint he hated. Lance reluctantly dropped him to the ground and picked him back so he could lead the way again. The anger rush disappeared and he breathed out hesitantly, trying to compose himself. He felt like a jackass for being so without a vocal counter to Kastiel's argument.

"If you've let it out of your system already… then focus on our task and let's finish this." Kastiel got up and reached for a brick on the wall that his Cloth's mace chain pointed out. "This next passage is not where your friend went through, but it will let us get the drop on Guardnia from above if the hidden maps are anything to go by. Are you ready to fight a real Silver Saint?"

The Pegasus Saint tightened his bandage-wrapped fists and narrowed his crimson eyes in determination. "Let's do it."

Kastiel pushed the brick in, causing a loud sound of a mechanism to be heard within the walls. The floor beneath them suddenly dropped itself into a ramp and the two Saints fell down so as to descend on the battlefield.

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Chapter 25

First Arc Finale

Episode 15

The Goodbye – Part 5 of 5

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Guardnia hesitantly held the sword above Shinta's neck, pondering his next move. The boy was utterly defeated, suffering under the sparks of his own attack's backlash, so ending the fight would be a simple matter of pushing down his weapon. The Silver Cloth of Cepheus in fact shouted over and over to finish the job with a voice that, amplified by the environment of the King's throne room, almost drove the Silver Saint mad enough to do it.

"Y-you're not a bad person, you're my Master. I know you wouldn't d-do this without a good reason." Shinta quivered, trapped against the wall. "If you feel you m-must fight me so your mind will be at ease, then I accept it."

The Silver Saint's hand trembled hesitantly. He didn't want to do any of this, but it was the only way not to stoop to either Sanctuary or Priam's level by letting himself be beaten by Shinta and leave this blasted war by the book. "I didn't want to kill you, Shinta. I wanted you to defeat me, not the other way around!"

"I'm the Andromeda Saint, so I don't mind sacrificing myself for others' well-being." Shinta then smiled comfortingly. "I wouldn't have gotten this Cloth if I wasn't willing to do that. If I die after a fair fight, you can surrender the Cepheus Cloth without its spirit constantly haunting your mind. The others won't blame me for your betrayal like they blamed you for your teacher. You will still have time to join those other people and your old teacher and leave Sanctuary behind to be happy. That's enough for me."

The remorse ate up the Silver Saint on the inside. There really was no way to leave Sanctuary without a coffin.

All of a sudden the ceiling collapsed a ramp into the water by their side! Guardnia's attention fully turned to it just in time to see Kerberos Kastiel, of all people, slide down with a twirling mace end chain in his left hand. "STEEL SPHERE STRIKE!" The twin spiked spheres of the Cerberus lashed out in sinusoidal flight at the blue-armored Silver, forcing him away from Shinta and crashing the wall down next to them.

Guardnia retracted his own star chain from his prisoner. "What?! Kastiel?!"

The Silver Saint assumed an offensive pose, lifting his weapons just above the water surface. "Yes, and I brought a little company!"

As soon as he said this, however, Guardnia lashed out his sword chain at the ramp "SHADOW GLAVE!"

Going through the defenses of the castle's stardust through a sub-space swipe, the weapon sliced off a wire of the ramp. This cause it to suddenly twist to the side and collapse just as Pegasus Lance was sliding it down, dropping the Bronze through the wall crumbled by Shinta earlier. The boy yelped disastrously and crashed through rubble, water and faulty flooring down to a lower catacomb beneath the throne room, instantly removing him from the fight.

Guardnia's sword chain returned to his hand. "Sorry, you were saying?"

"W-was that Lance? LANCE! Are you okay?!" Shinta screamed, but he could barely move with the pain in his body, much less go help his friend. "D-damn it!"

Kastiel felt a bead of sweat drop down his cheek. "T-that idiot brat! Now he left me in a pinch!"

"How did you find me?!" Guardnia demanded to know.

His old 'rival' smirked and touched his own nose. "I have a canine buddy that's really good at finding preppies."

Dark blue cosmos coursed through Guardnia's sword menacingly. "Well, are your dogs going to save you from me now, too?! I'm in no mood to put up with your provocations and you just interrupted a sacred ritual of my Cloth. Give me one good reason not to cut off your head!"

The Silver Cloth of Cepheus chuckled. "Yes, Guardnia, that's it, show me your fighting spirit." Cosmos from the armor flooded through its owner, refilling his energies. "This will be an interesting battle, probably the first time we'll be in any sort of sync. Let's kill this insolent pet sitter once and for all! It's about time he learned his place!"

The perceptive adversary did not fail to notice the miniscule trembling in Guardnia's body as he was boosted by his Cloth. "Is he falling under his Cloth's influence without realizing it? That would be a first. Guard' has always been very conservative regarding his armor's involvement in his fights. Something deep must be really going on." His own beastly armor growled in his mind at the challenge. "Well, don't mind me doing the same. I've had half a mind to beat you to a pulp for fifteen years!" He grabbed his mace ends and tensed his legs like an animal about to pounce. The background image of the three-headed hell guardian overlapped him, coinciding its heads with his hands and face "Kerberos CLAW!"

The Silver Saint launched himself like a tiger, zigzagging leaps across the flooded battlefield to disorient the Cepheus Saint before making a final pounce of raised paws at him. Guardnia merely launched his star chain. "Great Capture: WILD TRAP!" The defensive links rotated so as to form the shape of a bear trap that set itself on the ground Kastiel landed on, instantly snapping on his foot and setting his entire attack off balance.

Kastiel fell down to the floor with his mace ends, cursing loudly. He raised his head to see his rival with sword raised above the star end, the image of a king commanding a guillotine to drop on him filling the background.

"Oh c-crap!"

"GUILLOTINE CROSS!"

The sword slash descended through the star, causing it to unleash a four-split blur of light slashes on the Silver Saint that were barely dodged with a role, carving out a section of the floor. Kastiel screamed, feeling a cut through his flesh in several spots despite his maneuver, and stood back up only to feel several blood gashes on himself.

He twirled around one of his mace ends with furious supersonic speed until a red orb of cosmos encapsulated it. "Try this on for size, KERBEROS" his hand then pulled the attack towards Guardnia "HELL BASH!"

The enlarged orb of blood red power flew straight across the field, bashing through obstacles like pillars and accumulated rock crumbles as if it were nothing, but Guardnia merely tilted his upper body to the side to barely dodge it before tossing his star chain over Kastiel's links wrapping the connection and then pull it down to the ground with a roar.

The hell bash orb crashed with the ground helplessly, losing all its momentum, stopping Kastiel's most dangerous attack before it could even accumulate its full strength. Shinta stoop up as best as he could, seeing the move that Lance once told him about rendered null and knowing just how in much danger the Silver Saint was now.

"O-oh damn." Kastiel gulped, trying to not show fear.

"Did you really think your Neanderthal chain techniques stood a chance, you failure of a Saint?" Guardnia asked, narrowing his eyes. "You wouldn't know how to use your chains to arrest a student of mine, much less beat me! You have a lot of nerve, thinking you could just ambush me with Pegasus' help like I was one of your sycophant foot soldier servants! Now you'll pay the price for intruding on my affairs!"

"S-Saint Kastiel, run! Take Lance out of here, my Master isn't himself right now!" screamed Shinta.

"Y-yeah, I noticed that." Kastiel thought to himself, noticing the craze in Guardnia's eyes more and more. "We've never been on good terms, but Guard' was always the one trying to act superior, even when I got on his nerves. He wouldn't threaten me like this unless that screwed up Cloth of his was finally getting to him." He maintained his defiance, though. "I noticed you made new friends, Guard', is that why you're acting like this?!"

The mention of Priam and his rebel scumbags made Guardnia grit his teeth harder. "That's none of your business!"

Kastiel lowered his chin. "I think it's everyone's business, especially if you intend to betray Sanctuary."

A chain lashed out and bashed a bronze plate to the floor, clanging loudly. "SANCTUARY betrayed ME!" Guardnia screamed, pointing his sword menacingly. His dark blue aura enlarged. "I no longer intend to serve a place that disregards the sacrifices of so many so chillingly. I have buried enough students, carved enough wooden swords to be crosses on their graves! I will make my own fate from now on, with my own authority!"

"Yup, he's gone off the deep end. This assertive shit is the way the 'king' would talk." Kastiel then barked back. "So do ya intend to kill another one to prove you're right?! What the hell did Andromeda do to you, you crazy prep?! You're just pouting like you always do when things don't go your way and letting that armor get around your head!"

At first Shinta was gonna ask Kastiel not to provoke the Master further, but then he saw Guardnia blink hesitantly for a small second, as if the Kerberos Saint's taunt had some biting truth to it.

"I don't have to take that from a failed teacher who abandons kids in mountains just because he's too lazy to help them!" Guardnia bit back, something that indeed made Kastiel silent. "Oh, you don't like hearing that, do you?! It must just kill you on the inside, Kastiel, that not only you failed to compete with me as a warrior, but also as a MASTER!"

It was Kastiel's turn to get riled up. "You better not go where I think you're-"

"Don't act like an offended virgin; you had your chance to train a successful Bronze rank and you gave it up because you thought he was too old, that Sanctuary wasn't giving you a decent student. And not only did that student prove you wrong, but he beat you in front of the Pope and an entire foot soldier squadron! The whole Silver Saint Order knew about it by the end of the week!"

"You SHUT UP, you brainwashed coc-"

Guardnia's greave kicked his mouth shut before the profanity came out, punishing him further.

"Hurts, doesn't it, you brute?! Imagine what it felt like to your student fending off wolves and Black Saints without cosmos to soften the bites and blows! You're just another cog in Sanctuary's brutal military machine! Meanwhile, I never stopped trying with any of my students and I even managed to raise a student to obtain the Andromeda Cloth, the hardest Bronze Cloth of all after Phoenix!"

While this indeed irked the Kerberos Saint for a bit, it didn't seem like it was enough to shut him up, not with the nonsense of the situation they were in. Coughing out the blood from the kid, he answered promptly"…A-And now you're trying to ruin that accomplishment by killing Andromeda?"

To the amazement of Shinta, Guardnia seemed to tremble against himself, as if fighting an inner contradiction. His offensive fighting pose became disrupted and the Master's teeth gritted in struggle.

He shook his head. "NO, that's not it! I'm not…" Guardnia's mind tried to search itself for his own motivations, but it felt like all he could sense was Cepheus' voice echoing in his mind. "STOP IT! I'm not… AGHH!" His hand swept aside in frustration, slicing off a piece of the wall into crumbling dust.

The Kerberos and Andromeda Saints carefully stepped forward, watching the Cepheus thrash around with his weapons.

This was noticed by the crazed Silver, though, whose paranoia then jumped to eleven. "STAY BACK, YOU TWO!" he screamed, holding his chain ends menacingly.

"Look at them, Guardnia, they're both trying to fill you with lies so they can subvert you!" Cepheus hissed to his ear. "Just like your teacher and the Pope!"

His blue eyes paled and his mouth breathed deeply. "I have to do this… I have to do this to save my honor. Ugh, damn you Priam, d-damn you, Arles!"

"Yes, Guardnia, it's their fault, they're trying to control you, ALL OF THEM. Only you can decide how to get out of this." King Cepheus cackled, letting his cosmos fill up the human. "And the only out is through a blood bath, through a tribute to your determination. Are you going to let Sanctuary play with your conscience forever?! Show me your resolve. Take up your sword and fight! Destiny is but a servant to you, for you are the king."

"I am… I am the king." Guardnia mumbled, lowering and grabbing his head.

Hesitantly looking up to his teacher's eyes, Shinta saw a hint of newfound clarity in him. Was he feeling better now? "Master, it's not too late, please put down your weapons."

"My… weapons?" Guardnia looked at his chained sword and star, the symbols of his status as King. After a few seconds, he looked up again, locking crazed eyes with the Andromeda Saint. "Yes….come to me… come to me, my darling daughter."

Shinta stepped back "W-what?!"

Kastiel gulped "Uh-oh."

"Shinta, run now, take me out of here, please!" the Andromeda Cloth, also seemingly erratic, screamed. "Father has taken over, he wants to feed me to the monster again! D-Don't let him!"

Guardnia's sword sizzled. The Silver Saint smiled maniacally. "There you are, honey…. Come here, darling. Father has a task for you." he sweetly said. "Will you do it for me, your dear dad?"

Shinta raised his fists defensively. "Master, what's wrong? Speak to me! If you don't…!"

Guardnia stepped forward. "I just need…" Another step. "… for you to come with me." His fingers then tensed around the star chain. "It's so our kingdom will be happy ever after, you want that, don't you? I just need to chain you up-"

"SHINTA, RUN!"

Guardnia's face twisted into a murderous frown. "- and CUT OFF YOUR HEAD!"

"ERUPTION!"

The entire floor then exploded into a bonfire of light, boiling away the water, blasting through the ceiling to the surface, tossing the Saints away from one another and crumbling the entire throne room under its own collapsing structure. The king fell back on the floor, rolling around until he stabbed a piece of unharmed floor with his sword and raised up his eyes to see the pillar of fire burn away vengefully, allowing the image of a large, winged horse to fly it up to their floor from below.

The illusion of the burning Pegasus stepped on the throne room's ground, fading away to reveal the white-armored, horse-helmeted Saint on bent legs as if he just landed from a jump. The light and fire of Eruption raged on behind him, forcing Kastiel and Shinta to back away from the battlefield.

The king growled angrily. Drowned in the mirage of his own mythology fed to him by the Silver Cloth, all that Guardnia could see was the hate of the king towards Perseus and the flying steed that brought him back with Medusa's head, even though the human himself had nothing to do with any of it. "Pegasus! You again!"

"I don't think we've fought before, but whatever!" Pegasus Lance's foot dragged forward, his left palm pointed at Guardnia and his right fist coiled by his waist, wrapped in a small flame of white cosmos. His legs bent slightly. "You two, stay back!"

Kastiel picked Shinta off the ground away from the raging flames. He hated to admit it, but in the state Guardnia was in the Pegasus Saint was their only chance to get out of this. "Come on, let's go, kid!"

Cepheus Guardnia raised his weapons, his battle instincts returning to him. "I won't let him stop me from my sacrifice! Pegasus Saints employ multiple hit attacks like Aguilon's Meteor Fist and special close range moves like Rolling Crush. I can use my chains to counter these then!" He strategized; already living up to his Cepheus Saint fighting style of using other's moves against themselves. "As soon as the meteors fly-"

His whole body dashed like a bullet immersed in a charging horse's mirage. "PEGASUS –"

"-I'll counter with this!" The Cepheus star and sword chains whipped the air "SPIDER NET!" he shouted, casting the net of links before him.

But rather than a barrage of blockable blows, a single bullet of concentrated muscle power was suddenly formed as Lance's body exponentially accelerated through the net's openings before they closed up "- CHARGE FIST!" The blow exploded straight on Cepheus chest and Lance rammed him through the throne room's thick end wall, punching through to the outside.

The Cepheus Castle' wall burst out a shower of broken bricks, letting the two fighters land on a large, external balcony from where, millenniums earlier, the kings of Lalibela would look out into the India Ocean. They rolled, tossed and wrestled on its brick ground until they kicked each other away.

Guardnia coughed, still dazed from the landing, but stood back up to face an already posed Pegasus Saint. Kastiel and Shinta walked over to the hole they fell through to look down at the battle. Pegasus Lance's fingers assumed their Dragon-style claws and the aura of the flying horse overlapped his image.

"Ugh… I see you don't use the traditional Pegasus moves." The king-possessed Saint commented. He also assumed a pose and the image of a king armed with a sword and a star-tipped staff emerged around him. "No matter, I'll still defeat you and conduct my sacrifice anyway, Bronze Saint!"

"I don't have time to argue your crazy talk, Cepheus Saint! There's a much bigger battle on the other side of the island," he argued, pointing towards the far off beam of light coming from the south "so I'll just kick your ass and drag you out myself if I have to so I can go help the others!"

"Lance, don't hu-"

"I know, I know, Shinta, I won't kill him, blah-blah-blah! God, I get it!" The red eyed teenager focused on his adversary. "Though considering how easily he seems to have taken down Shinta, I might not have such a guaranteed victory myself. At least maybe outside that crazy fucking room I'll be able to beat some sense back into this asshole."

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Southern Beaches

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"EXCALIBUR" Kirin's sword-encased chop hand descended on Daese, whose feet buried in the sand as she blocked the entire weight of the Gold Saint plus his unbelievable sharp fingers with her handle.

She gritted her teeth painfully and drew back her weapon before Kirin could cut through it, rolling to the side. The Sanctuary warrior noticed a brief flash of light on the scar he caused on the handle before she reassumed her guard.

Kirin stepped on the ground and slashed her flimsy defense diagonally from below with such force the Paladin girl was pressed back. His hand thrust forward against her weak weapon to force her to counter by bashing up his holy blade, something that exposed her torso to his frontal kick with tossed her straight against a rock.

He pointed his blade at her neck. "Pathetic, do you expect me to be stopped by an edgeless sword! Take out your real weapon and fight."

Priam's aura concentrated around his longbow and he aimed his trick arrow. "Chrysó Fos Velos!" he fired a missile aimed straight at the enemy's head.

But the dart of light was swept aside by a brute torrent of energy caused by Excalibur which also blasted away the archer.

Kirin shook his head. "Ah-ah, see, Priam, this is why you lost the war; you always paid more attention to philosophy class than to training." He then blocked a surprise kick from Daese effortlessly. "I told you to stop kiddi-"

Daese suddenly 'slashed' the air with her edgeless handle and Kirin had to step back to dodge in fright at the feeling of a real blade reaching out to him. The long-haired swordsman set up his Excalibur and looked at her with new eyes.

"My blade isn't edgeless." she growled. "Now come and fight me!"

Instead, the Capricorn Saint re-observed her hand, noticing all the damage he should have caused it from his peerless sword being parried was gone.

"Who are you, girl? Where do you hail from?"

She narrowed her green eyes in hatred. "I'm from Cyrulia, from the home of thousands that you and your allies destroyed!"

Kirin chuckled. "Oh, now I understand. You are a Licht Ritter (German: Light Rider/Knight), aren't you? You can use the light of cosmos to reforge your weapons and armor. I thought you were all killed off by Aezrel."

"He failed!" she asserted, tightening her grip. "And you will pay along with him the price of your horrible crimes!"

Kirin stepped back, reanalyzing the situation and chuckling to himself. "That's too bad, because I haven't had a good sword fight in a while. I wish I could take my time fencing you, but obviously Priam over there has gathered dangerous people around him." He saw a cliff overlooking the battlefield and leaped on to it.

"Hey, come back here!"

Priam saw his old comrade make his cosmos burst through Excalibur, causing the previously lean blade to become rugged and brutish like an open flame. "Oh no… Daese, don't engage him! Take cover NOW!"

"It's too late. Now that Claymore Blight surrounds us, you won't be able to flee from this next attack" Kirin muttered. His cosmos charged, making its aura flare up. All of a sudden the horned shoulder plate of the Capricorn Cloth detached itself into the air and flew over to his hand, acting as a guard. "I'll wipe you all out in a single swipe!"

Paris hid further behind his rock. "Damn it, here comes the shitstorm."

And Kirin's aura burned more and more, engulfing his whole body. His whole body became shadowed by the light contrast, except for his eyes, which burned an intense green.

"I am Kirin, Capricorn Kirin… knight of the Goddess, Athena!" he began chanting.

The currents of light fluctuated into his improvised hand guard, causing Excalibur to grow ever larger and wilder until it swelled to the size of a two handed sword. In fact, the energy blade also detached itself into a sword separate from his arm that completed itself by fusing with the shoulder plate, sprouting a large leathered handle on the other tip from which to grab on. His hands reached out from the holy bonfire to clasp it. The mere touch of its owner roused the new Excalibur's burning light.

"My soul burns as the destroyer of evil, Excalibur! In a single stroke, I will tear through all your shields with a FLASH!" Kirin continued, raising the impossible weapon to the sky, its emanating energy spreading away to the skies, blowing away the ash to reveal the sun. "Oh my cosmos, burn! And reveal the power of the Capricorn ZODIAC!"

Daese did not relent, feeling the code of Paladins in the back of her head telling her not to cede a single inch, but her face still went pale when thunder began clasping from Kirin's aura, "What in the name of Athena…?"

Kirin held his sword with both hands to the side and this caused Excalibur to sudden explode in length, stretching through the air into double, triple, then quadruple its size! A gigantic beam of sizzling golden light that pierced through the horizon now formed the full edge of Excalibur, and the rebels all awed in fear, feeling the light of the gigantic Excalibur burn away all the shadows in the area, dwarfing even its owner in size.

"It… it can't be!" Daese gasped, seeing the tip of the blade angled with the far off height of the volcanoes.

Resting the sword guard on his shoulder as if to support the massive weight, Kirin allowed the ridiculously oversized edge of pure energy to reduce his enemies to trembling knaves and looked down on all of them.

"Sink in your heads now, Black Saints, how little a chance you all stood to begin with!" His aura then descended down his feet, which powered a tremendous dash leap towards them, and his entire body twisted, eyes burning a trail of power in the air, so the hands could swing the long handle across the field. "Cry, Excalibur! GIANT TEMPEST SLASH!" The length of the energy blade swung like a colossal whip, unable to support its straight shape, and struck the battlefield ground, turning into an erupting, all-encompassing tidal wave of golden energy that roared high into the sky.

The sand and rock of the ground was blown away before the unstoppable force of the gigantic wall of brute, unrefined light heading towards the rebels. All the rebels fled towards the beach, except Priam who saw the Paladin standing her ground.

"Don't try to parry it, Daese! You can't absorb it all!" he screamed. Daese just assumed her swordswoman pose and allowed the light to sweep her away, forcefully stabbing the ground just before her silhouette disappeared.

Kirin watched as the energy wave of his attack exploded into a nuclear blast of holy light, blasting away the nearby cliffs, turning the wind into a storm, blinding everyone and everything and deafening all ears with the crashing sound.

He waited patiently for the light to dissipate…

Trails of smoke were eventually detected, and then the falling grains of sand. Kirin saw the rebels still alive and okay, but before them where the girl stood was only a vaporized crater of destruction.

Priam fell to his knee. "N-no…D-Daese!"

Kirin, however, grinned happily. "Yes, she did it!" he gleefully remarked before reducing his Excalibur to its normal shape and jumping off to the destroyed beach. "Let the true fight begin!"

Upon hearing Kirin's strange remark, Priam looked up at the center of the crater and gasped. Paris also couldn't keep his head in his hiding place. "No way!"

Paladin Daese stood alive, well and unharmed on the battlefield. In fact, torrents of light rotated around her body until being absorbed into her handle. "So you figured it out…" she concluded waiting till the last light speck was sucked up into her weapon. "You truly are the warrior who defeated my people, Capricorn Kirin! You must know our every secret-"

"Enough talk! Bring it out!" Kirin demanded, smiling cheek to cheek. "I want to fight a Paladin at her best! Show me the power of a Licht Ritter!"

Daese let her sword handle drop from her hand, revealing that it was actually tied to her wrist by a tiny chain. Most importantly, it showed off the ellipsis-shaped diamond encrusted into it, which now emitted a bright pale shine from all the light she absorbed.

"Of the Paladin stones that were entrusted to me, I was given 'Diamond' by my king, the second most powerful." she revealed, showing off the pale geometry of the jewel. "With it, not only can I absorb any kind of light or fire based attack that I am able to parry, but I can redirect it to anything I want, including my Licht Ritter powers! Reveal my armor, Aquila Cloth Stone!" she cried out, raising her gem to the sky.

The gem in her sword handle suddenly seemed to shatter, turning into countless speckles of light surrounding her body like sand dust. Her fists tightened and she made her white cosmos emerge, causing the speckles to accelerate around her in a twirling dance. Kirin watched, anxious for his battle, as the speckles concentrated in different amounts in different parts of her body so as to form her protection.

There was a cry of an eagle around them. First came the set of blue triangular pads which encased her shoulders. Then a blanket of light went over her chest and locked in her back, forming a light cuirass. Metal gauntlets formed on her fists and crawled up her forearms to form wing-shaped protections and, finally, a belt inscribed with an emblem like a pair of wings rained down her thighs a set of twin caps before a pair of greaves protected her legs.

Finally, a head piece fell on her cropped blonde hair, a tiara shaped like an eagle resting its wings around her head, and the paladin posed herself with armored body and raised sword with the constellation of Aquila burning in the background behind her, ready for battle.

Capricorn Kirin couldn't be happier. "The Aquila Silver Cloth, so this is what has become of it. You hid it inside one of those damn Cloth Stones all these years. Heracles Aguilon will be thrilled to get it back. It belonged to a person special to him, you know?"

Aquila Daese's eyes narrowed. "I do." Paladin Aquila Daese dragged her foot forward, grasped her edgeless handle once again and, this time, a blade of searing white light came out from its hole, forming a complete sword. Her aura burst out, ready to fight.

"It's a shame, though." Kirin interrupted, shaking his head. "Because, you know… it's exactly over this kind of blatant, blasphemous theft that we had your people exterminated."

Daese's jaw dropped and her eyes blinked, shocked at the daringness of the provocation. She saw Kirin's grin turn devious and her rage paralyzed her face into a twisted glare. "Y-you… DAMN YOU!"

"Don't listen to him, he's trying to bait you." Priam messaged her. "Calmly engage him and remember I have your back. Just don't let him power up. The others need time, especially after he flattened the field with Tempest."

She nodded, containing her rage, and confronted her enemy. "You gave me plenty of energy to absorb, Kirin, more than I could possibly need! I should actually thank you." She raised her blade over her shoulder and all the extra energy left out from Tempest Blade that didn't recharge her armor or form her weapon revealed itself in the form of an aura the girl herself didn't seem to control. "Without you, I wouldn't be able to form this powerful counterattack!"

Kirin stepped back, holding his blade in parrying pose. "Wait, does this mean…?" he saw Priam charging another arrow "Oh no, you don't!"

She struggled to keep from trembling, locked eyes with the Capricorn and unleashed all this extra power, causing the sword to burst out the excess around itself, turning into a large, ornamented shape of a javelin whose searing energy seemed to be trying to rocket out of her hands.

Priam aimed his longbow at her hand and fired it. "Chrysó Fos Velos!"

"Take THIS!" She held her transformed sword over herself, allowing the golden, crystal tipped arrow to strike it and fuse with the attack, increasing its already uncontrollable intensity, and let go of the combined missile. "Diamond Beak JAVELIN!"

The spear shot straight out of her fingers at the slightest relent, flying right across the battlefield at top speed and colliding with the Capricorn Saint frontally, tackling him through the Claymore Blight walls' glassy cover against the sandy slope and exploding into a loud smoke cloud.

Claymore Blight's walls, having its forming sword slash collided with the Diamond Javelin as it crossed the barrier, shattered completely into a shower of light specks, freeing the Black Saints. The sand and rock Kirin collided against then crumbled on top of him inside the smoke, burying the Gold Saint.

"We did it! Ah, Ah" Priam celebrated before turning to his men. "Okay, hurry up, he won't stay down for long!"

"Priam, we need more time, we had to bury it pretty deep beneath stardust so Cepheus wouldn't stumble upon it, remember?!" argued one of his men, pointing at the caverns by the sea. "That insane sword wave from earlier just made things harder, you have to give us more time."

"We don't need more time!" Daese argued, pointing her uncharged light sword at the rubble and charging straight at it. "I'll strike him down while he's out! Priam, back me up!"

"Damn it, we don't have a choice!" Priam drew another arrow. "Alright, Daese, slash him out so I can-"

"CALIBURNUS!" The smoke screened rubble erupted in light waves, cutting apart the boulders with gridlines of orange light, blowing away the sand and blasting the charging Daese off. Capricorn Kirin walked off the rubble seemingly unharmed, his cosmos surging in the form of waves of light shaped like sword slashes flying around his body.

Priam warped next to Daese and dragged her away from the enemy. "Here it comes…" he muttered. "Come on, let's keep our distance!"

Kirin shouted at the top of his lungs "My turn to show off what I can do, again. Burn, oh cosmos!" His whole body let out an explosion of golden light. The rays were actually emitted from the edges of his Capricorn Cloth, however, and soon enough, with a wave of his hand, Kirin made these rays fold around his body once more. "CENTURIO PARATUS! (latin: Centurion Apparatus)" he cried out, and the rays of light seemed to be woven by his hand movement around every part of his Cloth's surface, forming new layers of protection.

The round, horned shoulder pads both collapsed while the rays re-layered them with pointy triangular pads made of sheer light and leaving out holes in the shape of Greek letters. His headpiece's horns sprouted out an array of rays in the shape of a roman centurion's longitudinal brush, and a small goat head crest was formed on the forehead. The other rays reinforcing the chest plate also shaped little Romanized details like nails on the cape, the armored skirt over the thighs and the carving of roman god faces on the chest plate.

A face mask covered most of Capricorn's face with the exception of his eyes. Tall neck guards erected from the collar and the unprotected section of his arms were covered by new sleeves of weightless golden light cosmos, like a chainmail of pure energy. Finally, the Excalibur blade itself suddenly detached from Capricorn's hand and slid inside the wrist guard, and its sprout acquired a slight curved guard like that of a gladius.

The 'Legionnaire of Light' shined splendorous and his cosmos radiated like a star in darkness. His two adversaries stood hesitantly in defiance, but could say little before the carefully woven work of art that the Capricorn Cloth had been turned into.

"Priam… what is this? W-what do I do?!"

"Centurio Paratus allows Kirin to move Excalibur slashes around his body so as to leave behind a layer, like Claymore Blight's barrier. What you see is the power of dozens of Excalibur slashes crafted into new armor parts over the Capricorn Cloth. In this form… both his offensive and defensive capabilities are augmented significantly." Priam explained. "He has literally armored himself with Excalibur! There isn't much we can do anymore."

"That's right, and since Excalibur is the sharpest sword, it will also be the hardest shield!" Capricorn Kirin confirmed. All of a sudden the Excalibur light blade shooting out of his wrist guard began spinning around furiously, its rotation making it seem more like a spear instead of a long edge. He leaped towards his victims and lunged forward, "LONGINUS DRILL!"

Daese pushed Priam aside and drew her light sword to parry it. The clash of the twisting holy sword felt like a ton on her and the energy she used in her weapon shattered almost immediately, only managing to slightly redirect Kirin's attack away from her heart. As soon as Kirin's feet landed on the ground, however, the Paladin had already reformed her edge with her cosmos and used her advantage of lessened weight to counter slash him. Kirin however just bashed her off with the side of his sword, the paladin barely able to block and being forced back in feet dragging.

Her sword holding lowered and she breathed heavily, trying to make sense of the situation. "I can't believe this… the light of his blade is now woven so tightly and flawlessly that my parrying can't absorb specks of it at all!" She saw Kirin launch straight at her with a direct lunge and, with an acrobatic side-step and body twist, her whole body rotated straight below his slash and allowed her to whirlwind slash him straight in the stomach, but the reinforced chestplace broke her edge with a loud crash, instantly shattering into pieces of dissipating light. "W-what?!... My sword… I hit you directly!"

His elbow struck her throat, stunning her, and his foot kicked her off against a rock before the Capricorn moved in for the kill like a predator with a drilling sword lunge through her defenses just as she gathered enough sense to try to dodge to the right, inflicting a graze slash on her side that splashed out blood on the ground. The Paladin screamed and Kirin's light-reinforced greave struck her wound, launching her straight at Priam and bashing the two through a boulder into the beach sand.

Paris merely observed, almost boringly placing his arms on the rock. "Oh boy… I guess Kirin will kill them now."

Priam tried to pick back up Daese but the wound he saw on her side was really bad. The Longinus Drill had torn straight through her Silver Cloth's protection and almost took a piece of flesh. Daese squirmed uncontrollably, feeling her wound burn with the lingering cosmos of Excalibur.

The centurion-armed Saint casually walked over to them and pointed his drilling wrist blade at the two. "I bet you two think the situation couldn't get any worse, right?"

And just as Kirin said this another explosion occurred, this time of a meteor-like object landing right by their side, dragging through a landing trail of dirt and rubble. The rebels both stood and watched, despair ever increasing as a gigantic man of long, blonde hair stood up from his mess and walked out to face them, folding arms before the rebels.

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Cepheus Castle Balcony

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The waves crashed against the castle's edge, wetting the balcony. Lance's fire aura emerged after this and he attacked again. "PEGASUS CHARGE FIST!" His body launched like a bullet once more and his fist swung straight at the Cepheus Silver.

But the possessed Guardnia promptly reacted, carving his chained sword into the castle's wall, pull his body up with it to the side to let Lance dash past his arm and then bringing his elbow down with the full force of his own weight on the Bronze's back, smashing him straight on the balcony's floor.

The crumbled ground collapsed, burying the Bronze, but pretty soon Guardnia had to squint at the beams of light that seared through the cracks before the entire rubble exploded, revealing a huge blast of fire cosmos fired straight at him. Guardnia roared, clasped his hands and hammered them down straight at the blast which, after a brief instance of resistance, was reflected right back down on the rubble, exploding against its source in a large bonfire of light.

This, however, had disguised Lance's high leap and Guardnia had just a small instant to turn his face up before a flying kick landed straight on his face! Guardnia's body shot through the balcony's ground till he hit its edge and Lance landed with minimal damage. Before the brawler could resume his attack, however, the sword stabbing the wall was pulled back by its owner and Pegasus had to tilt his whole body to avoid getting decapitated. The star chain that sneaked through the floor wrapped around his ankle and the Silver Saint retracted his chain, lassoing the winged steed by the foot and pulling him in for the kill with the blade.

The red-eyed kid saw the reverse-gripped sword coming down on him and rolled over on his back to allow momentum for his leg to heel-kick the blade off Guardnia's hand. This same momentum launched him back on his foot with an uppercut that Guardnia promptly cross-blocked. His fist went for the Silver crowned head but Guardnia surprised the gold-ranked Bronze by not only dodging it easily but palm strike his stomach, grazing Lance's blocking gauntlet with a side chop to the neck before finally jump-kicking the Bronze in the chest all the way to the other side of the balcony.

Lance shook his head and reassumed his pose, allowing Guardnia time to recover his own weapons. "G-goddamn it, what the hell was that?! I'm only barely managing to keep up with his lashes cause of all my practice sparring Shinta's chains." He let out a martial art shout and reengaged Guardnia in close combat, not allowing him the space needed to use his chains. He spared a second to glance at his friend. "Damn it, Shinta, I thought you told me your teacher was just a Silver Rank!"

Above the hole from the throne-room they both crashed through earlier, Shinta got his hands on the crumbled edge to look closer. "Something isn't right. Master is skilled but wasn't this fast." He commented, watching the teacher go head to head with Lance's light-fast movements.

Kastiel, who rushed through his mind to find out when did Lance have the time to learn light speed, snapped out of it and observed Guardnia's movement blurs more closely instead. "I can't tell how the hell they're fighting, but you're right, Guard' wasn't this fast."

"What's going on then? Master had to use strategy against me, so how would he-"

"If I had to guess I would put in question if that guy is still Guardnia at all." The Kerberos commented, narrowing his eyes at the blue blur.

Lance dashed for the offensive but had to pump his breaks and raise his gauntlet in an angle to parry the light-speed sword, deflecting it but putting an ugly slash on his armor, threw a lightning fast side kick and instead got lassoed yet again by the star chain and pulled by it with a body twist from Guardnia right against the brick wall.

Lance screamed and fell on the ground on his hands and knees, immediately recovering and re-engaging Guardnia by closing in the distance with a long fist punch, forcing Guardnia to step back with a diagonal kick and, just as when the Silver Saint was slipping himself to the side to set up another chain wrapping, Lance immediately countered by exploding his cosmos and executing a top speed overhand punch that hit him straight in the head, shattering the side of his Silver headpiece and flooring the possessed Guardnia.

Pegasus stepped away, feeling the impending threat of a counterattack and letting his body heat reduce a bit to prevent the blood from rushing too much to his own thoughts. He watched the Silver Saint slowly get back on his knees and reveal the left, large blue wing of his headpiece was cracked and blood gushed from his forehead.

"Hopefully that put some sense in your head." Lance angrily taunted, though the look on Guardnia's eyes was as crazed as before, if not more. "Well, I guess not, fuck!"

"It's no use fighting him if you want to rescue Guard'!" Kastiel shouted down "Just knock him out so we can drag him out of here! That Cloth is turning his brain into pudding the longer he stays!"

"SHUT UP, asshole, I know what I'm doing!"

Kastiel growled in frustration. "That damn brat… He better not screw this up!"

Shinta stared confusedly between the two. "But what you suggested made sense, why is Lance ignoring you?"

"He probably does agree with me but he hates me too damn hard to give me that!" Kastiel explained.

Guardnia held up his star and sword, both weapons growing more aggressive in shape as he reflowed his dark blue cosmos, causing the edge to grow serrated and the ornament to grow sharper points, both revealed runes Lance had seen carved along the walls of the castle has he had made his way here.

"So who am I talking to, here?!" Lance asked, tightening his fingers into claws. "Shinta's teacher or some stuck up armor from the Age of Myth?!"

Guardnia spread his feet apart and let his chains hang in preparation for the assault. "I'm the king!" his eyes then widened and his cosmos exploded "And you are a filthy intruder! SHADOW GLAVE!" His body then blitzed to the side as if compressed into a shadow and disappeared from sight.

Lance went to full defensive, realizing the Silver Saint had somehow disappeared from even his 7th sense scope, and backed away to reduce the vulnerability of his rear side. "D-damn it, where the hell did he go?!"

His instinct allowed him to pick up the fact that his four o'clock was wide open and he instantly turned over to find a reappearing shadow of the king thrusting the sword straight at his neck! Lance's arm responded also instinctively, barely putting itself in the way in time to let the blade cut through his forearm plate and slash the flesh.

He forcefully swept the arm aside to move away the blade and tried to kick Guardnia only for the shadow to sub-space its way around him for a second lunge "S-SHIT!"

"DIE, filthy Medusa spawn!" the king screamed, aiming straight has his heart.

Lance's both hands rushed up "BLADES!" the fingers tensed into chops and the energy flowed up in barriers to form makeshift swords to parry the Cepheus sword in a cross, dispatch the attack, push kick Guardnia's chest and then stepping in like a praying mantis to try to slice apart the enemy's chains.

The experienced king countered the assault with a perfectly aimed rising axe kick that struck Lance right in the lower jaw, instantly sending his brain rocking inside Pegasus' head, dodged a flailing Blade swing with a head bob, slid around Lance with a tricky foot work and positioned himself to bring down the sword on his nape.

Lance's elbow struck him with a back bash counter that pushed back the king and made him grab his bloody nose. His fire aura exploded, his fist closed and retracted to next his waist and he cried out his attack. "Pegasus!" The background image of the winged horse reappeared, this time with its wing feathers being made of fire, and its Saint's hand punched forward "Flame ATTACK!" The torrent shot out like a wall of fire, encompassing the enemy.

The king, however, supernaturally overcoming the pain on his nose, recovered himself and used his defensive star chain "Great Capture : SPIDER NET!" The chain shot forward straightly before bursting in a spiral pattern and reinforcing itself with retracting lines, shaping a perfect arachnid web that took in the torrent of fire and held it back, allowing the Silver Saint a small breathing room to step back, dropping his sword so as to grab his chain and perform a small counter. "Boomerang SHOT!" His sword tossed around the wave of fire in an angled shot straight at the source of the fire, forcing Lance to interrupt the emission of his flame throwing to roll over to the side and let the attack hit the ground.

The balcony creaked harder, its supports weakening with each careless move.

Seeing the unleashed flames being reduced to a simple large fireball with no feeder, Cepheus jumped out of the way and retrieved his defensive chain and thus the Flame Attack's force pushed on harmlessly across the balcony's edge unto the sea, wasted and blasting a spot on the sea into a torrent of steam.

Lance spotted him in the air and launched himself with a fistful of energy "PEGASUS - "

"Time for the final move!" Guardnia set up his trap against the Charge Fist by once again launching his defensive star and readying the sword for the counter "WILD TRAP!"

"-BARRIER!" Lance instead cast, thrusting his hand with open fingers in Wild Trap's direction and creating a succession of energy, glass-like rings that formed a dome shield with which the star chain crashed before it could form the bear trap shaped, shattering into tiny pieces and robbing the counter of its energy. "At the distance he'll attack me I won't have a choice but to try that move…!"

Unable to pull it back and started by his plan being ruined, Guardnia instead held on to his sword, let gravity push him down on Lance, and used his key killing move, "SHADOW GLAVE." His body once again entered subspace and, possessing unnatural speed, blitzed over to Lance to lunge his sword down at his neck.

"He needs to reappear just before he strikes me!" Lance's foot stepped on a loose brick on the wall side just as the shadow reappeared as Guardnia himself "ROZAN-" he shouted at the top of his lungs as his right fist closed, his arm muscles bulged and the white flowing aura that characterized him suddenly burst into a wildly torrent green like that of crashing water. Then, drawing power by leaping from the loose brick, the Pegasus Saint roared the attack's name and delivered the point-blank attack at full force "SHORYUHA!"

The sky went dark, the cry of a far off dragon was heard and Guardnia barely had time to react defensively before a single powerful uppercut struck his crossed arms with force so strong the air was blown away damp, the nearby wall was imprinted with a round compression, the blue forearm guard of the Cepheus Cloth cracked and Guardnia felt his arms pressed against his chest as if he had just tried to block a train charge.

The instant this happened, in the background, the image of the Pegasus disappeared to be replaced by that of a Chinese Dragon sprouting out of nowhere and biting down on the King's staff arm in a struggle.

The arm completed its movement and the Cepheus Saint was shot up at the air in a screaming spin with a soaring wind sound from the blow strangely similar to the dragon's roar. Flushing around pieces of blue metal from his broken gauntlets, Cepheus crashed down on the ever collapsing balcony along with Lance, who landed on his feet.

Seeing the Cepheus Saint apparently down, Pegasus breathed heavily in relief and let the heat of his body rush out. All of a sudden, though, his back flared up in pain, the green cosmos filling his body lashed back inside it in relapse and the Pegasus Saint fell to his hands, just as damaged as his adversary.

"W-what?! I… AGH!"

"Lance, what's wrong?!" screamed Shinta, though he still wondered what the heck was that dragon move just now. He leaped down on the balcony.

"NO, you idiot, don't jump down there!" screamed Kastiel, who almost reached for his chains to catch Shinta.

But it was too late and Shinta landed on the frail balcony right away, causing it to creak, slide slightly to the side and throw the Andromeda off balance. "W-whow, I… this place is falling apart; I have to get those two out of here." He rushed over to Lance, who was closest, and helped him get back up. "You're gonna be alright! W-what… what just happened?"

Lance grabbed his own head and thought back to Seiryu's words. "N-nothing, just… this move has a punitive drawback to me because I can't use its element. G-get away from here, Shinta, you're hurt and Guardnia might still-"

The chained star suddenly flew past them and carved itself on the wall, startling the Bronze Saints. They saw Guardnia use it as leverage to pull himself back up, coughing, stumbling and keeping his head low all the way.

Despite being just as hurt, Lance placed himself protectively over Shinta. "F-fuck, here we go again!"

Shinta brought out his limp chains and prepared himself to fight as well, containing his tears.

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Sacrifice Ritual Beaches

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Taurus Daniel joined Capricorn Kirin in staring down the two fighters against the wall. "So this is what's happening…"

Priam stood protectively over the wounded Paladin, even though he himself couldn't put up much of a fight. "… Daniel? How… how did you get here through the stardust?!"

"From the looks of it he just launched himself straight through the sky and endured the drop through the stardust." calculated Scorpio Paris from his hiding spot, noticing the trail of attrition left behind in the air. "Any other Saint would have been entirely sapped of his cosmos and splatter like a normal human on the ground, but Daniel always was a freaking hulk like this."

"Long time, no see, Priam…, you worthless, treacherous piece of Black Saint garbage! So you survived all these years, hiding in my student's island and even dared to attack the Pope?!..." The Taurus' teeth gritted barely for everyone to see and his face went red. A thin line of golden energy formed a silhouette on his body and the ground began shaking slightly.

The Capricorn Saint saw Taurus go into a fit and decided to interfere. "Hold on! This is my fight, I'll exterminate these rats. You don't need to go all ou-"

"No…" Taurus merely muttered. The shaking of the ground became worse and the air seemed to get thicker. "The situation at hand requires a harsh punitive gesture."

"Look, you don't understand, Daniel, that girl has the Aquila Cloth inside the Diamond Stone. If you use Great Horn she will just absorb it and use its strength against us. I can battle her just fine with Centurio Paratus!"

The blonde giant, however, staid confident "I don't need 'Great Horn' for these fellows, so step aside, Kirin. Without Malta or Akassius guiding us from the back row, our fighting styles tend to get in each other's way."

The two Black Saints raised bow and sword, ready to fight for their lives. Priam saw Daese trying to stand with dignity but her wound forced her whole body into a sweaty mess.

"Daese, you can't fight, move away from here!"

"I won't, or you won't survive either!" she reminded him, trying to look half-threatening before the two overwhelmingly power Gold Saints. She became so weak just from Capricorn's attack that her Licht Ritter sword sometimes seemed to fade away. "J-just direct me how to attack, okay?"

"You can't! Daniel is invulnerable right now!" Priam argued, defensively pointing his arrow at the two Gold Saints. "Back in the war he was known as the Ironclad Bull! When his aura burns and fills him up like that it reacts like reactive armor to attacks, reducing their strength to half before he ever takes a hit! Besides, Kirin almost tore a hole through you!"

"I c-can just reform my swords if they break, Priam, you're the one who can't-"

"Allow me to put an end to both your bickering" interrupted Daniel, his aura then flaring up to a bonfire and his arms unfolding, a gesture that put both of them on guard. "Neither of you will get to put my defenses to the test, because I will be smashing the both of you, right now!" His left hand raised and revealed a palm burning with golden cosmos from the wrist to the fingertips. The image of a soaring bull appeared in the background and Daniel roared to the high heavens, thrusting the hand towards them. "MAGNITUDE ATLAS!"

The hand seemed to strike something invisible in the air like an unseen wall between the Taurus Saint and the rebels at the same time the image of the bull stomped Andromeda Island and, with this impact alone, as if upsetting a delicate balance previously at play, and with a thundering sound that echoed through the air, through the ground, through the Black Saint bodies and finally through the far off furious waves, a rising tension began to be felt in the air, slowly escalating and growing.

At first, the two black Saints didn't feel anything, but eventually Daese felt her Eagle Cloth shake ever so slightly. Priam's bow slowly aimed off course and Kirin stepped further away from the battlefield, as if fearing an incoming devastation. Taurus Daniel's raised hand slowly closed the gritting fingers and the vibration got worse and worse as he did this, chocking the air itself. The shaking got worse and worse, depriving the two Black Saints and the Capricorn of their equilibrium but torturing the two enemies in particular with a concentration of the pulsating force. Blood dripped from the Paladin's mouth against her will as she desperately tried to stand before this invisible onslaught.

At first Daese, with her wound, fell to her knee, gagging in pain and only barely managing to hold on to her sword as the side of her clothes slowly filled up with red. Priam was soon to follow, unable to keep his weapon steady and feeling like someone was slowly dropping an elephant on his back.

With a second loud shout and a sudden opening of his hand, Taurus Daniel then released the full force of his attack in the form of a powerful, unstoppable vibration and the entire island shook all at once! The magma of far off volcanic rivers burst up, the air screamed out a terrible thunder sound, the central wasteland's many dunes flattened so hard they could now see all the way to the training ground huts to the north and the gigantic force pulse ran over the two Black Saints and sent them crashing full force through the boulders, the ground and then shooting off the sand to the beach like a runaway truck, all in the meanwhile blasting everything around him with a perfectly round invisible force, flattening nearby rocks, crumbling cliffs and causing the beach water to suddenly recede with tremendous force.

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Cepheus Castle Balcony

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The Pegasus Saint shoved Andromeda back away and reassumed his fighting pose. "Y-You still want to fight, asshole?!" he taunted "Come on! We got a w-whole bag of tricks just waiting for you to-"

"W-what… What happened?!" Guardnia managed to gasp out, rubbing his eyes with this free hand and feeling the balcony slowly losing strength. Surprising Kastiel and Lance and sending a wide smile of hope to Shinta's face, Guardnia looked up to them with a seemingly normal face. "I… Pegasus? Where am I? The last thing I remember was fighting… Kastiel…" he touched his chest, which burned hot, and saw his gauntlets almost broken apart. "W-why is my cosmos so exhausted? What happened to my armor?"

"M-Master! … It's okay, we'll get you out of here!" he walked towards the Master.

Kastiel's eyes saw the cracks on the balcony's wall edge. "NO, WAIT, don't put your weight on that side-"

As soon as the Kerberos Saint shouted this, however, the aftershocks from Daniel's Magnitude Atlas finally propagated into the castle, causing the entire structure to shake harder than ever before. The balcony creaked even harder and lost its integrity, putting the weight of Guardnia's body on the heavily damaged star chain gauntlet tension, causing it to tear apart and make the Silver Saint fall back on the balcony's edge. This extra push forced the balcony past its limit and the entire structured cracked off the wall! The Pegasus, Andromeda and Cepheus Saints screamed and fell off through the broken rock down the precipice to the cursed sea!

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Sacrifice Ritual Beaches

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Kirin sprouted out a disc-shaped tower shield of energy on his left wrist to protect himself and Paris held on to his hood behind his hiding hole as the air quake also unwittingly tried to blow him away just for being nearby the area and watched with his unclosed eye the beach waves being pushed higher and higher until, inevitably, with the receding of the pulse created by Taurus, the water crashed right back down on the sand in the form of large tidal waves, washing back Priam and Daese to the battlefield.

The rebels screamed in the caves below as they tried to dig up 'Nicolai', holding on to their dear lives. Scorpio held on to his hideout as best as he could, fearing the devastation would destroy it, and watched Daniel and Kirin re-approaching the two Black Saints.

He sweated nervously. "Daniel's overkilling like always… at this rate I might really not get my pay!" he looked at the destruction caused by his 'Magnitude Atlas' "Then again what can you expect from a such an enormous muscle buff that he causes air quakes by flexing his freaking fist?!" His bloodshot eyes then noticed that the Sacrifice Ritual cliff was oddly intact by the battlefield's edge. "And those two scoutboys are STILL holding back to protect the island's precious test artifacts! Honestly! How did Priam ever expect to beat these guys when Aeneas and the others are gone?!"

Daniel walked over to the fallen Priam, who struggled to get back up.

"How does it feel to be made the tuning fork for a concentrated magnitude 6 pulsation, Priam?" he only got a pained grunt as response. Daniel raised his massive foot and stomped on the burnt man, burying him in the sand with a foot as large as his stomach and forcing a loud, huffed scream out of him "That doesn't sound half as painful as being stabbed in the back by your own friends, now, does it?!"

Daese saw the giant blonde man torturing her friend and got back on her knees. "S-stop it!"

Daniel grabbed Priam by the collar and raised the bloody man up in the air. "Where is he?! Where did you hide Guard'?!" Priam didn't even try to answer this, instead punching Daniel's wrist defiantly, so Daniel retorted with a much stronger punch to the gut that pressed the air out of the rebel's lungs "ANSWER ME, you COWARD! Where's my pupil?! What did you do to him?!"

Coughing out blood and feeling his own face going red, Priam's trembling vision focused on the maddened bull's face. "H-he's gone! He's getting out of here with Arles' precious secrets and you're too late to s-stop him!"

Taurus roared like a wild bear and bashed Priam's body straight to the ground.

The Aquila Paladin reformed her edge with a flash of white light and tried to stand up straight, but her entire skeleton felt like mush. "L-let go of him! If you don't leave him alone-"

Daniel turned to her and just the way he completely swallowed her up in his enormous shadow paralyzed her fear, interrupting her threat. The Taurus Saint indeed stopped hurting Priam, instead tossing him aside with a kick, but now he moved towards the Paladin to call her bluff.

The immensely wounded Paladin forced herself to snap up and, crying out a battle roar, swung her sword in a upward stab at his stomach, the only spot her height could reach. Upon contact, however, the Gold Saint's aura lashed out a small detonation of light between the plates of his own armor and breaking her edge straight in half.

He stepped on one of the metal pieces that fell on the sand, causing it to crumble into bright pieces of vanishing light. "You'll do what, Cerulean girl?"

Daese stumbled back awkwardly, and focused all her mental energy into reshaping her weapon, but half way across building the edge her whole reserve dried out and the Paladin collapsed, instead using the half-craft sword as a cane to stop her from falling face front.

"D-damn it… D-DAMN IT!" she screamed in frustration. Her thoughts turned to her younger sister, who made her cosmos shine a bit brighter in the dark, but her body refused to move after that devastating quake.

Daniel simply picked her up from the ground by the nape like a bad kitty cat. He saw the armor she wore. "I never thought I would get to see one of your people again, much less with the Eagle Silver Cloth. Sorry, you fought well and you're not the one I have a grudge against, but -" His fist then coiled in preparation with a bubble of golden light around it. "- if you're with Priam, you're my enemy, too! And you are going to get smashed!"

Sensing her impending death, her cosmos burned one last time, a battle cry was unleashed, her hands grabbed on to his for balance and her metal greave suddenly kneed him straight in the face as hard as she could so he would drop her. His fingers didn't even budge, though, even though he smoked from the spot he was hit and her amazon-like strength had once fought off Celestial Stars.

Taurus' reddened face just frowned, causing her to feel her own break into staggered shock.

"Time to fly." said Daniel.

Time slowed down as his fingers released her weight and she was set in mid-air to receive the blunt force of the strongest punch in all of Sanctuary. His fist clenched so hard it almost triggered another Atlas and Taurus' light-speed finisher went straight for the target. Priam shouted her name helplessly on the floor.

A dashing missile of light descended straight from the upper side to crash down on his fist with a devastatingly powerful kick, catching Daniel by surprise and pinning his hand to the sand ground, the force bursting a crater and shooting a cloud of dust into the air. The Taurus Saint blinked repeatedly and looked over to see a man of round shoes, concealing sand-colored cape and a blank mask with bloodshot-eyed visage. While a few strings of blue-dyed hair were visible in the collar, the man's identity was mostly concealed.

"…. What the -?!"

Kirin widened his eyes "DANIEL, WATCH OUT!" and leapt into action. Excalibur whirred again and Capricorn attacked over Daniel's huge shoulder "LONGINUS DRILL!"

In a single smooth motion, Paris dropped back so as to both kick Daese's body away from the action, dodge the lunging Longinus and set up his hand to stop his fall and punch Capricorn straight in the throat, the only spot of his Apparatus that wasn't reinforced.

Daese crashed straight on Priam, triggering a loud cackle from the masked man.

Kirin fell over on the ground with blood gushing out his mouth and Taurus raised his cosmos-immersed palm from the ground with a roar. "MAGNITUDE-"

"Restriction!" Paris called out to himself, not wanting to reveal his identity and pointing his nail-less finger at the giant to unleash a flurry of restraining waves.

"-ATLAS!" A feeling of a string being wrapped around his hand was detected and Daniel was suddenly unable to close his fist completely, merely unleashing a Magnitude 2 pulse that was barely registered by the flowing of their airs and the displacing of close by sand. "Ugh!... What?!"

"Time to sleep, buddy." Paris thought, charging his scarlet needle with a purposely white-colored cosmos. The corner of his eye saw Capricorn rolling over and powering through the pain to charge back at him and Paris closed his fists for the incoming slugfest. "Hold on, gotta take care of the squire boy."

Using an offline footwork, Kirin extended his sword arm in a straight line to test the reach of his foe, but Paris merely danced like an harlequin around the drilling Excalibur lunge to strike his left side with a kick before hitting him square on the cheek with a full force right punch that forced Capricorn back a few steps.

Kirin spat out a drop of blood. "Okay, punk, who the hell are you?!" Paris merely laughed at his stupid face. "Urgh! If you won't talk then I'll just cut off that mask!"

Relentless and with all damage drastically reduced by Centurio Apparatus, the 'Legionnaire of Light' restarted his offensive immediately, assuming a medium distance with which to threateningly drag the tip of Excalibur through the sand, burning it into glass, before bringing it up in an initial diagonal slash to be dodged before a series of side swipes, vertical sweeps and lunging attacks to keep the pressure on the agile foe.

Meanwhile Priam struggled to get back on his feet, coughing and trying to reawaken Daese. "C-come on, g-get up, we have to get out of here."

With a lot of effort, Daese managed to keep her eyes open. "D-damn that g-guy! What t-took him so long to lend a hand?!"

With a more daring and skillfully executed wrist push, Excalibur was lunged straight past Paris' defenses, who twisted his body to the side so he would only get barely grazed on the mask, drawing a bit of blood. In return his arm wrapped straight around the Capricorn's from below, locking the sword.

Capricorn took this moment of struggling to take a good look at the details on the masked face. "D-damn it, fight like a man, you… you clown!"

"Gyeh-eh-eh, now why the heck would I do that?! I'm doing great like this!" and just before Kirin could process the sound of his voice, Paris' turned his whole body around to spin his round-shoed foot straight at his chest, kicking him back. The tip of Scarlet Needle burned a bright fake white "Scarlet Needle:…"

Tired of the games, Capricorn roared and swept his arm at a distance. "CENTURIO: CALIBURNUS!" And the long wrist blade unleashed an array of slashing light rays that cut apart everything in its path towards the stranger.

But Paris merely jumped acrobatically around the rays, landed by Capricorn and, before Excalibur could be re-aimed, unleashed his move "GRAFFIAS!" The scarlet needle ascended diagonally with a sharpness rivaling Excalibur and cutting in the air a wave of red light that slash-waved Capricorn straight against the rocks.

The swordsman crashed through the rubble forcefully, being buried beneath the cliff side's collapsing layers of stone.

"Ah! More like 'Legionnaire of Lame'! Take a hike, ya jerk!..." Paris laughed discreetly, self-aware that his charismatic chuckle would give him away. He then rubbed his masked chin "Wait, why do I get the feeling that I'm forgetting something?"

The earth shook with a far off stomp. "GREAT HORN!"

Paris turned over and yelped when he saw the gigantic bull of light heading straight at him. He leaped over its horns and kicked the blast just the right away to launch it at the spot where Kirin was thrown into, blasting it all over again, before gracefully landing before the gigantic Taurus Saint.

"Thanks a lot, that oughta keep your sword-happy buddy busy a bit longer. As for you, Taurus…" Paris growled angrily. "I guess my Restriction move wore off. Alright, big guy, let's do this!" he challenged, though he was not sure how long he would be able to trick these guys. "And I don't think I can damage him easily, either."

Priam carried the wounded Daese over his shoulder past Paris to keep them both safe. "Come on… we just need a bit more time!"

Taurus folded his arms once more and his whole body erupted in a torrent of light. "You are not going anywhere!" He then shouted out and thrust his hands in their direction. Another thundering sound followed and all three of them lost their balance. The constellation of the bull reappeared and stomped the ground with its hoof. "It's time you Black Saints learned the consequences of your actions!"

"O-oh great, what now?!" complained Paris.

Daniel raised his hands and clasped them together. "COLOSSAL SMASH!" The entire sand floor trembled and the air began flowing more rapidly. Everyone felt a great tearing sound coming down from below and Daniel's fingers twirled together more tightly, causing his aura to flow more furiously.

Priam cussed to himself. "Darn… You have to stop him, Paris, or he'll fissure the entire island with us and the 'Nicolai' crew in it!"

Paris' finger shined like a white star. "Alright, Daniel, I didn't really wanted to do this to you but you give me no choice." He launched himself towards the giant and aimed at the heart, timing it with the secret weak point of the Ironclad Bull. There was a sudden aurora colored light sweeping by, but Scorpio ignored it. "Scarlet Needle: ANTARES!"

"MIRROR COAT!"

Paris' finger struck straight through "Daniel's face, but the Gold Saint of Taurus merely gave in like an ice statue, cracking all over and breaking down into a bunch of large pieces of perfectly crafted hollow ice sculpture.

Paris landed between the pieces and blinked. "What the…?"

Sagittarius Priam gasped, recognizing the move from the info they had on the Saints. "That was Aquarius' move!"

Everyone looked over and saw Daniel a few meters behind where he was, just as confused as the Black Saints.

"Who… was I just saved?" Taurus looked over to the source and stepped away.

The air in the background that Daniel stepped away from suddenly began to be splitting a line of white light down itself like zipper and, once it reached the ground, it loudly opened up like a large stone gate from an ancient temple. Everyone stepped away and saw, to their awe, as the opening completed itself, the warring mazes of inter dimensional currents, an image of deep spaced mixed in with a floor consisted of a grid of light, like a makeshift current or path for someone.

And standing in the middle of the door was a whole group of people who one by one stepped out and entered the battlefield.

The former Sagittarius and the Diamond Paladin both paled. "Oh no…"

Kirin finally moved the rocks out of his way and saw the newly arrived reinforcements. He chuckled. "Well, Priam, if you thought you were in a pinch before…"

Aquarius Malta, the red-haired master of ice and auroras, walked out of the Other Dimension gate and joined the Taurus Saint and Capricorn. His eyes looked over the battlefield. "It seems we arrived just in time to wrap things up. Sorry, Daniel, but I saw the attack just as we got here and used my Mirror Coat to switch you with a dummy. Seemed like the wiser strategy."

The giant chuckled. "Ah, ah, ah, that's completely fine by me."

Sagittarius Aiolos the current owner of the real bow and arrow of the centaur also revealed himself. "We're sorry it took so long, Saint Daniel, Saint Kirin." He apologized, before turning his attention to the man with the longbow. "But I insisted we joined this reinforcement. I just had to see it with my own eyes that my predecessor was really part of this conspiracy."

And so did Gemini Saga, the current guardian of the Third House. "It's fine, though, our combined forces will now overwhelm the enemy."

"Saga?! Were you the one that crafted the dimensional path to go around the stardust?" Kirin asked, surprised they even managed to get here so soon to begin with."

Saga chuckled self-consciously. "Unfortunately I can't take the credit for that, my skills would have taken weeks." He looked over to their real escort, who was just walking out along with Heracles Aguilon. "That was someone else."

"Move aside to let the boss through, everyone." called out Heracles Aguilon, the grey haired man just as gigantic as Daniel. He saw the Taurus Gold Saint all shaken up. "Boy did they give you a hassle. How come everything isn't flattened already?"

"We did flatten everything, several times actually" explained Daniel. "I just didn't want you to miss out on the action."

"I took some time cause I had to order the Herculean Guard to keep things peaceful in the population." The silver-haired giant looked over to the enemy. "Priam and… is that a Paladin with the Eagle Cloth?!" Aguilon suddenly shouted, locking eyes with Daese.

The young paladin girl stepped back defensively, feeling the giant devote his attention to her. "S-stay back, Silver Saint! This armor was entrusted to me by m-my King!"

"I don't care about some dead monarch's claims, little girl, that armor is coming home with me now, to its true rightful owner!" Heracles threatened, before pointing to the portal with his thumb. "Well, make way,everyone; cause the ultimate buzz kill has come too."

Everyone stepped aside to let the tall man of broad shoulders, black hair of spikes and bangs, ceremonial clothes with shoulder pads and golden headband lead the seven Saints of Athena. He sternly looked down on the battlefield, letting the light of his portal make his shadow engulf the Black Saints.

Paris shook like a leaf. "Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck-my-life! He's here!"

Sagittarius Priam gritted teeth and squinted at his sworn enemy. "Akassius!"

Former Gold Saint of Gemini, Akassius Steiner, took in all the details of the result of Kirin's battle with the Black Saints.

"I didn't want to believe it when we found out." he confessed. His fist closed beneath his cloak, causing the gate behind them to close abruptly. "Well, Priam, you certainly succeeded in making me look like a fool, didn't you?"

Saga took a moment to look at said gate before its end. "I would have taken weeks to craft a path through the dimensions, but just by using Excalibur's all-cutting cosmos as a lighthouse, Akassius took just a few hours to guide our way here, if that." His fist closed angrily. "It seems we're really still just children compared to our predecessors, but I'll find a way to surpass this person!"

On the other hand, Aiolos was still agape at the sight of his predecessor, or even the situation they were in to begin with. Still, it seemed like with the exception of the masked man, the enemy group was all but run down and exhausted. "This is our chance to capture them. Saint Daniel, don't worry, we'll take it from here. You have retired, so this is our responsibility."

Heracles cracked his knuckles. "Sorry, Aiolos, but that isn't how these guys roll. There's not gonna let kids take this particular reunion away from me."

Aiolos, however, stepped forward towards the battlefield and locked eyes with Priam. "I'm afraid you'll have to accept my help as well, I came here to see with my own eyes the man who used to occupy my House and attacked the Pope! And I'm not leaving without retribution."

Before Aiolos could take a bolder stand, however, the four veteran Gold Saints took the lead, burning their unparalleled Gold cosmos into a quadratic formation of shining light. Daniel and Kirin took the front, drawing their burning palm and Excalibur respectively, while Akassius and Malta staid in the back row, already charging their powers.

Paris quavered before the approaching force.

"Fuck this!" he turned over to run only to be face-to-face with the injured duo of rebels. He saw the expectant and determined look on their faces. "Oh, don't you two look at me like that! You didn't pay me nearly enough to fight these guys!"

"… Y-you're s-shameless!" Daese criticized.

"That's enough Daese, this is Paris' choice." affirmed Priam, who then confronted the Scorpio. "Paris… please… we have no one else. We just need one more minute... and my body is far too broken to ever use Lionet Roar again like last time."

"Then how do you expect to claw that minute out of this situation?!"

Priam narrowed his eyes and put on his goggles, letting Daese stand on her own. "By doing whatever it takes."

Paris saw Daese nodding at this like it was some sort of codded command and he instantly deduced what he meant. "Oh no… no, no, no, no, no and NO! And the shameless one is me?!"

Daese and Priam assumed their poses, putting themselves back to back, twirling their fingers and pointing palms in the Gold Saint's direction.

"You choose your own path, Paris, but we do need a third person." Priam reminded him. "If you're not sure of this, then run, we'll cover for you."

Paris gritted teeth angrily. "Uuggggghhhh! FINE!" He turned around and assumed the third pose, getting on his knee and also aiming his hands at the Gold Saints. "But if this blows us all to hell, it's your own damn FAULT!"

Daniel and Kirin halted their march and assumed defensive poses. "Wait, what?! They… they wouldn't dare!" said Kirin.

Malta also had to blink his eyes. "Is that what I think it is?!..."

Akassius narrowed his. "It is!… Forget the formation! Daniel, Kirin, get behind me NOW!" The two Gold Saints didn't even hesitate and rushed to the back row.

Heracles saw ahead with his large height what that rebels were up to. "Holy mother of… SAGA, AIOLOS, stay with me!" he leaped to their side. "If anything happens watch out and get ready to support the adults!" the Silver Saint dug his fingers into the ground. "This battle is about to be over!"

The trio of Black Saints burned their cosmos menacingly, forming a humble golden bonfire and warning the enemy to step back. Daese's wound on the side of her torso from Longinus burned even harder, but she struggled to stay still in her pose. No one in the group had room for any mistakes or they themselves would be instantly destroyed.

"Priam, we've retrieved Nicolai and we're starting the engines!" said a mental message from the rebel crew below. "If you're gonna do something to shake off the Gold Saints, do it NOW!"

"Right, thank you all, you did great." They burned the energy even higher and Priam saw Paris fully focused on the task. It relieved him that the most selfish of the trio was so committed to this. His attention turned to Akassius, who for the first time in years seemed nervous. "It was nice to see you all. I'm glad you're okay, even if you don't believe me."

The Duke's fist clenched so angrily it drew blood. "You reckless,… remorseless COWARD!" threatened Akassius. "Don't you understand that if you dare to fire that, you might destroy the entire planet?! Will you really stoop to that level?!"

"I will. I know you'll be right there to stop it. In fact, I'm counting on it!" Priam confidently said before their entire remaining cosmos flared up and an atom of light emerged between their hand's triangle formation, with three extra particles flying around it like electrons.

Aquarius gasped, seeing the energy about to reach its exponential growth point. "Shit, he's serious!"

Akassius thrust his left hand forward. "F-FORCE MANIPULATION!…-"

And the rebel trio shouted in unison. "ATHENA…" The three electrons of light then fused with the atom, causing it to pulsate, violently bulge around and finally exponentially increasing in volume "EXCLAMATION!"

Everyone took cover and Akassius's right hand joined his left "- and DOUBLE DIMENSION!"

The trio of hands thrust forward the swelling atom at the speed of light and it exploded into a shower of light upon hitting Akassius, engulfing everyone and everything!

{======================|0|======================}

Cepheus Castle Cliffs

{======================|0|======================}

The entire island shook yet again, making the three Saints hanging just above the cursed waters of Andromeda Island's ring sway dangerously back and forth. Lance bashed again against the wall, his left hand fingers barely hanging on to the ledge and his right hand struggling to hold the Andromeda chain, which painfully sparked on his hand.

"D-damn it! WHAT THE HELL IS UP with all these damn EARTHQUAKES?!" he looked down to see the owner of the Andromeda chain hugging on to Guardnia. "H-hold on Shinta, I'll try to pull you up. Hang on to your teacher and… shit, try to keep him from stabbing you or something!"

"Umm, okay, you can count on me… just don't slip or anything okay?!" Shinta asked, kinda panicked they were barely over a cursed water that could kill Saints. He tried to talk to Guardnia. "Master are you awake? I t-think your defense chain fell down on the water, s-sorry. Lance, I don't think he's awake."

"PERFECT, then I don't have to worry about him being fucking insane."

"I'll try to wake-"

"SHINTA, LET HIM SLEEP, I like him that way! You know, the not-stabby way!" He tried to push himself back up, even burning his cosmos, but every time he did so the ledges on the wall just sucked up his energy. "Fucking castle and its stardust-reinforced walls! Why couldn't the ancients have invented some sort of wall that didn't make me hang like a ragdoll on this thing?! D-damn it, did Daniel fill up this kid with protein or something?! They both weight like a ton of bricks!"

Kastiel got on his knees and threw down his mace chain, showing off its spikes. "Here, hatch his chain on to this! I'll pull them up and then you!"

"FUCK OFF, ASSHOLE! I DON'T NEED YOU!"

It was Shinta's turn to yell sense to him. "LANCE, just accept his help or we'll all drown!"

The Pegasus Saint screamed a curse in anger. "F-FINE, ALRIGHT!" he used all his strength to lift the chain just enough to hook its links on the mace's spikes. He then let go of it and held on to the ledge with both hands. "Alright, j-just pull them up! D-damn it, really, what's with all this shaking?! It's been getting worse and worse."

As he was not hanging on to a stardust-filled brick, Kastiel managed to burn his cosmos to get superhuman strength and carefully pulled up the chain. As he did this, he looked over to the horizon, also curious about the odd tremors, and gasped.

"Holy… mother of Athena!" He then made everyone scream when he almost let the chain drop with the shock of what he saw. "SORRY, s-sorry, it's just…the beaches to the south…"

Lance and Shinta looked over in the direction he pointed and also widened their eyes.

Far off, to the island's southern edge, beyond the wastelands and the volcanoes of Andromeda Island, a blinding source of light roared on and on. At first they couldn't make out details but as their eyes adjusted the shape of a gigantic sphere of swirling waves of golden light cosmos blazed on like a sun on the earth's surface.

Waves of sand and strong currents of air blew away in the landscape from the blinding orb. Even the sea below them began raging wildly, threatening to wash down the Saints if Kastiel didn't hurry up.

The Pegasus Saint had never seen anything like this before. "W-what? But… it has to be gigantic, colossal even. W-what in God's name is that?!" His free hand grabbed his hand when his 7th sense, the most developed one of the four, began searing in pain like a punctured ear, something Lance didn't even know he could experience through it. "AGHH! My head… it's burning like crazy!"

"If that's some sort of attack… what kind of warrior is casting it?!" wondered Shinta, but a better question turned up in his mind. "Or better yet, … what kind of warrior is stopping it in its tracks?"

Kerberos Kastiel pulled up the two chain-armed Saints to safety and then threw down a second chain to Lance, who begrudgingly accepted help. The four saints stood back and awed at the sight of Athena Exclamation, the mightiest attack of all, blazing on like a second sun and wiping away the volcanic clouds of ash.

{======================|0|======================}

Paris, Priam and Daese pushed the wall of light with all their remaining strength, their bodies sweating and blood gushing from their wounds. It furiously roared, deafening them, and made the entire other side of the battlefield invisible to even their 7th sense, as there was so much cosmos exponentially burning right in front of them that all the powerful ones behind it were obfuscated.

All they knew was that they had to push harder than they ever had for as long as they could, but for some reason Athena Exclamation was completely static in its tracks. Though it indeed blazed and released its unstoppable power in the enemy's direction, it seemed unable to cover any distance.

"A-Akassius must have activated D-Double Dimension, we can let go now, but they still have to deal with all this power somehow. This is our chance!" As he said this, the cavern by the sea where the rebels had gone into let out a sneeze of salt water and a large, ornamented ship with the name SS Nicolai came out.

A pressure door on the mast opened up and a man wearing leather armor popped out and waved his hand. "Come on; let's go before the force of that thing smashes the Nicolai against the rocks!"

The trio nodded and gave Athena Exclamation one last force push before letting go of the attack, causing it to acquire a perfectly round shape and rotate around itself flawlessly. They ran towards the Nicolai and were helped into the pressure door by the rebels.

Priam took one last look at the beach before going in. "Sorry, everyone, but I had to do this. I had no chance of escaping you guys otherwise." His attention then turned to the Sacrifice Ritual. "Guardnia… I know that in the end you didn't want to listen to me, but I hope you're okay."

"COME ON, PRIAM! GODDAMN IT!" Paris screamed from the lower deck.

"Oh, sorry, sorry." He apologized before letting the subordinate close the breach door. The ship's engine roared and the Nicolai sailed forward at full speed before taking a sudden descent beneath the waves.

{======================|0|======================}

Saga and Aiolos screamed as the force of the winds pushed off by Athena Exclamation started blowing away everything. Capricorn Kirin caught Malta's hand and stabbed the ground with Excalibur to act as an anchor. Taurus Daniel merely powered his position like Aguilon with his sheer body weight, though he still had to get on his hands and knees.

Daniel looked up at the man stopping the unspeakable blast. "A-AKASSIUS! Are you ALRIGHT?!" he had to scream over the sound of the roaring attack and the storming winds.

He was not.

Hands stretched out to cast Force Manipulation to halve the Exclamation's ferocity and Double Dimension to stop it entirely, the unarmored, retired Akassius coughed, trembled and struggled to maintain his pose, blood coming out of his nostrils and eyes closed because of the terrible brightness of the light.

Taurus Daniel ran to him and supported the wild energies of Athena Exclamation with his own body's strength while burning his cosmos in preparation. "Don't worry, I'll divert it away, you know what to do, right?!" Akassius nodded, unable to answer in speech due to how concentrated and pained he was. Daniel's hand burned in golden energy and bashed on the sandy rock ground "TITAN NOVA!"

The whole ground shook yet again and three trails of light tore out of spot Daniel struck, traveling through the ground like tectonic light shockwaves before reconverging their direction towards the enormous fireball. Akassius's senses kept track of it to help him time the crucial step. "A-alright, Double Dimension, cancel out!" the dimensional force was released and the whole orb of Athena Exclamation began exerting its movement normally once again, trying to run over the Gemini.

And though his feet dragged back for a few moments, the Titan Nova shockwaves tore past him from the sides and converged right below the Exclamation, igniting upon contact with each other and blasting the attack off the ground, allowing the planet-buster to slide off upwards just as Daniel tackled Akassius away from its path, causing the sun-like attack to fly off into the air but still towards far off cliffs.

"Akassius' safe! Its trajectory is away from the Earth now, so it's my turn!" Malta came forward. "Now the final step… AURORA VASE!" His shoulder plates detached from his body and reformed the mystical vase of the Aurora Cloth, placing itself on the ground.

Kirin grabbed Malta and took him far away from the vase, which began sucking in currents of air like a powerful vacuum. The Athena Exclamation soared in the air along a curve path and then eventually crashed down right on the vase's hole, initially seeming to crush it entirely.

The earth shook up and down and the Gold Saints took cover. The energy of Athena Exclamation slowly, but furiously, was vacuumed inside the vase, shaping into a gigantic hurricane of light for the time being due to the way it was being sucked in. Eventually, with a flash of light, last specks of devastating energy entered the vase and a lid closed over it, trapping the entire force inside the object.

The atmosphere calmed down, and so did the climate, with great reluctance. The Saints slowly stood back up and approached the vase carefully.

Eventually Malta worked up the courage to pick it up. "Ah-ah… it's done! Athena Exclamation has been successfully contained."

There was a collective sigh of relief. The Gold Saints cheer and clapped at their combined success, saving the world yet again.

"AHA, we did it!" Daniel's huge hand patted Akassius back with enough force to make him stumble. "I guess you really can stop anything!"

"I just prevented its collision." Akassius humbly reminded him. "Without you guys I wouldn't be able to divert it to safety."

"And the Aquarius Cloth won't hold it forever, either, I will still have to release it into outer space soon." Malta explained, feeling the vase rumble ever so slightly in his hands.

"Look, I'm happy too, but let's not forget what we came after." Kirin reminded them before looking over the battlefield. "Where the hell is Priam?! I'm going to chop his head off!"

"If you're looking for the black Saints I may have bad news," said Aiolos as the Aguilon and the kids joined them. "I wasn't able to do much about since we were kind of in the middle of being blown away to the distance, but I caught a glimpse of a submarine going down the waters."

Akassius himself was surprised at his senses. "You… we were fully focused on the Athena Exclamation, how did you spot them, Aiolos?"~

The young archer chuckled and touched his temple. "A bowman's eyesight is pretty good, is all, especially a Sagittarius. My training had to get me used to using my eyes in spite of large attacks of light being thrown everywhere cause aiming with 7th sense isn't perfect in those conditions."

"A submarine, of course… Ugh, thank you, Aiolos. We've fought Priam so long ago I guess I forgot your House had those kinds of talents." Kirin kicked a nearby rock in frustration and turned off his Centurio Apparatus, returning to his normal form before he accidentally sliced someone up. He took a deep breath. "That explains how they move around island territories unseen…. And why they chose to stand their ground on this beach."

"And they're probably already going through shifting volcanic caverns below the ocean to make tracking them even harder and our techniques useless," commented Malta, being familiar with temperature phenomenon. "Still, for him to have fired Athena Exclamation to add to his already big pile of crimes… what do we do? It's not like we can chase him."

"I don't know about you, guys, but I need to know if Guardnia is safe," said Daniel, walking away. "None of us saw him with Priam just now, right? So I'll be going after Cepheus. Since Athena Exclamation blew away all the ash we should be able to both sense where they are and light speed right away, but if Guardnia is hiding himself-."

Malta's hand gestured the Taurus Saint to hold his phone. The Aquarius touched his forehead and closed his eyes, immersing his mind in the reading of energy signatures in Andromeda Island.

"Northwest, the Cepheus Castle's outskirts," he immediately picked up. "He's moving out with three other cosmos. Based on the Cloths, I'd say they're Andromeda Shinta, Cancer Lance and Kerberos Kastiel. None of their energies are burning aggressively. That seems to suggest that situation has been taken care of, too… I also sense a smaller life form, a dog of some sort, joining up with them."

The Heracles Saint laughed out loud. "AH-AH-AH, that dog must be Mr. Aguilon, my bloodhound namesake! Kastiel uses him to track missing people!" He patted his equally gigantic friend comfortably. "Don't worry about Guardnia, Daniel. It's not just the Gold Saints that get the job done around Sanctuary; us Silver Saints can surprise you every now and then too."

Daniel let out a sigh of relief. "I forgot how sensitive your 7th sense was, Malta. Thank you, you two. That sets my mind at ease… but other than Kastiel, what were those other two doing there to begin with?" He turned to the two young Gemini and Sagittarius Saints "Did you have something to do with this? Was this part of the ruse you were trying to pull?"

Aiolos and Saga exchanged guilty looks, but before the Sagittarius Saint said anything, the Gemini stepped up and took responsibility.

"I'm the one who sent the Cancer Saint ahead, disguised as Pegasus. Aiolos just followed the Pope's orders and tried to heal his wound." He confessed. Aiolos opened his mouth to protest and all the adults focused their attention on him, but the blue-haired youth shoved Aiolos back and stood up straight before the veterans "As for the Andromeda Saint, I really don't know. Since he was partners with Lance for a while, it's possible he stalked him here. As for the Cancer Saint's actions, I take full responsibility."

The much taller and more powerful adults, including the Heracles Saint, all exchanged a silent conversation with their mutual glances and looks, judging between themselves what the Gemini said.

"Saga, don't do this!" Aiolos warned in mental message "Let me take part of the responsibility, they are already insanely mad that the Pope tried to hide this from them and I did help you keep things under wraps."

"I arranged with Pegasus to keep a line of communication open with a radio link to avoid mental messages." Saga further explained, completely ignoring Aiolos' plea "But somewhere down the line that link was broken, maybe his radio was damaged in the fighting or during the eruptions. You can ask Elder Yuzuriha to verify this. It's my fault things with Guardnia got out of hand. In my defense, however, -" and Saga folded hands behind back in full confidence, facing the combined glare of the adults "– we did succeed in locating AND securing Saint Guardnia, who may possess important state secrets."

Capricorn Kirin noticed the guilty sweats in Aiolos' face and deduced that Saga was scapegoating himself. "These are very serious circumstances, Saga, are you sure you want to take the blame?"

"Absolutely." Saga confirmed "Aiolos is a medic and Lance is a fighter; neither of them could have coordinated all this by themselves. They were following my directions. I picked out the resources and I chose where to send both of them. I don't mind being punished for their actions if you feel the need to chastise us. It was my failure, not theirs."

"…Is this true, Aiolos?" asked Akassius Steiner.

The bowman Gold Saint was agape, having no idea Saga saw himself so much a leader for them that he was willing to take all the blame for this. Rather than contest his bravery, Aiolos decided to respect it.

"Um, yes, it's true." He thought about mentioning he wanted to have taken a different path and notify the adults immediately, but showing dissent among the youths would just hurt Saga's case further. "We made the decision as a collective in how to act, but the execution was entirely led by Saga." He then turned his eyes to his best friend. "I hope you know what you're doing."

Once again the adults seemed to silently converge their thoughts. An interesting detail that both Aiolos and Saga noticed was that they mostly seemed to glance at Akassius, who was long retired, to try to see what he was thinking.

"Alright, Saga, we'll believe you." admitted Capricorn Kirin. "We are already retired, so we don't have the authority to hold you accountable as your peers anymore, but we'll keep in mind what you said when we talk with His Holiness and the Allies. I hope you understand that means that, in the future, we'll remember you had this failed initiative."

"Of course." the Gemini confirmed. He then saluted the adults "We'll go immediately take care of the loose ends. Just because the leader has run away, it doesn't mean the island is clear of Black Saints. Let's go, Aiolos?"

"Yes… let's." the brown-haired youth confirmed.

While this all sounded very sacrificial of the youth, so much that Aiolos even grabbed Saga to the side to talk to him in private about this as they moved away, the adults were not fooled.

"That's a lot of hard work to impress a bunch of old men." Daniel started. "Then again, having been Saga's neighbor in the Temples, I can't say I'm wholly surprised. He always did try to make himself stand out among the young ones."

"Do you think he's lying?" Kirin immediately questioned.

"None of his facial expressions suggested so." Malta analyzed, having noticed more temperature fluctuations in Aiolos' face during Gemini's explanations than in Saga's. "I've trained Camus to restrain his emotions and even he wouldn't be able to lie so well. If you ask me, I think he's trying to take advantage of the situation to paint himself as a leader, and the timing of it, the day of our departure, is ideal for that kind of thing."

Akassius chuckled somberly. "It must really be a trend of my House to try to do that sort of thing. Hopefully this youth, Saga, can take the reins without causing as much damage as I did."

"Akassius, what should we do?" asked Kirin "Do we go after Priam? Do we talk with the Pope? We've been lied to all day that the Pope was attacked and we had no idea; what's to say that Arles isn't hiding more from us?"

Akassius' hand gestured the retired Gold Saints to be calm. "Let's give ourselves some time; we still have a lot to do before any decisive action. The Allies are still in Sanctuary, except for Cetus, and the others even had to stay back to make everything seem normal to the people and keep at least six Gold Cloths in the Golden Zodiac. Let's go home to make sure everything is secure, and then we can decide how to tackle this problem" These rational words alone seemed to relax the Capricorn Saint, who paid more attention to what he had to say. "The last thing we need to do right now is another rash decision to move out and create more holes for the Black Saints to squeeze through. Instead of turning against each other right away, let's approach this with a calm heart and make the smartest decision."

Daniel scratched his own huge chin. "Umm… yeah, you're making sense, like always. Aldebaran must be waiting bored sick at the Taurus Temple too, and he loves action just as much as I do. He'll go crazy when I tell him what he missed out here." Something then popped on his head from Akassius' words. "Wait a minute, 'except for Cetus'? Where did he go?!"

"As soon as we found out the action was on Andromeda Island he moved out as well with us through my gate, except he asked me to detour him to somewhere else." Akassius explained.

Daniel forgot about the mental messaging and grabbed Akassius' shoulders. "Where is he?! Where did you drop him off?!"

Aguilon raised his brow. "What the – Were you guys talking about just now?"

{======================|0|======================}

Moments Earlier

Cepheus Castle Outskirts

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The four Saints made their way out of the Castle ruin premises into the northern desert of Andromeda Island, trying to keep Guardnia as far away from Cepheus' influence as they could. The large Silver Saint walked with his arms over Shinta and Kastiel's necks to support himself, his body having been so damaged by electric shocks, chain attacks, mace bashes, punches to the gut, flame burns and even the unexpected dragon uppercut that completely wrecked his gauntlets. His sword chain was even smashed to bits by Kastiel's mace for safe measure.

Pegasus Lance led the way, burying his white greaves in the burning sand and keeping an eye out for Black Saints. His first instinct upon leaving the castle was to light-speed the hell out of there, but given the ongoing battle at the southern beaches and the devastation it was apparently causing, he judged it was best to find a better spot on the island where they could make a better decision on how to split their manpower between taking Guardnia to Sanctuary and reinforcing the Gold Saints.

His head hurt and his mood was complete and utter shit. Kastiel's mere presence irked him and so did everything that was being kept under the rug about what was really happening. He struggled not to make a rash decision about not going back to the Golden Zodiac immediately and demand Shion gave him some answers.

"Don't blame yourself." He suddenly heard, the voice coming from the Pegasus Cloth. "You did all you could to solve the situation."

Lance sighed. The Pegasus Cloth decided to speak with him with such an arbitrary frequency that he barely even registered its commentary most of the time. "I'm not blaming myself! Also, why are you popping out all of a sudden?! Are you going to possess me too?" This seemed to silence the cloth. "Maybe other than giving me that kind of nonsense encouragement, you could explain to me what exactly happened in that castle with Guardnia. Since when can armors just take over the Saint?!"

"If the mind of the owner grows weaker than that of the Cloth, it's a possibility…"

"What kind of possibility is that?! Guardnia was acting murderous! He attacked Shinta, intending to 'sacrifice' him, and eventually stopped acting like he was in control at all! He's not the person I fought in the balcony. That was 'someone' else!"

"Is this anger also about Guilty? Are you worried the same might happen to you?" This reminder alone from Pegasus made Lance swallow his own words and take his turn at quieting down. "You vowed to become the Saint he never could, Lance. As far as I'm concerned, you kept your promise. I 'value' what you accomplished. King Cepheus wouldn't."

"That's not the point! How could I trust what you just said?! How do I know you are not influencing me right now-"

"You know that as well as the difference between me and Karkinos. Do you think Cepheus ever made it subtle to Saint Guardnia that he disapproved of his opinions?"

Lance's mouth even opened up, such was his will to counter-argue, but once again being reminded of this, on its own, was enough to make him regret the words he had planned.

"Saint Guardnia was under tremendous stress. From what we've seen, he was taken by his teacher, a Black Saint, and likely had everything he ever stood for questioned inside a place where Cepheus' voice is at its strongest. After years following Athena… what sensible, good-hearted man wouldn't feel vulnerable?" argued Pegasus. "Does that situation remind you of anyone?"

The Saint's head lowered sadly, causing the helmet beak to shadow his eyes. "Yes, it does." He didn't want to admit this, but he saw some sense and comfort on the Bronze Cloth's words.

Way back, the Cepheus Saint mumbled to himself, slowly walking on his own but still needing the two Saint's help. "I'm… I'm sorry… I'm so sorry…"

Shinta shook his head, his eyes tearing up. "It's alright, Master, I don't blame you. It's going to be okay!" he assured with a nod. "We're taking you out of here and out of that armor and everything is going to be alright."

"Yes, Father, it's not your fault!" The Andromeda cloth cried out, though her voice was only heard by Shinta and Guardnia, who both had constellation connections to her. Her triangle chain moved up against her owner's will to peck Guardnia's jaw. "It's those filthy traitors, they held you up in that room that makes you feel in a bad mood! I'll find them and strangle them for their crimes, I promise!"

"Let him blame himself for a while, Shinta." Kastiel ordered, not happy about the state Guardnia was in despite their differences, but still realizing an adult attitude had to be taken. "Guard' won't forgive himself till he repents, so just let him wail it out."

"B-but…" While initially wanting to protest, the Andromeda Saint decided to listen to the veteran, who was clearly an old acquaintance of his teacher and helped him out immensely. "O-okay, Saint Kastiel. Hey, Lance, can we take a stop? Just to let Master help stand on his own feet for a while."

The Pegasus Saint measured the distance they put between themselves and the castle. "Ugh, alright, but don't take too long!"

The green-haired boy thanked with a nod and, with Kastiel's help, supported Guardnia's weight until the Silver Saint managed to balance himself despite his wounds. Everything was done under both Kastiel and Lance's suspicious glares, who expected at any moment the Saint to lash out in a possessed fit again.

Guardnia, however, grabbed his own head with a migraine, blinked his blue eyes and took in his surroundings. He felt the familiar salt water in the air from the northern sea, the warm grains of sand below his feet and the far off sights of the blazing volcanoes. This all helped take him back to his many life memories in Andromeda Island and situate himself with who he really was.

"I'm… okay." He admitted. The guilt, however, was plain as day in his stomach. "I… can't believe what I've done. The last time I remember thinking clearly was when Priam… when I woke up in his base inside the castle."

"Yeah, hopefully you'll explain who the fuck Priam is and what the hell just happened!" shouted Pegasus. "Also, why was the southern part of the island just nuked?"

Memories of all the fighting he did that day began rushing back to Guardnia's head. He remembered exchanging chain attacks with Shinta, Kastiel's Kerberos Claw, arguing with him and then completely losing control with the frustration that followed. Everything after this was a blur that he tried to fight through, like a drunken hangover.

"Did I… fight you, Pegasus?" he asked, feeling the odd images of trying to cut the head off a white winged horse fill his mind for some reason.

"You did fight him." confirmed Shinta. "You got pushed out to a balcony and he battled you. Speaking of which, Lance, are you okay from that last dragon blow? It looked just as painful as when my Nebula Storm imploded."

Lance rubbed his own back, which for some reason still stung. "Yeah, seriously, just a bit sore. I'll take a detour to China to talk to Dohko about it later." he answered secretly.

"Yeah, what the hell was that about?!" asked Kastiel "How come some low-rank Pegasus know a move like that, much less take out a veteran Silver with it?"

"NONE of your business, that's how!" Lance immediately snapped.

"Come on, Lance, don't fight, Saint Kastiel helped us out a lot!"

"I don't give a fuck! As soon as we get back home we are going our separate ways!"

"Don't mind him, Andromeda, let the baby pout!"

"Would you paupers behave yourselves on my island?!" a new voice shouted from the side.

Everyone turned to the person. A mid-height man of curly blonde hair and faint, pointy chin beard stood there in a full, splendorous armor coated by white-fur lining on the collar and a red mantle. Groups of soldiers, both from Sanctuary and New Lalibela, scattered behind him in confrontation with the Saints and the pair of golden predator eyes on the king seemed to want them all dead with a glare.

"C-…Cetus?!" Kastiel muttered. "S-Shit, just what we needed!"

"Oh no…" Shinta gasped, stepping back.

"You?!" Lance howled. "Oh great! What the hell do you want, now?!"

Guardnia just froze in place.

"I want you low-ranking Saints off my island." Cetus demanded, tone low but stern. His features slowly softened, however, first into a puzzled look and then to an 'oh' of realization when he took in the details of the Saints' sorry state. "Wait a minute…"

Guardnia stepped away by Shinta. "You stay back…" he threatened.

Cetus chuckled and walked towards them, signaling the soldiers with his armored hand to keep their distance.

"Wait a minute!" he repeated, gleefully. "Am I correct in assuming…. that is blood on your chains?" Cetus looked back and forth between Guardnia and Shinta. "Did the Court of King Cepheus ceremony repeat itself? Oh, this is just wonderful, ha-ha! I can have my new Cepheus Saint now! Maybe this one won't be so resistant to a little conditioning."

"I'm warning you, Cetus! Stay away from my student!"

Cetus laughed. "Now why aren't things sped along already? Was your ritual postponed again? Please tell me you didn't flood my old castle again. Allow me – " his hand then flushed itself in dark blue energy and he stepped towards them further. "- I'll make the honors to correct its course."

Guardnia leaped back, dashed around Shinta and wrapped what was left of his sword chain around the green boy's neck. Shinta gasped and coughed for air.

"SHINTA!" Lance screamed.

"Guard' stop it!" demanded Kastiel. "That's not gonna solve this!"

"ONE STEP FURTHER AND I'LL KILL HIM, I SWEAR TO GODDESS!" Guardnia screamed at Cetus, who seemed insultingly taken aback. "You heard me right, Cetus! Make a wrong move and say goodbye to your precious Andromeda Saint! Good luck getting another kid past the second worst tests in Sanctuary to act as your twisted 'daughter'!"

Cetus, however, merely chuckled and turned off his cosmos. "Oh, Guardnia, you're such a boorish actor. Please don't waste my time with this theater. Do you really think I believe you'd lay a finger on your one surviving student?"

"I just staged a whole fight inside the castle, ready to either kill him or die in his place! I'm willing to do anything to get him out of this insane Cloth right gridlock at this point, so just test me, Cetus!" dared Guardnia, squeezing the chain harder on Shinta as a warning. "If you think I'll let you do to him what you did to Cynthia…!"

The evil man continued to find this amusing, his shoulders shaking with the contained laugh. "That's a shame, I wonder what exactly Cassiopeia would say if she saw you right now doing such a horrid thing…"

"She would do the same in my place!"

Cetus only grinned cheek to cheek.

Lance observed the situation carefully, trying to find an opening to take out Guardnia. Unfortunately, the man seemed truly crazed, this time on his own protective motivations instead of the Cloth's, and the chained looked so tightly wrapped that Shinta's head could fling out at the slightest provocation. He saw Kastiel discretely signaling with a hand shake to 'not do anything stupid'.

Guardnia saw Cetus take another casual step and tightened his chain, making Shinta gasp out a scream. "I TOLD YOU TO STAY AWAY!"

But the monarch merely cackled. "You know, Guardnia, this situation reminds me of why you never made a proper Cepheus Saint like me. You see, if the Cepheus Cloth were to possess me, there would be no discernable difference as far as my personality is concerned. If anything there would be a 'downgrade'," he bragged, chilling the Saints who saw how Guardnia acted back in the castle. "You, on the other hand, would have been so revoltingly changed, wouldn't you? In fact, you've been fighting it for years, and you expect me to believe you would really rather decapitate my 'daughter' than let me have her?"

Cetus saw this and resumed his assault. "Don't make me laugh, you don't have that kind of determination, do you, Guardnia? You didn't stop me from getting my dear Cynthia." Cetus further provoked, his tone low and creepy. "And you're certainly not gonna stop me from getting that little cute Andromeda Saint, either."

"If there's a single evil soul on this planet 'worthy' to act as your placeholder Cepheus Saint in Sanctuary, then that person isn't worth the title of Saint to begin with!" Guardnia hissed. "Shinta will never follow you on your malice and I won't let you kill either of us! This ceremony will be interrupted again and you'll have to wait another fifteen years to get your ruthless lineage started!"

"Really? I thought you knew me better than this, Guard', especially after so many years. I'm disappointed." Cetus' hand slithered out from beneath his cloak once more and refilled itself with the same energy as before. "I mean, ah-ah, did you really think I'd dirty my hands with your blood?"

And before anyone could even ponder on what this meant, a sudden sound of metal being pierced and flesh being torn through was heard, making Guardnia's world go red. Everyone was paralyzed by this for a small moment and streams of tears came down Shinta's cheek. The chain wrapped around his neck loosened, releasing the Andromeda Saint, and Guardnia stepped back, grabbing his side.

Kastiel rushed to him. "Shit!"

"M…. Master!... I…" Shinta chocked on his own actions, seeing the triangle tip of his offensive chain inside his teacher's side. "N-no, I d-didn't d-do this! M-MASTER!"

"Oh, of course you did, Shinta. I'm standing all the way here, after all," mocked Cetus, touching his chest and chuckling to himself in amusement. "You'd never allow that lowlife to affront your 'Father', after all, would you? AH-AH-AH!"

Lance realized what just happened, burned his aura until it turned gold and launched at Cetus "YOU SON A BITCH! PEGASUS CHARGE FIST!" Cetus merely raised his finger and blocked Lance's entire attack force casually, letting the released wind flutter his hair harmlessly.

Kastiel brought hands to hair. "D-damn it, now he's done it!"

Lance was visibly shocked. "W-what?! I hit you with everything I had!"

The finger flicked off Lance and the Pegasus Saint was shot screaming through the sand dunes, rolling and tossing until he crashed against a larger sand dune. Kastiel watched the whole thing and stepped back, powerless.

"Mm-mm, I can tell he's going to be a fun time in reunions." Cetus mocked before turning his attention back to the Andromeda and Cepheus Saint. "Well, Shinta, you know what to do, finish the pauper off. He'll obviously never replace me as king and you've qualified yourself to be my next Cepheus."

Andromeda Shinta's whole body struggled against the control Cetus seemed to have over him, his face crying uncontrollably as he watched his beloved teacher fell to his knees, grabbing his bleeding wound.

"N-NO! P-PLEASE STOP THIS! I D-don't… I don't want to kill the person I love the MOST!" he begged. Memories of all the happiness he had in Andromeda Island flushed in his head, torturing him. "Y-your Highness, please, d-don't m-make my body do this, I'll do anything, A-ANYTHING!"

"That's admirable, Andromeda, ah-ah" complimented Cetus "but not really in my interest. Now show me some blood. Kill that cur!"

Shinta's face was drenched in tears. Guardnia, breathing heavily and with trembling vision, looked up and saw his crying.

All of a sudden, a golden blur traversed the area and the gigantic Taurus Gold Saint Daniel appeared on the scene. He gasped at what was before him and stepped in. "CETUS, STOP THIS NOW OR I'LL-" He then saw Guardnia's wound. "Guard'… oh no, Guard!" Rushing over to him, the hulk tried to pick him up.

"L-Lord Daniel, I d-didn't do this, I s-swear!" He tried to move but Cetus wouldn't even let his body turn away from the scene of his Master bleeding to death. "P-Please save him!"

Daniel snapped the Andromeda Chain stabbing Guardnia but let the piece stay inside. "I know, son, I know." He comforted. He saw the injury on the Silver Saint and realized the Golden Touch wouldn't be enough to heal him. "Guard'… speak to me! Why did it come to this?! Why is Cetus making Shinta kill you?! What the hell did Priam tell you to do?!"

"Isn't it obvious?" asked Cetus, delighting in the situation. "His old teacher popped by and filled him up with ideas, ideas that made him think he should leave Sanctuary." He laughed at the look on Daniel's face. "Do you understand now, Taurus? Guardnia decided to quit, and thought a good way to make himself feel better about his failed career was to let himself be killed by Andromeda in the 'Court of King Cepheus'. Just like his old teacher who also tried to take all the blame in. I guess the apple really doesn't fall far from the traitor tree."

Taurus seethed, his skin turning red.

Kastiel saw this and shouted "Be quiet, Cetus, that's more than enough!"

"And no one, no one, leaves Athena's army without a coffin," Cetus reminded the Gold Saint, before devilishly smiling and driving the final nail. "Not even your 'sons', Taurus Daniel, the so-called duke!"

Taurus' aura blazed up, blasting away the sand and bashing Cetus a foot back. For a moment the King thought he had provoked the Ironclad Bull a bit too far and prepared himself for a fight. Instead, this blast merely distracted Cetus enough to free Shinta and let him run to Daniel and Guardnia's side, immediately hugging the dying Master.

Kastiel joined in as well, still awestruck at his old comrade's situation, and raised Guard from the ground. "Come on, man, you've survived worse! What am I gonna tell Nam and Cynthia if you bite the dust like this?!"

"N-no… M-master, please don't die!..."

The Master's reached over Shinta's head. "It's… n-not your fault… Shinta… please h-help me stand." The Saints reluctantly helped him up and Guardnia pretended to lean on Shinta so his head would touch his. "There's something I need to tell you, Shinta… something you need to know that the others can't listen to!" he mentioned in mental message, the distance between their foreheads preventing interception by Kastiel or Daniel.

Shinta blinked in surprised. "What is it, Master? Is it something I must say to the others?!"

"No, this is for you…" Guardnia coughed, feeling his strength leaving me. "You've delivered the blow that will kill me, and the Court was not properly solved back in the castle, so this makes you eligible to be the next Cepheus."

"Don't talk like that, save your-"

"Don't protest, just listen!" he insisted, gritting teeth. "I was delirious back in the castle, but I meant what I said that there was something going on in Sanctuary. The Pope told me there is about to be a major war, something that will change Sanctuary forever! You need to… you need to become as strong as you can get if you want to make a difference!"

This caught Shinta's attention. "What do you mean, what am I supposed to do?"

"What you've always done…I was never pure enough to change anything with the Cepheus cloth, to resist the changes it caused in me, but you… You could make that change! You managed to be different! If you get Cepheus you'll be able to… fight Cetus' corrupt influence and even Sanctuary's madness itself!" Guardnia saw the look on Shinta's face change and knew he was on to his main concerns. "You care more about peace than anything, don't you? You of all people can stop these damn prophecies! This is the path to your dreams of peace, and my gift to you is my Cloth. Prove all these bastards wrong, Shinta!"

Daniel saw a change in Shinta's face, from the sobbing cry to a hardening determination "Shinta, is something wrong? What is he telling you?!"

"I know you don't believe in a warrior's motivations, so hopefully you'll believe in yours, that of a pacifist." Guardnia pleaded. He saw Shinta nodding and hope filled the Silver Saint's heart. Guardnia's eyes closed and tears streamed through. "Do your best. I love you. Goodbye."

"Goodbye…" Shinta spoke out loud, clenching the silver-star pendant beneath his armor to pray for his Master's soul, before helping Guardnia make his stand.

"Guard' what are you doing?!" asked Daniel.

The Silver Saint tightened his disarmed fists, burned his aura one last time and locked his eyes on Cetus, who boorishly awaited all the drama to be over with. Guardnia thought of all the horrors his family of Saints, especially Cynthia, had to endure because of this person.

"I'm d-doing what you taught me to do, Lord Daniel. I'm fighting for j-justice!" And, shining like it never had before in his life, the Cepheus Constellation helped illuminate Guardnia's cosmos aura.

He cried out a battle roar, dashed straight at the evil king with supersonic speed and threw his fist right as Cetus unleashed his massive energy blast, swallowing him whole and exterminating the Silver Saint before the shocked eyes of Kastiel and Daniel.

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Sanctuary

Pope's Throne Room

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Night had fallen on Sanctuary, hours after the end of the battle in Andromeda Island, and Pope Arles III sat on his throne, patiently listening to Heracles Aguilon report while Virgo Shaka stood by the side without his armor.

"From what we could surmise," said the enormous, scarred Silver Saint "it doesn't seem like the infiltration can be blamed on the lack of organization in the Saints earlier this morning. Whoever lured Lord Saga out of his temple did so with the intent of creating just a small window of opportunity, merely knowing that at least five of the Gold Cloths were already outside their temples. It didn't require a lot of spying considering the circumstances of the 88 Knights Festival, your Holiness, since everyone knew that at least three Gold Saints would be present at the Coliseum."

"And that the Libra Cloth would be all the way with Dohko in China…" added the Pope, to which Aguilon nodded on agreement. "These make four Gold Cloths out of place without any choice, meaning they only had to displace two."

Aguilon flipped his papers over and over. "From the timeline… the only plan I can make sense out of is that they somehow knew that King Cetus' visit to the Golden Zodiac would trigger a commotion. By this time, Saga was already away from the Gemini Temple with his Cloth without anyone's knowledge... except of course that of our young friend Shaka here." He mentioned, pointing at the blonde boy.

"Shaka, do you think Kanon was manipulated by the rebels?" asked Shion. No one in Sanctuary except the people currently in that room knew about Saga's secret. "Or did he act out in malice?"

"Your Holiness, I don't believe Kanon ever left the Gemini Temple's labyrinth to begin with." the young Indian boy confirmed "I believe someone on the enemy side knew of Saga's weakness and instead tricked him, making him believe his less reputable twin had escaped his confines."

"And that makes five Cloths." counted Aguilon. "And then Mu followed Cetus out of preoccupation, completely unaware of how the Gold Cloths maintained the blessings, making it six in total. Even so…" the giant scratched his face's triple claw scar in wondering. "That's barely enough to let mental messages through, much less an actual warping technique. Some extra step has had to be taken, I just don't know what."

"The only place close enough to this room that this person could have 'jumped' from is none other than the peak of Star Hill." calculated Shaka, pointing in the direction of north. "It's altitude leaves it one of the spots external to the Golden Zodiac in line with this temple, making it the closest location to the Pope's Halls outside the Golden Zodiac itself. It's possible that the intruder used it to reduce the chances of being intercepted to a minimum."

"Priam took a huge risk. It's also a lot of blasphemy for one day." Aguilon concluded, almost chuckling if it weren't for the seriousness of what happened. He shook his head sadly. "And just to get to kidnap Guardnia… it really doesn't make any sense."

Unfortunately what the two of them were unaware was the fact that Guardnia possessed the secret of the prophecies, so just meeting up with him was worth the risk to Priam, or so Shion presumed."So we are not at war?" concluded the Pope.

"Nope." Aguilon casually answered. "Priam's forces and methods were pathetic to say the least. He doesn't seem to have the fighting power to harass us, much less battle us. He went through a gigantic length just so he could get the jump on you and take a strategically worthless Silver Saint, which speaks lengths of how able he is to face us in the open. Once the Gold Saints were on to him it was a huge curb-stomp."

"Until he fired Athena Exclamation, that is?"

"Umm… yes." Aguilon admitted. "But it was only by the sheer affront of it that it played any role in his escape. Akassius, Daniel and Malta made fantastic work of disarming it, and now we know how he is moving around unnoticed."

"It seems this man, Priam, hinges his success chances on sheer audacity and misinformation." concluded Shaka. "I agree with Saint Heracles that said chances will shrink more and more with each encounter, your Holiness."

"Heracles, give me the civic optic, did the festival go unhinged?" asked the Pope, rubbing the side of his masked face.

"That's good news as well, your Holiness, thanks to my Herculean Guard. After Saint Kirin… umm… confronted you and the Saints moved out, it seems everyone just thought they had to be rushed over to a banquet. Everyone left quietly and contently and I was able to arouse the manpower for vigilance without sparking suspicion. The people are currently setting up the fireworks for the night as if nothing happened."

"And the casualties?"

Heracles hesitated, opening his mouth but unable to say a thing, but eventually looking over his papers and resuming the events. "Well, most of the damage in Sanctuary was…well, one serious injury, which would be you, Lord Arles, and um-" He pointed up at the huge hole in the ceiling and then at the crater in the throne room "- the consequences of Priam's Lightning Arrow are well visible."

"Yes, Saint Aguilon, but other than what is immediately seen?"

"It's all in Andromeda Island, your Holiness, and what could be said could fill a book." He described, waving the papers to show off the thickness of the stack of pictures and reports. "The fighting in Cepheus Castle alone wrecked the structure inside out. We'll need to form a team of engineers and alchemists just to restore all the broken mechanisms. On the other hand, we have the beaches in the outskirts of the Sacrifice Ritual cliff, which are utterly unrecognizable. And finally, we have the one casualty, Cepheus Guardnia."

Although his eyes were eternally closed, the Virgo Saint sensed the Pope bringing his finger to his masked mouth in pondering. Knowing that the Cepheus Saint had been in meeting with the Pope for a significant while, Shaka wondered if the Lemurian's current stress was due to a personal connection with the Silver Saint or due to some secret he may have entrusted the Saint with. All he could surmise from reading the Pope's karma was that the elderly man felt immensely guilty and blamed himself for the possibility of having been the catalyst for this situation.

"And you say he attacked King Cetus?" asked Shaka.

"Correct, to which Cetus responded by… pulverizing him." Aguilon coughed to his fist, knowing Guardnia meant a lot to Heracles' oldest friend, the Taurus Gold Saint. He then brought the silver-colored box he carried up the Zodiac to the Pope and opened it, revealing a pile of blue metal shreds. "This is what's left of the Cepheus Cloth, your Holiness."

Shion stared at the pile for a good minute. "What can you tell me amount the exact moment the cloth died?"

"Timeline suggests it was already dead by the time Cetus found the Saints, most likely from a Rozan blow from the Cancer Saint which damaged most of the armor, detached its star chain and snapped Guardnia out of a possessed frenzy." the giant carefully reported.

"We will need a lot of blood to bring it back to life." commented the Pope. "Hopefully the person it comes from will bring a positive change on the Cloth and prevent this tragedy from repeating."

"Your Holiness, if I may?" asked Shaka, to which he received a wave hand. "It's possible that the rebel Priam deliberately chose to bring Guardnia to the Castle to further muddle his thoughts against you through Cepheus' brainwashing influence. His honor as a Saint may not be sullied."

This was a rare gesture of consideration for others from the Virgo Saint, especially towards a stranger, but Shion assumed Shaka was merely concerned with religious issues and whether or not Guardnia would be buried as a Saint.

"Everything points towards the Cepheus Saint having been placed against his will in a mind-altering situation for a prolonged time. Reading back the timeline, I would say what he went through equates to a mental equivalent of torture. His attack on Cetus, after all, can't be described as anything else but suicidal." argued Aguilon, adding to Shaka's point.

The Pope took the hint. "Alright, I concede to your points, I will announce his death as an honorable one. Guardnia shall not be branded a traitor like his teacher despite his behavior. Furthermore," he then added, standing up from his throne. "Considering the circumstances of his attack on Andromeda, not to mention a direct recommendation by King Cetus himself, Saint Shinta of Andromeda is made eligible to be the next Cepheus Saint and will be authorized to pursue the Path of the Cepheus Cloth."

"Even when under influence, he tried to do everything by the book." concluded Shaka. "If I were to guess that he really intended to quit being a Saint, based on my experiences watching the changes in people's karmas and how they make decisions, Guardnia would probably have surrendered his Cloth voluntarily after settling matters with the Andromeda Saint. I wonder what motivated this attitude."

Shion, however, knew exactly what motivation it was. "He wanted to leave, just like Priam, but he refused to stoop to his level and curse Shinta to be branded a student of a traitor, just like Guardnia himself was." This, however, did not comfort the Pope. If anything it hit his confidence in his own actions harder. "In the end, Guardnia was just as fed up, but put his honor and duty to me first… he really did prove himself greater than Priam. How could I think any less of that poor man?"

A Papal Guard knocked on the door, opened it and spoke to the Pope. "Your Holiness? Sir Akassius Steiner is here to see you."

"Let him in. Shaka, Aguilon, would you two please take your leave?" The two Saints nodded obediently and walked their way out while the black-haired former Gemini made his way inside the throne room.

Aguilon walked by him and joked "Give the old man hell for us, Steiner." to which Akassius responded with a slight smile.

Shaka, on the other, commented something else. "Interesting, I've never met a human who has wiped away his guilt with sheer determination for his cause, instead of with meditation and growth."

Akassius didn't understand exactly what this young boy meant, but nodded anyway.

The large wooden doors closed with the departure of the Saints and Shion was left alone in the room with the most decorated Saint in recent history, a man that represented a generation of warriors despite his early retirement. He was also a man that Shion secretly feared for his political gravitas, and who had good reason to be mad at the Pope right now. Still, Shion confronted Akassius with dignity and authority.

"Welcome to my chambers, Akassius." He greeted, to which the man responded with a humble head bow. "I suppose… you are here for answers. I committed a great betrayal today, something you and your fellow men did not deserve, didn't I? I understand perfectly if you are furious and are here to express your ange-"

"Actually, your Holiness," Akassius interrupted, smiling gently and pulling out a wooden case from within his cloak "I came here to present you a gift."

Shion blinked, completely disarmed. He saw the carefully handcrafted box and felt his own fears wash away.

I meant to give it to you after the ceremony but…" Akassius looked away awkwardly "Well, circumstances intervened."

Blinking in amazement, Shion hesitantly took it. "…A bottle of wine?"

"Yes, from 1969 and grown in my own estate. It was my very first batch of it. I haven't thought of a name for it, though, it's a young vineyard after all." he informed "My wife, Cecilia, says the others tasted especially exquisite on a calm evening night like this."

Arles was stunned, completely disarmed even. "I… Thank you, Akassius, this is so very thoughtful." He carefully put down the wooden case. "After all the bad news… Forgive me, I thought… that this conversation would go completely different after what happened. Aren't you… concerned?"

"Concerned that Priam is still alive? Yes, of course," the duke confessed, looking over the walls of the throne room after years of absence. "But it's not my place to be at the frontline of this problem, your Holiness. I'm not the Gold Saint of Gemini anymore, that boy Saga is. Which I must say…" he remarked, waving his finger. "He's very talented, very ambitious and sharp. He'll serve you well. I was even more impressed than when I met him, Cancer and Sagittarius at my manor when he helped me craft a gate. I see a real leader in him."

"Yes, heh heh, me too! I…" Shion hesitated. He was suspicious why Akassius would just forget what happened, but why spoil this turn of mood? The whole day had been nothing but bad news and preoccupation, so there should be no harm in taking Akassius' hand in this. "That's why I made him your replacement! I have high hopes for everyone in this new generation."

"I won't be in your hair for long, your Holiness, I arranged to meet up with the others by the Aries' Temple's roof for a final private celebration. We'll be toasting to their retirement with our own bottle as Malta unleashes the Exclamation inside the Aquarius Vase to outer space."

"That sounds like a wonderful time, Akassius. I truly hope the best for all of you." Shion wished. "You were my Gold Saints for so long… I still remember the coronation of each and every one of you. It both saddens me and fills me with happiness to see you all finally citizens once more."

"Yes, your holiness….we were." Akassius somberly agreed. "It really feels like yesterday, doesn't it?" He turned his head away from the Pope. "When I made my early retirement announcement, I really didn't think Priam was alive. It set my mind at peace knowing that, despite all the blood that was shed, our enemies had been truly vanquished. To know he's been alive all this time, and that he even snuck in to attack you…"

"I'm… Again, I apologize it didn't turn out that way, Akassius, but I will find him and make him pay." He offered his hand to shake "You have my word as the Pope of Athena. Ah… its times of embarrassment like these that make me wish you had accepted my offer to become the Pope after the War."

Something then flared like an ember in Akassius eyes for a brief instance. He took Shion's hand and shook it. "Let's not dwell on that, your Holiness, but… I suppose I should make one final remark."

"Of course, of course, anything, what is it?"

"My loyalty to you, Athena and Sanctuary is eternal. My comrades and I fought for years for our vital cause, shedding so much blood, for the good of Sanctuary and your authority is my top priority. But-"

Shion sweated, feeling the hand tightening his harder. "…But?"

Akassius then pulled in the Pope closer, as if to share a secret, and mumbled. "-lie to me or to my brethren one more time…especially about something like this…and I will personally walk my way back all these stairs, dislodge you from your seat and replace you immediately… Do you understand?"

The Pope did not answer, feeling a chill go down his stomach and gulping. The retired Gemini and Duke of Kastoria let go of the Pope's hand and wiped it with a handkerchief.

"Be sure not to stress your wound, your Holiness. An arrow to the chest causes quite an amount of damage after all." He then bowed his head respectfully. "And with this I wish you a good evening, Lord Arles. Enjoy the fireworks, I heard the townsfolk acquired beautiful Chinese pyrotechnics for this year and your view from this spot should be excellent." He then walked out of the door, taking a time to smile and nod at the Papal Guards. "Oh and… don't forget to enjoy the wine. Pop the cork during the festivities, I'm sure you'll love it."

The loud clunk of the closing doors didn't manage to snap Shion of this terrifying spell. He looked down on the glass bottle and put it away like it was poison.

Eventually he walked back in stumbles, gagging, and fell back in the throne. His masked face sunk into his hands and a horrible sensation became stuck in his throat. For the holiest man on earth only a prayer to Athena came out and nightmares followed him for the rest of the night. He took the Japanese Puzzle Box that Athena had entrusted with him and hid it underneath the throne, swearing to vindicate this day.

{======================|0|======================}

Meanwhile,

Sanctuary Town

{======================|0|======================}

Kastiel walked out the clinic sporting a number of bandages around his arms and escorting Albiore and Elda after a visit to Orphée's room. They met up with Saint Cynthia and Saint Nam by the exit, where he saw her trying to hide the fact she was rubbing the permeable part of her mask's eyes which allowed tears to get through.

"I checked on Lyra and got the kids. Orphée has a broken arm but he's going to be fine. Doctor says he will be able to play the harp just as well as before." he confirmed.

"That's… t-that's good to know." Cynthia said.

Elda raised a brow suspiciously. "Wait, have you been crying, Saint Cynthia? Those girls I met with masks once left marks on her masks just like those from wailing about fight losses."

Albiore's elbow bumped her. "Shut up, Elda, can't you see you're being insensitive again? Besides this is your future teacher!"

She gasped indignantly and punched his arm "Insensitive?! Did you see what you did to poor Orphée?! The kid is lucky he didn't flush himself. You got a lot of nerve calling me out for something like that!"

Kastiel and Nam ignored the kids and the Sagitta Saint broke the tense silence between the adults. "So… Guardnia is gone… I…" He sniffed. "I never even imagined…What do we do now? What can we do?"

"Well… for starters now there is the problem of what to do with Albiore, who was supposed to go to him." started Kastiel. "What about you Cynthia? Are you in shape to take Elda?"

She nodded tremblingly. "Y-yes, of course, I… I will be fine! I'm a professional." she assured, trying to be determined. Her hand covered her mask' eyes though "B-but Guard'… my goddess, how did it come to this?"

"We don't have to torture ourselves with the details of that right now. We'll have plenty of time to process this and Sanctuary will be after those Black Saint bastards," Kastiel argued. The image of Cetus finishing his childhood acquaintance off wouldn't leave him, though.

"How is Shinta?" Cynthia asked, immediately concerned.

"Surprisingly okay, if I had to say. For some reason he decided to sit by the Cancer Temple. I doubt the owner will let him somber there, even if it's a place of the dead. I heard the new Cancer is a moody recluse." Kastiel explained.

She nodded, her tears drying up in the knowledge her sweet Andromeda Saint was fighting this. "Yes, he's grown strong, he'll find a way to pull through. That bastard Cetus, I'll make him pay for this one day!"

"H-hey, calm down, Cynthia, don't go Rambo on us, not now!" Nam appealed. "Listen, guys, I have a proposal… since Elda here needs to go with Cynthia to Andromeda Island to train for her cloth and Albiore is compatible with Cepheus… why not hand over Albiore to Shinta?"

Elda pushed Albiore over when she heard this. "WAIT, wait, does that mean… that we'll be training together?"

"Not exactly, but yes, you'd be on the same Training Ground, and it would be better than handing Elda over to Olivia, who is just going around hunting for Saintia candidates." Nam confirmed. "She actually stopped by the MMC looking for Elda. My Goddess, that girl is persistent."

"Absolutely not!" Cynthia cried, breaking Elda's hopes. "Shinta is just fourteen and has just lost his father figure. He can't take care of another child and we aren't certain if he'll even receive the Cepheus cloth!"

"But Cynthia –"

"No means no!" she set her foot down. "That cursed Silver Cloth… it has caused enough damage already! I can accept that if Shinta decides to follow Guard's footsteps, but I will use everything in my power as a Silver Saint to prevent that armor from taking advantage of both him and Albiore, even if I have to take this to the Pope!"

Albiore raised his hand "… can I have a word in this?"

Cynthia was about to snap at him too, but stepped back, took a deep breath, and gave him the floor. "Yes… of course, Al', what would you prefer the most?"

The young, blonde, Argentinean boy rubbed his chin. "Well, I don't know who Saint Shinta is, but it sounds to me like he's the only chance I have to get the Silver Cloth as soon as possible AND stay close to a student I know. I don't want to go somewhere with strangers who might bully me." He touched his chest as if in to swear he's telling the truth. "I don't know much about Sanctuary customs, but my main interest is to get as strong as possible as fast as possible."

"… Why is that, Albiore?"

But the boy just shied away, his face looking to the side. "I have my reasons…"

Sagitta Nam remembered an important detail. "Guys, Albiore comes from a war-torn home. He might be harboring violent traumas which would explain why he wants the strong armors right away and why he hurt Orphée unintentionally. Wouldn't it be better off if he stayed with a positive influence like Shinta, who's a pacifist? It worked with Pegasus Lance." He suggested, pinging the message to both Cynthia and Kastiel.

Cynthia folded her arms. "I… I don't know. I just don't want Shinta to be put in an unfair situation."

"You'd be on the island with him training Elda, right?" asked Nam "You could guide him through this."

"I'll also keep an eye." offered Kastiel. "I'll probably be asked to help out looking for Priam, but I'll pass by Andromeda Island whenever I can."

Both of them widened their eyes at this. "What? Really? Why?"

Though he didn't want to admit it, the memories of arguing with Lance inside Cepheus Castle returned to him, making him wonder if he really had something wrong to make up for. "Someone today made me think I might owe myself to do this."

Cynthia addressed Albiore. "Okay, Al'… can I call you this?" The boy just nodded. "We can't guarantee anything, but for now we'll try to keep you two together. What about you, Elda, are you okay with this?"

Elda chuckled happily. "Okay with this? Are you kidding me? This is great!"

"Uh, how so?"

"Saint Cynthia, I've been training to get a chance for a good training ground forever!" she grinned in excitement. "This is, like, the best I could ask for!"

Cynthia was honestly surprised. "Elda, honey, Andromeda Island isn't a walk in the park, are you sure you should be so excited? Why do you want an A-Grade training ground so hard?"

The brunette young girl's excited smile watered down to a nervous chuckle, unsure if she should share this. "Well… First of all there's this kid that tried to bully us today and I really want to get back at him –

"Are you still on about that guy?" complained Albiore "The kid was a Gold-Rank from the Cancer Temple, Elda has been fantasizing about punching his face all day."

Elda ignored Albiore. "ALSO… I didn't really want to say but there is someone I really admire in Sanctuary's rank… and I heard she was running for the Silver Cloth. This is my best shot at eventually being with her, miss Cynthia."

"Do I know her?" asked Cassiopeia Cynthia.

"Probably? Her name is Rebecca."

Sagitta Nam saw Cynthia stagger a bit. "Something wrong? I don't remember that name in the files, either."

"…. No, it's fine. Maybe Olivia got to her before we did." She then returned her attention to Elda. "Be an obedient student, Elda, and I will help you find her someday, deal?"

Elda beamed up, laying out her hands. "Are ya kidding? Of course, it's a super deal! Thank you, Saint Cynthia!"

Nam stared at Cynthia suspiciously but moved on. "Oh well… at least Guard' would be happy to see Shinta be a teacher, I guess… I hope the greenhead won't refuse the offer or we'll have to think of something else."

{======================|0|======================}

(?)

{======================|0|======================}

The snow storm blew loudly on the mountains, making the naked trees creek and wiping away the boy's footsteps. He pulled through a rope over his shoulder the fresh carcass of a canine creature he trapped. Blood dripped from his arm and tears of pain from his eyes as his entire body felt exhausted from his most recent hunt. Whole nights had been endured in the top of trees, away from fresh water, right in the path of the coldest winds, just to catch the loner away from the pack. There was no strength in the young hunter left.

A faint sound of his stomach rumbling was heard and then his legs failed him, causing Lance to fall face first on the snow. The stomach burned and he cried in despair, feeling his mind sink in the memory of the four hundred and seventy two days and nights he had already spent in that Training Ground, alone and out of medical supplies. All he could think about was how much he wanted to die.

The memory of a person's smile came to him. "It will be alright… just become a Saint and it will be all over."

The red eyes teared up further, remembering the Triangle Saint who first brought him to Sanctuary. "N-Noah…"

"If you become a Saint, you will have amazing powers, and all your problems will go away, you know?"

"I… I c-can't do it, Noah. I can't do it on m-my own. I don't know what to d-do!" He wept. It was so cold he could almost feel his blood and tears turn into ice on his skin. If he didn't get the wolf he caught back to his cabin he would either starve or freeze to death. "I've b-been stuck here for so l-long…."

"Ah, ah, it's easy-peasy, trust me, I did it too." The memory of Noah from the time he was first telling him about Sanctuary chuckled. "Just six years under a teacher and you'll tear the ground apart with your kicks and rip apart the skies with your fists, like a superhero! You'll never be weak, or hungry, or sad again!"

Lance couldn't stop crying on the ground, body slowly covered in snow by the storm.

"And you'll make friends too, nothing like that awful orphanage I took you from. Friends like me!"

"I c-can't! I d-don't know how, it's impossible to do this, N-Noah! I can't break a rock with a punch, I can't leap over mountains like you, it's just not possible!" His eyes closed shut in pain. "K-Kastiel was right… I'm too o-old to learn…"

"Ah, ah, ah, I'm your hero? Just because I took you from that place?... Aw, I guess you're still a kid…" Noah lost his smile all of a sudden. "You do know, though, that you're going to a place packed to the brim with real heroes, right? And you'll be one someday too… I guess if you want ME to be yours it's alright for a while, ah ah ah… but you will have to fight for your own ending."

The boy in the snow felt his heart sink, these fantasies felt like corpses in it. No longer had he had any hope in Sanctuary. He was going to die on that mountain, he knew it, just was a matter of when or how. Hunger, disease, infection, the cold, the injuries or the time limit would take him.

"And, you know, Sanctuary is a place of miracles, of stunning sights and Saints who can do the impossible, so your happy ending will definitely come true!..."

He grabbed his own head, no longer believing in any of this. There was no happy ending waiting for him at the end of the tunnel, and even though he once wondered if there was ever a time when a horrible place like he was in could have changed for the better, he now didn't. It was pointless to think about it. The trappings of places like Sanctuary never change. Places like the orphanage he was in never change. And places like the world he lived in never, ever changed.

"… all your hopes… and dreams…. Definitely!"

Hardened like an oak by this despair, the dead husk of a boy slowly stood back up. He pulled the rope wrapped around the dead weight's body again and dragged once more. It was no longer dreams and illusions of heroism in Sanctuary and its Saints that motivated him, just a deep, deep sadness and cynicism, as if the simple act of surviving was a struggle against all this anger, even as the days grew darker and darker and the nights colder and colder.

And by a hate, like a black fire in his stomach, for everything and everyone around him, weather real or not, but most of all, for Sanctuary, for a place filled with monsters like the men that put him in Mount Olympus, the wolves that constantly tried to kill him and the Saints that looked down on him like a reject, another child to be sacrificed in their training pits, but also for the ghosts all around him, the phantoms of dead dreams and innocence, for the memories of the man that told him life would flow like a stream in the land of Athena and for all those who stood by and watched him get dragged to that mountain, who could have changed this for the better. This fire would never be satiated, never doused. It would follow him for the rest of his short, miserable life.

And he found himself screaming out, to the wild, in complete unhinged anger, tears falling down in his cheeks, and was answered back by the howls of midnight's wolves in Mount Olympus, an opera to the loneliness and despair in Sanctuary's staircase to the Gods.

{======================|0|======================}

Present Time

Cancer Temple

{======================|0|======================}

"Are you thinking about Mount Olympus, Lance?" asked Pegasus.

Sitting at his desk with both his cloth boxes by his feet, the red-eyed Gold Saint signed his last reports and finished up his work. "Yeah, I guess. How could you tell?"

"You've been doing it a lot, lately, so the signs are telling. Is something on your mind?"

Lance sighed and got up. "Like you can't tell already what it is."

The Pegasus Cloth box staid motionless "Meeting Saint Kastiel was just a chance encounter. It shouldn't weigh on your mind so much-"

"It's NOT just him! It's… It's this whole fucking day!" Lance shouted verbally unintentionally, letting out his frustration. "It just reminded me a lot about why I don't trust this place, why I never did. There's so much here that can just turn on you and leave you helpless. Poor Shinta, for example… who in God's name would have imagined his teacher would do something like this? That he was even connected to some sort of conspiracy even I as a Gold Saint am not allowed to know about? What's Shion hiding this time?!"

"What does that have to do with you?" asked Karkinos in his golden box. "Just fulfill your duty and develop your powers, what else do you have to think about as a Gold Saint?"

Lance groaned to himself, exasperated.

Taking a more delicate approach, the Pegasus Cloth touched the topic he suspected lance was pondering on too. "Lance, over the last two years I've sensed your thoughts turning to someone else who introduced you to Sanctuary, a Saint of Triangle, correct? Were you thinking about him too?"

"He…" lance hesitated to elaborate. "When he brought me in… he would tell me so much stuff about what kind of place Sanctuary was, how it would change my life for the better. Now here I am at the top of my career in it and I don't feel any different. If anything I'm more confused than ever. I see people around me being hurt left to right and more often than not it's this place's fault instead of Hades'." He rubbed his red eyes tiredly. "Whatever… I'll go to Master's place as soon as possible. Roshi is about the only person who can make me think all this pondering is nonsense. If I'm left to my own devices I'll definitely just overthink it again and turn it into another drama."

Having just finished his last reports about what happened in Andromeda Island, the red-eyed teenager, now donning his strongest armor, carried off the Pegasus Cloth box on his back by a lash and reassumed his identity as the Gold Saint of Cancer. Mumbling and grumbling to himself, he walked over to the entrance of the Temple to sit by the massive stairs of the Golden Zodiac, guarding his house.

He saw Shinta sitting there already, gazing off to the night sky. "Are you doing okay?"

The green-haired boy sniffed but nodded. "Yeah, thank you…"

"The negotiations so far seem to be doing okay and Shaka just messaged me that your teacher's memory will not be shamed."

"That's good," he stood up and faced his friend. "Thank you for everything, Lance, if it weren't for you… I wouldn't even have had the chance to see my teacher fully sane after the fight. I think that is helping me accept what happened."

"If he wants to see his teacher again, you could escort him to the Underworld, Lance," reminded the Cancer Cloth, seeing a chance to trick Lance into exercising its powers. "Just a quick casting of the Underworld Wave and-"

"So he can watch Guardnia stand in a line like a zombie to drop down the Well? Don't be ridiculous, Karkinos," argued Lance, before readdressing Shinta. "I know this is a bad time, but there's something we gotta talk about, Shinta. If I postpone this it won't be okay."

The boy's attention popped up. "Yeah, sure, what is it?"

"You shouldn't have done what you did. Shinta, you knocked me out after agreeing to work together with me to catch Guardnia. You not only endangered the mission, but you're one of the few I really trust. I am still rattling in my head how you could do something like that."

"I…" Shinta hesitated, clearly ashamed. Looking back on things he truly regretted his actions. "I'm sorry, you're absolutely right, but I had my reasons. You were talking about engaging Master like an enemy –"

"And what happened then, Shinta? Didn't he treat you like an enemy?" confronted Lance, stunning the Andromeda Saint. "If you hadn't knocked me out… we could have gotten him out of there BEFORE Cetus showed up and ruined everything, do you understand that?! Because you put your emotions before your job, your Ma-"

"DON'T YOU DARE!" Shinta screamed, startling Lance like he never had before. "Are you going to say that because of me he's dead?! How can you say that?! You don't really know how things would have turned out!"

"I could say the same about you!"

"HOW COULD I?! You hate Sanctuary's teachers so much that you were ready to walk inside the castle with raised fists! You wouldn't even accept Saint Kastiel's help in the most dire of situations, so how could I trust you with my teacher's well-being?!" Shinta countered. "I know you have your differences with him, but Saint Kerberos was giving you the keys to solve the situation the entire time and you were tossing them away because of something that happened six years ago!?"

Lance's teeth gritted. "What are you trying to say?!"

Shinta's eyes teared up. "I-I'm saying you have no place criticizing me for being a pacifist just because you're full of anger! I was so happy when I saw you getting along with Saint Dohko in China, I thought he had changed you, but you're still just full of resentment!" the younger Saint accused. "I refuse to live like that… My teacher attacked me, yes, but also spent his dying moments telling me he loved me. I know he had reasons for what he did!"

"He had the chance to drop his weapons the second you found him and instead he pulled you into some crazy fucked up ritual!" Lance shouted back.

"Because it was the Cloth's tradition, he was doing what was best for me-"

"HOW DOES THAT MAKE ANY OF THIS OKAY?!" Lance roared. "Does that mean Kastiel was right in dumping me in that mountain to force me to survive, because it's what the Pegasus Cloth may have wanted?! Does that mean I should listen to Karkinos and start going around stealing people's souls so Mephisto can see me as a role model?! You're painting your teacher as a rebel that followed the Cloth's book! Was he sick of Sanctuary yet for some reason thought he should honor it in his desertion?! Don't you see the oxymoron in this?!"

"It doesn't make him EVIL, which is how you were ready to engage him! Wasn't there a time when you were a Bronze Saint and were always wondering why Sanctuary was giving you a hard time, even though you did nothing clearly wrong?" Shinta confronted, making Lance bite his own lip. "Did you think you were being treated fairly? Didn't you take the time to make it clear to Kastiel when you beat him down that you were 'dueling him'?! You reminded me of that tons of times! How is that any different from what… what M-Master Guardnia did with me?!"

The Cancer Saint narrowed his eyes and stepped back. "So it's like that, huh?"

"Yes, and I don't understand how you're unable to equate Master's situation with yours," concluded Shinta. "If it were you in his situation, you would have wanted me to hear you out, to ask what you meant… and I loved my teacher! I know I made a mistake knocking you out, but how could you lack that kind of sympathy?!"

"What the hell are you saying, that I'm a psycho?!"

"I'm saying that just because you were hurt by someone once it doesn't absolve you from treating everyone like the bad guy! Maybe the reason you can't see the other person's side of the situation is because you can't get over the fact you weren't good enough to pass Jason's Trial!"

Lance was visibly stunned, widening his red eyes in shock and staying quiet.

Shinta breathed out his anger in the meantime and shame eventually crept up his heart. "I'm… I'm sorry, Lance, I didn't mean to-"

"Get out!"

"Lance, I-"

"I SAID THE GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!" the Cancer Saint screamed, tossing his Pegasus Cloth box to the ground loudly to startle the Andromeda away. "This is my Temple, my House, and I want you out NOW! Take your moralism elsewhere; this is a place for warriors, not Black Saint apologists!"

Shinta contained his tears and walked off. "Alright… I'll go... Good bye…"

"Good fucking bye!" Lance shouted, walking inside the Cancer House and loudly closing its massive wooden doors.

Mephisto saw him in the inner hall and rushed over to him with his paper. "Hey, Lance, come here, I need you to sign this paper saying I made you aware that I've illegally swindled tickets for the Coliseum fights. This Silver Saint jerk says my Golden Zodiac caretaker has to be notified-" He then saw Lance screaming and punching off a whole side of a pillar to the ground. "Um…. okay, so not a good time?"

{======================|0|======================}

Standing in the roof of the Cancer Temple, Lance sunk his face into his hands, furious and ashamed. "Great, just fucking great."

"Not enjoying the day, I see."

"AHH, FUCK, WHAT THE SHIT-" he turned around and saw the man he met in Kastoria, Akassius Steiner, standing before him. "Oh, it's you, that Akassius guy from the ball! Damn it, you startled me and yeah, it's been a long day! How the hell did you sneak inside?"

Akassius joined him. "You seem to forget I was once a neighbor of this Temple. I know my paths through the Golden Zodiac. I was returning from a meeting with His Holiness when I saw you… sulking on the Cancer Temple's roof so I thought I'd give you a scare."

"Well, congratulations! Don't you have anywhere else to go?!"

The man took out a golden pocket watch carved with the Gemini symbol and saw the time. "I do have a meeting with friends. On the other hand," he added, putting the watch away and looked at the red eyed Saint. "It occurred to me I was walking past the House of the Saint about to be the eldest member of the new gold generation. Since I've once occupied a similar role, excluding poor Daniel of course, I thought I would ask how you felt about that."

Lance narrowed his eyes. "I'm sorry for being rude, I just feel like a big bunch of problems are about to be dumped on me."

"Hmm, I know that feeling."

Sensing the man was taking no offense at his earlier outburst, Lance calmed his nerves. "Well I don't intend to stick around for that. The Pope says I still need to be educated into proper gold sainthood." Lance reminded, referring to his ongoing training under Dohko. "Not to mention Saga has made it perfectly clear he intends to make everyone's problems his own to solve."

Akassius looked down at the lower Gemini Temple. "Don't judge him too harshly, he's merely living out his role."

"Role?"

"Yes, Saga will have to overcome challenges pertaining to both his Cloth and his place in the Golden Zodiac. I know because I once had to face those problems," the retired war hero mystified. "We all have our roles in this place. Sanctuary is an abnormality in this world, especially in current times, and all the cogs will be vital to fulfill its mission."

Lance squinted. "Is that so? Even you, a retired soldier?"

This time, however, Akassius seemed dismissive. "Heh heh, of course not. It's just an analogy to explain why warriors who move at the speed of sound are just as honored as those who move at the speed of light."

The Cancer Saint folded arms. "What about the Cepheus Saint? He seemed pretty into that logic. In fact he seemed engrossed by it. Was he another cog trapped in the mechanism that happened to break?"

Akassius looked over to him with blinking eyes as if wondering what the Cancer was talking about. "That's strange… you seem awfully concerned with this metaphor, I was just talking about Saga, my replacement, and maybe some other Saints. Is something bothering you in particular, Cancer Saint?"

The Cancer Saint leaned against the stone railing of the balcony, feeling the memories of his rise to power in Sanctuary conflict between the actions he regretted and the people he shunned. "Nothing, maybe I'm just wandering what my role will be."

The experienced Duke walked off. "Well, I wish I could advise you, but the Cancer Saint of my generation passed away, so I have little wisdom to share."

"So I've heard." confirmed Lance. "Some sort of massacre, right?"

Stopping for a small moment, Akassius looked over his shoulder to him and nodded somberly. "Correct, but aren't so many forced into awful situations like that when in search of who we are?"

The young boy was flabbergasted. "What?! Are you for real? Of course we aren't; who gets forced into committing something so awful for a dumb reason like that?!"

Akassius touched his own chin in reflection. "Maybe someone with nothing to lose in that path, like a Gold Saint?" he suggested. Lance was about to call him out on his nonsense, but the man then departed. "Good evening, Saint Cancer. I would continue the conversation, but, like I said, I have a meeting scheduled I refuse to be late to."

The suspicious Gold Saint squinted. "Sure, like I can't tell you're full of shit."

{======================|0|======================}

Moments Later

Taurus Temple Roof Garden

{======================|0|======================}

The open roof of the Second Temple housed a beautiful hedge maze surrounded by roses and flower arrangements. Unlike the gardens of Elisa, however, these were not planted with ill-intent but merely by a soul seeking comfort from the daily tribulations of being a Gold Saint. The end of the edge maze facing Sanctuary Town's landscape assumed round contours in the walls so as to surround a resting point where a set of chairs, a table and a tea balcony were located.

Capricorn 'Achilles' Kirin, sat in his normal training clothes and the laurels the Pope handed to him, joined Aquarius Malta and Taurus 'Ajax' Daniel, also in similar attires, around the table and welcoming the final invitee, Akassius Steiner, into the peaceful room.

"Is everyone here?" asked Daniel, to which he received nods. "Ah, good, the fireworks are about to start and Aldebaran is guarding the entrance, so we can be at peace."

"Indeed." agreed Malta, who brought out the Aquarius Cloth vase and placed it on the table. "I will have to ask your student to return this to Camus once we're done, I hope you don't mind."

Kirin saw the object trembling slightly. "Is this… really safe?"

"Of course, I applied an alchemic reagent that has been turning the energy inside into stardust. Once I open the lid, only a cloud of sparkling ash will come out, triggering an aurora. Glasses?"

"I brought some from Daniel's cupboard." assured Akassius, placing four elegant cups, each watermarked with a horned bull head, around the vase. He then pulled out a wine bottle. "The wine, though, is my own, I assure, ah-ah. I promise it's good, since I've given another bottle to the Pope."

"May I?" asked Kirin, and upon receiving a nod he took two fingers and perfectly slashed off the cork with a 'pop', releasing the grape and alcohol aroma. He filled their glasses and raised a toast. "To us; to a lifetime as comrades and to Sanctuary and Athena!"

"To Sanctuary and Athena!" they repeated, smiling

*clink*

They all drank the crimson liquid down. A miscellanea of faces, frowns and tongue clicks followed from all four. They looked at each other awkwardly.

"So… um, what do you think?" Akassius asked.

Malta was the first to say it. "It… um, it needs work."

"It's not bad!" assured Kirin "It's just…um…"

Daniel spat it to his own garden floor. "Uuggh! It goes down like crap! Aldebaran's protein shake tastes sweeter and it's made with dry potato roots! PAH!"

The former Gemini sighed. "Oh… so it tastes like our victories."

While there was a beat of hesitant quiet, the other three chuckled with this in bitter comedy before eventually laughing out loud, which filled Akassius with joy despite the failure of his wine. The thought that another bottle of equally disgusting wine was probably being opened by the Pope that exact moment filled them with extra happiness.

Amidst the laughter, an earlier thought occurred to Malta. "I didn't want to confess it to you guys, but something about seeing Priam today after years thinking he was dead made this day more special to me, maybe because it reminded me of a time when we weren't on different sides."

"How long has it been?" wondered Daniel.

A bit tipsy, Kirin blurted out "Depends… do you consider when it all started breaking down when Priam punched the Pope or a year earlier when Cancer killed your son-…" he saw the disheartened look on Daniel "Oh, I'm sorry."

Daniel's hand waved and patted Kirin's back. "I won't be sad, not tonight."

Malta wiped a tear and picked up the vase. "Ah, okay, are you all ready?" The others confirmed and the Aquarius Saint walked over to the edge. "As of today, we are no longer Gold Saints. With this gesture, we entrust you to our brave youths, Athena. Goodbye Sanctuary, and all the people of the Goddess, we tribute this shower of light to you all."

And the four Gold Saints watched as, upon the lid being opened, a shower of sparkling, golden dust was blown out like a vacuum's content. The wind blew by from the cold mountains surrounding Sanctuary and, sweeping by the Taurus Temple, picked up the stardust made with Priam's attack and washed it across the starry night.

And from the ceilings of the towns and the plazas the fireworks came, shooting through the air into the spreading cloud of stardust and blasting into sparks of multicolored light over and over, shaping formation alluding to the constellations of the bull, the ancient goat and the lady with the vase. The whole of Sanctuary looked up to the sky, seeing the end of an era of warriors manifested in a heavenly aurora of honoring to the Goddess and her Saints and all from the Gold Saints to the mere townsfolk prayed for the glory of a new generation.

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Meanwhile,

Port Chatham, Alaska

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Taking advantage of the dark, the SS Nicolai emerged from the depth for a small moment and approached what was the creepiest town in all of Alaska, Port Chatham. Considered cursed by the natives of the American state and thus desolate even by Alaskan standards, it was the ideal point of entry for Black Saints travelling in an armed submarine.

Former Gold Saint of Sagittarius Priam to open the breach door and breathe some fresh air. Paris following him out of the vessel to do the same and took a look at the bleak artic city.

The massive spruce trees characteristic of the region gave the bay island a claustrophobic feeling. "T-this is what you pi-picked for a docking point?! A fr-fr-frozen moose barn in the North Pole?!" Scorpio Paris complained, folding his arms with the cold.

"It's remote, we can more easily sneak in as citizens, it speaks a foreign tongue that most of us have learned and its close enough to where we can get Daese medical attention. Homer is just 50 kilometers from here." argued the rebel leader. "She's in very bad shape! That blow Kirin landed on her should have been fatal. Falling victim to Magnitude Atlas and helping fire the Athena Exclamation made it all worse. Besides, no one told you to come dressed like a carnival dancer."

"F-fine." Paris stole an extra cloak from the sub's sailors and put it on. "Now where's my payment?!"

Priam tossed him a small sack which was immediately opened by the greedy mercenary, revealing a bright assortment of multicolored gems. "It's got your favorite, rubies straight from the Amazon."

"Uoh-oh-oh, that's the stuff." Paris drooled and bit down on one of the gems. "It's real too! I'd like to know what tribe you traded these which!"

"I'd like to know something else too, Paris," asked the rebel, leaning his arms on the sub's railing to look out at the town. "You were right back at the island; I didn't pay you to fight the Gold Saints and risk your disguise, only to make sure we had enough gold-rank hands to make the operation work. Why did you choose to help us in the end?"

"You're confusing generosity with professionalism," assured Paris. "You dead means no pay, but if I interfered right away it would ruin the whole idea of stalling the others. Seeing just the two of you alone in that beach, especially a Cerulean Paladin, made Kirin overconfident and let the blood rush to his head. He would have just taken things seriously right away from the start if I was with you."

"Spoken like a true bought sword," sighed Priam. "Still, you gotta admit, fighting with those guys for a moment was a bit… nice for a moment, right? It took me back, at least."

"Pah, a sentimentalist like always!" the rude Scorpio mocked, shoving hands and gems into pockets "I don't share your little introspections, okay? The whole reason I left Sanctuary was because the others wouldn't stop glorifying such sentimental ideas like nostalgia and what could have been! Fate isn't like that, ya losers! You either bite your way to victory or you fall in the trash!"

Priam sweated. "Sometimes I'm amazed to remember you come from a family of aristocrats. Anyone would figure you would be more… um, more conservative."

"The golden ring was the first thing I sold off! My sister wanted it a lot harder than me and her kid, little Milo can keep it. His parents certainly didn't make good use of it." said Paris. He handed over a contact to Priam in the form of a number on a piece of paper. "Look, if you got more jobs for me, I'll take them, just call that number and it will take you to a friend of a friend of a friend of me. Until then keep your theories to yourself and tell that Paladin girl to stop thinking she can knee Taurus Saints in the face if she doesn't want to get herself killed."

The former Sagittarius blinked confusedly. "Wait, you're already going?"

Paris put on his hood and stepped on the railing. "Yeah, got a new contract already, there's this white-haired freak wants me to do a detective job. If I were you I wouldn't contact me for a while."

"Why not?"

"Cause rumors say he's gonna be the next Quetzal of the Jaguar Warriors, you know, those Mayan freaks that my ancestor Kardia once fought." explained Paris, surprising Priam. "If it's true then you might not want your voice to be heard over the phone by one of Sanctuary's Allies." He saw Priam staring at him and groaned. "Fine… goodbye, dear friend, ugh!"

Priam nodded and waved his hand in farewell as the Scorpio Saint disappeared into a light speed blur. "Bye, it was good seeing you." He then closed the breach door and climbed down the sub's ladders.

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Germany

Hades' Earthly Castle

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The grandfather clock ticked away in the room filled with Victorian furniture as Pandora took a sip of her tea boiled with flowers from the Underworld, sitting by the impeccably decorated table. By her side, Daemon Lucifer, the tall young-looking man of long silver hair, red colored eyes and purple Surplice with red cape and red marking of a roaring creature's face on his chest plate looked out the window with strange curiosity.

"Is something the matter, Lucifer?" she asked. "Has Rhadamanthys finally climbed out of the training pit to challenge you yet again? Or have the Specters made a mess of the Prisons again?"

The man's crimson orbs narrowed at the marvelous sight of the far off night sky to the south filling with an unnatural aurora. He also saw the Behemoth and Nasu Specters arriving at the gate of the castle and ordering the Skeleton Soldiers to let them in.

His hand closed the curtain. "No, Lady Pandora, but I do have matters to attend. A group of my scouts has returned, you see, so if you would not mind?"

"I do, in fact." she retorted, putting down the tea cup. "I did not hear of any scouts being sent out. Would you explain to me what information is being collected without my knowledge?"

"Merely data about our enemy Saints-"

"Really?" she squinted. "You wouldn't be lying to me now, would you?"

"Daemon Lucifer never lies, milady -" Lucifer promptly bragged, sticking out his chest proudly. "- especially not to you."

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Climbing down the steps of the castle, the caped Daemon Specter walked out the corridors into the opening by the metal gate, which was ordered to be lowered to let the two Specters in. Skeleton Soldiers rushed out of the way while others escorted Behemoth Torak and Nasu Erika, two of his most faithful underlings, inside the castle.

The two of them kneeled, fist to the ground. "Lord Lucifer, Celestial Star of Pride, your assumptions were correct." started Torak, the large youth of dark blue hair. "We have observed the retirement of the three older Gold Saints as well as a battle in Andromeda Island."

"We have discovered that a number of enemies of Sanctuary were in fact still alive." Continued the Nasu Specter, who raised up her head to her lord to confide an even sweeter secret in mental message. "Including the Black Saint you showed interest in, former Sagittarius Priam."

"Excellent information, you two have fulfilled your mission." congratulated the Dark Prince, who then spotted an undesirable approaching. "Go, you're dismissed, keep this information to yourselves and report to me the details of the rest later."

Judge Garuda Aiacos saw what was going on from the battlements and approached them. "Is something the matter, Prince Lucifer? Did these scouts report a weakness in Sanctuary?"

"Yes, Aiacos, it appears Black Saints tried to sabotage the Gold Saints retirement. Nothing to concern Lord Hades with, though." he revealed, staying true to his proud reputation of not lying but still withholding vital details. He then walked away to rejoin Pandora.

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Chapter End

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Arc End

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Next Chapter: Side Story 1 – Arrival of the Gods – Chapter 1 of 2

Description: It's 1974, two years before Priam's attack on the Pope, and the Gods of Death and Sleep are about to return to Hades' court, welcomed by Pandora, after a long period of sleep. It falls to the Dark Prince of Hades, Daemon Lucifer, to honor their return.

Author's Note: I had a number of things planned to say in this chapter's notes, but I kinda forgot them over this last month period of exams. I am absolutely elated to be done with the First Arc, however, as it has been a bane of my story for several years. While I do not think this new version is perfect, it has corrected many of the establishment flaws it had in Version 2 of LR and I can now walk forward with raised head to face future plots.

Unfortunately for fans of the Second Arc, we will not be diving straight ahead into it and, instead, a Side Story that was placed in the middle of it (Arrival of the Gods) that helped establish several important figures of the upcoming conflict will be rearranged and posted as the next chapter following this one. It should be fairly quick, though, as its only two chapters, and it will help me keep the story organized more neatly. It will still deal with the plot of Arc 2, though.

This is also the longest chapter in LR history, numbering over 36,500 words, an inevitable size considering all the work that had to be put into wrapping up the First Arc. Anything smaller and important scenes would be left out.

Finally, it's posted on the celebration of the Fic's 7th birthday, so yay, happy birthday, LR.

Anyway, hope to see you all in the next arc and that you enjoyed this chapter. If you've made it this far to reading this, then something about the story definitely hooked you. There's a lot yet to come.