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.

63. 2A: Arachnophobia

Notable OCs: Pegasus Lance's Saint Generation, Civil War Saint Generation, World War Saint Generation, Daemon Lucifer's Specters, Maiden Elisa, Priam's Black Saints; Cyrulian Refugees

Notable Original Concepts: Mount Olympus Training Ground, Sanctuary Court, Teos Cloth, Athenian Empire mythology, Isle of Gardens, Stardust Prison, Hades' Dark Princes; Desert Beyond, Sanctuary Town Layout & Buildings; Kido Mount;

Recurring/Cameo OCs of Jenny DeVic: Mrs. Schafurwatt, Cyrus

Recurring/Cameo Concepts of Jenny DeVic: Great Bodyguard Legend, Golden Line Heritage, Sanctuary Orphanages, Andromeda Island's Geography & Tests, Sanctuary Nobility, 88 Knights Festival; Gemini Dagger Curse;

Author Notes:

-this chapter was betaread by my friend Alkonost Storm. Check her stuff out, she writes Shion stories about after the Lost Canvas War, as well as Final Fantasy fics;

-Reuploaded chapter to fix the "Next Chapter Description" line;

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"Sanctuary's court is a scorpion's nest, through and through. A society raised by an egalitarian Goddess such as Athena would ideally not have an aristocracy, but when people start noticing that aptitude with the cosmos is genetically reinforceable, it becomes easier for families of Saints to entrench their power across generations. Unfortunately, empathy doesn't seem to have the same transmissibility and the people who come with masks and rings to Astraea's court tend to become deeply insular from the rest of society, hoarding wealth, accumulating suspicions and conspiring against each other.

This stratfication is because, to Sanctuary's upper caste, talent with the cosmos forms the backbone of their power pedigree, as it sits on their ability to supply the Pope with candidates to Sainthood more steadily than anyone else. Infertility or the inability to produce even mildly skilled footsoldiers for too many generations could mean the destruction of their lineage, motivating them to do everything they can to secure important military posts for their descendants. As a result, even for an aristocratic system, there seems to be an especially strong emphasis on strategic weddings, not to secure more land, but to ensure the children have as much predisposition to awaken the cosmos as possible. Unlike Lemurian households, the resulting couples are often therefore loveless and pressured to artificially maximize their children's chances to destroy rocks, often resorting to traumatic upbringings and teaching ruthless amorality to their heirs. Nothing could be more shameful to them, after all, than to have a talentless child.

The patriarchs wear golden rings, and then silver rings are given to whoever in their family is thought to be their next best candidate to a high military ranking, demonstrating their confidence and luxury. Many a Scorpio Saint has once been a silver ring of their famous family, which has dominated the 8th house with an Hapsburgian grip since even before the Millennium Wars. The 8th House's occupants are therefore more public about their identity than the others, leading to more propensity to festivities in their Temple.

The Holy Father seems content with this state of affairs, never expressing any dislike to having his ranks filled consistently, especially after the bloodshed of the last Holy War with Hades. I question the wisdom in this, despite the obviousness that his age makes his Lemurian ascendancy to be. Arles III stations these princes in his territories as guardians, much like he does in our colonies, after all, and considering the environments they are raised in, it's hard even for me, a man of law and impartiality, to picture any of them to be of particularly strong moral standing. To find heroes in them is the exception, not the norm.

Said exceptions do exist, though."

-Judge Meropis, in "Letters to Shamballa", a collection of observations on modern Sanctuary society under Pope Arles III secretly requested by Elder Yuzuriha

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Romania,

Crow's Nest Fortress

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The fortress of Crow's Nest stood quiet in the night as Erika returned to her stand at the tower top, done with resurrecting Lycaon Phlegyas. The False Specter defeated and killed by Akassius had lost his Surplice, which was now likely back in the Underworld, but thanks to their diligent storage of their souls and her rituals with the help of the Necromancer Specter, the spy was able to successfully mimic Hades' resurrection ability and Phlegyas now breathed and walked, albeit in a dazed stupor, among them.

Yet, her good mood was now soured by the most alarming of news transmitted to her by Ainsel. "(His cosmos vanished?! How can that be?!)" she mentally shouted, transmitting a message through a highly shielded telepathic channel.

All the way back in Greece, the Papillon Specter, Ainsel, responded. "(I don't know, it's too early to tell, but I lost track of his cosmic and mental signature at the Libra Temple. This isn't the first time this has happened, so there's no reason to panic, but it's true the Prince wouldn't just drop his Cosmos to zero in the middle of a big battle with all these Saints still running around.)"

Looking out the castle walls, her teeth gritted with the sight of all the tents packed with former Gold Saints besieged the fortress. If they found out their leader was down…

Ainsel continued. "The Prince isn't so easily defeated, I'm sure of it. I wouldn't believe it unless we saw his corpse with our own eyes. Besides, there are still many of us left, Erika." He argued. "(As we speak, Torak is in the process of crushing the Gemini Saint, while Erika and Treble are working on doing the same to Sagittarius and Scorpio. Moreover, sooner or later we'll get our hands on the Cancer Saint and revive all our fallen allies whose souls he stole.)"

But the Nasu was unconvinced. "That moth-brained fool! We weren't supposed to have this much trouble to begin with OR lose any of our Elites! Things aren't going according to plan, no matter how you spin it! You can't take any chances when you have two separate Olympian armies pissed at you!" she voiced outloud, frustrated, before resuming the conversation. "Where are you heading to now?"

"Downstairs, under the Prince's orders. It will lighten the jamming in the upper Temples, but he gave me an important task. I'll be back to Gemini before it makes a difference."

"What task is that?!"

"He ordered me to rescue the Cyrulian girl after he got the upper hand on the Saints. You know, the one you stabbed back in Germany."

At first, Erika had no idea what he was talking about, but then the memory of the Cyrulian teenager came rushing back at him. "What?! Her?! She's still alive?!"

"I was surprised, too. I mean, you're usually so efficient…"

She frowned angrily. "Asshole…!" but she focused, knowing something important had to be done. "What the hell is she doing down there?!"

"Something tells me our late friend Lemon has something to do with it, perhaps a scheme to backstab the Prince. You know, Erika, considering how much trouble she has caused both of us, maybe we ought to honor our fallen comrade's desires... while the Prince is still MIA, of course."

The tone in his message was clear as day. "The last time the Prince used that girl, we lost Urial! On top of all the risk she posed of our entire scheme getting discovered by Hades prematurely with all the training he gave her, now she's back again forcing you out of your strategic position…"

"Ah, ah, Miss Erika, are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?"

"The idea was YOURS!" Her brows tensed; were they really capable of acting against the Prince this blatantly? Perhaps the Pride Star's sudden disappearance might be a blessing in disguise, giving them the chance they need to rip the weeds from around his heart. "Well, hurry up with that, then! The longer you guys stay out of this castle, the less I think our hostages will stop these white knights camped outside from nuking the fortress!"

A chuckle of amusement she could not hear from Romania was let out by Ainsel at Greece. "Well of course, 'spymaster'."

The connection was then shut off and the Nasu False Specter was left to her thoughts in the dark night. She noticed the emphasis he put in his last word. "Jealous bastard…Our entire Elite circle is made up of self-interested snakes. I could bet a drachma he was the one that started these rumors about me being a cannibal. It's is no less HE can claim!"

Still, she couldn't help but bite down on her long fingernails with what was transmitted. The Prince being down was not unprecedented, much like Ainsel argued; during the Exodus, as they sailed across the Acheron River with no boat left behind for the Prince, the False Specters were convinced half the time that the Prince, left behind at Giudecca, was overwhelmed by Hades, Hypnos and the Judges, only for him to later show up at Pandora's Castle with Minos and Aiacos defeated by his hands.

But it wasn't appeasing news either.

Her lips tensed in realization; how DID Lucifer get over the Acheron River anyway? The stream coursing between the Gate and the First Prison was too wide for margin-to-margin leaps, unlike the Styx. He never really explained that to them.

Thinking over the trials like this one that they had survived, though, from the indentured servitude in the Underworld, to the suffering in the surface world that made them accept Hades' lies to begin with, to the insane leap of faith they all made with the Exodus, made Erika forget her fears and fill her heart with hateful determination.

As such, her clawed fingers cringed on the battlements until the rock cracked. "We will not fall! Hades already robbed our lives once, enslaving us to fix his rotten Prisons under false promises of heaven. But the Prince has shown he can deliver on those promises!" the blonde witch asserted. "No matter what, by Persephone, the False Specters will prevail over this lying world! So slit those Gold Saint necks already, Elites! We can win the night yet!"

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Sanctuary,

House of Aries

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Back at the First Temple, Adriana looked out the exit of Aries to the ascending stairs and saw several flashes occurring at the Cancer and Sagittarius Houses, but noticing that the ones at Libra had stopped. In addition, the flames of the Fire Clock seemed stubbornly stuck on Libra. She had discussed with Lance previously that based on the speed of their movement, the flames were likely tracking the enemy progress, but if the enemy was clearly already at the 10th Temple, why did the iconic tower watch have six flames yet to die out?

In any case, it seemed that the blazing flash of light that ran past them had arrived at Libra and helped put a stop to whatever was going on there. Seeing the surroundings of the Aries building more or less secure, she returned to the doctor, who seemed to be still tending to Cerah the best he could, monitoring her and applying healing cosmos here and there, mostly around the bad injury on her side.

"How is she?"

He looked up at her tensely. "Not good; she's beaten up all over, but while I can take care of that, the wound she has beneath this gunk you put on her is very severe. I'm frankly speechless that she's still alive." He confessed. "I haven't seen a wound like this outside of battling… She looks like she was struck with something blunt, hard and with curved contact surface, like a baseball bat or a club."

The noblewoman blinked. "You can discern all of that?"

Iaso shook his head self-consciously. "I've stared at a lot of Coliseum wounds over the years… sometimes on people I've actually managed to save. Saints and Hoplites always think cosmos can protect them from anything until they run across someone with just a bit more than they have…" He then saw Cerah wincing and gasping again. "Damn it, she's going into shock again!"

Immediately, Adriana got on her knees and helped the doctor gently lay Cerah's head on her lap while he did his best to stabilize her. Not only wasn't she accustomed to being in such a situation, but the silver-ringed young woman couldn't help but keep staring at the girl's pendant cord as this happened, knowing better than the doctor the secret behind how she ended up like this, as well as the important significance of a Cyrulian girl hiding in Sanctuary underneath everyone's noses. Even more critically, she knew more than a few powerful people who would immediately call for a witch hunt to purge Rodario if this got out…

Cerah's life was therefore in severe danger, and not just because of her wounds.

The doctor sweated, seeing that the girl wasn't getting any better from just what they could do any longer, and he took out his canteen. "Asclepius forgive me, I don't have a choice!" He then gently closed Cerah's nose, making her mouth open up, and he let the canteen's contents slowly pour out into her mouth.

The two monitored her as the young teenager gulped, but Adriana noticed that the secret risky potion just looked… like ordinary mineral water. "You're giving her… spring water?"

Making sure Cerah swallowed the liquid from Twin Peaks Mountain, the medic corked the canteen and gently secured the girl. "Just watch what it does…"

Before long, to Adriana's puzzlement, the pale blond girl began gently convulsing on her lap. "Goddess, what… what is happening to her?!"

The brown-haired medic irked; everyone had heard about the Waters of Life, but it was considered a fairytale at best and a scam at worst, so if he actually said this was it, the fancy lady with the sword would think the doctor was a quack, which he didn't have time or occasion to argue against at this point, much less tell a story about a Pegasus Saint she's never heard of being healed by it that night already.

However, to her awe, the Waters of Life, which only worked in specific circumstances when the will of the God Seiryu responded to the fighting spirit of the drinker, began reacting to Cerah's inner cosmos, causing the girl to lightly brim with the white and yellow shine of her Cosmos. After about a minute of anxiety-inducing shaking from the patient, the two of them were finally set at ease when Cerah's body eventually stopped shaking, her breathing relaxed and her sweating died down.

"Ah, thank you, Athena… she didn't explode or anything…" However, the Waters confirmed something to him. It could be just latent forces, which wasn't rare in a place like Sanctuary, but it was still something to add to Iaso's list of suspicions about her to share with Aguilon. "She either has cosmos or she took martial arts lessons…And I don't know any dojos in Rodario."

"Only those of great fighting spirit would cause the Waters of Life to react in a healing fashion, as all they really do is stimulate your chi. The drinkers heal themselves in a certain fashion." The Ophiuchus Cloth reminded him. "It's not exactly a common find in a young girl who lost a year of her life to a coma. Perhaps your conspiracy mindset is not incorrect in this case, Iaso."

While she took notice of the Saint having a private conversation with his Cloth in the cosmos, as energy brimmed off the armor in a rather indiscrete way, the strawberry-blonde aristocrat was all the more stunned at Cerah herself. Not only did she wonder what kind of miracle water was this, but how the doctor got his hands on it and the fortunate timing of having it on hand to save the girl's life. She was sure he wouldn't administer it if he didn't have reason to think it would work, but the whole situation was still bizarre.

In any case, she reached down and touched the silk fabric wrapped around Cerah's side, causing it to loosen and reveal a slowly closing wound on the inside. "Incredible…"

The doctor observed it with equal fascination. "The blood vessels and nerves are being repaired and reconnected, while the cells are experiencing rapidly accelerated and stabilized regeneration. Hell, you couldn't get this speed with the Golden Touch without accidentally causing cells to corrupt into cancerous ones."

Getting up, Adriana breathed in relief. She now simply had to discretely make her way out, as she still had no interest in getting caught in the fighting. However, the appearance of this Cyrulian did renew her interest in what was going on. She should find a way to stay in contact with her after the battle was over, as something opportune was surely going on.

"Ah, then all is well that ends well." And she stepped away to go call her steed. "Well, doctor, it was an honor to assist a Silver Saint, but if you excuse me, I absolutely must go. It just isn't safe for me to stay here. If you wish, I can carry Cerah to-"

The Silver Saint got on his feet in a hurry. "Not so fast! Do you think I've forgotten already how this all happened?! You're not going anywhere, miss Ghisi! Especially with young miss Heloise! Not until you explain what you were doing around here tonight and how did she just land on your lap at four in the morning in the middle of the woods!"

The aristocrat felt the tension skyrocket all over again and lightly breathed out in disappointment. Saint Iaso really was the suspicious type, wasn't he? There was no denying it; she had to give something up if she wanted his suspicions appeased. "Well, Saint Iaso, very well… I-"

"Saint Iaso, what a delight to see you!"

The doctor's brown eyes widened in recognition!

A loud, battering shock of forceful winds suddenly came about, startling the both of them! The medic instinctively reached over and pulled Adriana down protectively over Cerah, putting his armored body between them and whatever was arriving there.

The winds blew stronger, making the doctor cape over his armored plates flutter wildly, and he looked up to see, in horror, the familiar sight of those horrible green wings of black bands gently flapping up and down, descending a figure clad in damaged, orange-painted Damascus metal over them, spreading golden dust everywhere!

The Silver Saint stood protectively over the two women "It… it can't be!"

Papillion Ainsel chuckled. "I'm equally stunned; here I thought I'd have to search all over Sanctuary after the battle to get you, but you come to me! Jamir truly was a bonding experience, was it not?"

Falling on her side with the strength of the wind currents, Adriana looked up to see the heavily damaged Specter confronting the snake handler Saint, recognizing him from her studies as the Papillon. Her throat tightened with the terrible danger she now felt under. Silently, she crawled away, dragging Cerah with her to behind the rubble of the Hall of Jason.

Tossing his doctor coat away, Ophiuchus Iaso displayed his purple armor, letting his fingers get encased in the sharp fangs of the toxic snake as cosmos brimmed around him. "D-damn it… Did you come for round two?!"

The blue-haired held his back-hand against chin dismissively. "Payback? For what you did to me at Jamir? If anyone is going to suffer for what happened there, it will be the Aries Saint, in due time. Speaking of which, where is he? He's been noticeably absent… and where is that delicious looking Lemurian boy that my moths want to eat so badly?"

The implication of this regarding the small lilac-haired boy made the medic sick to his stomach. "You're going to have to ask the other Gold Saints!"

The bug-armored man lowered chin tensely, as if the memory of confronting them displeased him. "Now, now…don't be stupid, Saint Iaso. I'm willing to let you live for old times' sake, after all,-" he lied. ",-so tell me where they are."

The Ophiuchus felt frankly terrified on the inside, posing gallantly to protect the other two but having fresh memories from just half a day earlier of facing this precise Specter at the famous blacksmith tower. While the bastard looked scorched and broken like someone just shoved him through a furnace, Papillon looked able to fight just as ferociously as in their last encounter, when he absolutely handed Iaso his butt and they had to resort to Kiki pulling a fake-out with the Aries Cloth to survive.

What was he going to do? Even back when he had the surprise element and attacked this bastard from behind, his Toxic Thunder Claw was sensed a parsec away by the Specter and promptly dodged. He was a Mach Fiver against a Lightspeeder, which meant the Specter was capable of reaction and movement speeds 200,000 times greater than his own! The only reason he was still alive was because Kiki tricked the guy into thinking the Aries Saint was back.

Now he was on his own, standing between this carnivorous killer and two innocent women. Fucking fantastic!

His jaw clenched nervously; he had to do something, even if he was hopelessly outmatched! That's what being a Saint of Athena meant! The Specter's armor had several cracks and holes in it from (unbeknownst to him) fighting Saga, Lance and Shinta, so maybe landing a strike through them would actually have an effect! And if he wasn't capable of getting an opportunity to land a blow that would be slow as snails to the Specter, then Iaso simply had to create it!

"I'm going to cast an illusion to create an opening to strike this Specter! The moment he struggles around with it, I'll get the other two and run the hell out of here! It was a horrible mistake to come to the Aries Temple!" And then he tossed his clawed hand towards Papillon, feinting the Toxic Thunder Claw. "BURN, MY COSMOS! LAMIA COBRA GLARE!"

But as soon as his arm was outstretched, the doctor froze! His cosmos refused to burn and his eyes widened as he felt himself losing his grip on what was going on around himself. The Aries Temple seemed to spin left and right and the rubble in it left behind by Lance's battle with the Skeletons seemed to morph, taking new, familiar shapes.

Papillon Ainsel stood there in triumph, laughing. "Oh, no, what terrifying Saint technique is this?" he mocked.

The doctor trembled in fear.

He could hear it.

That horrible, horrible underground noise.

It was like the bellowing of a buried God or of Poseidon's Trident striking the seabed. It made the objects off his bedroom walls fall off, crashing snow globes and brush cups on the ground. His parents came screaming into it, telling him to get under the bed!

And then the ground began ripping in twain beneath their feet!

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The scarred giant in the Silver Cloth stepped over the rubble, grabbed another large, broken piece of apartment cement and lifted it over, exposing more rubble. His large hands excavated with a balance of gentleness and hurry, sensing life below the dirt rapidly vanishing like a dying star. He only had a few seconds, but if he worked to fast, he could cause another collapse, making things worse.

The boy sat nearby, covered in the blanket the Silver Saint gave him, his face filled with dust. He could do nothing but watch the giant try to save them.

Eventually, light broke through with his help down on a dust-covered hand poking out of the ground. Aguilon widened his eyes, reached down and grabbed it, making it stir in sudden hope! Iaso's heart skipped a beat!

But then the hand went limp…

Powerless, just like he was…

Before he unlocked his cosmos…

Before he knew of Athena's vision…

Before he ever experienced the wonders of the universe coursing through his body, making him achieve the impossible…

His face sunk into his dirty hands, wailing out loudly.

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The Silver Saint stood there still; his mind returned against its will to that childhood memory.

"My Own Self!" Ainsel declared, burning yellow cosmos in his hand and projecting bubbles of power around both Iaso and Adriana's heads. "With this technique, I can sever your ability to grasp your Cosmos by returning your mind to your younger, more innocent days, like a dream, back before you ever unlocked it."

The Silver Saint struggled, trying to burn his cosmos, but he found himself lacking the knowledge of how. He felt something was deeply wrong and that he shouldn't still be in those earthquake ruins, but his mind lacked the awareness to grasp its own dream-like status.

Iaso shook. "D… Damn you." And with his locked 7th sense out of reach, he tried instead to focus his sixth.

Ainsel smirked, feeling his attempts to send a mental SOS and twitching his antennae. "Go ahead. Call for help. Scream your mental messages out. No one further than the distance to the doors will hear you. I'm in control of what is said and heard in this battlefield…"

As such, he was completely powerless when Ainsel then bashed him straight across with a hand swipe, clubbing him down so hard that the floor cracked. The doctor gasped, helpless, and felt his mind returning to the darkness of sleep.

The Papillon smiled in satisfaction, seeing all the three present interlopers unconscious. "I'm sorry if you expected a more dramatic reencounter, Saint Ophiuchus, but I have no time or energy to waste on small fry. It's better if I just handle you all quickly and move right back to Gemini with the girl."

And he stepped over the Silver Saint. It took no time at all for him to find Cerah laying there on the ground next to the strange young woman in blue coat and dark brown suede boots.

"I don't recognize you though…" Noticing her slightly more expensive looking turncoat, though, the Specter's foot tapped Adriana's hand, exposing the shine in her finger as an aristocratic ring. This made him realize immediately who she was, as he familiarized himself with Sanctuary's society when undercover among Priam's Black Saints on Lucifer's behalf. "Mm, another unexpected guest. I better get rid of you!"

With a single flap of his wings, golden dust spread around which expanded into the last surviving few moths of golden light he managed to carry with himself to safety. The insects descended on Adriana and immediately began both weaving the mighty Silky Threading, which would wrap her in a cocoon, and also bite on her flesh, injecting powerful tranquilizing substances in her blood stream.

With that taken care of, he then turned to his objective, the Cyrulian girl Cerah. Ainsel scoffed, unsure what to think of her; clearly, she was valuable to the Prince, but as far as the Elites were concerned (and by this he meant himself and Erika), the blonde Corvus Knight was a gigantic liability. Not only did she make the Prince take risky decisions like having Ainsel fetch her up, but it turned the False Specters into a target of that blood knight, Aquila Daese. The blue-armored warrioress was far from a threat to the Prince, but she carried the same determined spirit and powerful Light Element that was so dangerous to anyone with a Surplice, False or not. The last thing they wanted was an experienced Light-user go all Rambo on Crow's Nest or Sanctuary.

He grabbed Cerah by the hair, lifting her up. "A little bug tells me Lemon probably sent Cyclops after you, little girl. It would explain a lot of strange things that happened tonight. You must have braved great dangers to survive that envious man's conspiracies to undermine the Prince… Your mad dog of a sister would be proud of you!"

His antennae flickered, sensing the Prince to still be out of reach. While this concerned Ainsel, it also meant the Pride Star was not paying attention to the same sensorial network that the Papillon was; in other words, Lord Lucifer was likely unconscious, distracted or knocked out of the same communication web, all possibilities that gave him the opening he needed to do something for the good of all the False Specters.

"However, I'm afraid this is where your road ends. How tragic! Poor Saint Iaso, upon discovering you were a Cyrulian, saw nothing but an enemy of Sanctuary out for revenge and murdered you before I could stop him!" the Specter dramatized. His other hand then hardened into a chop. "It will break the Prince's heart, but believe me when I say, this is for the good of all of us."

The chop hand then formed sharp nails of rainbow cosmos and lunged down, aimed at her neck! The air became thick with murderous intent, flesh was pierced by a sharp point shining under the moonlight and blood splashed out, wetting the ground!

…!

Cerah was dropped right on the blood puddle, motionless.

Ainsel gasped and shook in disbelief, seeing a sharp tip pierce his stomach plate from the inside, and then he finally felt the cold sharpness lodged through his left rib, wetting his shirt with red.

He grabbed it, brought back to the memory of having dodged Saint Iaso's sneak attack at Jamir so easily. How did he not sense Toxic Thunder Claw this time?! "G-ah…! Ophiuchus?! H-How-"

"G-Guess again!" the female voice hissed.

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Chapter 63

Second Arc

Episode 25

Arachnophobia

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Her other hand was practically clawed on the damage hole of his armor's shoulder pad for gripping and pushed the weapon's hilt and pressing it harder through his body, trying to finish him off. Ainsel gasped and quivered, feeling what was obviously the top of a single-edged sword, and not a Toxic Thunder Claw, pushing out of his flesh. The noblewoman?!

His cosmos burned. "H-how… HOW DARE YOU?!" and he swung his body around as harshly as he could, swiping Adriana straight across the head, shooting her fragile body through the Hall until her back painfully hit a pillar, making her scream before dropping silent.

The False Specter dropped to his knee, shocked and in pain. Reaching around, he took the sword by the handle and crudely tried to take it out from around his body, eventually pushing through the pain and pulling it out, tossing it with cling sounds to the marble floor. While this was usually not a good idea to take a stab wound blade out, the Specter had a few tricks up his sleeve and applied Silky Threading on his wound, closing the blood loss.

He then studied the weapon, wondering if there was perhaps anything special about it that let it slice through two layers of Damascus plus his own flesh. It was elegantly crafted, with a design that combined the flowery hand guard of a rapier with the effective cutting blade of a medium-length straight-edge, giving it as much slashing power as it had stabbing thrust, similar to a cavalry backsword. The moonlight glow of strange strings not dissimilar from his Silky Threading were visible around its edge length, but it seemed otherwise unremarkable. Could it be just pure cosmos that let it go through his body?

His body sweated, adding this injury to the last slot in the list of injuries he suffered that night. He saw the young woman still covered in his bugs and couldn't understand what went wrong.

"D-damn it! How did she… I'm sure I caught her in the radius of My Own Self, but even if I hadn't, my babies would…" At least the bitch was dead. In fact, she was lucky her head didn't explode into gibs from the lightspeed force of his swing. He then saw her coughing and trembling. "W-what?! You're alive?!"

If she was, she seemed to be having trouble nonetheless, trembling uncontrollably from the heavy punishment he just inflicted on her, but still her hands slowly pushed her up from the floor and her face rose up. Blood was dripping from her forehead and her breath was harsh.

The pain from the strike she stood still shook across her body. "H-Hera save me…T-that was too close …"

Ainsel then watched in horror as the woman dusted herself and the moths that bit down on her neck and hands fell to the floor, dead and rotting into blackened husks. "I-Impossible!"

Adriana took one of them still clinging to her neck and studied it in her palm. It was quivering like a stepped bug, feeling its body rotted from the inside out and its organs digested by the very blood it tried to drink as its wing bands darkened like infected veins. The poor thing never stood a chance against the toxins already inside her blood. Her pale fingers then closed on it, smooshing the insect into vanishing specks of light. She tossed them into the wind and her almond eyes rose at the Specter, revealing a bloodthirsty red tint in them.

Focusing his thoughts analytically in the face of the intimidating display, he casted away this irrational panic and confronted facts as they were. "H-How sneaky! Were you some sort of disciple of Pisces all along?!..."

She cleared a bloodied hair strand off her face. "Not exactly. Do I look like a Saint to you?"

He then hovered his foot over the sword, intent on crushing it, and laughed at his own rushed conclusion. "Perhaps you're right. You certainly have no mask… and you certainly don't lack the shame in using weapons! How about we put them aside?"

Before he could snap it in two, her hand pointed at the blade and then her wrist flicked, causing the object to suddenly slide out from underneath his foot and return to her hand.

He stumbled and reassessed the situation. "Telekinesis?! No, I, Papillon Ainsel of all people, would have felt it! Strings, maybe?" he calculated, before his lips quivered up, intrigued. "That was a neat trick. Do you mind if I ask how did you not lose your cosmos to My Own Self? Your mind should have been trapped in your powerless childhood fantasies…"

A flash of fury crossed through her red-tinted almond eyes. "S-so that's what those mirages were… A memory technique? I'm glad I understand it now." And her next words came closer to being a disgusted hiss than spoken. "I t-thought I had truly lost my mind…"

Ainsel widened his eyes. "Then it worked after all?! But… then…"

The silver-ringed woman simply paced towards him. Not only had it worked, but her mind was still half drowned in the Specter's technique. It still saw the Hall of Jason as crawling with gigantic spiders scaling down the pillars with their big, dark legs, as if the building formed the corners of the box she was once shoved inside of by her parents to cure her phobia. Their movement was as silent as it was invasive, outflanking her and dropping to the floor with soft lands, fidgeting their chelicerae in anticipation and letting the background shadows that spawned them make each and every one of them seem even more enormous than they already were.

It phased in and out of her perceived reality, making her heart beat faster. Soon, they would crawl all over her… and she wouldn't be let out until her parents were happy with her attitude.

But those weren't real… unlike the very solid and dangerous moth-armored man standing in front of her. Unfortunately for him, the moment she unlocked her cosmos was deeply intertwined with the ones he dug up in her mind, causing My Own Self to merely reinforce her connection to it.

Ainsel flapped his wings powerfully, blowing away the currents raised by his adversary's aura and lifting him up into the air. "So you're the type that woke it through trauma? Did your rich parents perhaps beat your weakness out of you? Fine… Then I shall break you physically instead!" He then hummed and charged his cosmos, before laying his chop hand close to waist. "FAIRY…"

The woman tensed her shoulders and her booted feet burned energy, casting her secret move.

Ainsel then rose his hand, slicing the air to create rainbow-colored curtains of power. "- THRONGING!"

The blow shot like slicing guillotines, raining down on the young woman like two giant blades of destruction, but her blood-red cosmos flared out and the ground beneath her feet seemed to compress, "Burst Step!" With shocking acceleration and agility, her body leaped into the air at an impossible speed and height even for a Silver-Rank, leaving behind after-images to be struck by the Specter's technique, blowing the ground apart harmlessly!

Time slowed down as Ainsel watched his foe now above him raising her sword edge, unsure if he saw things right! Her body leaned downward so that her feet touched the ceiling, from which she bounced back right at him like a speeding bullet with shining edge in hand. Her wrist twisted, aiming the blade, and a blinding silver light flashed outwards, blinding the gasping Specter, who rose his arms to cover his eyes!

And she descended down on him with thumb pressing the secret trigger on the handle, causing the edge to become drenched in blood red cosmos flare. "MOONLIGHT FLASH!"

With no time to think, he raised his armored, charged arms in block. In a fraction of a second, the attack's full force stomped unto the crossing of his arms, making the Specter shake and irk, taken by surprise by the power behind the move. The great weight behind it eventually overwhelmed him and his armored arms were pushed off, causing him to get slammed right back down and crash unto the ground.

Landing silently on spread feet and hand, Adriana watched him bounce around and wasted no time, aiming blade in a hanging low to execute the finisher.

Suddenly, the pommel of her backsword opened up and sprang a small strange, smoking cylinder capsule that tinkled on the floor like a spent cartridge into her hand. She saw it greyed out and clicked her tongue nervously. Not only was it an old charge, but she must have used more power than she thought in this last attack. Keeping an eye out for the Specter, she took out a second one from her pocket and shoved it inside the handle with her thumb through the same opening before locking it shut with a click like a cocked shotgun, causing hidden filaments of stardust along the edge to briefly alite.

Roaring in anger, the Papillon Specter pushed the large rock plate on top of him off. Marvelous; her chance to deal a finisher while he was down was gone.

Ainsel looked down his forearm guards, which were significantly damaged from the blow he just tried to block. The pain from the stab he took was also still there, even if his Silky Threading was doing its job containing the damage. This didn't make any sense! He was supposed to be fighting a scrub!

"That attack… shouldn't have had so much power! She's tricking me somehow!" Papillon got up with a wince. "M-my, my… wherever was this deadly force I'm facing all night? If only these Gold Saints knew there was another Gold Rank around who could help them in their battles up the stairs."

The woman turned to him, unphased by his comment, combing a hair strand off her eyes as if to show off the nasty wound he inflicted on her. "Help in their battles? I'm just a powerless woman without armor. The Gold Saints do not need me, Specter. My presence would simply force them to protect me."

He showed off the cut grazes on his arm protections from Moonlight Flash. "Powerless?…Am I to think this was done without a Gold Saint's power?"

She suddenly changed subject. "Before I fell under your technique's effect, I heard you tell Saint Iaso that it was no use for him to call for help. Is that true?"

The Elite hesitated, but nodded, having no reason to lie. "Yes… Mm, mm, does that make you afraid? None of these Gold Saints will realize in how much danger you are."

However, her reaction was actually to sigh in relief. "No… those are fantastic news."

His brow twitched. "What?!"

She tucked sword aside, relaxing her muscles as blood-red cosmos was gathered around her body, making her blue overcoat flutter and the red tint return to her irises. "I have a lot of enemies in Sanctuary, Papillon… Enemies who will outlive your pathetic invasion and don't like having powerful, growing rivals around. They would jump at the chance to nip them at the bud, regardless of how many people they save or Specters they kill... but your jamming fields are up, so no one will know what I'm capable of in Sanctuary, no matter how brutally I butcher you."

The Specter became sick of her arrogant posturing and charged his cosmos, immersing the Hall of Jason in even deeper darkness. "Butcher me?... You?!"

Her head shook playfully. "Well, everyone will think Saint Iaso did it. He will have… killed you while under the maddening effects of your technique. It's similar to the story you were going to tell your leader about poor Cerah Heloise, correct? The Pope will likely medal him and the accolades of ripping apart a Papillon Specter will surely attract funding to his hospital in this martial culture of ours."

The Papillon tensed his eyes, feeling a behind-the-scenes deviousness off of this woman that reminded him of Nasu Erika, his main rival for the Prince's approval.

As such, he questioned her motivations. "You could have quietly gotten away… I had no idea my moths weren't affecting you. All you had to do was play dead while I killed that girl!""

Adriana continued "Perhaps, but that's the rub, isn't it? You were going to kill that girl and likely Saint Iaso as well, but you've also contributed to a lot of suffering tonight, Specter. That field of death just down the stairs, for example."

The Papillon chuckled. "You mean the soldiers that died defending this House from the Prince's invasion? I assure you, miss, I just stood there and watched."

Her almond eyes sterned and she cut the bullshit short. "Even if that made a difference, we both know that's not true, don't we? You and your relay insects are obviously the source of these jamming barriers. I even had to help Saint Cancer get past all these scouts carrying your spy bugs." She revealed, making the Specter's eyes suddenly widen in realization. "Killing you will make these barriers go down, and then the Gold Saints will be able to unite their efforts properly in annihilating you vandals, saving the day."

Ainsel sunk face into palm in disbelief as his cosmos swelled. "Mm, mm, mm….So it was you! You're the one who helped that blasted Cancer through…"

Adriana stepped back cautiously, feeling her adversary's power level spike dangerously. The green of his wings began projecting intimidating kaleidoscopes of the monstrous moth his Surplice represented, threatening to utterly devour any Sanctuary dweller that dared to think they could escape its wrath to drink their bodily fluids from the inside out! The Surplice itself seemed to shine brighter and began sprouting threatening spikes out of the overlapping plates of the forearms while the helmet lowered purple visors over Ainsel's eyes that made him look even more like an insect human.

As his cosmos reached his peak, his threats continued. "Your friend scorched me pretty badly…You must really have no clue what kind of danger you've gotten yourself into, little miss. We are the False Specters of Daemon Lucifer attacking Sanctuary, the first force to successfully rebel against their God in centuries! And I am one of its great Elites!"

She irked and guarded herself with her weapon, feeling powerful currents get kicked up by the Specter's aura. His shadow seemed to grow and grow, threatening to swallow her up, and his fingers tensed in anticipation to ripping her to shreds and feed the other two to his babies for good!

His spiteful hissing went on. "Humiliations inflicted on us will be repaid with death! And we will not be stopped short of the triumph we deserve in Sanctuary, especially by some prepped-up little princess doll with a pretend sword like yourself!"

Feeling the threat before her rise, Adriana adopted a defensive sword stance, holding it forward in warning at approach. Her temples dripped blood from her wound and nervous sweat, unsure if she would come out alive. The new capsule inside her backsword handle was growing hotter. She only had one more to waste that night….

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

House of Scorpio

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

The Hall of Orion was still pitch dark.

However, the secret battle taking place inside of it raged on.

Tackling through pillars with his big, round, armored body, Golem gave the small Gold Saint pursuit through the Hall, trying to track him through the cosmos. "SCORPIO! Where ARE you?!"

Pressing back against a pillar nearby, Milo panted as quietly as possible, letting the Specter rampage through possible hiding spots. The youth had taken a number of heavy blows to his small frame which failed to damage his magnificent armor but still carried more than enough weight to give the soft body inside a terrible treatment.

Even though he found the piece of paper explaining what happened, his disadvantage still felt surreal. "Scarlet Needle isn't working on this guy at all! He brushes off Antares as if the Scorpion's poison makes him stronger, instead of dead! What am I gonna do?!"

The large man, tired of searching fruitlessly, swung his huge arm around, striking the air with such ferocity that it impacted several pillars in Milo's general direction, shattering them to pieces and narrowly missing the Greek boy, who leaped out of the way. "I'll FIND YOU!" he then leaped into the air, curled over himself and dropped to the ground like a giant spinning blade. "Sisyphean CRASHER!"

Summoning the force of the Third Prison's boulders of greed, the Specter's body ignited into green flames and wrecked its way across the Temple! The Scorpio Saint gasped at sensing the giant human buzzsaw rushing across the Hall of Orion, trampling over rubble like a runaway train, and leaped out of the way, letting it crash unto a far-off wall with so much force it made the entire temple shake.

As soon as his small feet touched the ground, he immediately heard the Golem stomp his way towards him like a running train. "And his senses are so sharp, too! He locked the two of us inside this dark on purpose! If I don't do something, he'll turn me into roadkill!" Burning his bright golden cosmos to announce himself visually, the Gold Saint hummed and leaped at the Specter at the speed of light, raising his knee towards his face.

It struck the Specter's jaw painfully, briefly stunning him, and Milo rolled over him like a dancer to deliver a follow up side kick from behind that struck his rib plate, but the heavily reinforced armor brushed off these light strikes like a fly just swatted it. Milo let out a battle cry and bombarded the Specter with a lightspeed combo that resembled a shower of rays more than a series of punches and kicks, but the Specter's frontal armor seemed only lightly battered by this onslaught, pushing back his body only a little before the small boy ran out of steam, landing off the combo with a pant before his enemy.

Darkness returned as his aura grew weaker, illuminating only the few tiny cracks his assault caused.

Golem chuckled. "You really think those tiny muscles of yours can hurt me? I guess you really can't do much without your scary Antares! Here… let me show you a real punch. It will be a whole new technique! Let's call it…-" He then winded his arm and roared as he swung it. "…-SCORPIO SMASHER!"

Milo's reaction was instantaneous. "R-RESTRICTION!" and his mind casted out the powerful intimidating glare of the Scorpio in the form of a series of paralyzing waves.

Treble gasped and irked, feeling his entire body suddenly arrested by faintly visible forces around his upper frame. "Gah! What the heck is this crap?!" He tried to finish his swing but he could only barely move his legs, let along his punch. Milo then slid through beneath his large legs and swing his feet across the floor in a powerful rolling kick, striking the giant with enough force to trip him. "AGH!"

"I'm still a Gold Saint, jerk!" he then leaped high into the air to avoid the enormous collapse of the huge, grunting body and formed a large ball of golden cosmos in his hand like the sun, illuminating the entire Hall. "A-And I still have my COSMOS!"

Treble barely had time to widened his eyes before the huge sun-like ball was fired down on him in a large stream of energy that painfully impacted his stomach and blasted him through the ground. Before gravity had time to do its work, Milo charged new spheres of cosmos and capitalized on this opening, rapid-firing the downed Specter over and over from the air, filling the air with smoke.

Landing back away from the blast zone, Milo cautiously stepped back, analyzing his handywork. He knew the Specter was pummeled but far from beaten, so he tried to think of what to do. From the sound of that paper, Milo should treat this fight as if the Golem took his poison like a simple wine drink, so it was no use trying to sap his strength, let alone killing him, through Scarlet Needle's traditional means.

But Milo was anything but traditional… He aimed his nail at the subsiding smoke in the dark, funneling cosmos into-

A ground rumble under his feet was felt and a hand ripped its way out of the ground, grabbing his leg! Milo screamed, startled, and was taken into the air as Treble erupted out of the floor before being viciously slammed into the ground like a piece of towel. Not letting go of his prey, the Golem continued, running through the Hall and time crashing Milo through several pillars by the leg, stunning the boy further, before finally tossing him his in the air and swinging his fist like a baseball bat to bash the Scorpio right in the center of his mass, hitting him across Orion's Hall into a cratering pillar base.

Green and dark cosmos emanated from the Specter, lifting rocks around him into the air. "ROLLING BOMBER STONE!" Golem shouted, hurling his arms.

Milo coughed and looked up. He widened his eyes and screamed as several broken down pillar pieces, reinforced by his enemy's Earth cosmos, then tumbled down on him at the speed of light like makeshift comets, loudly burying the young boy under crashing debris.

Laughing and approaching the pile of rocks he created, Golem shook his head reprehensively. His Surplice was smudged by the blast barrage unleashed on him, but not much more. "You don't get it, do ya, kid? I wasn't picked just because I can neutralize your Antares… The Prince knows you Scorpio Saints! And exactly what your weaknesses are!"

Crawling away from the crumbled base, the Scorpio held his wounded side and tried to pick himself back up as the world around him seemed to spin out of control. Suddenly, a sharp pain was felt in his thigh and he went down on a knee. He grabbed his thigh and felt the bone inside broken…

Hearing no response from the kid in the dark, the Golem continued. "Whether it is Kardia, Escarlate or Paris, you are all roughly the same; a fantastic agility so you can do a lot of zipping around, but no punching power! I'm not just immune to your poison thanks to my paper command; I'm also on way too heavy a class for you! In fact- " and the Golem stood still and laid his arms apart, exposing his segmented chest armor. "- go ahead! Throw your best shot! I'll stand right here!"

Stumbling his was back to his feet as blood began to drip from injuries, Milo forced himself to focus and recharge his golden aura. His arms laid aside in a dance of the Scorpio stars, cosmos charged into his left hand, forming a new large cosmos blast, and Milo fired it with a battle shout, continuously streaming the beam right into the Golem.

Treble laughed and focused his cosmos of Darkness, fortifying his body mass with its densening properties. The beam struck him strongly, but merely bashed him back a little before his heels braked his body and the waves of energy simply washed over his shoulders and armpits, deflected. "See?! I don't even feel warm!"

Despite the provocation, Milo kept streaming the beam, even heightening his aura alongside his martial hum.

It began to irritate the Specter, who started stepping against the beam. While the temple was dark, the beam's flaring light was more than enough to show the Gold Saint he was wasting energy "Ugh… you stubborn brat?! Are you blind?!"

The Scorpio simply leaned harder into his arm, as if he was trying to keep the Golem away by the force of the beam alone, but he simply lacked the specialized training to give his basic Cosmos blast any more actual firepower.

The Golem tightened arms and fists, heightening his dark aura. "Perhaps your mother never taught you not to pick a fight you can't win?! This is what's wrong with you Gold Saints… you think you're invincible! But I'll show you the limits of your strength and make you regret your greed for glory! By the end of tonight, everyone in this mountain, Saint or not, will have their blood wash these stair steps of your profligate stai-"

Suddenly, Milo shut off his blast stream, causing a tighter tail end of it to blast the Specter with sharper force, interrupting him and smoke-screening him before lunging right at his foe with his good leg.

The Specter stumbled back, surprised. "AGH, you little-"

The golden blur reached him and ignited its nail with a bright red glare. "SCARLET NEEDLE:…-!"

The Specter confidently reacted, raising his hand to crush him with a new close-range blast of earth cosmos. "FOOL! ROCK CANDLE BLIGHT!"

But Milo's hand rose sharply at his raising arm. "- GRAFFIAS!"

Green and red light flared together from the two foes as one smashed down a blast of green cosmos and the other angled upwards a slice of crimson red, clashing the two energies like impacting galaxies releasing tremors in the very cosmos!

…!

The Specter screamed, feeling a sharp pain across his unarmored arm pit as Milo's edged nail carved right through it like a scalding hot turkey knife, slicing his entire arm off its socket! Blood splashed out everywhere and Milo landed behind him from his speeding dash as the arm tumbled down on the floor, firing off Rock Candle Blight at a wall harmlessly.

Treble roared in pain and held his mutilated shoulder as the green blast went off in the background, destroying some random wall segment. "AGHH… N-NO…! YOU BLASTED… S-SNIVELLING… ARGH!"

The youth was unmoved. The idea of Ms. Shafurwatt being so viciously threatened by this guy was burned in his mind. "You dare talk about my loved ones? N-Now you've done it!" Milo hissed, his aura burning with a blood red glow, making his young eyes shine like two crimson stars in the dark of the Temple. "Golem Treble… this Scorpio Saint will have no mercy on you. Even if Antares itself is powerless, every other star of my constellation will be used to their absolute heating extent to destroy you."

The sweating giant faced him with newfound fury, but Milo faced this threatening glare in the dark head on. Golem Treble just fell victim to the seldom-seen Graffias star, which used the sharpness of the Scorpio's hot pincers to slice through the flesh of its victims at a significant cost of cosmos, a move reserved only to those that earned the 8th Gold Saint's fury. There was no poison in it to be neutralized, only the sheer wrath of the arachnid whose nest had been callously stepped on.

He burned basic cosmos to cauterize his limbless socket and cursed himself for forgetting about the Golem surplice's design weakness, but he also didn't expect this kid to have other radically different techniques mastered at such a young age. At first, he was only going to kill this kid to serve the Prince and get a bit of delight out of smooshing a popular Gold Saint figure, but now it was personal!

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Meanwhile,

Death Queen Island

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

In a dark, desolate valley more safely tucked away from the running veins of lava, volcanic showers and the ever-shifting terrain, a detachment of five Skeleton Soldiers sent by Troll Grendel now stood before one of the two objectives they were sent to the damned island to find; a two-tiered marble shrine with a short stone staircase rising off an otherwise flat rocky ground with the soft light of a permanently lit candle coming from its small innards.

They pointed their spears at it. "That must be it… the Phoenix Cloth box!"

A tall lieutenant cautiously approached the building. He felt an incredible sense of dread emanating off the simple-looking shrine. "I can't believe we found it before Lord Grendel's group! But… what is this feeling?!"

The devastation of Death Queen Island, which harassed them so with labyrinthic dirt paths, fire raining from the skies, tremors and the suffocating heat all seemed diminished around this humble construction, as if the volcanic rage of that hellish place dared not offend the sanctity of the site. It created through the atmospheric contrast an eerie feeling in all of them, like a predator or some kind of devious being, perhaps even the Phoenix itself, watched their every move, and their eyes were attracted to the powerful object sitting atop it as whispers entered their ears, enticing them to claim the most powerful of all Bronze Cloths to themselves…

All in all, it looked so simply to just snatch the damn thing after all they went through. On their way into the shrine site they even lost some members, who either fell on the lava or got lost in the paths and were yet to show back up. Now the first of the two objectives given to them by the Prince in that hot island simply was walked up on by them and it was all so simple that they were unsure what to feel or do.

The lieutenant eventually got his bearings. "Well… get the damn ladder, then!"

They looked at each other. "Right, who was carrying it?"

Another scratched his helmeted head. "Virgil, I think?" and they searched for the Skeleton Soldier amidst them. "Wait, where the hell did he go?!"

A mook pointed at the road they took "He was JUST behind us, making all that noise with the ladder up the slope!"

"THEN USE THE HOOK ROPES! OR CLIMB THE DAMN SHRINE WITH YOUR OWN TWO HANDS FOR ALL I CARE! Just get that damn CLOTH out of there!" the lieutenant roared, tired of incompetence. Lord Troll would never forgive them for wasting time and he personally wanted to get off that island as soon as possible. He then felt a tap on his shoulder. "What is it-"

The tanned hand then rushed up at his face as he turned, silencing him!

Meanwhile, the men staggered and rushed to work, taking the rest of their weaponry and equipment to help climb the cloth. Two of them swung chain hooks and latched them unto the shrine's upper tier. "Okay, we got a grip!"

Putting his foot on the wall, one of them began to scale the shrine and it wasn't long before his hand reached the edge of the top. "Ugh… I got up!" but he was having trouble pushing himself up with the weight of his armor and the sweat coming off his head and fingers wasn't helping. "H-Hold on, I need to get rid of this thing!"

The third skeleton standing at ground level took a look inside the shrine and immediately plugged his nose.

"Gods… it smells of rotten carcasses inside!" Shadowing his eyes with his hand as he looked up, he was startled at the sight of the climbers discarding their heavy armors and was suddenly forced to catch them, lest they get tarnished and they earned a reprimand from Lord Troll. Their blasted black-colored armors were turning into real furnaces in that island so he couldn't blame the guy, but they could be a bit more careful. "Hey, watch it!"

A fourth Skeleton onlooking wiped his forehead. "By the stars, I frankly think I'd rather have Pandora zap me than stay five more minutes here…" He then saw a shadow of a friend flanking him. "Yeah…?"

The climber heard some noises down but focused on raising himself up. After a mighty struggle, he roared in triumph as he pulled himself up on the shrine's roof, where the Cloth box sat at.

"Ah, I got it!" he then helped the other climber up and contemplated the box. "Uh… it looks just like a normal Bronze box. What's so special about it?"

The second climber scratched his head. "Maybe it's immortal like an actual Phoenix? You know what they say about this Island…"

The first climber disagreed. "I've spent too many years slaving away in the Prisons to think anyone can dodge death's cold bitchy fingers, person or Cloth. Besides… that guy at the beach didn't look immortal at all when Lord Troll blasted his head off!"

A third skeleton standing on the other side of the Temple cheered him on. "Hurry up and just kick it down so we can leave!"

The Skeleton gladly tried, but as he pressed his weight more and more on the Cloth Box it refused to move. His friend helped out and the two tried as hard as they could to move the box off its place, but the stubborn object felt dense as lead. "Goddamn it, it won't budge!"

The other called for help. "HEY, come here and help! This thing feels like it might be latched on the floor or something!" but then he realized the ground around the site was desert. "Uh… hey, where did everyone…"

The two turned and screamed! Standing there in the roof with them was the masked guy that Lord Troll blasted at the cabin. Not only was he alive, but he had the heads of their lieutenant and their other two comrades, not to mention of everyone else that got lost along the way, tied to his belt with expressions of shock or pain on their faces. Blood dripped down his pants off their necks, wetting his bare feet.

Guilty leaned his head. "Hi…"

The two unarmored Skeletons panicked and grabbed their scythes. "W-w-What the FUCK!"

"You're supposed to be D-DEAD!" the other gasped. "W…WHERE ARE OUR FRIENDS?!"

"They're right here…" The tanned, white-haired man took their lieutenant's head and made its jaw move up and down while he made sounds. "Hello! I'm Mr. Bones, the friendly Skeleton Boss man! You guys are working too hard! You should relax and play foot-checkers with my new best friend Guilty or you might lose your heads from all this stress!"

With the shock of his appearance subsiding, the two Skeletons tucked their weapons properly. "You sick fuck! We'll tear you to pieces!"

Guilty's head leaned sideways again, causing his neck to crack, and he saw their tools dropped around the Phoenix Cloth. The Hate began beating in his blood faster. "… What were you doing?"

The two shared a look and their feet kicked the tools aside. "Quiet, profligate! This is none of your business!"

The other added on. "We're here under Prince Lucifer's command to take what's his! That's what we're doing!"

This made Guilty drop the lieutenant head and take a step, towering over them. "Were you going to steal that Cloth?..." and he shook his head. "Oh no… oh no, no, no… You can't do that! Fun is very important, but stealing is wrong! Didn't you ever watch Sesame Street?"

One of the Skeletons lost his cool, screamed and swung his scythe, carving its tip deep into Guilty's upper left torso, splurging blood out! They saw Guilty groaning and stumbling backwards, clearly in pain. "T-TAKE THAT! AHA! H-how do you like-"

Guilty took the scythe, uncarved it off his own flesh and tossed it down the shrine, letting it clank on the basalt ground. He then swung the arm, like he had a simple cramp, causing blood to jut out violently off the wound, wetting the Skeleton. The silent look on their faces was nothing but horror and deep confusion.

The demon eventually cracked his neck to finish the sore off and then clicked his tongue. "Tsk, tsk, tsk… that's not very friendly of you. You need to cut deeper… much more violently than that. How am I supposed to feel any real pain like this…?"

The two stumbled back and tripped on the floor, terrified. "AHH! WHAT the F-FUCK!"

His shadow swallowed them and he began to sing. "I know what the problem is…we just need to get to know each other better! Find out what makes us tick!…And I know just the trick!" and his scarred hands descended down on them as the Hate beat faster and faster inside his cursed, dead heart. "A good day out fishing!"

The loud, horrible screams of the two Skeletons then filled Death Queen Island's ash-clouded skies!

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Sanctuary,

House of Aries

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

The Hall of Jason howled with the forceful currents kicked up by the Specter's rapid movements to punish its walls and pillars. The Papillon's flight was agile and flexible, taking sharp turns around the battlefield to deliver sudden dive kicks at the speed of light that cratered the ground while also flapping away just once to carry enough force to leave close quarters immediately. Taking successive step backs on her suede boots, Adriana could do little more than hang on to dear life as she gripped her backsword with both hands to parry the deliberately telegraphed blows, gasping in effort as the force that impacted it still made her body shake and stumble.

The False Specter flew around and saw her stumbling around helplessly. "Ah, ah, ah! You're like a branch in the storm; helplessly swinging back and forth until it inevitably snaps!" and then came down with an arm slice that rattled her to the core with the strength with which it hammered her defending blade, making her fall on her black. Slowing down just above her, he mocked her weakness. "Are you merely another Silver Rank who targeted a Specter with his back turned, like Saint Iaso? The weak of Sanctuary should listen to Athena's edicts and leave the battles with Specters to those who mastered the speed of light!"

Using her sword as support, she got back up, gritting her teeth in frustration and panting. The insectoid maniac wasn't even resorting to his techniques all that much anymore, taking complete control of the battlefield with his flight, speed and combat experience. She could try to keep parrying blows with her sword for hours, but sooner or later the second cartridge would give out, making the edge as useless as common steel against the Damascus of her enemy's Surplice.

Back against a pillar, she gripped her blade, focused her thoughts, summoned her blood-red Wind Cosmos and calmly drew in the air a full moon shape with her sword, leaving behind a drawing trail of energy...

The Specter halted in the air, intrigued by what she was doing. "Isn't that… the Bronze Saint trick for charging cosmos?"

When the sword tip was done circling the moon, her aura flared, she straightened her pose, hanging the blade high with the tip down diagonally, eyes focused on the Specter as wind currents picked up from the floor around her feet, making her hair and overcoat flutter.

"Feel the slicing currents of the night!" With the winds wrapping around the edge's length, she then swung it from below up diagonally, striking the battlefield with the pounding force of the blade. "WIND SLASH!"

The violent, slicing shockwave of wind cosmos struck across the air, blasting the Specter with an inescapably wide force that struck like a cannon shot to his chest, failing to cut the metal of his armor but battering him back with a pained gasp. She brightened up, feeling her hopes raised, and tried to catch the falling Specter with a follow-up dash strike.

However, before she could take advantage, he suddenly recovered and sped down once again, dodging her slice, and aimed his cosmos-enhanced armored arms like insect pincers! Once more she tried to defend herself, parrying the blow with a vertical sword block that made her body rattle, but suddenly a powerful telekinetic force pulsed out from the attacker, taking briefly control of her movements! Adriana was made to held her sword arm completely aside and even flip upside down to lose her sense of position and balance, giving Ainsel the perfect target to bash and slash with a powerful gliding strike.

Adriana screamed, tossed against the ground and rolling as he flew away, and held her bleeding side. Gathering her focus, she quickly recovered her sword with the same trick as earlier that seemingly pulled it off the floor into her hand, and rose her almond eyes up to see the laughing Specter triumphantly pause once again in the air to enjoy the sight of his ill work.

The Specter continued. "That was… an unexpectedly painful strike… You know, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly will I do with you when you're dead, since my moths clearly can't feed on you. Perhaps I'll save your corpse to give to Nasu's flies, instead! She'd get a fun surprise from all the poison inside of you!"

Her strawberry-blonde brows tensed in slight irritation. The Specter was still going on about how confident he was. Nothing got under her skin faster than the type that flamboyantly gloated about their advantages, be it in life, combat or business. It reminded her way too much of the Gold-Rank people she had to deal with in her circle.

Pain flashed through her side, reminding her of the new wound. She stood up and discretely casted on her exposed rib wound the same fabric she did on Cerah's, causing the tear in her overcoat to mend and the wound to be bandaged. The pain and bleeding were still there, but at least they were contained and sterilized, allowing her to preserve her focus and strength.

Focus and strength that continued to be tested as the Specter rubbed his exposed jaw pensively and kept going. "I wonder which limb I should slice off first from your body… it would be fun to watch you crawl around on one leg, at the very least. Or maybe I'll take your hands first so you can forget about that laughable little toy you call a sword?" he pondered. "I think I'll leave you guessing; it will make my next attack a lot more fun for the both of u-"

The woman groaned audibly. "Forgive me, but you talk way too much. Please shut up. It's beginning to test my patience."

A nerve discretely popped in the Specter's crowned temple., making his antennae twitch. "Mm, you're a rude woman, aren't you?"

Holding her sword out high with a straight arm while burning her red aura, she challenged him further. "If you're going to kill me, then do it with your actions, not with your words. I already spend most my waking life having to deal with court poodles who do nothing but spew sweat words and bribes on their way to power." she hissed. "So stop playing with your food, Papillon…and fight!"

His cosmos manifested with rainbow tones. Despite being much more soft-spoken, this woman could affront him nearly as much as that loud-mouth Cancer, so he'd grant her request for a harsher punishment.

Not by falling into her obvious bait, though!

With a mere twitch of his antennae, a powerful invisible pulse was waved out and Adriana was made to take a gasp of air in startle when powerful telekinetic forces gripped her whole body from every direction, arresting her just slightly off the floor and constricting her breath.

"You silly woman…Have you forgotten? Among the Specter of Hades, Papillon has one of the highest telekinesis levels, on par with the Gold Saint of Aries. That's why Prince Lucifer has chosen me to be the barrier keeper…Now-" Ainsel bragged, before pointing his finger at her. "-let's see you lose that scowl! UGLY ERUPTION!"

A shower of green, sludge-like acid sprayed out of his fingertip directly at her. Adriana widened her eyes in fright and struggled as hard as she could against the telekinetic grip, prepared to burst at the seams if she had to, but the grip suddenly gave out, causing her to toss herself aside into the ground rolling badly, dodging the spray but hurting herself with the fall.

She looked and shook in fear at the sight of the ground getting eaten by the green acid.

The Specter laughed and didn't even give her time to turn her face before gripping her all over again with the telekinetic force. "That was a demonstration… I wanted you to see what my acid can do to this Temple's beautiful marble, so you can picture ahead of time what it will do to your face! Will I let you dodge it this time, though? Or will I offer no mercy?"

Though hurting, Adriana still had the presence of mind to be utterly disgusted at this. The Specter could have very well have done the deed already. In fact, she wasn't sure how she would have gotten out of the way of that first acid spray.

And this told her everything she needed to know to stall for a bit more. Watching the veins around Ainsel's shoulder wound grow darker, she spoke "D-Do you think you impress me with those threats?! I know you're not going to kill me just yet!"

He frowned. "Excuse me?"

Standing up, she faced the monster. "You know exactly what I mean, Specter…You're the type that gets off on the process of killing his victims, not the killing itself." she accused, smiling when she saw the discomfort grow in the Specter at this. "You were going to kill that girl right away... but she isn't awake to know what was going to happen, is she?"

He floated there silently, not liking the tone of the conversation.

Adriana smirked confidently, "I bet it drives you insane that you can't recreate your little fantasies with those two over there. I've seen that kind of perversion in people with too much power a million times, even in my own family. You want that feedback from your playthings, that look of fear and the struggle they make against your silk trap that proves that the power you have over them is real and not imaginary. Why would you ever kill me before you're done getting that?"

The orange-armored Papillon snorted in irritation. "Perhaps you are right, but look how much good it's doing to you! Your perceptive eyes have surely helped you out of my telekinetic trap, haven't they, miss…?"

"Marin." she lied, bold faced, throwing the first name she thought of out of a list of new Pisces trainees she happened to read recently. Not only didn't she feel like honoring this abhorrent Specter with her real name, but she wasn't sure she'd make out of the temple alive, so her household had to be protected in the future.

He smirked. "Miss Marin… what a beautiful name! You will need it for the long life ahead of you as Lord Lucifer's slave- " He then pointed his left hand index finger again at her, charging his cosmos. "-forever hiding your ruined face behind a mask of shame!"

Her grip on the backsword tightened as cosmos flowed through it. Sweat beads formed in her temples, watching the coin of fate about to be flipped once again. The hungry spiders around her crawled towards their victim bit-by-bit… Perhaps with Burst Step she can slip past his mind powers?

Ainsel focused his thoughts and coursed his cosmos through his fingers. "UGLY… ERUPT-" he then suddenly gawked, and his body shook as the room around him suddenly began darkening and spinning. An intense pain flashed through his upper left side and the floating Specter fell to the floor. "W-what?!"

The loss of concentration was more than enough to break the telekinetic hold on Adriana, who also dropped to her hands, but in triumph. Burning her cosmos, she cautiously observed her adversary, seeing him grasp his shoulder and gasping in pain. "Finally!"

The pain began to grow harsher and Ainsel looked up at her in rage. "Ah!... What did you do?!" burning his cosmos to suppress the pain, he trembled all over as he tried to get back on his feet and fire his technique with his other hand "U-UGLY ERUPTION!"

Green acid sprayed out, but its trajectory was flawed and her feet burned up with cosmos "BURST STEP!" and she practically trampolined off her spot with the power of the Wind Cosmos, letting the acid shower the ground instead.

The Specter panicked at seeing the blur move all around him and spread his wings out, enacting his telekinetic pulse alongside his thread technique. "Trying to stay out of my mental homing capacity?! I'll catch you again if I have to! SILK THREADING!" The wings brightened in yellow light, pulsing out the force, while his body ejected silk webs in all directions, firing nets through every pillar opening at rapid pace!

One of them going in the right direction was suddenly ripped to shreds, just above his right wing!

Sensing this, Ainsel turned around and thrust his hand up at the incoming blur. "FOUND YOU! FAIRY THRONGING!"

Concentrating wind cosmos, she reversed her sword grip as she spotted the gap between the slashing rainbow curtains and she angled her weapon downward to the left in a forceful spin, focusing all her cosmos on movement speed. Ainsel gasped at the sudden sight of some kind of eight-eyed creature before the shadow descended on him. "NOW! MOONLIGHT CROSS SLASH!"

Sliding through the gap in the rainbows, the sound of a ripping strike was heard and the powerful technique struck across Ainsel like the foot of a spinning top, slashing his wings to pieces and grazing his armor all over while blasting his body with the force of a rising tornado, sending him screaming to the skies.

Stopping her momentum with a foot and hand brake on the floor, Adriana panted with the exertion, feeling the handle boiling hot in her palm, but quickly span over for a follow-up assault, seeing Ainsel crash behind her! She couldn't afford to let herself get caught again by the enemy's mental powers. "Burst Step!"

The Papillon got up, trying to recover as fast as he could but feeling small grazed pieces of his Surplice fall over. There was a spot in his chest plate where exactly eight slash marks were concentrically focused on, like a spider web center, having been the main impact point of her technique. The blows were weak, but together they had cut almost deep enough to touch his stomach while blasting him to the skies.

"Y-You… detestable woman! Do you t-think you have the upper hand?" burning his cosmos, he felt her zipping around once again and targeted her more effectively this time "Silk Threading!"

This time, the silk blossomed out from underneath his feet, rapidly covering the floor in sticky, wide substance that stuck to the pillar bases. Even the unconscious Iaso and Cerah were enveloped in it, caught by the tide of material that wrapped around their bodies before rolling them away with the force of its spread. Sensing the threat, the blur that was Adriana was forced to leap high unto a pillar side and then jump off it towards Ainsel, sensing an opening. "This time…!"

But Ainsel laughed and bobbed his body, dodging her sword thrust and letting her crash unto the Silk Thread floor. "I got you now!"

Adriana gasped and rolled away, but she quickly found herself covered in growing silk webbing. Burning cosmos, she slashed thick threads of it off while stepping away, but her heels sunk into ever thickening flooring of silk the more cosmos Ainsel burned to cast it. "U-ugh!…Blast this…cursed extrusion!"

The Specter cackled at her attempts not to express her fear and frustration in swear words. "As you can see I have more than one way to catch my prey… and your little speed trick won't work anymore." He called out, startling her with her realization. "You look surprised! Did you think you'd keep it away from me just because you aren't screaming it out like these idiotic Saints do? I haven't figured out the details yet, but I can tell you're using some sort of foot trick to give you these confounding speed bursts."

She gritted teeth as she fought against the sticky substance gripping her feet and ankles and tried to back away from the Specter, feeling completely vulnerable.

Ainsel tapped his jawline pensively. "You use it when you ascend or do front dashes… so it's some kind of spring force, isn't it? A sort of trampoline burst so you can keep up with much superior foes. I could feel the Wind cosmos. It's very familiar to me since your type is similar to the Darkness and Wind combo which that ticking hormone bomb Rhadamanthys uses back in the Underworld. It gives you just the force you need to wreck my beautiful Papillon Surplice with your weak slices."

Frustrated, she stopped resisting for a moment and relaxed her stance. "W-well, you're half-right…"

While she wasn't about to give her secret away, the Papillon was dangerously close to figuring out how her Burst Step worked. Concentrating wind cosmos in her step or jump was definitely a part of it, but using wind was just the most efficient way she had to gather her energy in the right spot as, unlike what popular imagination dictated, the element didn't make you faster just for the heck of it.

The reality of the Burst Step was that it was far more hydraulic than anything else. Through the power of her non-elemental cosmos, a potential force against the surface she was on would be built up by tiny braces of energy casted beneath her toes and heels. Then, when needed, in a split of a fraction of a second, all that force would be converted into Wind cosmos. Because this element existed in a much thinner form in the cosmos, it caused a squeezing effect, which in turn caused pressure against the floor, which finally then sprang back against Adriana.

In other words, she could create massive acceleration bursts from a static position so long as she had something to ground her foot on...which, inside a Zodiac temple, could mean several mid-air spots thanks to all the pillars around as well as the massive ceiling held up by them.

The Specter, however, seemed to be under the impression it needed a bounce. "Half-right…?"

Setting her sword at an inside right, a pose meant to set up a frontal dash thrust, its tip was aimed straight at the weakness on his cuirass created by her Moonlight Cross Slash. She smiled. "You think I need to flex to do this, after all." Her eyes then narrowed and the red tint returned to her irises. "Burst Step!…-"

Before the Papillon could even express his shock, her feet suddenly burst out of its silky shackles, launching her at him at terrifying speeds with a blade edge wrapped in blood red. He screamed in startled and focused his cosmos unto his arms to counterattack, but he had gotten too close to her and now had barely no time to dodge or block!

Her hands lunged the blade through, burning her cosmos high and manifesting a wrapping column of wind twisting and narrowing into the tip of her sword like a drill. "Wind Slash -Tornado STAB!"

Time slowed for the two. Ainsel screamed, stepping back at the sensation of the deadly blow coming at his heart!

Click!

Adriana widened her eyes, feeling the familiar knock of her handle ejecting a spent stardust capsule. The power in her weapon then took a sharp drop, extinguishing its edge's blood red aura, and the steel tip of Tornado Stab touched and got deflected right off the scars on Ainsel's cuirass with a mere spark.

His angry roar was heard before his armored arm swung at her once again, exploding on her body like a concrete whip and bashing her across the room straight against a pillar before her dash was even completed. Adriana screamed and rolled on the silk-filled floor, dropping her backsword.

Ainsel panted where he stood, lowering his arm as his brain calculated what exactly just happened. He saw the two spots of silk she freed herself from, as well what looked like a strange bullet clinking on the silk. It was visibly overheated, as it sizzled loudly on his threading and set it ablaze. His foot stomped on the fire before it grew and he carefully picked up the object.

Adriana held her head and coughed as she rolled into her hands. She felt blood dripping from her side to the floor as waves of pain from the blow filled her body, paralyzing her. The effects of My Own Self were also getting worse, now making her see the enormous spiders crawling down her arms into her blood-soaked hands and face, not to mention making the little moonlight in the Hall of Jason grow dimmer. She had to fight against this and remind herself it was just a memory illusion, or she would succumb to the horror!

Said horror only increased when she saw the Papillion had found her secret, holding it high to the moonlight with a look of someone who had just found out a prank had been pulled on them.

The False Specter knew not what to think. In his palm rested what truly looked like some sort of small stardust rod shaped like a bullet cartridge. He had never seen anything like this and it clearly came off the woman's weapon when she conducted her technique, seemingly responsible for the abnormal power behind it.

He closed his fingers on it, crushing the object in his hand. "I see… your little sword was clearly not normal, but I didn't realize it was this sophisticated! Ha, ha, HA!" he complimented, truly amazed at the depths of Marin's deception. "A stardust-bullet gunblade?! What will they think of next?!"

Adriana tried to crawl away, but her body shook too much and the silk began threading up her hands. How was she going to get an opening on him now?!

"METAMORPHOSIS!" the Specter shouted, causing his cosmos to burn in yellow and flare out of his back, reforming his shredded wings. He then stepped menacingly towards her. "I think it's about time we stop, don't you, miss Marin? Don't worry…I may not be able to make you into a nest for my moths, but I can make you suffer in so many other ways…"

With a mere twitch of his antennae, Adriana then gasped when she felt her body suddenly gripped by invisible forces!

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

House of Scorpio

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

The Hall of Orion shook with the fury of the False Specter Golem Treble who, reduced now to one arm, stormed across the darkened Temple, swinging his arm left and right through the thick pillars and hammering it down on the cratering floor, but Scorpio Milo was too small and agile, dodging left and right with short leaps and backflips on his remaining good leg.

The giant sweated. "You've disgraced me, you brat!...You've shamed my pride as a warrior of the Prince! An ELITE! Flee all you want, I'll catch you sooner or LATER!" he then burned his cosmos and raised his hand. "ROLLING BOMBER STONE!"

All the rubble created by his trashing lift itself unto the air as a large cloud of rocks and launched straight at Milo, whose heated needle cut right through the chaos of boulders in the air with Graffias, sliding down unto the floor in loud, harmless crashes. Flipping over the last few catapulted shots, the Scorpio descended down on the Specter with the slicing nail. "SCARLET NEEDLE!"

But the experienced warriors this time knew what the child Gold Saint was capable of and hardened his arm protection with Darkness cosmos, using it to parry the slicing blow. The heat of the star of Graffias sizzled loudly and brightly against the metallic mass of darkness, but Golem overpowered it, bashing Milo's attack away as if his arm were a mace. He then hammered it down on the ground as the Gold Saint was landing, triggering a trailing shockwave of green cosmos that traveled towards the target.

Milo smirked, easily detecting the attack's path. "Ah! Is that all you got left?!" and he simply rolled to the side, dodging it. "Even Aiolia could dodge that, let alone me!"

As the first wave travelled onwards and blasted itself against the wall, Golem hammered more and more, unleashing more quake-inducing shockwaves. The blue-haired youth irked and sprinted along, escaping their trajectories while arcing towards his enemy. He was wary of the guy's unexpectedly quiet movements, but the bright green light of the shockwaves denounced his position everytime he fired more, giving Milo a clear target.

With an impressive diagonal leap to dodge a fifth wave that then stepped onto and leapt off a pillar, Milo flew like a bullet towards Treble with technique in hand. "SCARLET NEEDLE…SARGAS!" and his finger shot off not a thin needle, but a powerful Cosmos shot that struck the Golem's cuirass, exploding like an artillery shell impact.

Golem screamed and stumbled backwards. The hollow point of this strange needle broke on impact and spread hot cosmic waste all over his cuirass, making his armor feel like a scalding oven on top of the pain from the impact. With darkness swallowing them again, his remaining hand reached down his waist pocket…

Landing silently, Milo irked and dropped to his knee as the pain of his broken leg flashed again. This hesitation killed his combo's momentum, but he focused, detected the sounds of the large body stumbling around and went for the kill with a jump from his good leg, aiming his next blow at the Specter's neck. "Now… GRAFFIAS!"

Feeling the deadly force lunging towards his head, Golem immediately bit down on what he pulled from his pocket while burning cosmos in his hand, parrying Milo's thrust once again. The igniting flash set the temple briefly alight, revealing Milo's frustrated face at the unexpected block, and Treble roared to bash away the Scorpio, taking him off of himself.

The two adversaries both stumbled backwards, alarmed, and Milo kept hands high in readiness. "What? That was a strange blocking…I was sure I made him think I'd go for the legs. Why would he think of doing that?"

Golem breathed harshly and tried to detect the Scorpio's presence based on sounds, but the blasted kid was so light it was difficult to hear his tiny metal steps like before over his own panting. "Ah… you think you have the upper hand, don't you, kid?!"

Milo smirked and stepped around the Golem in a varying radius, using the darkness to his advantage while keeping his cosmos signature suppressed. "Yeah! Surely one more hand than you do, anyway." He messaged.

The Golem chuckled as his eyes shifted left and right. He knew the kid's leg was broken so he couldn't be moving that fast. "Oh, and you think you're clever, too… taunting me in mental messages so I can't hear where you are?"

The boy grew tired of this guy's insistence to resist. "I think you oughta just surrender by now, you know? Nothing awaits you anymore than getting captured or killed. I may look small, but trust me, I won't hesitate to wring your neck for what you and your buddies have done!"

Golem touched the spots where he was struck with Antares at the start of the fight. "Oh, I'm sure you won't! Neferti has told me about your House! The lethal Scorpios… more than just pretty boys she said, but Sanctuary's favorite assassins!" Feeling the pain in his empty left arm socket, he counted the seconds to enact his strategy. "It's probably why you set up this ambush on me… you Scorpios must think differently from the rest of these Golds."

Now stepping around the Golem's rearguard, Milo wasn't sure what this guy was getting at, but he smirked, not embarrassed one bit by the role he occupied. "You could say that, yeah, but honestly? I think Aphrodite is even sneaker than me." he commented, even though Treble had no idea who this was. "I'm just doing whatever it takes to take you people down as efficiently as possible!"

Golem stood up straight, confident. "Or, perhaps, you know I still have you backed against a corner, so you sneak around… like a coward!"

Milo snorted. "You really think I give a damn what you call me? As far as I'm concerned, you guys are the cowards!" he countered, taking ever slower steps.

The Specter tensed his brows. "What?!"

The balsam his cosmos had on his cracked bone was limited. He then took a rock. "You've assaulted us in the middle of the night, caught off our communication, amassed yourselves like a gang of bullies on lone Gold Saints instead of giving guys like Shaka and Aldebaran the grace of a one-on-one fight AND you even act like you think we're just as stupid as you!"

Treble felt a vein pop in his temple, sick of this kid thinking he was so clever, but he kept his cool and assumed the pose he needed, looking left. "You ignorant child… if you had any idea what we went through in the Underworld you wouldn't speak so vainly about False Specter courage."

The blue-haired boy hesitated. "False Specter?"

Golem Treble chuckled. After what happened with Virgo, it was no use keeping it a secret for soon-to-be-dead Saints. "That's right. We are False Specters… for we were picked by Hades to take the responsibilities of the Surplice without the rewards of Paradise in the after-life. Temporary workers to fix the Prisons the True Specters couldn't protect!"

Milo halted, standing to the Golem's right and seeing through the night visor the guy's unarmed side completely vulnerable. He was going to toss the rock to make the guy look in that very direction for him, but hey, this was good too!

Yet, what he said gave him pause. "Am I supposed to feel sorry for you? Maybe you should have thought of that before making deals with Hades."

Golem chuckled. "Ah, ah, perhaps you're right… but we won't make those mistakes anymore… Now we are wise to the evil of Olympians, and with these Surplices we'll take from the world what is rightfully ours!"

With a cosmos burning speed that one of the highest in Sanctuary, Milo barely let out a signal of energy as his good leg shot him off the floor like a silent bullet towards his foe, with Graffias in hand!

Suddenly, though, the Specter's body became alite, burning bright cosmos all over! Milo gasped, blinded by his night visor, but his attack persisted through the flash! "GRAFFIAS!"

Golem roared and blood sprayed out of his arm socket along with the light and, to the Gold Saint's shock, a full left hand came out of the light-immersed wound, catching Milo in mid flight!

The Gold Saint gasped. "W-What?!"

And the Golem cackled before spitting out the new Command paper he had put in his mouth. "Let thy body be of clay, and rebuild come what MAY!" Golem rhymed, revealing his back-up paper's line. He then roared and smashed Milo on the floor with his reformed arm, cratering the floor with the screaming child and pinning him harshly. "You're MINE!"

Grinded against the ground by the huge palm and fingers, Milo struggled as hard as he could, even biting down on the flesh, but despite the fact that the arm was lacking armor this time it wouldn't let up.

"You screwed up, kid…did you think Lord Lucifer entrusted me with just one command?! With my Golem Surplice's powers, the right order can even make it restore body parts like I'm made of clay! That's child's play compared to making me immune to famous Scarlet Needle!" He then let go of Milo only to then harshly stomp his armored foot down on the child, pinning the Greek youth even harder. "This time I won't let up! I'll crush you like a press machine against your Hall's floor until your maids have to mop your blood and brains out of it!"

Milo screamed loudly, feeling like an elephant was putting its weight on his entire body. The Scorpio Cloth endured, but its more flexible plates were being pressed down on Milo's small frame, threatening to crush him like a tin can's walls. Space for air in his lungs was slowly being reduced and rubble from underneath him was starting to pile up over him, giving Milo the sensation of being buried alive.

Golem laughed and leaned his foot more on the heel, pressing weight on the broken leg and making Milo unleash an absolutely chilling scream. "AH, AH, AH. LOUDER!" and he grinded the heel, making the leg feel like its muscles were twisting and tears to form on the child's eyes.

Amidst the pain, however, the Gold Saint raised his trembling finger at him. "Agh…sc…crew Y-YOU!" and a red laser fired off his finger at Golem's waist.

The Specter gasped and let go, but he just felt it grazing off his armor's pocket, setting it alight! Treble realized pretty quickly that his stash of paper commands he hadn't used yet was just set on fire and he patted it. "AGH! FIRE?! Lord Lucifer's…YOU PUNK!" he roared, grabbing Milo's wrist "You just fired your last damn needle!"

With a cruel jerk, Milo's wrist was then bent to the side, breaking it. The child screamed even more and his eyes watered.

Treble searched his pocket frantically, but only managed to pull out blackened pieces of paper, including the ones that would send his body into a steroid-like frenzy and trigger more radical forms of healing. "Lord Lucifer spent nights focusing his cosmos in fashioning these for me… thanking for my services!"

Milo completely ignored him and crawled out of the crater, holding his pained wrist to apply the Golden Touch, trying to reconnect his bones and nerves.

Veins began to pop all over Treble's head at the sight of Lucifer's gifts destroyed! He saw the light of Milo's healing, walked over to the rubble, grabbed the largest pillar boulder he could find. "You heretic Saints! You know nothing of respect and honor! Only to hide under Athena's skirt like faggots!"

The Scorpio frantically charged energy into his wrist, but he felt the bone wouldn't stay in place!

Golem walked over to him, dragging the boulder through the floor "But we are different! We are worthy warriors tempered by Hades' cruel treatment and lies! The toil of the Underworld made us stronger than anyone! This is why we'll conquer you! This is why we'll win! Mankind's sins can't be punished away by Hades or forgiven by Athena! Instead, they will be cleansed by strength!"

Desperate, Milo did the only think he could think of to lock his muscles and bones where they should. "Restriction!" and the paralyzing force waved out into his hand, tensing it up straight.

"I will crush you to bits… with the power of Cataclysm Clay, the technique that destroyed the House of Leo!" Golem then lifted the boulder high above head and burned his cosmos, causing it to be enveloped in the green flames of Pandora's castle much like he had done to himself at the Leo Temple. "Like Atlas, we shall lift the weight of our curse as False Specter over our shoulders, and OUR GLORY shall be ever ETERNA-

Milo rolled aside and thrust his restricted hand, firing the scorpion's needles. "SCARLET NEEDLE! ANTARES!"

The needles all fired through the holes already previously punctured into the armor, penetrating the Golem's flesh and refilling his blood with poison "- NAH..AL.. AGH!"

Milo panted heavily, lowering his hand as he saw the Specter stiffening into place.

Treble's vision began to shake, seeing multiple needles and feeling the boulder grow heavier. "You… s-stupid kid… I told you that wouldn't…"

"R-Really?! Look AGAIN, jerk!" Milo hissed.

The False Specter lowered his gaze and watched, agape, as blood jutted out of his needle wounds, unable to coagulate. Pain began invading his joints, soring his muscles and weakening his legs. "I…N-no!"

Milo crawled away, cleaning the sweat and blood off his face with his good hand. "L-looks like you overplayed your cards, Golem Treble! You should have stuck to your first command!"

His body shook and fell loudly onto its knee. "N-no! We…we were s-supposed to…u-u-" His protest was cut short by vomit flooding out of his mouth, further weakening him. The incantated boulder was getting heavier and heavier on his shoulders. "C-curse the Gods! Curse Ha-ades! H-how…H-HOW?! HO-"

The Scorpio Gold Saint then looked away in fear and disgust when the Specter's body gave in to the poison, losing its strength, and the Sisyphean boulder wrapped in the Underworld's flames he lifted crushed his armored body under its weight, flattening Golem Treble into a pressed mass of canned flesh on the Orion Hall's floor with a loud, quaking thud. Milo guarded himself with his cape from the lifted cloud of dust and observed the crushed Specter, waiting to see if he would pop out from under the floor again for a good half a minute.

Seeing that nothing happened, he laid hand on his broken leg and applied the Golden Touch more thoroughly, breathing a sigh of relief. He owed a special gratitude debt to the aged lady that read him books from her old Jewish home. "Thank Athena, I've done it… I'm never gonna disrespect Ms. Schafurwatt boring stories ever again."

The broken pieces of the Golem Surplice then began disintegrating into dust in the dark, returning to the Underworld. The last paper swallowed by the Golem, which restored his arm but overwrote the immunity to Scarlet Needle from the previous one, causing the Specter's downfall, then mysteriously burned up as the specks of spectral magic in it lost the source of their power.

With the pain in his leg mildly relieved, the young Gold Saint rested his back against a pillar base, exhausted. His night vision span and his mind felt heavy from the extraordinary effort he put into this battle. He had to go help the others somehow, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to close his eyes for five minutes…

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Meanwhile,

Death Queen Island

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Troll Grendel's eyes squinted at the hot breath coming out of the cavern, like a monster's gaping maw. "This is it… the entrance to the Queen's furnace!"

The Skeleton battalion led by the False Specter awed at the force they felt from the inside. Not only had the volcano they've been hiking feel immense and scalding under their booted feet, but now being face to face with it's evil gateway made feel as if transported all the way back to the Cauldrons of Blood, or even the famous Underworld gateway which invited you to abandon your hope. It's orange light was menacing, reminding them of all the tales they've ever heard of the worst place under Athena's realm, and its black cavern walls seemed claustrophobic, almost strangling to the eye, promising loneliness and fear to all who dared breach the island's deepest sanctum.

They looked around. "I don't think I wanna go inside…"

Grendel's ear perked up. "What's that?!"

They panicked. "Nothing, sir! At your orders!"

The False Specter looked around. "Has anyone heard from the other search party? Did they find the Phoenix Temple."

A single skeleton rose his hand. "One of them announced it in mental message a while ago, sir."

The grey-skinned warrior in dark brown Surplice cackled. "Excellent! Then both our objectives will be soon accomplished! This mission couldn't have gone smoother! Lord Lucifer will shower us in praise and treasure for this! Come on, then!" he led, walking right inside the cavern so his men wouldn't waste time like a bunch of pussies. "Perhaps I, Troll Grendel, will even be promoted to Elite, if any of those other assholes die at the Temples!"

While the group felt constricted and watched in the black, narrow corridor which grew warmer and warmer, it wasn't too long before they all came out into the volcano's inner oven, consisting of a large ground cliff protruding out over the pool of magma. At this point, a tremor was felt and they all quivered.

Three of them then yelped and hit the dirt when the volcano roared and expelled geysers of lava. "I've got a terrible feeling. We should leave this place!"

Grendel rose his hand. "Don't be scared! It's just this island acting up…." And then his eyes searched the place. "Now… where is that armor?!"

"GYAAAHH!"

The entire group went to full alert mode, raising their weapons and facing the way they came. "W-what was that?!"

"Did someone fall off?!" the one closest to the wall pass wondered, stepping towards it. "HEY, WHO JUST SCREAME-" A hand then came rushing out of the dark and pulled him into the pass. "EAAGH!"

They all widened their ways and aimed their crossbows and hands. "We're under ATTACK! FIRE!" and they unleashed their bolts and cosmos blasts, filling the corridor with purple flashes of light and poisoned missiles which seemed to puncture someone.

With the quakes getting worse, Grendel lowered one of their arms. "STOP FIRING COSMOS! Do you want the mountain to cave on top of us?!"

The False Skeletons tried to argue, but a man's voice then echoed throughout the volcano "Oh, is that so? But I'm afraid you'll have to leave whether you like it or not."

The Three False Specters stood up and stayed close to each other. "What? Who's there?"

Torrents of lava burst from below and washed over the volcano's exit, briefly illuminating a big-eyed masked face leering at them. Steps were heard and a single man stepped out of the lava and slowly walked towards the False Specters.

He was wearing a Bronze Cloth.

With a white helmet, shoulder pads and breastplate while also sporting light red greaves and gauntlets. His helmet was decorated by a three-pronged yellow crown with a lower, red beak and three tails of metallic feather plumes hanged from his back. His hair was white and his muscular body was tanned and deeply scarred. "My name is Phoenix Guilty, the Master of Death Queen Island."

Grendel widened his eyed. "Y…You.. YOU'RE THE GUY WHOSE HEAD I BLEW UP! You're the Phoenix Saint?!"

He raised a finger. "Yes, dear friend, but tonight, I am also your interviewer! Welcome… to my audition."

"Audition?!" a skeleton asked.

His neck cracked loudly. "Yes, you see…I'm producing a play." and then Guilty pulled out a head on his hand whose face they recognized. "I call it…. Guiltlet! I wrote it in my spare time which I get plenty of. It's about some stupid nonsense like…. my dad dying or something…But it has a scene where I talk to a head like this, so I thought it'd be fun! And then, at the end, EVERYONE DIES! HA, HA, HA, HA!"

The masked cackle made them gasp in horror. "He killed our men!"

Guilty cackled and folded his arms. "Killed? Oh, you mean those guys at the shrine? Oh, no. I didn't kill them. How dreadful. I just went fishing with them!"

The Skeletons exchanged unnerved looks.

Guilty leaned his head forward questioningly. "Do you like fishing? It was quite pleasant. I mean, they were rather heavy baits and they squirmed a lot, but, by Athena, they caught me the two largest white sharks I've ever seen! And all I had to do was make them bleed a little. We chatted, had a few drinks… They weren't as lively then and kept blurting out the booze I've worked so hard to salvage and save for guests, but it was still lovely. What about you?" asked Guilty. "Do you like fishing? Maybe instead of theater we can go fishing, too!"

The three False Specters gasped and took several steps back with horror, not having fallen down the bluff because Troll managed to keep his composure. "B-Bastard! Where…Where is Teos? Tell me now, or we'll kill you!"

"Teos? I don't know anything about that. I know this island very well but I've never killed anyone named Teos." Guilty then cackled, his voice thick and cavernous like that of a demon.

"GET HIM!"

The False Specters roared and charged towards Guilty, charging as much cosmos as they could at the moment. Guilty sighed. "So you don't like theater OR fishing? What about Christmas? It's almost December and I know the best Christmas songs!" he said, side-stepping to dodge the first blow. "How about this one? On the third day of Christmas Guilty gave to me…Three punches in the gut!" he chanted, giving the aforementioned to the first Specter so hard the man's guts came bursting out with the first punch and the other ones made him fall right off the bluff.

The rest of the group hesitated and screamed at the casual gore in this. "AH!..."

"Two pokes in the eyes!" he then shoved his index and middle fingers right in the second one's eyes, making a horrible scream fill the cave before he kicked the poor man off the bluff.

Grendel rushed in with his cosmos charged to the max. "YOU PROFLIGATE BASTARD! GREATEST PERESTROIKA!"

He then dodged Troll's fist with a head bob before his fist rushed forward. "And a Genma Ken to-the-FACE!"

Troll felt a hot needle stab his forehead before it turned into something warm that spread throughout his brain. He was left stunned for a few seconds, not sure what just happened as he dropped to his knees.

Then Troll unleashed a horrible wail and grabbed his head! "HAAAAA! Lord Thanatos, forgive me! I DIDN'T MEAN TO BETRAY YOU!" Troll then started screaming his head off as the ghosts of Tartarus Phobia appeared out of nowhere and bit down several parts of his body. He stood up, trying to shake off the winged skulls attacking him and, in the midst of all his squirming and twitching; Guilty's foot was somehow placed behind his heel, causing Troll to trip over it and fall down the bluff.

Guilty cackled as he stood at the tip of the bluff and watched the three men scream as their Surplices melted and their flesh flared up from the lava. His masked face twisted in the direction of the rest. "Anyone else wants to SING?!"

The Skeletons dropped their scythes and ran "NOO!"

"R-RUN! FLEE!"

"I DON'T WANT TO D-DIE!"

But Guilty only laughed at their terror as they attempted to escape, like everyone always did, and the volcano washed over another wave of magma over their battlefield, catching the escaping Skeletons and dragging them screaming into the boiled rock, melting them down to the bone!

He stood there for almost a minute, thinking about something as he watched the Specters disappear under tons of liquid rock. "I guess that ends it. I don't feel satisfied, though. Maybe it was a little too quick." Guilty then took out a notepad and a pencil from within his Cloth's collar and began to write. "Next time…catch the last one by the wrist and give him a little hope that I'll have mercy before dropping him for good."

He then chewed on the tip of his pencil as an idea started forming on his head. He would need a few hooks and a LOT of steel cable, though.

Before he could complete the idea, the earth shook and lava was spat from the pool, so much that it nearly caught Guilty that was forced to leap away. He cursed the volcano as he felt his idea slip away.

"Keep quiet!" he roared at the volcano. "Didn't you like your meal, you stupid bitch?! I've already had a long enough day without listening to your incessant complaints!"

Much to Guilty's indignant surprise, the volcano only got more violent, making its magma rise and the tremors grow worse.

The Phoenix Saint backed away and eventually escaped the premise, coming outside the mountain to behold the raging volcano. It's tip flared out furiously and the violent teenager narrowed his eyes. Something was not right. The volcano usually obeyed him but, now, it was just being plain rude to him! "Something's bothering the Queen…Did she not like my presents? Whatever is making her angry is coming from inside that lava. I wonder what it is."

Guilty shrugged his shoulders and walked away, having no answer. He hissed putrid words at the Queen's temper, even going as far as considering making a terribly-tasted period joke, as he took off his white helmet and decided to go fishing some more. After all, his recently acquired baits were still good, even though they didn't squirm any more.

Oh, boy, how he loved to sound of the word "fishing"! Maybe he could go fishing with Lance too the next time Guilty's red-eyed best friend decided to check on him. He was sure Lance would absolutely love his new baits. Guilty had the feeling that Lance didn't exactly like being offered barbecued kitties when he last visited. He should work hard to think of something nicer to present him with and a fishing trip sounded just peachy.

First, though, he needed to definitively do something about that damn dragon he got to protect him.

Meanwhile, beneath those tons of raging lava of the Queen's volcano and beneath the tons of solidified rock beneath that same lava, a metallic box flashed on and off with golden light. Its active cosmos was making the Queen of Death rage with fury as the object watched the False Holy War with captivated interest.

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

House of Aries

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Struck harshly, the young woman was bashed by the telekinetic hold harshly against the marble pillar, pinning her and putting her way out of reach of her weapon. Adriana screamed in pain, feeling the invisible force being applied like a flat wall crushing her, powered by the yellow light in her adversary's cruel eyes. Her body was slowly dragged up as the force began concentrating on the front of her neck, tightening her breath.

Ainsel's crown antennae twitched every now and then as it manifested the strength of his 6th sense. "Here's something you won't see the Aries Saint do every day; strangling an intruder without touching them!"

Her suede-booted feat dangled in the air, searching for leverage as panicked resistance was made by her. Silver cosmos began to be burned as hot as possible around her neck to prevent her from being chocked to death, but she could only barely stave the pressure off.

He saw her trying to search for something to press her toes on to enact Burst Step and smirked. "You can't do that trick of yours without flooring, can you?" and he twirled his finger, causing her body to flip 180º, making her lose her sense of balance and the blood rush down to her head, further lightening her ability to think of a way out. "AH, AH, AH! Don't you just love it?! All that hard work you put into showing how you're a nasty killer, and now I can just toy around with you like the princess doll you actually are! Shall we house play?!"

This provocation triggered another cruel telekinetic trick as the Specter made her get tossed into and dragged across the floor of the Hall of Jason like a mistreated toy, further hampering her consciousness before crashing her body across another pillar, making her gasp out and weaken her resistance. The world now began to oscillate between blackness and awakeness with the brutality she was being subjected to. Blood drenched her head and torso from the repeated blunt impacts and she couldn't focus enough to pull her disarmed sword back into hand, not that it would do much with the powerful grip he had on her.

Suddenly, Ainsel gestured his finger invitingly, causing his telekinetic grip to drag the tortured woman floating right before him like a ragged-up doll. He saw her breathing heavily but resisting the choking. "You know what I just realized, miss Marin? I'm not being fair to you. The Prince believes very much in vengeance, so all his Specters do, but he does encourage a deal of fairness about it. He says it makes it much more delicious."

She merely scowled at him, blood dripping up her face from her tense lips due to her upside-down body.

It made her look like smiling instead to the Specter, too. "Ah, ah, I knew you'd agree! So I thought about how you've been trying to slice me to bits all night -!"

Adriana widened her eyes at the sight of him raising his arm in chop.

The specter narrowed his eyes cruelly. "- so it's only fair I'd do the same! FAIRY THRONGING!"

Focusing all her cosmos on defense, Adriana screamed when the slicing rainbow shockwaves blasted her body, pushing her off the telekinetic grip and ripping several skin and clothe spots all over her. The edges were blunted by the layers of energy she put out, but still struck like painful, grazing baseball bat bashes, tearing blood and flesh off.

She shook and crawled away, feeling her blood pooling the silked floor. Her almond eyes searched for her weapon but her vision shook. "A-agh….a-am I… going to die?!"

He stepped around her, keeping his antennae focused to mentally grip her if needed. "We are just starting, miss Marin… Hm, Marin! Such a Cyrulian name, straight out of a catholic church! It brings me back to those years spent spying on Sagittarius Priam and his little Paladin bodyguard. It surprises me to find a Sanctuary aristocrat that isn't named something like Helen or Aphrodite instead. Perhaps your identity is as fake as your so-called vulnerability?"

She widened her eyes, feeling a panic suddenly surge her. "P-Priam?! You Specters… spied on the Black Saints?"

He nodded his head. "Well of course! The Prince must keep track as much of his allies as his enemies! It's through the intel gained through the both of your factions that this invasion went so smoothly. It wasn't a pleasant couple of years, though…" he admitted, sighing. "Aquila Daese never really trusted me, always giving me those stern looks and having those talks with poor naïve Priam, asking me questions about how was it that I became a Black Saint like them... It's as if those Knights can smell the Damascus off of a disguised Specter's hide. Truly Athena's attack dogs."

Adriana did the math in her head immediately, remembering what she discovered on Cerah Heloise's neck. "So that's the real reason you wanted to hurt Cerah!...To hurt a Cyrulian like that one! You are just some resentful little garden bug, aren't you?"

Papillon Ainsel frowned and swiped his hand, painfully slapping her body with the air current.

"I resent the tone in that, miss Marin, especially coming from some lying Sanctuary court cunt. You'd have to bring Virgin Athena herself before us to judge our character." Ainsel asserted. "We are the ones fooled by Hades with promises of Elysium; the False Specters owe no-one in this world their honesty or respect but to the Prince! And you… you are just some ruthless wolf of an aristocrat who walks among Athena's sheep, caring not for their well-being. The pathetic games of power you and your ilk play will be put to rest by Prince Lucifer's rise to absolute authority… who at least will be honest about his tyranny."

She held her pained side with gasps, but struggled through the suffering as her disgust grew and grew, raising herself unto her hands and knee. Her patience was nearing its limit. "Y-yes, I know all about your Prince! Another imperialist who wants to rule the world! As if the world doesn't have enough sadists in power!"

He widened his eyes, surprised. "Oh? You do?"

What she witnessed along with Saint Lance in that very Hall as the Cancer Saint interrogated the Skeletons had informed Adriana about Lucifer's pretensions. "T-These Gold Saints still don't understand the level of danger your leader represents by going around claiming he's the Athenian Emperor's heir… but neither do you! More than reigniting the wrath of the Gods against the Earth, Sanctuary will sell its very soul to the devil if that man's ideology is in any way ever returned to power! One thousand years of repentance for all the lives and cultures that were ended for the ambition of one Pope… and your Prince wants to end that! I… will not allow that!"

He scoffed, unconcerned. "The Gods?! Ah! You really don't know anything about us! We've already defied the Gods… and won!" With his 6th sense firmly locked on her to put down any resistance, he rose his chop hand again to enact his technique and put this dull battle to rest. "As for you, miss Marin… you can burn with the rest of the hypocrites, profligates and barbarians who tried to stop his rise to power… right after I rip you to shreds! FAIRY THRONGING!"

And the hand descended down on her defiant face, wrapped in a rainbow-colored edge of sharp cosmos that shaped it like a descending blade!

Blood splattered out!

A firm grasp, however, was clasped around his arm like steel grips, catching it in mid-air! "W-what?!"

Silver cosmos burned brightly around the strawberry-blonde woman, powering her palms against the deadly limb. New beads of blood ran down her palms and forehead like rivers, having both barely missed direct slices from Fairy Thronging. The False Specter grunted and struggled to push his attack down on the blasted woman, but his strength was suddenly failing to do the job despite her clearly weaker body.

He couldn't believe it and struggled ever more frantically. "What is going… L-LET GO! You're… Gargh!"

Her feet fought to place themselves on the silk ground and her legs pushed to raise her up, forcing the Specter slowly back. "W-who do you think I am, Papillon Ainsel?! Another grape-eater who took comfort in her birthright, like your Prince?!" she hissed. "You can harm my people; say I don't care about them… It puts a hole in me, but I can live with that fissure between me and everyone else! I will never be seen as anything more than some rich person who doesn't get it!... BUT…-!"

Ainsel began shaking, losing strength and feeling the world go darker. His shoulder in particular began tightening and hurt immensely, causing him to wince and step back.

And she pushed onwards, brightening her silver aura into its fully charged blood-red. "-… but, Athena hear me, I will NEVER let you destroy all we've done to pay for our sins! Weather those in my lifetime or 1,000 years ago!" Then, firmly grasping the wrist on just one hand, she pressed her other one against the Spiral Slash's scars. "WHITE STAR NET!"

A bright white star of the Red Spider Nebula's core was ignited on the central spot of the slices, its shine producing a particular outward flash of Wind Cosmos currents that blasted out of the Surplice crack, making the Specter scream as four curved 'spider leg' currents sprouted out. Said legs were actually sprouting anchors that punctured the ground and ceiling and lifted Ainsel off the ground before connecting their lengths together in a weaving spiral of cosmic web, sticking his entire body to it.

He gasped in horror and struggled. "Agh… Impossible! This net is… the Red Spider Nebula?! And casted with Wind Cosmos?! When could you have set this trap?!..."

With her opponent firmly stuck, Adriana's aura collapsed in burn out. With some freedom to act, she flicked her wrist, causing her sword to jump off the ground once again into her hand. "Like you pointed out, this isn't an ordinary sword… but it's gunblade cartridges aren't it's only secret, either!"

The Specter then beheld her exposing the backsword's edge to the moonlight, showing off what seemed to be countless web-like filaments sticking to its sharp surface.

"This is the Blade of Arachne. It was forged from the needle of her cursed spinner by Artemis, Goddess of the Moon, taken by Saints in a Holy War and then passed down my family as an heirloom from Athena herself. My blessed grandfather entrusted it to me… so that none of my useless, merciless parents would wield it. " She then sliced the floor with it in a swift motion, cutting through Ainsel's silk. The Specter watched in realization as the cut mark began to sprout small cobwebs on it. "Every slice of it leaves the spider's web seeded on its path, like the spinneret itself… With it, I caught and sliced every single one of your spying moths in town. Moonlight Flash and Moonlight Cross Slash left just enough of it for me on your Surplice to now cast the technique arresting you."

"Y-You,… AGH!" Ainsel struggled, burning his sickly yellowish cosmos.

She smirked, feeling the tables reversed and seeing the spider net grow golden. "Go a-ahead, struggle. If the net doesn't drain you dry, then the poison I injected on you at the start of this fight will finally turn your blood into jell."

The cruel Specter stopped, feeling his cosmos being drained by the webbing and then he looked at the source of his pain; his left shoulder was now almost completely black, paralyzing the arm, and two punctured on it were now clearly visible. "My shoulder..! When did she…?!"

He then froze when he recalled that important moment!

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

How did he not sense him this time?! "G-ah…! Ophiuchus?! H-How-"

"G-Guess again!" the female voice hissed.

Her other hand was practically clawed on the damage hole of his armor's shoulder pad for gripping and pushed the sword's hilt and pressing it harder through his body. Ainsel quivered, feeling what was obviously the top of a single-edged sword, and not a Toxic Thunder Claw, pushing out of his flesh. The noblewoman?!

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

The moth-armored man gasped, suddenly finding his muscles too weak to push down on her and his heels. "N-NO! YOU… You T-TREACHEROUS HARLOT!" he shouted, struggling in against the net. "YOU POISONED ME?! AGH… "

"Yeah."

He was agape with the bluntness in her response. "B-BUT…You dishonorable…" and he struggled harder out of sheer rage. "I-I'll make you P-PAY! How COULD YOU?!"

The silver-ringed swordswoman eyed him strangely, like he said something incredibly stupid. "How could I? You messed with my mind, covered me with your carnivorous little insects, beat me up, strangled me, cut me, tossed me around like a soccer ball with your mind powers, insulted my character and tried to throw acid at my face…. I'll be extraordinarily generous, Papillon, and say this makes us even."

The usually dignant spy was out of himself "Y-YOU…WI…-"

"Witch?" She then searched her pocket. "I'd also save my tongue for an uglier word, because the worst is yet to come."

He trembled there, unsure what to expect from this horrid woman anymore and unable to free himself from the webbing, which just sucked the little cosmos he could still burn on top of his rapidly solidifying blood stream. His heart began beating faster when a third stardust cartridge was pulled out.

"You see…" Sliding the slot in her sword handle open with her thumb, she lazily tossed it inside before releasing the slot like she had done it 1000 times, causing it to spring-load shut with a satisfying click, like a cocked gun. The edge immediately flared up with blood-red cosmos, carrying the stores cosmos down the edge to make it as deadly as its owner. "This is my last cartridge… I wasn't expecting getting caught up in a big fight when I left home, after all. However, I can't leave margin for doubt that Saint Iaso really was the one to get rid of you. My injection on your shoulder and all the cuts in your armor are more than evidence that the doctor wasn't responsible. So… I have to make sure I leave my plate clean!"

The False Specter screamed, seeing the woman approaching his exposed body with the sword and the red tint returned to her eyes. "AGH! GET AWAY FROM M-ME! YOU CAN'T DO THIS!"

She blinked, bewildered. "I can't…? You threatened countless innocent people, including children I have an attachment to, like Lords Shura and Aphrodite, and you're in the way of these Saints helping one another stop an unprovoked invasion trying to reinstall a cruel dictatorship. I could stay here all-night listing all the things that prove you're only getting what's coming to you." she recalled, letting the shadows of the temple obscure her in darkness as she rose her blade in a low hang. "Now you're caught in a net, so, well… I'm just going to cut to the chase and ask it already; are you going to drop that barrier of yours or not?"

He irked, stuck between the wrath of the Prince and whatever she meant to do to him. "I…"

Getting her answer, Adriana smiled, appeasing. "You won't? I see…I suppose you have a frightening boss, considering he's the emperor's descendant and all that. I understand…. but, you know what happens next, then, don't you?"

Ainsel screamed outloud. The shadows seemed to cloud her suddenly and she tightened her grip in anticipation of the first blow as she walked towards him. The Hall of Jason allowed their shadows to be casted by the Skeleton corpse fires unto the walls, projecting a theater of a struggling, screaming man on a net being run through by a sharp sword in the stomach, it's tip jutting blood out the back, splashing blood all over the sword wielder. It's grip was held tightly, fighting against the spasms in its victims muscles, and it jutted upwards ever so slightly, shaping the first fake Thunder Claw mark on the screaming victim

It got pulled out, and then it stabbed again in the rib, repeating the process. Then again right next to it in the liver. Then again and again and again on the ribs, the gut and the stern, drawing more and more claw attacks. Then the stabbing grew faster, more violent, splashing sprays of blood out as the body spasmed against the net and flashing strains of blood-red light as pieces of orange metal were carved like dinner, wetting the swordswoman's face with blood. The sharp shadow started going back and forth so hungrily it then seemed like multiple pointy legs of a famished spider pouncing on a captured butterfly, repeatedly running it over and over with bites and leg turns until it was nothing but a canned piece of flesh howling to the skies in horror and pain.

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

House of Libra

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The green fires of the One Hundred Dragons of Rozan raged on at the 7th Temple, ever shrinking yet still bright. Scattered throughout the ruined Hall of Balance were the Saints of Athena trying to get their bearings on the situation. Aldebaran and Shinta looked down the Houses from atop the collapsed rubble of the roof which Daemon cut down unto the stairs, seeing the path that the Taurus Gold Saint practically tractor-ed to reach the battle in time to give critical assistance.

Shinta blinked, impressed by the trailing path pushed through the heavy marble boulders and furniture ruined. It really looked like his former sparring partner had just pushed through all of it by hand. "W-wow, you really did all that without cosmos?"

"Well, I used a little… just enough that the Daemon bastard wouldn't pick up on me coming." Aldebaran confessed. He liked impressing his naïve older friend but not outright lie to him. "I knew that if I just used Great Horn, his 7th sense would sound the alarm and ruin the surprise… so I improvised."

The Andromeda Saint looked down the Houses. "I can't sense anything yet… I wonder if Saga is alright."

Aldebaran scoffed. "Absolutely, he is! That Specter doesn't stand a chance! You should have seen the look Saga gave him when he swooped in to come rescue me, like he'd tear him to pieces!"

Shinta smiled with this confidence, but there was a tiny hole in this. "Well, yeah, but then you guys had to retreat, right?"

The Brazilian boy gritted teeth, conceding. "Yeah, but… that's just cause my Temple was already such a mess. Besides… I softened up that Behemoth for him."

The green haired boy chuckled, always cheered up by the unflinching optimism the Gold Saint exuded. Immediately after, though, as he beheld the scale of the devastation the Golden Zodiac already suffered and he felt the tremors from the fighting up the stairs, his mood soured. Not only did he still feel very much aware of how much they still had to do to stop the killing, but Lucifer's words kept echoing in his head as he stared at his hands, which had diverted Eternal Darkness back at its owner as if he knew its black whispers intimately for years.

I'm saying that you are NOT who you think you are! I'm saying you're like me! A Dark Prince of Hades!

Has Hypnos contacted you at all? Have you ever met anyone with pale bold hair, glasses and a look on their faces like they can tell your future? Someone who seemed oddly interested in you out of nowhere?

I understand you don't accept the truth, and that reincarnation isn't the same as fucking amnesia or whatever else could be equivalent to this situation, but your Cosmos is Michael's, so as far as I'm concerned, you are him...

"Mephisto, stop standing so close to that! You're gonna burn yourself!" Lance suddenly shouted, snapping Shinta out of his trance.

"I'm FINE! I'm JUST LOOKING AT IT!" Deathmask yelled back.

Aldebaran saw his friend looking like someone just punched him in the stomach. "You okay, bro?"

The green-head bit lip nervously and looked away. "I am… Lucifer just said some horrible things that are still stuck inside my head."

The kid's thick brows tensed. "Ah, I see… Well, you know Specters; they got the same sense of humor as a tape worm. They were probably screwing with you."

Andromeda headed back to the rest of the group. "Yeah… you're right." And he joined Shaka and Lance, who were sitting by the Libra Cloth. "Are you two feeling better?"

"Y-yeah, I'm just kind of exhausted. I certainly don't feel like I can sprint to join the fighting at Sagittarius yet" Lance assured. His torso was covered in bandages to contain the bleeding from the slices of Dark Angel Flaming Sword, when his Cloth was shredded. "I'm also pretty sure if Aldebaran pats my back again I'll hurt a lot more."

Andromeda looked up. "The Scorpio Temple seems to have stopped shaking. I hope Milo is alright."

"If it wasn't for all this damn jamming, we'd be able to tell." Lance snarled, grumbling at the thought of the guy responsible. "I should have burned that Papillon guy to a crisp! Did you listen to the crap Mu said he tried to do at Jamir?! I hope a goddamn truck falls on him on his way out the Temples!"

"Are you sure you're feeling no after-effects from Eternal Darkness?" Shaka insisted. He raised his palm to the corner of Lance's peripheral vision. "How sleepy do you feel? Do you see my hand still or does it look like it-"

"F-For the third time, your hand doesn't look like it's sprouting tentacles! Or that it's made of pure evil OR that I feel naked in front of the school auditorium!" the Cancer Gold Saint asserted. He picked up a piece of the Cancer Gold Cloth off the floor. "L-looking at this, I think I should be happy that I'm just alive."

The small Indian boy pouted sadly. "I don't understand… why didn't it work on you?"

Shinta and Lance exchanged glances, as they could tell it was more than just the mystery of it upsetting Shaka. Considering that the same technique robbed Shaka of pretty much most his powers but had the opposite effect on Lance, it was probably pretty normal to feel there was something wrong with you.

However, the Andromeda Saint, as much as he loved his friend, felt that it was more likely that there was something wrong with Lance, instead. "Lucifer took in a bunch of it and he never acted the same afterwards during the fight, so I don't think Lord Shaka was particularly weak against it or something. Lance… something about you must have deflected the effects of the move."

The Cancer Saint scratched his head. "Again, the only thing I can think of is my old memory seal. The reason why I insist on it is because it wouldn't be the first time it deflected a mental move made on me."

Shaka's attention perked up. "You mean… Mara, right? You've seen his Genma Ken."

"Don't call him that. His name is Guilty." Lance stressed in his mental message. "He's not some demon set loose in the world. He's human… no matter what he says or how much he messes with you. Calling him Mara or whatever is forgiving him for the crazy crap he goes around doing."

Shaka respected this point of view on the demon of Death Queen Island, but his spiritual experience disagreed with it. "Perhaps after all of this I'll accept your offer to talk about him, then. I'm sure we have much to share."

Shinta could see them blink weirdly. "Hey, what are you guys talking about?"

"Nothing important. I'm just admiring the Libra weapons." Lance assured, who then tried to change subject again. "MEPHISTO, I TOLD YOU TO STAY AWAY FROM THAT!"

The purple haired Sicilian boy sighed loudly. "Okay, look, see the distance between me and the burning?" he showed off with his arms, pointing at the relatively safe space. "I'm perfectly fine! I'm just… you know, looking!"

Lance shook his head, but let it up. He was too tired to deal with this. Maybe if he felt Lucifer's cosmos he'd be more worried, but they'd been sitting there for like half an hour and the guy hadn't come out. He just hoped the Sicilian boy wouldn't get any dumb ideas like trying to put out the fire by pissing on it.

Grinning, Deathmask waited till they all looked away and he picked the stick he found again to poke at the green flames. There was a lot of rubble underneath the burning, but he was hoping he could find the big bad Specter's corpse to poke at. He dragged it a bunch, pushing some embers and pebbles out of something hard he felt, but then he hummed in curiosity when a clink sound was heard with another deep stick stab, like it touched metal.

He blinked and leaned closer, seeing something black and shiny under the green burning.

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

(?)

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Lucian sat there, locked in Eternal Darkness' lucid dreams, cup of spirit twirling in hand while beholding the metal dragon sitting on the floor. He had been staring at what Master Thanatos brought to him for hours. Its neck was long and its wings scaled and sharp, not to mention its pose was very reminiscent of the draconic demon slayed by Saint Michael George in Christian mythology. The mockery was stupidly obvious, even as early as this point in this life, when he was still as drunk on Hades' lies as he was on the drink in his fingers. He was clearly nothing in the Emperor's eyes but someone spared after Judgement Day by the very opponent that should have slayed him.

Pandora snickered at the sight of him staring at the armor like a bad Christmas present. "Does it make you feel small, Prince? We even made sure to craft it to be not quite as strong as Dark Angel... just so you won't forget your place in the Underworld." she mocked. Her 16th century persona never held back its desire to belittle others for failing Hades. "You should be grateful you get to breathe under that mark of shame. The Celestial Star of Pride… burning for the most humiliated warrior in the Underworld. Ah, ah, ah…. My brother is truly wise in the irony of his punishments."

At this point, Lucifer learned why Rhadamanthys was such a rampant drunkard; he had been putting up with this malicious raven-haired harpy for countless more generations of Specters than himself and Michael, who were newcomers.

Pandora studied the Surplice more closely. "Yet, like all of my brother's works, it looks magnificent. You should truly prize it, Lucifer, for it's still a mightier armor than even the Surplices of the Judges. If it were me, you would have been placed in the Third Prison for thinking your greed for power was enough to earn my brother's love. Let the irony behind it forever be a reminder of how you failed the Emperor… and your debt to Michael."

"My debt…" Lucifer mused, staring at his alcohol.

The darkness in the corners of the room increased. They crept across the floor around the two of them, threatening to drag Lucifer's mind to the depths of Eternal Darkness by lulling him with this memory of humiliation.

It still all felt so unreal, like the fight had been nothing but a bad dream and he was still days away from it, training to prove his absolutely superiority over the coward pacifist competing against him for the Dark Angel Surplice. With a snap of his fingers, the Surplice dismantled and took to the air, placing its parts on his body robotically. His cosmos burned in it, amplified to incredible levels, yet still just shy away from what he sensed off Michael when the Absolute Star visited him in the cell.

He opened and closed fist, testing its flexibility. Anyone else who wore this Surplice would have been ecstatic, for the power in it was more than enough to slay even a Gold Saint. It's overflowing strength brimming into Lucian's skin was such that it suggested he could generate a truly infinite amount of adrenaline and energy through it, speeding across the Underworld and even the Desert Beyond in zig zags while firing apocalyptical blasts everywhere and relish in the cheap destruction it could cause.

The silver-haired teenager, however, felt focused on nothing but the shame of getting the second-best prize… the consolation award. His other hand closed on the spirit glass, shattering it to pieces.

The liaison was disgusted at the alcohol wetting the palace's floor as the darkness reached their feet. "You only have yourself to blame for your frustration, Lucian…No, Lucifer, the Celestial Star of Pride. Perhaps if you serve the emperor justly, you too can drown those feelings of humiliation in the joy of knowing to have made Lord Hades happy."

The murky shadows then crept up their legs, slowly eroding Lucian's ability to distinguish reality from nightmare.

Sparks of lightning coursed in his hand. "No… this isn't over! I still live! And that means I will continue to reach out to what's destined to me!"

But the shadows distorted his confidence further as their bodies up to their necks were covered all the way up to the neck. Pandora was now more shadow than person, her eyes turning into bright spots of light in an otherwise humanoid shape of a shade. "What's destined to you? How arrogant… No, Lucifer, your ambitions will burn, just like your father! And your mother! And everything else you knew!"

The Specter shook, seeing his fist get wrapped in the blackness like slow bandages. "N-no!"

Pandora's voice began distorting as well. "The world has changed. Your little dreams of greatness mean nothing anymore and all the fantasies he filled your head with are just that; dreams of a child turned to ash! Your course has been set by Judgement Day; and you will live under Michael's shadow forever!"

The Daemon burned his aura in revolt, making the room shake.

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

House of Aries

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Breathing heavily and feeling her arms sore, she pulled the blade out and beheld her work; the grotesque sight of the Papillon Specter's torso carved top to bottom with pretty believable claw marks. All she had to do was burn the right amount of energy out of her cartridge and focus enough to make parallel cuts with the right penetration for each individual finger strength, and the rest was to just do it enough times to make it look like a bear attack. Sheathing the weapon, she took the burned out cartridges before anyone else found them and cleaned her face with the white handkerchief in her pocket, drenching it in Ainsel's blood.

"Finally, it's done." she sighed, exhausted. The red tint slowly vanished off her almond eyes and she headed for the unconscious Cerah, who seemed to have finally stopped convulsing from the effects of Waters of Life. She took a small note and wrote on it. "I don't know how you got that wound, Cyrulian, or even what in the Goddess' name you're doing in Sanctuary, but you have some sort of guardian angel on your shoulder to have so many people save you tonight. Once this is all done with, I want you to come see me at this address."

Ripping it out, she folded it around the girl's obsidian pendant. Even as she did this, the unconscious girl seemed to twitch instinctively, amazing Ghisi with how powerful the self-preservation instincts trained into Cerah were. Saint Iaso mentioned she was in a coma, but it wouldn't shock Adriana at this point that if the key to getting her out of it was someone messing with the Cloth Stone.

Before heading to Iaso, the noblewoman expanded her 6th sense, testing the waters with the jamming barrier. Somehow, even though she was pretty sure the Specter was down for the count, they were still up. A residual effect, perhaps?

She then headed to the doctor, to whom she had to do something a bit unfair. Turning him over, she observed the Ophiuchus Cloth's chestplate, looking for its critical weakspot. Her hand then burned with cosmos. "Athena, forgive me."

Lunging it down on the man's chest, metal was shattered and blood splattered in a lethal blow! Iaso gasped and spasmed, feeling the strike in his sleep.

Irking in pain, the woman held her injured hand, but watched intently as the warmth in the Silver Cloth disappeared, indicating its death via a discoloring of its purple. It was considered a serious sin in Sanctuary to murder a Cloth of Athena for whatever purpose, as they were the most important religious artifacts in their society right below anything that the Goddess may have sneezed on, but this was a small price to pay to eliminate the only witness to the battle she just fought.

Slowly and with drowse, Iaso opened his eyes, feeling a massive headache torturing his brain, seeing the Hall of Jason spin around him. He felt like had either gone through the worst hangover of his life or the worst stress dream. "U-ugh… what happened?"

The noblewoman noticed the doctor beginning to move as she finished cleaning the blood off her face. With a gesture of her hand, the White Star Net around Ainsel turned to specks of cosmos, dropping the defeated Specter to the floor carelessly.

Supposing they simply had to wait a little, she helped the Silver Saint up. "Thank goodness, Saint Iaso… you're yourself again."

The brown-haired Saint groaned and shook his head. "Wha… What happened? The Specter…"

Adriana firmed her grip on his arm reassuringly. "You were incredible, Saint Iaso! You saved the day! The Specter tried to control you with his hypnosis and… he must have done it wrong, because you proceeded to butcher that Specter with your Thunder Claw."

"I… I did?" the Ophiuchus Saint asked. He then saw Ainsel on the silky floor, covered in blood. "Oh,… oh, Goddess…! I… don't remember anything." He then looked down on his armor. "Hey, Ophiuchus, can you tell me wha… What the…?! What happened to my Cloth?!"

Her almond eyes shifted. "Your armor! Oh no… I guess it must have saved you from some sort of terrible attack." she lied. "Can you get it fixed?"

In reality, she crushed the cloth to kill it after she was done with Ainsel because she knew the Ophiuchus armor would likely not go along with her story and at least by killing it she could induce amnesia on it. It was a fairly known phenomenon that armors revived by Saint Aries lost some of their memories, since their consciousness was stored throughout their metallic mass instead of some sort of centralized brain system. This was the main reason they couldn't rely on the armors to uncover secrets from previous Holy Wars.

As he recovered his sense of self, the Silver Saint only felt bewilderment. "Ah, Hephaestus hammer me! I… I suppose Kiki is at Rodario, I can probably call him up, but….by the gods, did I really kill that guy? I mean… the last thing I remember is fighting him, but…" he muttered. Obviously, there was a corpse in the room and the carved wounds looked so vicious that they could have been from his Toxic Thunder Claw.

It was unlikely given the power discrepancy… but it was plausible. Saints did crazy things all the time under the influence of stress. The problem was that the only witness was Adriana Ghisi… but why would she lie about this and let him take credit? These aristocrats were constantly looking for reasons to prove to everyone they were the real warriors of Sanctuary.

… He supposed… it made sense? He was having such a bad dream about the time he became a Sanctuary dweller that maybe that made his cosmos go crazy and take the Specter by surprise. Besides, the Specter looked just like those Black Saints he once went nuts on in Argentina, all carved up with Thunder Clow even as he twitched there on the floo-

His brown eyes widened all of a sudden and he pushed Adriana behind him. "HEY, LOOK OUT!"

The noblewoman gasped, startled, but then she realized what he noticed! Shockingly, despite the butchering he was subjected to, Ainsel was moving! His body trembled only a bit, but he was definitely still alive. The swordswoman tensed, wondering if her cover would be blown now. The coagulating poison should be turning the Specter's blood into jelly by now, so he shouldn't be able to pose a threat anymore, but he could still blurt something out.

Iaso charged his cosmos, causing purple sparks to dress his clawed fingers. "I won't let you touch these two. If you still want a fight, by Zeus, you'll GET IT!"

As the Specter got on his hands, though, the frightening amount of blood on his body laid all fears to rest. He barely seemed able to breathe, coughing out as his neck swelled with thickening blood. "U-ugh… this is it for me… I can barely even burn my cosmos anymore…That woman's poison is chocking the very breath out of me…" he thought. "I can't believe… that Erika will get to resurrect me… she'll never let me live it down."

Iaso turned to Adriana. "Miss Ghisi, please get Cerah! We need to leave immediately!"

She didn't hesitate in nodding and headed for the Cyrulian girl, picking her up.

Ainsel took one last chance to admire his Surplice, the gift behind the lie Hades told him; the lie that turned him into the monster he was now. "I suppose this is it for us, Papillon Surplice… We had a wild few years after you picked me up in that orphanage.. back when I used to think fairytales might be real. I wonder if the real Specter, Myu, is out there right now… living a simple life… May you crush him inside yourself when you return to the Underworld!" he then coughed out a laugh, seeing the Silver Saint and 'Marin' run., and his body began to burn up, channeling the little cosmos he could still use into his big wings. "N-no… none of you are going anywhere. I am… a False Specter Elite…Even if I'm dying… I won't be revived with an incomplete task! You three… are coming with ME!…"

The Silver Saint felt the hair in his nape stand up, realizing what the Specter intended. "Oh, s-shit!" and he took Cerah unto his back and fled. "RUN!"

With a rallying cry, Ainsel rose his arms to the skies. "L-LONG LIVE L-LORD LUCIFER!" and his entire body came alight with cosmos with a searing sound, blinding the entire Hall of Jason!

Then the human bomb went off, bursting the entirety of its cosmos in a deafening blast, punching pillars off their bases, smashing them against the walls, cratering the ground and overall bursting the entire Temple of Aries, collapsing its supports in a brutal kamikaze explosion. The dome of light expanded and expanded, consuming rubble, Skeleton bodies and workshop tools, and what was left of the broken gateways was swallowed up by the flash before being utterly disintegrated, if not ripped out of its hinges down to the stairs!

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

House of Libra

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Three things happened that startled the Gold Saints celebrating at the 7th House out of their rest.

The first was the loud, bright, quaking explosion suddenly felt all the way down at the 1st House, which made Shinta and Aldebaran gasp at the sight of Mu's Temple collapsing under its weight and crashing its upper floor unto its ground, sending waves of dust and particles in every direction and tumbling pillars down unto the entry stairs.

The second was the sudden lifting of the jamming barriers, causing every Cosmos in the Golden Zodiac to suddenly sense each other throughout its entire length, like a door being opened to let blinding light into the room! The Gold Saints and Shinta gasped, suddenly detecting the fighting going on at Cancer and Sagittarius, as well as the triumph of Milo at Scorpio and the Specters rapidly approaching Capricorn.

And, finally, the third was Deathmask's scream, accompanied by the green fire he was observing bursting from within, sprouting rubble out everywhere along with a roaring, maddened Daemon Specter.

"AGH! HELP!" The boy fell on his back and crawled away, terrified by the shadowed sight of the demon out of hell.

"MEPHISTO!" Lance screamed, rushing out with the Libra Shields.

Lucifer gasped harshly, like he had just swum to the surface from the bottom of the ocean floor. He stepped out of the rubble and found himself before a crawling, pant-wetting Mephisto, who screamed frantically at the sight of the ruffled, soot-covered Specter with the maddened red look in his eyes, ripped up cape and the cracked Surplice.

His sight alternated between seeing a young Sicilian boy of purple hair and Cancer Manigoldo on the floor…

"W-what? What is going on?" Shinta stuttered, shocked. "He was defeated. Lance hit him with all he's got. W-what happened?"

The Specter gritted teeth. "Mani…goldo?….gold… Gold Saints!" he seethed, pinning the crying Mephisto to the floor with his gaze. He sunk hand into palms, feeling all of Hades' brainwashing assault his mind at once. "My enemies, Gold Saints!"

Practically sliding between Mephisto and the Specter, Lance held up his shields, using their energy to reignite his battle aura. "DON'T TOUCH HIM, YOU BASTARD!

But the Pride Star was only beginning his fit of madness. As his 7th sense returned to him, his eyes widened in horror as he realized that he was no longer feeling Ainsel's cosmos, much less the barriers it projected.

All their identities, all their actions, all their placements were laid bare to the world, to anyone with the ability to feel the Cosmos.

The False Holy War was exposed.

His teeth gritted, his fists clenched and his 7th Sense aura burned up again! This meant more than just an underling's defeat to him. To Daemon Lucifer, commander of the Specters, no matter who battled under him, it was always painful when he saw his men being slaughtered, but his grand strategy had now also been compromised before its time. All his ambitions could be laid to rest now that Sanctuary's power could be amassed on Crow's Nest, all his secrets discovered and all his forces outflanked and surrounded!

"L-Lance…"

Lance stood on his guard, making sure his fighting pose favored his Libra Shields. He would need them. "W-what is it?"

Lucifer looked down and allowed his silver bangs to hide his eyes. After a short while he started chuckling. He then raised his head high in the air and laughed out loud, scaring the Saints with his eerie cackle.

To think that he would be forced to use it! "I won't forgive you! I won't forgive any of you! You are all DEAD!" he shouted at the top of his lungs before both his aura and that of his Surplice exploded into pillars of light so think that fused into a single one and burst through the clouds.

The shockwave of this bashed Lance and Mephisto away from the Specter, landing them in Aldebaran's bracing arms. "AH! W-what is going on?!" Deathmask screamed.

Lucifer closed his eyes and collected his dark thoughts once more, just like at the battle with Minos and Aiacos.

With all the rage he felt with that night's humiliation burning in his veins, he then unleashed his cosmos. "DAEMON!" he cried to the night heavens. "You are my Surplice, one of the two armors crafted for the Princes of Hades! With your gauntlet I slayed the Godslayer and struck terror in the heart of every Saint of Athena! So let out all of your power! Let out all of your blood thirst! Let out all the light of the Celestial Star of Pride so it can shine in all its glory so brightly that all of Athena's constellations will be washed out of the SKY! But more than anything,… let me spread once again spread the horror and despair in my enemies, so that they'll never for the might of Lucifer, the Dark Prince of Hades! Now…" he muttered "FLAP YOUR WINGS, DAEMON!"

A huge shockwave burst from Lucifer and struck the Saints with a cloud of dust at the same time a pillar of light burst towards the sky, swallowing up both Lucifer and his Surplice. The pillar of light slowly thinned itself as the Saints heard the Surplice disassemble and place itself on Lucifer, whose silhouette inside the pillar seemed to be getting larger. A huge, cavernous roar was heard as Lucifer screamed to the skies, as if he was transforming into a monster!

The pillar of light dissipated and the earthquake stopped. All Gold Saints squinted in Lucifer's direction to see past all the chaos. They then all gasped with horror with what both their eyes and their 7th Senses told them.

Before them, stood Lucifer, avatar of Pride, his Daemon Surplice shining coldly under the moonlight with a new, more violent shape which smoked with the spent energies morphing it. The black cape was gone and a pair of huge, purple, ruby-horned, dragon-like wings with red membranes and black scales was now on his back. His fingers, previously left out in the open, were now encased inside threatening silver-colored, sharp claws that were sectioned at the finger joints for maximum flexibility. The red ornaments, including the red monster jaw on the chest, on the entire purple Surplice were now edgier and more violent in their patterns. His forearm caps now extended into pointy elbow guards and were reinforced by secondary bicep guards while his old set of double shoulder padding now added a sharp, third armament over it with high-pointing tips. Finally, his headpiece horns, formerly resembling the thin dragon horns of the legendary Bronze Saint, had engrossed and enlarged into segmented ram horns pointing upwards like upside down Ps, incarnating a more biblical visage.

Lucifer slowly opened his red eyes and calmly looked up to the Gold Saints. Feeling the energy that the Daemon Surplice usually held back in its contained form to generate his eternal youth now coursing through his body, Lucifer opened and closed his fists repeatedly, now aging like a normal human would for the first time since his fight with Minos and Aiacos. He allowed the Gold Saints to relish in the sight of the true form of his Surplice.

The Gold Saints, even Shaka, just stood in shock, having never seen anything like this. They were no longer simply battling the Celestial Star of Pride, but the one who, in his quest to compete with his rival, violated his Surplice's limiters and unlocked the power which slayed the Godslayer.

The Arch Devil of Despair was there, before them.

And he would kill them all…

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Chapter End

{======================/Ξ\.◊./Ξ\\======================}

Next Chapter: Chapter 64 – Episode 26 – The Archdevil of Despair

Description: Victory seemed assured over the Specter leader, but Daemon Lucifer has unleashed the true form of his Surplice and now the tide of the battle reverses once again. In the meantime, Saga and Aiolos run into trouble as well against the remaining False Specter elites.

Deadline: October 25th

Author's Notes:

This chapter took a while to write and it underwent a LOT of fidgeting and scene transplanting. I must have taken 21 work days to get through it and spent at least 5 of those just on editing. This is what happens when you have a chapter dealing with two characters you haven't mastered yet at a stage of the Arc where everything needs to be tight and concise; you end up touching and retouching every single dialogue line over and over and before you know it, you have 33k words written that need to be sparse out between this chapter and the next one.

This is because Adriana is just one of those characters that have to be constantly fine-tuned as I'm writing her, since I have to walk the line between making her background believable while also making her relatable. If you're wondering why I go through the trouble, then, I'll have you know I used to have the exact same issues with Cerah, believe it or not, and now she's one of my most balanced characters. As for Milo… I will admit, I've had worse opinions of him in the past (nowadays I consider Camus to be the worst Gold Saint character, fight me on this) but writing a child fighting an adult and winning is still challenging, come on. With Aldebaran we can at least all still pretend he's not really a kid…

Today we return to our False Specter etymology gimmick, since three of them die in this chapter alone; I've already spoken of Ainsel before, so I'll focus on the other two.

The first is Treble, and this one is easy to explain… it's a audio/Megaman pun. Yup, simple as that. The actual Golem Specter is called Rock, and even though Deadly Beetle Stand is the one that Kurumada actually named after music, when I hear someone called Rock, I automatically think of the Megaman series, as it's the name of the main character (in turn, also a deliberate music pun by Capcom). Owe the choice to me being a fan of "Bob and George" for so many years. Looking back, I should have named this False Specter Golem Forte. Would have been a nicer pun, as Bass is Megaman's actual 'false counterpart', but at the time it felt too tough for the odd Megaman-savvy reader to abstract themselves from.

Then we got Grendel, and as for him I had to actually find my old notes and I believe I named him after a troll creature in "Beowulf". This is because Troll Ivan by Kurumada was just a big joke of a character meant to be immediately wrecked by Hyoga or whatever so I decided to put around the same level of thought in it, since I always intended him to be a minor False Specter. Hell, Guilty gets more mileage off killing his unnamed grunts.

ANYWAY, please make sure to share the story, review it, like it on Twitter/Tumblr and generally support this project if you enjoy it. I've recently passed 25000 hits, which is nuts for a Saint Seiya OC story and I'm happy, but in the grand scheme of fanfics this isn't all that impressive so please don't stop giving feedback, especially at this stage where the story is escalating and the hard work is only increasing.

Also, make sure to check out the Saint Seiya Reddit Discord server, where I'm currently one of the co-admins. Other writers like Jenny DeVic also can be found in it. You can hang out with the rest of the English-speaking SS community and we host several weekly events, like episode streams, games and now a whole new Horror Movie Night themed after the Underworld.