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.

71. SS2: The Curse of Hatred - Part 5 of 6

Notable OCs: Pegasus Lance's Saint Generation, Civil War Saint Generation, World War Saint Generation, Daemon Lucifer's Specters, Maidens of Sanctuary, Priam's Black Saints;;

Notable Original Concepts: Mount Olympus Training Ground, Sanctuary Court, Teos Cloth, Athenian Empire mythology, Isle of Gardens, Stardust Prison, Hades' Dark Princes; Desert Beyond, (Cyrulian) Knights of the Zodiac; Sanctuary Town Layout & Buildings; Kido Mount; Death Queen Island's Geography;

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

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

Author Notes:

-This chapter was betaread by Zebulon_Wallace;

-Reminder that I've published a map of Death Queen Island as companion material for the storyline. I've added link in my profile this morning, but the site is sometimes iffy with them depending to where they connect (in this case, DeviantArt);

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Trigger Warning!

While the story will retain its T rating because nothing is graphically shown, beware that this chapter contains some particularly violent scenes and dark themes, particularly in the early-to-middle section of it in the Phoenix Shrine.

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Death Queen Island

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Marching through the shadowy mirk of warm darkness, Pegasus Lance found himself in a daze once more, surrounded by encroaching fires. Following him close by was Pegasus itself, shining like a bright white star, which kept its wing over him protectively, lest its owner trip and fall. The Saint's red eyes looked up to see the figure from his dreams again, this time standing at a distance, as if wary of the winged horse.

"March on, Lance. We need to leave this place." Pegasus urged, keeping an eye on the woman stalking them with her masked gaze.

The Saint couldn't comprehend what was being said in a rational manner, feeling a dense fog in his brain that hampered his thoughts. He kept making impulsive decisions based on basic stimulus, pushing onward by the sheer drive of the constellation's encouragement. "I don't…. where am I?"

The fires kept slowly encroaching around the two. Unless a way out was found, they would soon burn up. "Hold on to me… and keep moving. Please."

Lance nodded, barely processing the words.

"Thief." The masked, orange-haired woman hissed in the dark.

The winged horse neighed nervously and closed its wing tighter around Lance. There had to be a light out of the dark somewhere.

"Thief!" she repeated, tenser, taking a step towards that seemed to transcend their apparent distance. No matter how much the two moved, she didn't seem to get any further away. Her clothes slowly coated themselves in orange flames while her fingers seemed to grow a scaled texture and denser, darker nails, like a bird. "Pilferer of souls!"

Pegasus saw Lance squirm in his march at the sound of the evil voice and hurried him up with a neigh and a push of its wing. "Don't stop! We have to leave, before-"

"HE'S MINE!" she suddenly shrieked, taking another step before fully morphing into the firebird and launched herself at them.

Pegasus and Lance screamed as her claws caught him by the shoulders, burning him. The flames swallowed him in the dark entirely and his body burned horribly at the touch, tearing him down to his bones!

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"Saint Lance!"

The bronze saint gasped awake, sweating bullets and grabbing the hands on his shoulders in fear like she had been the figure in his nightmare, startling the person. They both relaxed as the Saint realized where he was. "It's… you."

Nina backed away shily. "You… looked like you were having another nightmare."

Lance looked around. He was back in the cavernous cabin. He felt like asking what time was it, but he remembered that Nina couldn't tell. He slowly stood up, but his body felt groggy, like he hadn't slept in weeks.

Nina noticed his shaking. "A-Are you okay? This island… takes its toll on visitors. When Guifi first came, he had similar sleep problems. It's okay if…"

"Yes, I'm fine." he lied.

The girl frowned skeptically, but she hesitated to press on it, knowing by now that, unlike Guifi, the Pegasus was touchy about admitting weakness to her. "Saint Lance, if you don't mind me asking….is it true?"

Collecting himself and putting his armor pieces back on, Lance eyed her. "What are you asking?"

The black-haired, battered girl gulped anxiously and looked at him hopefully. "Did you and Guifi… talk? About what to do?"

Putting on his horse-helmet in half a daze, Lance felt her words triggering the memories of the previous night, from his discussion with Guifi, to their fight with the Black Saints, to their arrangement. Her blue eyes kept staring expectantly.

"Yeah, we did." He confessed. "Today I'm taking you with me out of this island. To Sanctuary."

She gasped deeply, as if she didn't really expect what Guifi told her to be true. "Oh! You WILL? I…I mean…" Nina scurried around in place, having no idea how to physically process the thought of being outside Death Queen Island, to the point that she seemed to just freeze in place and tears formed in her eyes. "S-Saint Lance, thank you!"

The Saint felt awkward and shook his hand. "Look, don't do that. I really don't like-"

The scarred girl embraced him tightly and wept of joy. "Thank you! T-thank you, thank you, t-thank you! Goddess bless you so much!"

The Saint gently pushed her off, red as a pepper. "O-Okay, that's enough! Go hug your boyfriend instead! God fucking knows you might not see him after today!" he shouted, frenzied at the emotive contact. He saw her stunned look, but Nina seemed to relax, realizing he still had boundaries. It was then that the Pegasus Saint looked around and noticed the cabinet was empty. "Speaking of which, where the hell is Guifi? We haven't worked out every detail yet."

She clasped hands humbly. "Father took him this morning to the Burning Swamps. He said they'd be back soo-"

Lance's eyes widened in horror. "WHAT?!"

She gasped. "I-It's morning practice! Father said he was getting Guifi ready for the attack on Jangotown and they had to settle something. He said not to wake you up because you looked tir-"

"SHIT!" Lance cursed, rushing out the door. As soon as he was out, his armored body burned white cosmos and sonic-boomed towards the Swamps. "FUCK, he's gonna kill him!"

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The Burning Swamps

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The island roared, shaking and expelling fire out of its mountains down on the eastern plains. Today would be a bloody day.

The Master's dark, leathery fists pummeled on Guifi's body mercilessly, clad in auras of orange fire. "Do you feel it yet?! The hatred you deserve?!"

Guifi screamed, feeling his blood splatter with every painful blow and burning his cosmos as much as he could to survive. His head could barely think, every thought cut short by another punch in the stomach or face, much less muster the ability to respond.

"Do you see it yet?! How much your disgusting existence is worth now?!" the master hissed, landing a rising punch to the gut that made Guifi gasp blood out. He socked the boy down and kicked him on the ground brutally, aiming to break bones. "The very sight of you makes my fists burn in anger! How about you?! Do you hate me?! THEN HIT ME! OR YOU'LL DIE LIKE THE WOMANLY MUTT YOU ARE!"

Bashed against the dark ground and kicked on over and over, the student screamed in pain, feeling like the very frame of his body was breaking under the violence he was subjected to. With a final, brutal kick to the crotch, his whole body was tossed up into the air and landed rolling by the edge of one of the Burning Swamps' countless lava pits.

Bleeding and coughing, Guifi's felt the marks of the blows sting on him like branding irons, bruising his muscles. His shaking red eyes saw the lava of the pit below him and, for a brief moment, the thought occurred him to take the final leap.

Anything to escape this. Anything!

A knee crashed painfully on his downed body, pinning him and making him scream. The Master's cruel, blood-streaked hand grabbed him by the ankle harshly and dragged him away from the pits. "We're not done, Guifi…You don't get to flee like everyone else."

The boy's fingers carved bloody furrows on the basalt ground, leaving desperate bloody trails.

"Because you… are the worst fucking thing on this entire island! Aren't you?" the Master hissed, dragging him on. He pulled the ankle more harshly, flinging the boy through the air to crash him against a boulder, cracking it. "Tell me, Guifi… do you love me?"

Breathing with difficulty, Guifi barely believed he heard these words. "M-Master?"

"You must love me. I've been so kind to you, after all." The orange-hooded man mused, chuckling. "Like a father you never had."

Guifi shook in disbelief. "You fucking insane bastard!"

"Who else on this earth would care for you? Not Sanctuary, that's for sure. Not any of its other Masters… I'm the only soul loving enough to try to make you a Saint, even though you're such a deplorable little shit." He continued. "Yet, you don't love me like you should. Honestly, what does my daughter see in you?"

"She's NOT your daughter!" Guifi screamed on the inside.

"I suppose she can't help it. She's such a kind little girl." More chuckling was heard from the mouth inside the hood's darkness. "Even after everything you've done to her."

Guifi's eyes teared up, his body tensing in anger.

"And how much you enjoyed it…" the master teased.

The tears rolled down his face and Guifi's fists closed, trembling.

"And how much you'd love doing it again." The Master finalized, smiling ear to ear. "Wouldn't you, Guifi?!"

A threatening brim of orange cosmos lit up around Guifi as his face twisted into a hateful scowl, his senses all focused on making this man pay for what he said! The master stepped back and laid out arms expectantly, inviting him to attack. Guifi's body burned like a furnace and he launched at the Master with a battlecry, reaching the speed of sound.

Such was his fury that he didn't catch the Master's dark hand closing and swinging down towards the side of his neck!

A thunderous sound of cosmos impacting cosmos echoed throughout the Swamps, making the craters shake, and Guifi screamed, bashed back by the shockwave. The master's eyes widened at the sight of a scowling Pegasus having caught his fist by the wrist. "STOP IT!"

Cooling down, Guifi gasped. "L-Lance!"

The Pegasus Saint shoved the Master off with a growl. "Guifi, get out of here NOW!"

The Master stepped away in appeasement, seeing the blood in hand from the friction with Lance's gauntlet. "Ha, ha, ha…Here to join the lesson, Pegasus? I'm happy to rewind them to students who oversleep!"

The bronze saint brimmed white with furious cosmos, ready to kill the bastard. "I've had enough of you and your sick jokes! Let's see how you like when you get pummeled like a do-"

Guifi suddenly grabbed and pulled him back. "No, STOP IT, Lance! It's… it's not what you think!" he assured. "It was just a lesson… Master was getting me warmed up for today's final assault."

The Pegasus was stunned, but the battered, bleeding Guifi was giving him no indication of this being a lie. "What?! That was a warm-up?! Look at you! I thought-"

But he stopped himself, knowing it was important not to give Guifi's teacher any hints of what they had planned the previous night.

Guifi turned to the Master and bowed humbly. "P-Please forgive my friend, Master… He worries for me."

"Yes, more than a cockroach like you deserves, Guifi." His gravelly voice hissed, walking past them. He stopped by Lance and eyed him. "As for you… It's your last day in our lovely Training Ground, isn't it, Pegasus? Tell me, are you anxious to visit Jangotown?"

While the situation was not what he assumed when Nina said Guifi got dragged out, Lance still didn't lower his guard in the face of this bastard's falsely kind tone. "If you mean I'm looking forward to wiping out the Black Saints and go on my way, yes."

"How cruel. I thought you were adoring it here. As Death Queen Island's Master, I work very diligently to make sure the island… lives up to its fame. I suppose I'll have to work extra hard to make your last day here unforgettable."

"The only way you could do that is if you gave me an excuse to punch your teeth in." Lance thought, trying to keep his promise to Guifi in mind.

As if sensing this in him, the Master leaned his face in, to the point his scarred chin became visible in the otherwise shadowy hood, and smirked. The Pegasus Saint irked in disgust, feeling his nostrils invaded by the insufferable mix of blood, sulfur and rot in the man's breath.

"You know, Pegasus… I can see it in your eyes that you'd make an excellent student. I sense a black murk inside you not unlike Guifi's that could be fashioned into a powerful blade under the proper… hammering. It's a shame you already have your armor. Then again… I think I'd be willing to spend the extra years ripping that Pegasus stench off of you. I'm very kind like that, you see?"

Guifi shook his head, gesturing at Lance not to respond, which his friend didn't.

Yet, the master continued. "Tell me, Pegasus… what's the worst thing you've done in your life? I'm curious."

This caught the Bronze Saint by surprise. Even if a chunk of the most traumatic moments of Lance's life wasn't locked behind a memory seal though, he wouldn't answer this freak. "None of your fucking business!"

The rejection only seemed to amuse the hooded man, though. "Oh,… That bad, uh? Mm, mm, mm. Whatever it was, though, Pegasus… I assure you; you can do worse. Like Guifi here." He provoked, making the student shake tensely. "He thought he was better than the Black Saints, too, but now he knows he's a guilty little freak, far worse than any of them! That's the biggest lesson the Goddess has to bless us with through this Training Ground."

The island shook with volcanic tremors, punctuating the outrage that then became stamped on Lance's face. "Lesson?!"

The Master laid out his harms. "You could become great on Death Queen Island, Pegasus…It teaches you how honest you can be with yourself in this world. How much you can hate, even when you wouldn't dream to do so… How much evil you could do if you were just given the right choice to make."

Lance sneered, feeling the story Guifi told him last night ringing in his head. "Is that what you were doing to Guifi just now?! Trying to turn him into a psycho like you?!"

"Lance's, don't!" Guifi demanded.

"You stay the fuck away from me AND him!... Or I will kill you!" Lance threatened the hooded man, shaking in restrained anger. Promise or no promise to help Guifi, these sentiments were still true. "Then we'll see how much your stupid Goddess Athena blesses you when you're screaming down in hell!"

The Master recoiled his hooded head in confused silence. He then seemed to 'oh' in realization and burst into loud laughter, startling the two of them.

Lance growled. "You think this is funny?!"

Slowly calming his laughter, the Master shook his head in lament. "How wonderful… you're an even blanker canvas than I thought, aren't you? I can't stop thinking about what kind of masterpiece I'd paint on you….Maybe something with lots of red in it. If only we had the time. GUIFI!"

The student shily raised his head. "Yes, Master?"

"We'll continue the warm up twenty minutes from now by the shrine. My advice to you, though? Be early. I have… special training prepared for you today." And he then marched to the northeast, heading for the far-off building housing the Phoenix Cloth.

Lance shook in anger and waited until the bastard was far enough to address the student. "That's the guy your girlfriend wants you to save?! A victim?! Is Nina stupi-"

Guifi immediately socked his chest. "Don't you fucking badmouth her! What the hell is wrong with you, anyway?! Stopping our training and talking back to him like that?! Do you want him to know what's going on?!"

"I thought he already did when Nina told me you got dragged out!" Lance defended himself, rubbing the spot Guifi hit. "But that was training?! He was going to beat you to death!"

Guifi rose his chin superiorly, despite his many bruises. "Now you know what I've lived with every day for the past two years. Anyway… let's head back for now. I want to see Nina one last time before you take her."

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Back at the cabin by the volcano's feet, Lance leaned back against the rock wall and tapped his finger on the arm it folded on impatiently while Guifi and Nina spoke their goodbyes nearby. The temperatures were rising steadily, hinting that midday was approaching, and for some reason the volcanic tremors only seemed to be getting worse. The Queen's Mouth and Mount Lemuria kept belching fire into the skies even higher than the previous two days and the dark soot in the air only seemed to be getting thicker.

"It's like the whole fucking island is in a bad mood." The Saint bitched to himself. He turned and saw the two lovebirds leaning their foreheads together in silence like there wasn't a fucking death clock over their heads. "Hey, hurry up! Your teacher is waiting for you, remember?! And my boat is probably already nearby!"

They snapped out of their trance and Nina bowed head. "I'm sorry."

"Wait, let's review the plan." Guifi insisted. "Nina, what will you be doing?"

The black-haired girl clasped hands. "I'll… go with Saint Lance and guide him back through the Changing Fields so he won't get lost."

The way she put it made Lance cringe like an embarrassed child, but it was just the truth with the way that terrain was like. "Is it really okay to take the same route back? What if we get spotted?"

Guifi shook his head. "The only other route is following the coastline down to Jumper's Cove, at the south end of the Phobos peaks, and then back up towards the beach, but it's much longer and riskier."

The Saint shuddered at the thought of why there was a place called Jumper's Cove on the island, but wasn't terribly shocked at this point.

Guifi pointed at him. "Your turn."

Lance unfolded arms. "I'll escort Nina to the beach and help her get on board the Trinity. After that I'll turn back and strike Jangotown."

This last part made Guifi scratch his head pensively. "Even though you now know its Black Saints don't stay dead?"

Lance shook his head. "It doesn't matter. There could be survivors from that cruise ship still in Jangotown. It's my duty as a Saint to at least check. Besides, I'm not convinced they won't try something while you're confronting your teacher."

Guifi looked away reflectively, as if he hadn't considered this. "Good point."

At this point, Nina had to voice her concern. "Guifi… are you really going to fight Father?"

He held her small hands to calm her. "Nina, I have to…It's the only way to… save him and get the Cloth."

Lance scoffed skeptically. Even if he still didn't find the notion of that guy's salvation absolutely nauseating, he had his doubts about the intelligence of Guifi's intentions. "Really? Cause based on that training session just now, you don't look like you stand much of a chance!"

But Guifi shook his head. "I'm much stronger than he thinks I am. I always hold back in training. It's why I haven't fallen yet, remember?"

But Lance practically growled at such optimism. "You better be damn sure, because I am NOT coming back to save you, understand?!"

"I also know his weakness." Guifi revealed, getting Lance's attention. "He's got scars on his body similar to mine. They're all on his star points. He's not wearing a Cloth, so striking them will let me stun his cosmos."

Lance held hand in hip, suddenly feeling vulnerable about whatever his Pegasus points might be. "…I didn't realize that was a thing."

Guifi could always count on Lance being ignorant about common Sanctuary facts. He showed off his own. "To be fair, I only realized it cause of the pain he made me feel when he did… this to me."

The Pegasus Saint groaned, trying not to think about it. He still wanted to kill the guy just because of this particular story being referenced. Perhaps, though, this was why Guifi was better suited to do it, since he seemed used to by now to suppress how much he hated the man.

"Fine, I'll be heading to those Changing Fields, then." Lance warned, heading out towards the terrain climb. "Once you're done getting the armor, come to the beach too. By that point I'll likely be done with the Black Saints."

Nina looked away and rubbed her scarred arm.

Guifi saw it and frowned sadly. "What is it?"

Nina tried to smile but her lips quivered nervously. "I'm scared. I…I'm just so nervous of what's out there. And what will happen to you while I'm gone. I… don't want to leave you." she revealed. Her shoulders then started shaking and her eyes were growing humid. "I walked to the bluffs to look at the ocean so many times and it feels so…strange that you're taking me away from here."

Guilty sat beside her. Nina lived on Death Queen Island all her life, so, in her mind, the world on the other side of the Pacific didn't exist. She probably couldn't fit inside her head that there was anything beyond that horrible world of theirs, much less that they were actually leaving it. He held her close to him. "Don't worry. You'll be okay in Sanctuary."

But her eyes teared and she held him, rubbing her forehead into his chest. "G-Guifi, I don't want to leave you. I don't want you to g-get hurt."

The trainee's heart broke and his eyes welled up. How still could she care for him this much, after all he's done? "It's only for a while. I'll be there in Sanctuary with you, as the Phoenix Saint. Then, no matter what happens and no matter how scared you get, I'll protect you." He closed his eyes and tightened his arms around her. "I love you, Nina, and I won't let anything bad happen to you ever again!"

She rested her head against his scarred skin. "Thank you."

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Meanwhile,

Southeastern Waters

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The third day of the Trinity's patrol around Death Queen Island waters was as gloom and foreboding as the previous two; the sun was hidden behind vast expanses of volcanic clouds and temperatures climbing back up to heights unseen anywhere else on Earth. Nevertheless, the boat was fulfilling its duty, making a second stop close to the cursed island as arranged with Pegasus Lance to pick up the Bronze Saint.

However, this time, it carried a new passenger.

"So that's Death Queen Island. What a ghastly looking place." The purple-armored Compass Bronze Saint Nova commented to the captain, seeing the huge eruption geysers from the volcanoes. "Thank you for bringing me here on such short notice."

The aged captain lit a cigarette and shook head dismissively. "Normally I wouldn't do it, Saint Compass. It just so happens we arranged with Pegasus to come here anyway."

Compass Nova wiped the sweat off his brown curls. He was starting to regret having accepted Nam's request to reinforce the mission. "It's already so hot and we're still more than a mile off the coast… I wonder how much worse it is on the beach."

"You'll have to find out yourself. We're not getting any closer." The captain warned. "Anything within a kilometer will put us in range of a Black Saint's Mach 1 sweep. You should have seen what they did to a cruise that passed here recently."

The Bronze Saint gulped, picturing hundreds of innocent people on vacation getting picked off by bloodthirsty Black Saints. He then noticed something weird about their approach point. "I noticed you took a deliberate curve around the island. Is there a reason why we're entering through the southwest?"

The captain pointed to far off waters around both the northern and western coastlines. "See those shores?"

Compass's keen senses detected a murky color in their water. "Yeah?"

The captain took a cigarette puff. "Fucking poisonous as shit, just like Andromeda Island. It smells like chlorine when you get near, eats through the boat's paint and my brother nearly died from eating fish caught there. Sanctuary geeks say that lava from those three big volcanoes enters the water in those spots but instead of turning into rock it just dissolves into… some kind of corrosive filth. I've seen people jumping off the island and end up floating all rotten… Trust us, the southeast beach is the only safe swim route. It's where we left Pegasus."

Nova shivered and nodded understandingly. He then tried to scope out the island by sensing the cosmos, but even with the heightened senses that his particular Bronze Cloth provided him, he couldn't feel anything past a thick black mist surrounding the shoreline air.

He looked north, saw Fire Mountain spewing big black clouds into the sky, held out his hand and saw tiny specks of shiny dust land on his palm along with the black ash. "Blasted stardust… Those clouds aren't just soot, after all. I have no choice. I'll have to slowly approach the place to avoid the Black Saints and then try to find Pegasus once I'm inside the island. He'd better be somewhere close…"

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Meanwhile,

Death Queen Island,

The Changing Fields

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The ever-shifting topography of the southeastern plains was still just as treacherous, shadowy and hard to cross as Lance last left it, when he first crossed through the island. Marching ahead of Nina with his armor back in its box and with a light burning of white aura to protect her from the ever-moving debris, collapsing rocks and lava sprays, Lance paid attention to her indications.

She looked up and pointed in a counter-intuitive direction to their southwestern goal. "Left, Saint Lance."

The Pegasus Saint nodded and pushed a jagged boulder out of the way to reveal a fragile, curved path that would indeed take them more efficiently towards the mountain range pass. As they crossed it, he tried to find geographical pointers in the area, like the Black Scar peaks and the Queen Mouth's, but he realized immediately that the real problem was that if he paid too much attention to landmarks, the hot, morphing terrain would gently take him away from his intended direction without him realizing. Someone used to the island's deceits like Nina, therefore, was truly indispensable to making a safe way through the Changing Fields.

Fortunately, before too long, they managed to reach a stabler rise in the terrain that headed to the mountain pass.

Nina smiled in happiness. "We've made it across!"

By contrast, the Saint frowned nervously. "I won't relax until we reach that damn beach. Not with all those Black Saints skulking around and Guifi heading for a guillotine of a fight." and lead her up the pass. "Let's go. There's still a lot of ground to cover."

Nodding obediently, she crawled up the steep road along with him. Being lighter and of thinner fingers, she actually had an easier time than the armored Saint and kept up surprisingly well.

The island quaked immensely, though, offsetting their efforts and occasionally making them slip. "D-Damn it! What is going on?! It's like this place is trying to keep us here!" Lance thought. His body also felt heavier than normal, probably from his terrible sleep. He felt truly exasperated, however, when Nina began passing him by. "Nice, Lance. You got trained in a mountain and yet you're falling behind a starved girl up a hill road. What the fuck is the matter with you toda-"

Nina suddenly screamed when the terrain crumbled and she slipped down.

Lance's eyes snapped in alarm, his body burned cosmic energies and the Saint caught her in the air with a mighty jump of cosmos, before landing both of them further up.

Lance felt his heart beat fast at holding the girl so close to himself and set her down gently. "A-are you okay?"

She saw his face red and lowered head in shame. "Y-yeah.."

"Be careful, g-goddamn it! You could have made us both fall all the way down to a lava pit!"

Nina blinked, seeing no such thing at the depth they were climbing out of. Seeing his face still red, she wondered if the Saint upset that she put them at risk or… something else. "S-sorry. Thank you."

Helping Nina crawl up to the top of the terrain, where the path was flatter, the Saint groaned and shook his head. "I'm just keeping my word to your boyfriend."

She paused in realization, though, and smiled warmly. Underneath all that scary, angry demeanor, the Pegasus Saint had a warm heart. She now understood why Guifi and him became friends. "I see."

Brushing the situation off, the Saint went on ahead, breaking through terrain with cosmos to speed their path. Normally in a situation like this he wouldn't announce his presence with cosmos like a damn lighthouse, but it was fine to do so because Guifi's Master thought Lance was making his way to go slaughter the bastards at Jangotown, rather than take Nina out of the island.

Before long, they reached the height of the pass and found themselves at the show of the Black Scar and the Queen's Mouth. From that spot, they could both look back on Guifi's Training Ground and see the Beach of Black Sands ahead, where he first stepped on the island. Heightening his senses and shadowing his eyes with his hand, he could spot a distant object in the sea.

"It's the Trinity, the boat I came in." he realized, turning to Nina. "That's the boat that will take you out of here… Hey, what's wrong now?"

The girl seemed stuck in place all of a sudden, looking back and forth anxiously between the two areas divided by the cliff pass they stood on, as if standing at a crossroad. "I'm… fine. It's just…I'm just now realizing what's happening to me. I've been here for so long that… it doesn't seem real."

Again, with this? "You're going to get to leave this fucking place, is what. Do you have any idea how I'd kill to leave Olympus?"

She looked up curiously. "Why didn't you?"

"They had a damn abyss blocking the way down and you could only activate the bridge with a Cloth Box. Speaking of which-" Lance set his Cloth Box down and started putting his armor pieces back on, tense as a rod and feeling quite exposed up there. "- From here onward stick extra close to me. The more we leave your Dad's vicinity, the bolder those Black Saint bastards will get."

Watching him put on his pieces, Nina swooned, dreaming of her own knight. "I wonder how Guifi will look with Phoenix…"

Lance now only had his helmet left, which he stared at. "Not as fucking goofy as I do with this horse mask on my head, I bet. If Black Phoenix was anything to judge by, Guifi will look pretty damn cool compared to me."

She felt her breath tighten. "Do you think… he'll hurt Father?"

"Ah, I'd do a lot more than just hurt him." He wanted to say, but deep down he knew the truth was different. "No. Your 'dad' wants him to be violent, and if there's one thing I know about Guifi is that he hates playing into bullies' sick games. It's… what he taught me actually. To stick up for myself."

Nina clasped her hand. "Could you do me a favor? Could you just… sense where he is right now? So I'll know he's still okay before we leave?"

Lance didn't really want to be distracted from what they had to do, but he agreed with a nod. He turned his eyes northeast, to where Guifi was heading, and expanded his locked 7th sense to search for his signature. His cosmos' eye surveyed the Swamps, looking for that pile of Fire Cosmos with hidden explosive tendencies he knew so well, and slowly searched more and more in the direction of the Shrine, where he knew Guifi was ultimately headed towards.

He groaned in frustration, though, scoping almost all the way up to the Phoenix Cloth's resting place yet not finding it. "It's no good. I think Guifi his keeping his cosmos hidden, probably to avoid falling into some trick from your dad."

She sighed. "I see, that's alright. I can just pray for hi-" but she then saw the Saint suddenly tense up and irk, his red eyes suddenly locking on something. "Saint Pegasus? What's wrong? Did you find him?"

No, he didn't.

But something found him.

And Death Queen Island shook even more, expelling enormous beams of fire out of the Queen's Mouth.

Feeling his body stiffing like a jolt of electricity suddenly coursed through him, the Bronze Saint's senses all locked on the far-off Shrine, feeling a burning energy intensely link back with him across all those kilometers. Like a twisted version of meeting the gaze of someone you fall in love with at first sight, Pegasus Lance found himself, in a cosmic sense, suddenly looked back on by a horrifying glare from an otherwise dead building, as if a burning spirit filled it with intent overnight.

His body trembled and his legs grew weaker. Reason evaporated from his brain. Much like in his dreams, he felt paralyzed, invaded by screams of tortured souls, surrounded by a ring of fire that wasn't truly there!

Nina gasped, seeing the Saint collapse unto his hands. "S-Saint Lance!"

{======================|SSII|======================}

The Phoenix Shrine

{======================|SSII|======================}

Marching tensely through the path to the Cloth's resting place, Guifi's heart pounded in his chest, feeling his destiny withing reach. He could already see the Master standing there, with his eternal orange hood, his back turned, and though his body was bruised and bleeding, his fists closed tensely, burning with a force that was ready for the most important battle of his life.

There was no turning back now. Today, the cry of the Phoenix would be heard.

With the island shaking more and more and fire raining from the sky, Guifi reached the Shrine's dueling ground. "I'm here, Master."

The man did not react, simply staring at the shrine like a statue, much like the almost seven hundred vigils he stood every night at the cabin, robbing Guifi and Nina of any fantasy of escape or freedom.

The Chamorro boy hesitated, unsure how to begin. He had dreamed of this so many times and now he was stumped. What could he possibly say that captured how much he absolutely hated this man and wanted to see him destroyed, now that he finally had a chance to be honest? To talk about wanting to hurt or kill him didn't do it justice.

Taking comfort in the thought that Nina was safely with Lance, a Saint capable of defeating enormous groups of Black Saints, he voiced two years of resentment out as simply as he could. "Master… I've come to challenge you!"

The man did not respond. The island tremored and the Burning Swamps geysered lava behind Guifi, but no answer came from the Master.

So Guifi took another step. "Did you hear me?! I'm here to END my training!" he then burned cosmos in his finger and slashed blood out of his arm, causing it to drip on the Shrine's duel ground to form a boundary. "Today, my living hell on this island ends! You will be the last person I'll be made to fight in the Blood Ring! And in the name of the souls of all the innocent people you've had me kill… of all the people you've made me hurt…. I will destroy you! And save your soul from your own sadistic existence!"

But no matter how loud or passionately Guifi spoke, the Master would not react.

It began to infuriate the student. "Won't you even look at me?! ANSWER ME!" he screamed. "YOU, who've tortured your daughter, who've twisted souls, who've allowed those murderous Black Saints to continue to exist!... If you don't answer to my challenge -" and Guifi's aura exploded into a fiery blaze as he waved his hands to shape the stars of the Phoenix, triggering a cry in the cosmos. "THEN I'LL HAVE YOU ANSWER FOR YOUR CRIMES!"

And with a battlecry carrying in it the pain and horrors of one hundred weeks in Death Queen Island, the weight of numberless innocent he was forced to pummel and choke, Guifi Taitano shot towards the Master like a blazing cannon ball, swinging a meteoric fist of fire! Before he even realized it, the student punctured the cursed orange hood, striking through flesh and splashing blood everywhere.

Guifi felt his fist poking out the other hand, caked in blood.

A moment he could not believe… he had actually killed Master?!

Yet, his red eyes widened in horror as the force of the blow he delivered made the hood collapse, revealing a familiar face of blue mane.

Guifi retracted his fist, making the mere scarecrow he struck fall to the ground. "…B-Black Phoenix?! Why is Master's hood on him?! But then -" And absolute horror made him turn with a gasp. "NO! N-NINA!"

His foot screeched, though, and Guifi gasped, finding himself standing before numerous shadows in black armor climbing out of the boulders around the shrine and surrounding him!

Hydra.

Bear.

Unicorn.

Wolf.

Even Andromeda, Cygnus and Dragon, which Lance had killed.

They all collectively laughed and pointed their palms, charging balls of dark blue cosmos in them. The last thing Guifi saw before they fired was a blinding shine of black light converging on him that blasted him simultaneously, swallowing him up in an explosion of cosmos that made him scream!

{======================|SSII|======================}

"S-Saint Lance! What's happening to you?!" Nina gasped, trying to hold him up.

But as if her touch was made of fire, Lance screamed louder, feeling the same horrors of his dreams suddenly invade him in full force at a completely conscious state. The Queen's Mouth expelled a gigantic amount of lava, creating whole new streams of fire, and the island shook harder than ever before

Dropping the helmet to the ground, Lance struggled against the visions, even though it felt like a nail of fire had just punctured his forehead. His Pegasus Cloth burned hot, scalding Nina off of him, but little-by-little the Saint picked himself back up.

She stepped back, holding her injured hand. "S-Saint Lance!"

"G-Guifi! He's…he's in d-danger!" the Pegasus realized, slowly getting a grip against the mental force trying to subdue him. He looked up to order her to run to the beach. "N-nina, you have to… Nina? What are you staring at?"

The girl covered her mouth, the blood seemingly drained from her face. "F-Father?!"

The affected Pegasus Saint froze, feeling a shadow over himself, and turned around as swiftly as he could, roaring and closing his fist for a swing. Held down by the strange fiery force coursing through his nerves, though, the Saint was too slow to stop a powerful, dark hand chop from striking his exposed nape, sending another jolt through his entire body that robbed him of feeling.

The Saint collapsed on the floor. The last thing he saw before darkness covered his eyes was the Master, disarmed of his hood, stepping over him and Nina screaming, making a desperate attempt to run before the man's hands descended on her!

{======================|SS2|======================}

Chapter 71

Side Story 2

The Curse of Hatred – Part 5

The Cry of the Phoenix

{======================|SSII|======================}

Using a combination of cosmos and his expertise in stealth, Nova, the Bronze Saint of Compass, already wearing his armor of purple spikey plates, dashed across the surface of the water at the speed of sound, causing small bursts of foam to spray into the air in his trail, and eventually landing on the ash-covered beach of Death Queen Island.

Nervously looking around and burning his cosmos as discreetly as he could, he immediately dashed to the nearest cliff side to conceal himself and casted his technique. "Cardinal Net!"

The gems on his armor shined and a sphere of red grids visible to his eyes alone was cast out by his cosmos aura, mapping the geography around him in his mind's eye and finding the best directional paths. This technique would allow him to understand details of barriers and paths in his area, something that merely sensing the cosmos would not suffice for. The island, however, denied him more than a few mere kilometers of scoping, most of the analyzed space confined by the terrifying mountains surrounding the beach.

The cause was understood immediately, making him sweat in heat and fear. "Damn it! The sky is littered with stardust! Those volcanoes must be shooting a whole Cloth's worth of it into the air! How am I supposed to find Pegasus?!" Just as he was about to go try his luck, though, Cardinal Net detected a slope into a mountain pass further ahead, mapping it in his mind. "I'll try that way. Goddess Athena, please just don't let me run into that hooded freak! I'll clean your statue for a month, mop the Coliseum, even be the first to step into Hades' Castle in the war, if I can just find Pegasus without running into him."

With a self-soothing gulp, the Bronze Saint then dashed in supersonic zig-zags to the next spot. Then he did it again, getting ever closer to the beach's end. Then he repeated this routine, going from shadow to shadow, until he entered the inner areas of the mountain enclosure depth and, as soon as he was reasonably sure no one was around to attack him, much less the Master of Death Queen Island, took one mighty dash straight into the path climb he saw ahead, between the cliff ranges.

As he did so, the temperature climbed precipitously, going from fifty degrees at the beach well into the sixties, then past the seventies! An acid drizzle began to be felt, stinging his face, and the rumbling in the ground was growing from a soft purr to an audible tremor. Far up ahead, he could see the orange light of the feared Queen's Mouth flaring from behind the Black Scar peaks, surpassing even the wildest rumors he had heard about its ferocity, and vicious thunderstorms began to brew in the ash clouds, adding to the volcanic lighting of the otherwise dark island with their bright flashes

By the Gods, what was going on?! Was the island detonating?

As he reached the top of the mountain pass, he gasped at the sight of the fallen, armored teenager.

"OI! PEGASUS!" rushing over to the unconscious Bronze Saint, Nova turned him over and shook him. "Wake up, kid! What happened here?! Where's your helmet?!"

The unconscious Bronze Saint groaned, unable to gather his senses. It relieved Compass that he was still alive, just covered in ash, sweat and dried blood, but this bode poorly for their circumstances.

The pocket radio he brought with him, tied to his belt, began making static noise. "GSSH- in. GSSHH-is is Trinity, Compass! Please respond. Over."

Gently lowering Lance, Nova took the radio. "Trinity, it's me, Compass! I can barely hear you! I've found Saint Pegasus! Over."

"GSHH-llent! Bring him back, then! Over."

But the older Bronze Saint widened his eyes, seeing the mark of a blow in the back of Lance's neck. Someone took him out, recently too! Moreover, there were struggle marks nearby, specifically blood splatters and thin finger furrows on the ground heading down the northern descent, like someone with Pegasus was taken and forcibly dragged out of there.

Scurrying his eyes around looking for threats, Compass only saw the environment all around him getting worse and worse. The drizzle was slowly turning into acid rain, the volcanoes were roaring louder, the earth shaking more and the black clouds in the sky growing thicker. If that wasn't enough, Compass could feel in the Cosmos a terrifying energy filling the air, coming from the northeast, like a great infernal heat gathering from all over the island to a specific location.

He knew enough about Training Grounds to tell this was not normal. Even for Death Queen Island.

He thought his options over and hesitantly responded. "Hold on, Trinity! He's been knocked out! I think something bad is going on here! Over."

"Tha- GSSH-ing Death Queen Island! Horrible shit happens there every second of every day! You can ask Pegasus about it on the boat! Over!"

Compass growled. "Damn it, they don't understand! This feeling in the Cosmos…!" he hissed to himself. He couldn't expect innocent escorts like the captain and his helping hands to get this sort of thing, but his training taught Nova to not dismiss these signs, since they could lead into some kind of disastrous event.

Could he do it? Could he get to the bottom of this safely?

His duty as a Saint spoke high. "Trinity, I think this time it's different! There could be innocent people in danger! I'm going to try to awake Pegasus and understand the situation better! I'll stay in touch, over!"

While the radio complained some more about his folly, Compass Nova shut it off to conserve battery and stored it, knowing they would need the electronic help with the island jamming the 7th sense.

Then he turned to Lance, and the sight of the infamous Bronze Saint squirming in the ground made him want to curse Nam with all his might for talking Nova into this. Duty or not, Pegasus was still the guy who almost killed a Silver Saint over a personal dispute, making him little better than violent brutes. Needless to say it made it a bit harder to do the right thing, but Nova wasn't cruel, not to mention the Pegasus had vital hindsight on what was going on.

The sight of lights between the ash clouds caught his attention. At first he thought it was volcanic spew, but his eyes widened when he noticed their path and long trail of a series of bright lights coursing through the clouds.

"Are those… the late Phoenicids? It can't be! Their cycle ended weeks ago! And its daytime!" he reasoned with himself. He shook his head and laid hands over Pegasus to try to apply his Bronze-rank training equivalent of the Golden Touch, releasing balsamic waves of energy to try to heal the Saint out of whatever knocked him down. "Focus, Nova! You have to wake Pegasus up! And then get the hell off this damn island!"

{======================|SSII|======================}

The Phoenix Shrine

{======================|SSII|======================}

Red embers flew everywhere like petals of beautiful burning flowers blown into the wind. The sharp rocks surrounding the Phoenix Shrine were bright orange with the volcanic light reflected on them and the rocky ground before the building was carved up everywhere by swords, axes and spears of varying cruel shapes and serrated designs, all brought by the Black Saints of Jangotown. Brought by them as well were the last, chained survivors of the cruised ships they raided, pushed and kicked into the ground screaming and laying their trembling, shackled hands in pleas of mercy.

"H-HELP!"

"S-STOP! PLEASE, D-DON'T!"

"N-NOOO! P-PLEASE! I'VE D-DONE EVERYTHING YOU ASKED!"

But the screaming ones were simply shoved harder unto the center of the grounds. Silent as a grave, Black Lionet's clawed hand took the small, crying child off its mother's embrace, pushing her off. Then, against all her begs, the gladius dug deep and mercilessly into the small screaming body's chest before ripping downwards, butchering it like a fish, spraying blood everywhere and spilling a mess of small eviscerated organs on the floor, sending her into a sharp cry of utter anguish.

He tossed the small corpse aside. "Thirty-one…." The mother tossed herself at him in utter rage. He simply bashed her skull with the gladius' butt before Black Cygnus dragged her off to get quartered. "Thirty-two…."

It went on and on and on, one after the other, in various cruel ways, almost like procedural work. Captives were held up, many times in front of loved ones, held down or up, and one of the many weapons littering the shrine ground would be taken and used on them, all with no care for the mess it made. The black ground became increasingly caked with gore, pooling blood into small cracks and depressions.

The Saints, more animals in black armor than men, descended on them with metal and fingernails as each was laid out, ripping them apart and bathing the floor with their blood.

"MORE! BRING MORE!" Black Wolf demanded, tossing aside the body of a teenage boy he just ripped to shreds. "Honor the Goddess with their blood!"

Black Lionet held down some screaming woman and hacked her to pieces with a crude axe, breaking limb from torso until she shut up. He looked to see in disappointment that the numbers were dwindling "Eighty-four...We're running out!"

Dressed back in his orange hood after they disposed of Black Phoenix's wretched corpse, the Master folded arms. "I made it clear to you all… that we needed eighty-eight sacrifices!"

Black Hydra cackled. "Oh, Master, it's all Black Phoenix's fault!"

Black Andromeda laughed into his hand. "Yes, he wanted to toss them all at the Cloud to sabotage you and honor the Goddess all for himself! We had to convince him to stop and target your student again, we did. He must have sensed his end coming, now that a new Phoenix will ris-"

But the Black Saint was then silenced by the spine freezing glare of the Master's shadowed face. "I've received word recently that a new Andromeda Saint has been chosen in Sanctuary. You'll be next to meet his end if I'm missing a single piece of my gift to the Goddess!"

"Ah….I s-see…Bring the lovebirds!" Black Andromeda sang, raising a cup of blood at the sight of the two teenagers by Black Bear and Dragon. "They oughta bring us to eighty-six, at least."

Guifi screamed in distraught and struggled like a wolverine under the hands of Black Bear. "L-Let her go! YOU BASTARDS! MURDERERS! L-LET HER GO!"

Nina screamed, dragged violently by Unicorn to the center of the field. "G-GUIFI! HELP ME, PLEASE!"

"STOP IT! Let her GO or I'll KILL YOU ALL!" Guifi screeched, fighting so ferociously that Black Bear was starting to have trouble holding him down.

But the Master's dark foot slammed down on his head, pinning it on the ground. "Kill us?... You, Guifi? Don't make me laugh…You can't kill us. You're such a good person, after all, aren't you?"

"F-FATHER!" Nina screamed in despair as she was held down on the ground. "D-Don't hurt him, please!"

Guifi coughed, feeling his mouth pressed against the blood-soaked floor. "Y-you… you murderer! You're following the Black Saints?! Your enemies?! The people you call pretenders?! Even after everything… how c-could you?!"

The Black Saints laughed, accompanied by the rumbling of the island and the screams of the last few cruise survivors that Wolf and Lionet mutilated to death and tossed away.

"He doesn't know anything, does he?" Hydra mocked. "It's us who follow the Master now!"

"We follow the purest warrior on the island, who can win the Goddess' favor." Black Dragon taught, folding arms in lamentation. "Black Phoenix has shown he's not the one. He can rot in Hades."

Black Bear pressed his weight harder on Guifi, nearly crushing him, and smirked. "In this cycle, just as Haisaku in the last one, the Master will be the one to inherit the Phoenix, little boy."

"C-Cycle?! The G-Goddess?! You sick psychopaths!" Guifi hissed. It was just like when Lance broke that stupid statue; people in Sanctuary seemed to be willing to do the most insane and cruel things to make their idea of Athena happy. "YOU JUST WANT POWER! This has nothing to do with ATHENA! L-LET NINA GO!"

The Master shook his head. "Are you angry, Guifi? Sad that I'm doing this? But you must know this wouldn't be happening if you had listened to me."

The shock and outrage that became stamped on Guifi's face at these words was unprecedented. "W-What?!"

The Master rose a lecturing finger. "I tried everything I could to get you to see. If you had let yourself go and hated me with all your heart, let the fires of the island really burn you down to the bone… you'd be too strong for these cruel murderers, as you call them, to hold you down like this. But you think you're too good for it, don't you? A stubborn little pretend-pacifist you are, refusing to hate me…"

Guifi roared and struggled so hard that Dragon had to come and help Bear hold him down They squeezed his arms, but still he pushed and shoved. "I D-DO HATE YOU! WITH ALL MY FUCKING HEART! JUST LET US GO!" he demanded, the sight of Nina screaming and struggling making him go insane.

The Master only cackled.

So Guifi continued. "LET YOUR DAUGHTER GO! If she means ANYTHING TO YOU, then fight me in the blood ring, instead! I'll show you how much I hate you there!" Guifi begged. He only got more laughter, though. "You… Y-YOU MONSTER! What's SO FUNNY?!"

The Master now laughed so hard, holding gut, that his hood threatened to drop back. "You hate me, Guifi?! That's a good one! A stupid little shit like you, holding on to your soul as hard as you do, doesn't have a fucking clue what to truly hate someone is! But I will show you… Just before you die, I'll make you feel a hate so strong that you'd wish you could rip yourself out of your body! Only then you'll be ripe!"

Dreading whatever this sick fuck had in store next, Guifi relented his struggle. "What? What are you going to d-do?!"

The Master held out his arms in reverence to this glorious sight. "OH GODDESS! HEAR MY CALL!" he called, making the ash-filled skies thunder. The island's volcanoes then geysered like they never had before, sending every faucet of fire across the Burning Swamps ablaze like a great common celebration of fire that made the dark clouds appear orange. "I stand here, before your shrine, to wet your rotten altar awake with an offering of hatred! For decades I toiled in your island! For decades I dedicated my heart and body to forge those you've had me bring here into your perfect swords!"

The Black Lionet and Wolf pulled ropes on the ground. Totems with teethy masks carved on them buried beneath the ground to rose off the floor, surrounding the blood-flooded shrine grounds.

"G-GUIFI, RUN! P-please!" Nina begged, her cheeks drenched in tears.

The student's heart beat faster and faster, recognizing the totems. He was a sacrifice? "Y-you… you were planning this all along? From the moment you met me in Greece?!"

The master completely ignored him, instead bathing himself in the growing acid drizzle now dropping on them as the Swamps raged higher and higher with fire! "The TIME HAS COME, Goddess! I am ready to be Mara. Make me… your new Phoenix Saint! Dress me with your mask, and I will spend my life punishing this rotten world for all the sins it makes against you!"

Guifi's teeth gritted and his aura burned in pure outrage! The memories of the many cults he's seen around the island made by the victims of the Master and the Black Saints assaulted his mind, worshiping an unseen demon of legends. "Y-YOU… a MASK?! You're DOING THIS FOR A FUCKING CULT M-MASK?!"

The Master's arms lowered. "Soon, I'll have my name as the Goddess' Mara, Guifi. All thanks to you… I knew all the kindness I've given you over these two years would pay off. You know… for a moment, I really thought I'd have to replace you with Pegasus. That you were too strong for this. You almost had me convinced that when you whipped my daughter into a bloody pulp that I had merely caught you in an… exceptional moment."

"YOU M-MADE ME DO THAT!" Guifi screamed, his cosmos burning more and more, making Bear and Dragon grit teeth in effort to contain him.

The master's shoulders shook in amusement. "Nah-ah-ah… that was your choice. Your surrender, Guifi. My daughter had to suffer under your lash… because you couldn't take another one yourself. Aren't you ashamed?" He twisted. "And last night, when the Goddess told me all about your devious fucking schemes with Pegasus,…. I knew for sure that all this time you've been nothing than a hateful, guilty little fuck who would DARE raise a hand at the teacher who tried so lovingly to make him a Saint. You even tried to steal my daughter…"

The student shook in anger and felt tears rolling out his eyes. "She's NOT your daughter! You're just a brute who enslaved her! Who tortured her for years! I was s-saving her! I love her more than you would have in a MILLION YEARS!"

"You love her? Mm, mm…Let this be my final lesson to you, Guifi… Love is temporary. It dies away. You get bored of it. You move on after your fancy wisps away, like an ember. It can't make your cosmos burn for too long." The Master hissed, his eyes shining like red stars under the hood. "But the shit that I'm about to make you feel? That is eternal!"

Guifi saw him then walk towards Nina, who panicked and tried to struggle again. "NO! I SAID L-LET HER GO!"

"G-GUIFI! HELP!" she screamed, closing her crying eyes as the black Saints held her down and spread her arms and legs apart. She felt her 'father' press his enormous weight unto her, pinning the girl, and shook her head in terror. "N-NO!"

His thick hand clasped her throat. She felt her throat squeezed shut, gagged horribly and bulged her eyes.

The Master's fingers went inside her mouth and she screamed, feeling him pull her tongue. "SHUT UP! You stupid, useless bitch! I can't stand the sound of your shrieks anymore! ON and ON…" A ripping spray of blood wet his hand and the girl's pained screams turned into crimson gargles. The Master tossed the bloody tongue out at Guifi's feet and sighed in relief, like he had wanted to do this for years. "Just be quiet for now."

Screaming uncontrollably, Guifi tried to set himself free, burning his cosmos to levels he didn't even know himself capable of until his body made Bear and Dragon feel like they were holding a piece of lava, but the Black Saints just piled on him more and more.

Dragon punched his face, stunning him, and Andromeda grabbed him by the hair and held his head up. "Don't you love your girl? Then watch! This is a beautiful moment for her. You don't want to miss it!"

Growing as cold on the inside as a glacier and widening his eyes in abject horror, the student was made to watch the girl he loved gasp for air, her throat painfully tightened, as the few clothes she had around her legs were violently ripped off by her 'father', exposing her thighs and nether regions. The Master then reached down and took off his belt, telling the others to hold her down firmer.

"N-NINA!"

{======================|SSII|======================}

(?)

{======================|SSII|======================}

A sharp pain on Lance's nape was felt as he laid on the murky darkness of yet another nightmare. He felt his face and body half sunk into a shadowy swamp, his body held up from total oblivion only by the strange force of a triangular crest burning ferociously in his forehead with bright white light.

The only sound was of a horse neighing sufferingly close by. Pegasus collapsed in front of Lance from off in the darkness, knocked aside by some force.

Before long, though, another sound was heard, that of sandaled feet stepping towards him.

Lance's red eyes drowsily looked up to see a pair of aged, womanly feet in sandals by his face, recognizing the frightening warmth of its cosmos from his other nightmares. "D-damn it, W-who are you?!"

"Lance, r-run!" Pegasus 'screamed'.

The masked woman held her hands around back rather casually and tilted her head. "He's not going anywhere,… are you, Red?" she spoke, her voice echoing.

Even drunk on dreaming, Lance's eyes widened in alarm. "H-how do you…?!"

Painful visions of horror assaulted his mind, cutting his thoughts short! Visions of people getting torn apart by the Black Saints by the Phoenix Shrine while Guifi and Nina were held. He screamed, feeling an intense mass of energy setting him fire from the inside, as if a burning hand formed around his heart and gripped it tightly, threatening to crush it at the slightest offense.

She chuckled at the sight of him squirming, as if merely watching a child trip over his toys. "You're running out of time, Red. But this is your fault. I tried to get you to see sense. Now Guifi will suffer for your selfishness. Again."

The winged horse shined brightly with cosmos and tried to get up. "D-don't listen to he-"

With a snap of her fingers, a ring of fire formed around Pegasus, trapping the winged horse completely. No more interruptions. That other Bronze Saint intruder, Compass, would soon wake the Saint up, so she had limited time.

"This is your last chance, Red. Let me save you." The orange-haired woman continued, taking her mask off once more and presenting it down on him. "Take it! Aren't you tired of making these mistakes? Of letting others suffer because of you? If you just let me… burn you down to your core… I can make you perfect. Once you see your true self, you'll never allow the world to do this to you again."

The more Lance tried to get a good look at the mask, though, the more it seemed to morph from a simple Amazon piece to an ugly, toothy face of red.

"G-get… the hell away from me!" he demanded, rolling away and throwing his arms.

"Y-yeah!" Pegasus cheered.

Oblivious to the steed's voice, Lance gritted teeth at the shadowy silhouette in front of him which his sleepy mind could not study. He stood up the best he could, despite the flashes of Nina screaming on the ground with a massive body of shadow over her. He held his head, perceiving terrible images of her crying out as these bodies thrust themselves over her over and over while Guifi screamed and collapsed in sheer distraught, all while innocent people seemed to be burned alive around them.

What was happening to them? Whatever it was, he would put a stop to it!

Yet, the woman stared expectantly.

"I don't know who the fuck you think you are…" Lance growled. "… but I'm not one of your island monsters! I'm going to stop them… Starting with those fucking Black Saints!"

She smiled. "How cruel. Why would you ever do that to your own?"

He froze. "My own?!..."

She put the mask back on her face, making it lose its demonic features. "You must have asked yourself already, Red, right? Dragon, Cygnus, Wolf, Hydra, Bootes, so many shadows of so many Bronze armor spirits running around… even Phoenix." She reminded him, making his mind recall Guifi's description of the Black Saints present on Death Queen Island. "Yet…isn't someone missing?"

"What?!"

She stepped towards him as fire ignited at her feet and ascended up her body. "You've never seen a Black Pegasus, have you?"

Stepping away from the rising heat she cause, the Saint's eyes bulged in horror. "I'm not him!"

"LANCE!" Pegasus shouted from its ring of fire.

The Bronze Saint backed away from the approaching woman as the flames began to take shape around her body. "I'm not!"

The darkness around them began to crack under the pressure of Saint Compass' cosmos, letting beams of light in. At the same time, the flames on the woman's body began wisping into a metal form, obtaining a shape like that of Black Phoenix' armor, yet shiny like the most beautiful of Bronze armors.

Fully armored, the woman giggled, charging cosmos into her hand and triggering more visions of a Guifi being tortured by the Master in his mind. "Tick tock, little Red. Your destiny is slipping through your fingers. You can yet rest your weary head on my chest… Don't let that foolish hooded man steal it from you."

There was a burst of cosmos and her hand suddenly lunged at his face like a fiery rapine bird's diving claw! At the exact same time, the rest of his dream's shadowy dome shattered, letting daylight in with someone's call for him.

"WAKE UP!"

{==============|SSII|==============}

A mighty slap hit across the Pegasus Saint's face, "WAKE UP!" Compass Nova shouted.

Lance gasped loudly and breathed in, sweating like a wet sponge and finding himself back on the island, specifically in the arms of a stranger Bronze Saint. "W-what?!"

Helping him up, Compass Nova sighed in relief. "Thank the gods! What the hell happened here?! Why were you knocked on your ass?"

But the Bronze Saint of Pegasus merely widened his eyes in horror, recalling everything that happened. "S-SHIT! NO! NINA! GUIFI!" he screamed, looking northeast at the source of the terrible cosmos they both felt. "WHERE'S MY HELMET?!"

Bewildered, Compass Nova held him still and gave him the stupid-looking horse headpiece. "Relax, it's here! I found it next to your box! Did you get ambushed or something?!"

The panic of the situation was then hit with a bucket of cold water by Lance realizing that this guy was here out of nowhere. "W-What?! I… Who the hell are you?! What are you doing here?!"

Seeing he was kind of okay, Nova let go of him. "I am Saint Nova of Compass. Our dear mission handler, Nam, sent me to keep an eye on you. He was concerne-"

But the Pegasus Saint exploded "WHAT?!" and grabbed Compass's armor collar. "AND HE SENT YOU?! WHERE ARE THE GODDAMN GOLD SAINTS?! DOES SANCTUARY HAVE ANY FUCKING CLUE WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?!"

Nova blinked, shocked at the demand and a bit insulted at the lack of appreciation. "Gold Saints? Are you serious, Pegasus?! Why would Sanctuary send its top brass to a Bronze Cloth training ground?! Why don't you tell me what happened first before you act rude to m-"

"I GOT KNOCKED OUT by its MASTER, that's what happened!" he screamed. "That… that bastard! He waited until I had crossed the Changing Fields to attack me and Nina cause he knew I wouldn't be able to find my way back!"

Nova's eyes scurried, in shock. "The Master?… but…"

"He's a traitor! And he's going to fucking kill my friend!" Lance revealed. He wasn't sure how he knew this, perhaps something in the strange nightmare he was having put the thought in his mind, but still. "That psychotic bastard is collaborating with the fucking Black Saints for some kind of fucking ritual! We need the Gold Saints to nuke this place NOW!"

As if to punctuate Pegasus' words, a sharp eruption from all three of the island's volcanoes and sudden spike in the malicious, fiery cosmos to the Northeast was felt in both of them, causing both Bronze Saints to scream and wince. Thunderous bolts crashed down on the island from the ash clouds and acid rain began pouring, drizzling their armors.

Putting on his helmet tightly, Lance cursed himself. "Damn it! Why didn't I keep this stupid thing on my head?! GUIFI, NINA, I'm COMING!" he shouted, rushing down the slopes towards the Changing Fields.

The adult Bronze Saint gasped "HEY, WAIT UP!"and, unsurprisingly, Nova saw the Pegasus Saint trip down in strain, rolling with pained screams down to the entrance to the ever-melting Changing Fields. "Hermes' sandals, he's getting himself killed!"

With his body hurting all over and burning his cosmos to compensate for his exhaustion, Lance tried to get back on his feet. Yet, the acid burned his skin and armor, the uneven ground of the Changing Fields confused his tired mind. The heat piled up more and more, reaching over eighty degrees, a temperature so high that he felt the sweat on his body evaporate into steam.

He had to save them…! Yet he could barely take a step!

Dear God, he was in hell!

Catching up with him, Nova held him up once more. "You're in no condition to fight, Pegasus. The Trinity is just offshore. I'm taking you there NOW."

"N-NO! Don't you understand? I don't care about leaving right now, I need to save Guifi."

"Who the HELL is Guifi?!" the Compass Saint asked, exasperated. "Just STOP for a second and tell me what you want me to do, Pegasus!"

Finally realizing he wasn't being smart about this, Lance forced himself to lower his panic level and tried to explain it as concisely as he could. "He's the student training for the Phoenix Cloth, but I think his teacher wants to… sacrifice him or something!"

"What?!" the Compass reeled. A Master willingly sacrificing a student? As hard a Training Ground could be, actual deliberate murder was completely off the marks.

In fact, it was so out-there that, despite the fears everyone had about Death Queen Island's fabled monster of a Master, the Compass Saint was of dropped jaw, still hesitated in believing it, especially from the mouth of a Bronze Saint who just woke up from being ambushed.

"Pegasus, are you sure? Like you said, you got knocked out. Maybe it was the Black Saints!" he reasoned. Pegasus Lance was, after all, famously an enemy of Sanctuary's teachers. "Maybe you're letting your animosity with Kastiel cloud your-"

"I'M FUCKING SURE! I saw his daughter call his name!" Lance shouted, utterly insulted.

The Compass Saint gawked. "D-Daughter?! That guy has a child?!"

Seeing him dazzled by the mess they were in, Lance held his collar appealingly, trying to remember his name. "Listen… Nova! There's no time to explain it all! We have to get to his trainee and the slave girl, Nina! They're to the northeast, by the Phoenix Shrine! You're the Compass Saint, right? Can you get us through the Changing Fields?!"

Nova looked up at the terrain ahead and understood immediately why the Pegasus asked such a thing. The very ground ahead of them seemed to be morphing under the lava streams' heat.

In the face of these challenges, though, the Compass Saint scoffed. "No problem! My Compass Cloth can find its way through any labyrinth! I could get through the Minotaur Maze in the Underworld if I had to! But, kid, listen…" and he then got serious. "Are you sure of what's going on? If the Master is really allying himself with Black Saints, especially from here…Then we're in real danger."

Lance growled under the acid rain. "You fucking think so?!"

The island released cavernous growls of moving magma underneath their feet and cracking more and more ferocious thunderbolts.

"Cardinal Net!" Compass casted. Immediately, his cosmos found a path through the Changing Fields that was relatively safe and formed a pulsating beam of energy showing a stable road. He began guiding Pegasus through it. "What I meant, Pegasus, is... that I didn't expect this from you, helping others in such extreme circumstances. I always heard… other things about you."

This caught Lance's attention. "Other things? What, do you people think I'm some sort of rabid dog just because I gave Kastiel a beating?! HE LEFT ME IN A MOUNTAIN TO DIE! He got what he deserved! Now can we go save my friend?!"

Compass sweated, making way through the first turns of the Fields. "Okay, so he's still a touchy guy, but at least I'm starting to see what Nam meant; maybe he really is just a nice kid with a bad reputation being driven nuts by all these punitive assignments. Still -" and he looked up at the darkening clouds and the worsening eruptions. "-I'll help him get his friends, but if things get too dangerous, I'm dragging Pegasus out of here, hostages or not. Even Athena would turn a blind eye at choosing not to face the Death Queen Island's Master."

{======================|SS2|======================}

The Phoenix Shrine

{======================|SS2|======================}

Still held by the Black Saints, Guifi watched in tearful horror the broken girl getting dragged out of the slab into a makeshift cross. "N-Nina…!"

The sound of the hammer striking the nail was as torturous as it was consistent to him, driving it deeper down through the soft tissue between her wrist bones. It made her already shattered soul scream and cry more and more, begging with a mutilated mouth for them to stop. Two uncontrollable streams of tears wetting both their faces. Each pounding on the metal heads carved the sharp points deeper into Nina's soft, naked flesh, pinning it harder on the wooden boards salvaged off the shipwrecks, and banged a noise that vibrated louder and louder into Guifi's mind, filling every corner of his thoughts with her pain.

His throat was dry and bare on the inside from how loud he screamed her name. He wanted to hurl, utterly horrified by the spectacle of violation and torture the person he loved the most in the world was put through, right before his eyes. How could all of this be happening? How could he have let this happen?

Thunderbolts and acid rain fell on the shrine, turning the massive puddles of blood on the ground into morbid moors of carnage. Guifi saw the Black Saints toss out the dismembered bodies into piles to be burned in the Goddess' name, like the aftermath of a macabre celebration. Even the Black Phoenix' corpse was tossed amongst them without a care by his former followers.

The young Chamorro boy felt his soul sucked into a vacuum of darkness that was the sight of the naked Nina sobbing and screaming at each pressing of each nail on the cross, her eyes permanently shut at the horror she was put through. When the final nail was fully driven through her feet and after another harrowing round of pain was endured, spearing through flesh and bone, the Black Saint's hands dusted themselves and took the cross, lifting it up high and planting it firmly on the ground like a proud banner.

Guifi's body shook at the sight of this hideous human monument raised in the Goddess' name, crying relentlessly at the image of Nina covered in bruises, soaked with tears and with blood and semen dripping down her viciously ravaged inner thighs.

An image forever burned in his mind, along with many harrowing ones preceding it. An image that would not leave him for as long as he lived, nor would he ever have words to describe. An image that ruined him on the inside, rendering all his promises of love and care in vain, teaching him that there was no escape from the hell he chose to himself the day he stood between Saga and the Master.

No escape from Death Queen Island.

No escape from its fire and horrors.

Even if he fled to Elysium itself.

Even if he prayed to Athena.

Even if he faced the lava.

Even if he jumped in.

Even if he died.

Even if Guifi Taitano burned down to ash, even if the Gods themselves blasted his body to cinders with every thunderbolt in Olympus, the last thought of the last cell of the last speck of dust he'd be disintegrate into would be that of what he beheld right then, the sight of a sacked, destroyed Nina who had cried out his name over and over to save her, to tell her their nightmare would end, to give her a future beyond the horror that refused to reach a conclusion.

Sitting on a rock nearby in the midst of the Black Saints was the Master, casually twirling in his hand one of the many swords, poking the ground with it, checking his reflection on its cracked, blood-smeared edges as if relaxing in the park after a morning of hard work. He saw Guifi slumped in the grip of Dragon and Bear, his resistance dead, and smiled, feeling the decisive moment of the ritual getting closer.

"Do you feel it yet, Guifi? That death inside of you?"

The teenage boy merely shook and silently sobbed. The Master stood up and signaled for Bear and Dragon to release him, which the two obeyed by practically tossing Guifi to the ground.

"Can you feel it yet? How you'd move heaven and earth to make me pay for what you've just made me do?..." he asked expectantly, but all he got was more sobbing, so the Master's foot slammed his stomach with all his might, tossing the boy over screaming into a puddle of blood. "SPEAK, YOU WORTHLESS FAGGOT! OR DO I HAVE TO MAKE YOU TAKE A TURN GETTING FUCKED TO DEATH, TOO?!"

With a shower of vomit of rat flesh coming out of his mouth into the blood, the white-haired boy's shoulders shook and he wailed. "W-WHY?! NINAA!"

She faintly gasped his name back, missing her tongue and feeling her lungs slowly crushing her from the inside.

The Black Saints laughed. Hydra's shrill cackle, in particular, stood out. "Why, he asks! As if his teacher hasn't answered that a thousand times!"

Black Dragon folded arms in lament at such a pitiable creature. "You did this to her, boy, not us. You chose to betray your Master for your own selfish goals…. Like a shameless thief!"

The teenage boy saw his reflection on the blood soaked in tears of sorrow. "M-my f-fault…?!" His hands rose from the blood of the sacrificed captives and tensed like angry claws. "N-no… N-NO!"

Black Unicorn came over and grabbed him by the white mane, raising his eyes to the crucified girl. "LOOK AT WHAT YOU'VE DONE, Romeo! The Master's lovely daughter… pinned like a fucked doll on a cross!" he mocked, cackling at the pain and distraught that flashed through his face at the sight of Nina's suffering cries. "I thought you loved her!"

"H-His… daughter… N-no!" Guifi refused, feeling his body beginning to burn in rejection. "She's N-NOT!"

The Master saw the cosmos rising in him. So, Guifi still had spirit left, like he thought. "Are you angry, Guifi? Do you hate me?! Do you want revenge?!"

Black Unicorn kicked Guifi so hard the boy got tossed at the Master's feet. "Don't disrespect your teacher. Answer him."

Guifi Taitano's body began igniting with fire cosmos, locking hateful eyes with the man in front of him, the hooded monster responsible for two years of torture more horrible than anything he's ever had nightmares of. In a single moment, every bone ever broken on him, every captive he's had to murder, every lash he was made to put on Nina, every lie about how bad a person Guifi was… and especially the last hour, all flashed at once in Guifi's heart, pumping what felt like pure lava of hate into his bloodstream.

Kill him! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!

As if reading his thoughts, the Master laughed, tossed the sword he was playing with to the ground and pointed at his bare chest, at one of the spots of Phoenix stars. "Go ahead! Take your best shot! Right here! Then I'll destroy you… like the pathetic, worthless, treasonous, guilty little fuck you truly a-"

"I'LL KILL YOU!" Guifi screamed, making his aura explode in a shockwave of fire that startled the Black Saints and the master. He rocketed across the dueling field with fists encased in pure infernos.

The master gritted teeth and manifested his cosmos for a counteratta-

But Guifi's fist slammed across the man's hooded face, making him scream in pain! The punching continued and blasted the Master's body over and over and over, stunning the Black Saints with the sudden turn of events. He attacked more, more and more, feeling blood splashing out! Fueled by countless memories of pain, the boy's lungs cried out in hate and didn't even register the man's hands trying to keep him off. He just pummeled again and again, making the fire in his fists burn hotter and hotter, until the force of his assault pushed the Master completely off the field.

Then, with a final shout, Guifi thrust a final penetrative dash punch. "DIE, YOU MONSTER!"

And before the eyes of every Black Saint of Death Queen Island, the teenage boy's fist struck the bashed body, pulverizing flesh with the unparalleled explosive power of Cosmos, piercing all the way through the central Phoenix star point and letting his knuckles puncture through the other side, spraying blood everywhere!

{======================|SS2|======================}

A few moments before,

The Burning Swamps

{======================|SS2|======================}

Finally crossing over the Changing Fields and speeding by the Master's hut, the two Bronze Saints of Athena, Pegasus and Compass, climbed the high terrain just before the swamps of fire to try to spot the Phoenix Shrine.

Panting like he was about to pass out, Lance's red eyes saw the building of marble contrasted against the Emerald Meadow mount at the distance. "T-There it is! That's where the cosmos is coming from! We just have to cross these lava pits!"

Compass Nova shielded his eyes from the volcanic light of the swamps. He had never seen such a hellish spectacle, and this was going to be their next terrain obstacle. Truly Death Queen Island was living up to its fame. "Seriously?! This island just keeps getting worse and worse and worse!"

"It's g-going to get a hell of a lot more terrible if we don't get to-AGH!" Lance dropped to his knee.

"H-hey, you okay, kid?!" Nova asked.

Lance shook his head, seeing his sight tremble and his body hurt all over.

Nova straightened himself in somber realization, remembering Pegasus has been fighting for three straight days. "You only just woke up from a knock out and then we had to cross all that morphing hell… You're clearly having a Cosmos burn out. We need to reassess our strategy."

"N-NO! Guifi, h-he… I promised him!" Lance reinforced, holding his pained chest. It felt like he was having a heart attack.

The older Bronze Saint paused in hesitation. Nova was already way deeper into this mess than he ever thought he would be when he left Greece. This was supposed to be a mere rendezvous, just something to assure Pegasus that, despite everything, Sanctuary had his back. Even though Nam suspected something bad was going on, neither the Sagitta Silver Saint nor the Compass Bronze Saint ever thought the Master was gearing up to treason and some kind of murder ritual, as Pegasus believed.

Now the Pegasus Saint he was supposed to help, the only one between the two with proven silver-rank abilities, was both at his limit and refusing to leave until his two friends were rescued, and these were apparently at the heart of whatever was going on. "Pegasus… it's time to cut our losses."

"N-no!"

"This is way above our heads! We don't have the strength to stop whatever's going on and we're not gonna get there in time!" Compass Nova argued. "Sometimes it is what it is!"

The exhausted Pegasus rose in fury. "SHUT UP! IT'S NOT!" he shouted at his face, utterly disgusted. "I don't want to hear your stupid complacent Saint-of-Athena hand-washing bullshit, Compass! My… best friend is up there, the only one among you all who ever took my side in anything, and he's probably gonna get his fucking head cut off by his stupid fucking Master! What the f-fuck do we have the Cosmos for, if not to push ourselves to stop evil shit like this from happening?!"

While these feelings were admirable, the Compass Saint, older and wiser, sterned his amber eyes and laid out the truth. "You're at a breaking point. You'll snap in half unless you stop for a minute. How will that help?"

But the more Compass reasoned with him, the more frustrated Lance seemed to get. "Fine, let me snap! Because Guifi has a future!... and I don't! I'm…" he then stumbled, dropping his ass on the ground in exhaustion and shaking. "I'm not like Kastiel! I will not… abandon Guifi!"

The purple-armored Bronze Saint stared, stunned at the sight of a youth absorbed into his trauma. "Nam was right, this Pegasus kid isn't some ungrateful vandal…No one this dedicated to someone else would beat up their teacher for no good reason. He needs help… the real kind." He slammed face into palms. "Fuck. It's one of those 'what would Athena do' situations, isn't it?"

Lance forced himself to get up and burn cosmos, causing a white brim of energy to emanate and power his movements. He needed to concentrate really hard. If he stayed focused on generating cosmos, then he could move! "A-Alright, let's go!"

But Compass's index finger suddenly pressed into his head. "Polar Shift!" and with a mere speck of purple cosmos, Lance gasped, as his brain suddenly felt like he was spun around in a chair a hundred times in a single second, making him collapse against a rock in utter disorientation. "Forgive me, Pegasus…I just took away your mind's sense of direction. It's time for an adult to take care of this situation. Don't worry, you'll be back to being able to stand up soon, otherwise I'd win a lot more Coliseum games than I have with this trick..."

The Pegasus Saint held mouth, sick. He felt like a compass needle in his head was spinning out of control "You... s-son of a bitch!"

Nova looked away in shame. He understood Lance's feelings, but the Pegasus was still just a teenager way below his depth. It was time for an adult to take action, for once.

And before long the liquid inside his stomach went up his mouth, making him hurl Nina's crappy soup to the black ground, which sizzled like a fried egg. He looked up at Compass the best he could. "C-Compass, p-please!"

The Bronze Saint of Compass nodded. "Brown-skinned, pale-haired teenager, full of scars… and the only girl on the island. I think I'll recognize them pretty easily."

The Pegasus seemed shocked as he tried to stay sitting in the same spot, like he didn't expect such kindness out of his Sanctuary peers. Considering the circumstances, Nova couldn't blame him. Not only did the Pegasus grow to expect very little out of his brothers in arms, Nova himself had a stomach-twisting sensation that he'd regret this show of bravery sooner rather than later.

In a rare show of humility, the Pegasus gulped and spoke. "T-Thank you."

With a nod of comradeship, Compass Nova then burned his cosmos. "CARDINAL NET!" and once again a pathway formed through the next field of obstacles, which he boomed across at Mach 1.

{======================|SS2|======================}

The bolts were getting longer and brighter, tearing scars of light across the sky, while the tremors grew louder and more frequent. The geysers of lava all around him raged and expelled noxious fumes that somehow reached his nose even as he reached the peak of his supersonic velocity. Though he only had to cross a few kilometers, it was like the natural evil of the island could imprint on him no matter how fast he sped across the terrain. Still, through clouds of immense heat and sulfur, Compass Nova traversed the Burning Swamps and landed with a discrete crash unto its edges, immediately entering the road to the Phoenix Shrine.

He was now in the deepest part of Death Queen Island, where few men other than the Gold Saints have lived to return from.

Yet, even as he ran at normal speed up the road to avoid being detected, he could already see streams of river flowing past his boots from up above, as well as the pained cries and shouts of the Black Saints, making his heart beat faster.

Then, as he slid around a boulder for cover, a spike in the cosmos was felt, followed by the Black Saints ceasing their laughter! A fight?!

Breathing fast and holding back against the rock, Compass tried to sense the situation through the cosmos, but it felt to his locked 7th sense like the Shrine's surroundings on the other side were shrouded in a blood red mist. Fearfully, he peeked his head over, already spotting the shadows of the Black Saints as well as the blood-chilling sight of the piles of corpses of various ages. So this was where the blood was coming from…

Yet, what he saw at the blood ring in their midst froze him to his very core!

Nova stepped out, joining the scene with a look of utter horror stamped on his face, no longer registering the danger of the Black Saints around him. "K-Kid…"

Guifi's eyes shook as hard as his bloody hand protruding out the Master's back. The man chocked to death with his chest punctured. Despite what happened to Nina, his heart beat uncontrollably fast in sheer happiness, finally snapping the hateful tension held inside it for this man during two long years.

His smile beamed widely like it hadn't in years at the sight of the teacher slumping down on his arm. He had done it! Guifi had killed the Master!

"Kid…" Compass muttered once more. It had to be the Guifi boy, matching Lance's description perfectly. "W-WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!"

The blood-red mist in the Cosmos evaporated at that very moment and the image of the Master of Death Queen Island punctured in the chest was dispelled away, leaving behind an utterly broken, naked Nina in its place.

Guifi Taitano's body turned to rock. "N-Nina?!"

She held on to Guifi, tears rolling down. The core of her chest was utterly pulverized by his blow while the rest of her body was covered with the burned bruises he thought he had inflicted on the Master. The image of herself on the crucifix also vanished, revealing the depth of the trick.

"G-Guif….!" But her words, already hampered by the lack of tongue, were cut short by a surge of blood out of her mouth, soaking him in red. Her last act was to raise her eyes at him and whisper. "W-Why-y-y?!"

With the world in utter red and shaking like a leaf to his eyes, Guifi Taitano then felt the small body in his arms grow cold. Gasping in unprecedented sorrow, Guifi embraced her with a scream. "N-n-NO, NO, NO! NINAA!" he wailed, pressing her against chest, but her chest stopped breathing and her head and arms slumped in his embrace. "N-NOO! Please, DON'T D-DIE! DOOON'T! N-NOOO!"

Frozen in shock at the sight of the two, as well as of the utter carnage surrounding him, Compass Nova looked over and saw the dreaded Master, the man in the orange hood who murdered that Maiden in Rodario two years ago, just sitting there with a chuckle like he was enjoying a show.

It made his Saint's blood boil. "YOU!... What…. What have you DONE HERE?!" he demanded, ignoring all the Black Saints around him laughing or standing in his way.

He rushed towards the two teenagers, but Black Unicorn and Cygnus stood in his way. Unicorn pushed him off. "Not so fast, little Compass!"

"We won't let you interrupt the ceremony now!" Cygnus assured.

"YOU TRAITOR!" Nova roared at the uncaring Master, struggling against them. "Siding with the Black Saints?! Murdering all these people?! Doing…. this to those kids?!

"Great… another reinforcement! And where did you come from?" Master hissed, standing up and trying to ignore Guifi's stupid wailing. He studied the arriver's Cloth. "I didn't do a thing, dear… Compass. It was Guifi who killed her. My daughter… That pathetic fiend just rushed straight at her out of nowhere and started pummeling her over and over, full of fury. My poor, beautiful daughter screamed at him to stop… but he just pinned her like a pork like the little beast he is."

Black Hydra laughed. "Yeah. We were all shocked. I can't believe he would do that to his sweetheart. He must be one cold bastard."

"YOU DAMN MONSTERS! Do you think I believe any of your lies?!" and he faced the hooded Master in specific. "And you… You TWISTED FUCK! Even with all your reputation, how could you?! As a man of the Goddess! You won't get away with this! Not this time! Sanctuary will have your fucking HEA-"

With a blur of fire, the Master then landed an organ-smashing punch straight on the Bronze Saint's stomach, making him bend in pain. A wind-searing kick then struck Compass, cracking his Bronze Cloth and shooting him into a shattering boulder, spreading pebbles and dust everywhere and amusing the Black Saint crowd.

The red stars in the darkness of the Master's hood shined unnervingly. "As a man of the Goddess, he says?... How dare you question my devotion to her."

Coughing and bleeding, the Compass Saint climbed out of the rubble and his trembling vision saw the Black Saints encircling him. "N-No man of Athena would do any of this! She will make you pay!" but everyone just laughed at this comment. "Y-you… Why are you laughing?!"

Bear dragged him out of the rubble and tossed him to a puddle of blood at the Master's feet. "PAH! He thinks we're talking about Athena?!"

Black Andromeda clasped hands around face. "You poor soul. Where do you think you are? Back in Sanctuary?!"

Covered in blood, the Compass Saint shook in terror and beheld the terrifying sight of the Master. "T-Then… who?!"

The master knelt down to him, filling his nose with the stench of rot and blood. "Look around you… who do you think?!"

Crawling away, Nova ventured a horrifying guess. "The…t-the Phoenix?!"

A bolt of lightning crashed at this, accompanied by the far-off Queen's Mouth unleashing a shower of fire into the skies and the cackle of the Black Saints.

"For forty years I've toiled on this island… trying to please my Goddess." The master recalled. "Make every fool who thought they could be my student and every sinner who passed through my shores be forged by her furnace into what she wanted me to make for her. Honor her more and more! More than anyone else, I've survived the hardships the Queen had to offer… and now my time has come." He beheld the Phoenix Shrine, where his desired Cloth laid. "I finally had my rightful offer, the gift that she promised her love for! I would teach my dear little Guifi the meaning of true hatred, let it burn him down to a finer ash than I've ever burned anyone else to…"

"What the h-hell for?!" the terrified Compass Saint asked, regretting now the moment he stepped into Nam's office.

His arms laid out, as if to receive a reward. "To show her I can be her Mara!" But his arms then slumped in disappointment and he looked at Guifi, who quietly cradled the dead Nina. "But even after all this… my mask is still not appearing. The Phoenix Cloth is still not opening its box to me. And now that whelp is just sitting there, crying over spilled blood! But I understand now… I am still missing two offerings, after all."

The wounded Compass froze in terror at the eyes suddenly on him. "O-Offerings?!"

The Master waved hand at the piles of corpses off to the corners of the shrine grounds. "We've accumulated captives born under every other constellation to sacrifice today… but never a Phoenix… or a Pegasus. I knew the second that Bronze Saint landed on my island that the time had finally come. That the Goddess was speaking the truth to me all these years… and that I would be the one destined to wear the mask!"

Black Andromeda chuckled. "Are you going to train Pegasus, Master? Teach him the meaning of hate, too?"

Dragon shook head skeptically. "I don't think he likes you very much…"

Cygnus scoffed, folding arms. "What of it? I happen to have noticed he seems to dislike my powers… We can easily break him if we have to."

"I'll convince him. I can be very persuasive." The Master assured. "Put Guifi on the slabs. And toss what's left of that stupid cunt to the sharks. No good to me dead. I'll find some other doll to toy Pegasus with…"

Cygnus and Dragon grabbed Guifi and tried to pry him off the wrecked girl's corpse, but found unexpected resistance.

"W-what the… he won't let go!" Cygnus kicked Guifi as hard as he could, but the boy didn't so much as whimper, much less release Nina. The tear-drenched teenager just rocked her, face sunk unto her shoulder "He's just holding her like a doll! HEY, SHE'S FUCKING DEAD, YOU RETARD!"

Lionet and Bear cracked knuckles. "We'll separate the lovers…" and their punches descended on the two.

Yet, even as he was banged on mercilessly by the countless armored fists, Guifi just held tighter and tighter to Nina, whispering words to her and refusing to waver. Refusing to accept reality. Refusing to back on his promise. In fact, even as his body cracked under their punches and kicks, bleeding more and more, he vowed more and more to her paling ears.

To take her to the Emerald Meadow once more.

To show her the shores beyond the sea.

To free her from pain and horror.

To never see that island again.

To have a life with her.

To eternally love her.

To grieve for her.

To fight for her.

To kill for her.

To die for her.

And many, many more promises, words bound in the Cosmos itself, forming threads of fire in it in the hopes that, somehow, that terrible day would turn out to somehow have just been the worst nightmare he's ever had. His very body grew warmer and warmer with these feelings as his mind ran across countless memories of her soothing his fears and his wounds, showing him love like no one else, even his parents, had.

Yet, nothing changed. She still wouldn't move. And was still at fault for it. Still guilty.

Bear and Lionet gave up the prying and wiped their sweat, confounded. "Shit, he won't let go!"

The Master groaned. "Must I do everything?!" he then took one of the swords on the ground and headed for his student. "Alright, Guifi… time to graduate."

Guifi felt the vibration of his steps on the floor and smelled his bloody stench right next to him. The Master preached something to him with a mocking tone before his dark-skinned hand descended on the trainee. Guifi didn't move a muscle or hear a single word. He just held on to Nina's cold body as hard as he could, trying to protect her from the Master as his hand descended on them.

However, as soon as contact was made, as soon as Master's hand touched the nape of his neck, something happened. Suddenly, Guifi felt the last two years of his life flash through his eyes as his cosmos came in contact with the Master's, remembering every single horror and every single scream of pain. It felt as if his very heart stopped for a second and he was no longer in Death Queen Island, but in a place of utter darkness.

A place where, all around him, familiar fires began to burn, casting his and Nina's shadow in every direction.

Then he looked up, feeling a presence, and, in that frozen moment in time where the Cosmos was eternal and all around him, he saw the woman of his dreams standing there, more solid than ever, dressed in a mesmerizing attire of fire. She smiled lovingly with the mask already in hand, presenting it to him without a word.

He could already sense a warmth to it. A loving warmth he had only felt in Nina's embrace. A warmth he desperately wanted to touch once more… and never let go again. But if he wanted to get it, he had to let go of Nina.

As such, his embrace relented, dropping Nina into the darkness, and his hands reached for the mask, touching it! In that very moment, the woman collapsed into pure flames that instantaneously concentrated into a single, needle-thin beam that struck his chest, puncturing his dead heart. A powerful beat restarted Guifi's heart, shooting pure fire through his veins, igniting every muscle in his body. His red irises shrank sharply into stars infinitely dense with hate before exploding in size, feeling his orbs with red light!

{==============|SSII|==============}

Guifi screamed and exploded into fire and Cosmos! An explosion that ripped in the air like a sudden geyser of lava and seared the Master's hand and arm into ashes instantly, blasting him away with a horrible scream with a force that shattered the ground and shockwaved Compass Nova and the shocked Black Saints off into the air!

They all fell in every direction with rolls, screams, gasps and recoils, raising their arms at the beam of red now furiously firing into the ash-filled skies, accompanied by a soul-chilling howl from deep inside it. The Master held his bleeding arm socket in terrible agony and could only stare in sheer shock at what laid before him, his hood blown aside by the raised wind currents.

And as the pillar of fire grew thicker and thicker, the wail of sorrow deep inside it grew in pitch into an entirely new voice. Every inhabitant of Death Queen Island would recognize it. It was present in their dreams every night of every year of burning they endured in what was left of the Continent of Mu.

It was a sharp shriek, one that they all feared or worshipped, one that would make the Black Saints lower their heads and the slaves flee into the caverns of the island in terror. A call for punishment that normally would only echo out of the Queen's Mouth worst eruptions, like the voice of a Mother Nature deeply angry at the Gods themselves, wishing to carve its claws into Olympus high above and punish the impurity of every living creature on Earth.

It was the cry of the Phoenix.

{======================|SS2|======================}

The Burning Swamps

{======================|SS2|======================}

Still mildly disoriented by Compass' technique, Lance struggled to move through the infernal pit fields, keeping his stumbling body low to avoid falling on the lava and desperately crawling meter by meter towards the shrine. His only thoughts were to get to the shrine as fast as possible and save his friend. "G-Guifi!"

Yet, as if the hot ground beneath his body wasn't enough, as if the acidic rain burning him, the tremors making him trip and stumble, the pieces of lava crashing all around him like meteors all didn't suffice, a great sudden tremor then shook the entire island, accompanied by a shockwave of currents and dust stormed out of the far-off shrine, pushed out by an explosion of blood-red cosmos that beamed towards the skies. Lance shielded himself but was still sent flying back with a scream, missing a pool of lava by a hair and instead crashing against a boulder.

Groggy and battered, the Bronze Saint rose with his hands and looked up in horror at the cosmic sight; a great bird of fire with long tails of plumes spreading its wings in the air and crying out. As its massive body of burning sizzled in the air, a high-pitch screech invaded Lance's ears, sending him screaming with the visions of those sacrificed to the Phoenix being dropped into an abyss of burning with no way out.

Then, the very real screams began. All coming from the shrine in the distance, joined by the extinction of multiple cosmos!

Yet, the Pegasus Saint fought against this insanity, roaring against the scalding force in his mind trying to drive him mad and focusing on his one goal of overcoming the bloody madness of Death Queen Island. His body stood up and his disorientation faded at last and Lance burned his cosmos, brimming with white energy that concentrated more and more deep inside himself. Thinking of nothing but his mission and the stakes in it, his mind cleared of fear and worry, leaving behind only the passionate desire to save his friend and bring justice to that awful place, that concentration of strength exploded like a supernova, flooding his body with energy.

With a heavy pant and sweat, he finally stood up, shining with the starlight of Pegasus. This was the strength Noah once taught him he would have, should he just trust in his emotions rather than succumb to despair. The burning of the explosive power of the Cosmos, as Guifi once put it to him.

It had saved him in Mount Olympus. And it would save them all now as well.

Rushing across the Burning Swamps at a speed higher than sound, Lance crossed through pits, fissures, crashing rocks and lava veins, his eyes razor focused on the building ahead growing larger and larger.

All the while as the chilling sounds of screaming got louder and louder. Noises of metal slashing through flesh and bones being crushed into rocks joined them, creating a cacophony of horror, and the cosmos in the area kept disappearing.

These screams did not frighten him!

The silence following them, however,... did.

He slowed down as he reached the entry pass and found Compass's footprints, unsure of what he would encounter. The same rivers of blood that had welcomed Nova's boots now baptized Lance's, making his feet splash in otherwise dead, infertile ground. With every step into the shrine grounds, the area got quieter and quieter, and the air grew staller and staller, stanching of copper and soiling so badly that the Pegasus almost vomited then and there.

Then the carnage welcomed him.

Piled up in pyramids of gore were the sliced arms, ripped legs, blood-nailed hands, carved stomachs and severed heads of dozens and dozens of people that had been held captive in Jangotown for years, maybe decades. There weren't any flies or maggots around them, unable to survive in that blasted island, but the rapid rot under the filthy air was still clear. His soul went as cold as Olympus when he noticed the smaller bodies among them, as young as but a dozen moon dances around the Earth.

But these weren't the cosmos he felt vanishing, nor were they Nova, Guifi or Nina. Watching out for the Master, the Pegasus walked deeper into this nest of hatred.

And his eyes widened then, for before him, scattered in the ground, he found the Black Saints! Pinned against rocks by swords, carved to pieces with axes then dug deep into their heads, impaled by spears and then raised into the air like flags or even merely beaten until their heads were but puddles of bone and blood, all eight of the bastards numbered by Guifi, from Dragon to Unicorn to Hydra to Andromeda, were all dead before him.

Guifi was right. They were not dead from their battle with him after all. But now none of them seemed to be getting back up again.

But the worst of it was the beaten, half-pulverized body he found just at the entrance of the small shrine. With small tears of sorrow forming in the corners of his eyes against his notice, Lance slowly approached the body of the naked girl dropped on the ground.

She was burned horribly and the lower section was blasted away by something that had blown through the chest, but he recognized the scars of the person he promised to take safely out of the island. "N-Nina…"

This was it.

He had failed.

Lance was surrounded by nothing but death!

And it was all his fault!

….

It was then that Lance's immature, silver-ranked 7th sense picked up an energy in the middle of all that void of life!

One.

Two!

THREE!

By the Emerald Meadow! Of course!

Having not found everyone yet, Lance rushed up the hill road, calling his friend's name. "G-GUIFI!" he called. Yet, as he entered the rocky heights that enclosed the garden, his feet screeched into a halt on the ground harshly, spreading dirt everywhere, at encountering the sight of the man on the floor. Lance's face twisted with hatred. "…. I-It's…Y-You!"

What laid before the Pegasus Saint was nothing more than a man desperately crawling on the ground for his life, coughing blood and with his disgusting intestines ripped out from his belly in the open, dragging on the ground. His head was bald, his skin dark and heavily scarred, the flesh around his mouth looked to have been burned off decades ago, exposing familiar set of yellow, cracked teeth and his eyes were blood-red like Lance's own.

Lance had barely recognized him, having only seen him so far under that orange hood. And yet, here he was, the Master of Death Queen Island at the doorstep of death, a terror of Sanctuary's world reduced to a mere man without the mystery of his cloak, missing an arm and with his stomach opened.

"T-that…. That l-lying w-whore…She t-tricked me! She said… she'd give me the power I deserved!" he tried to say, carving his fingers of his one remaining arm on the ground to desperately crawl, but his words were interrupted by harsh breaths and surges of blood. "F-Forty… f-forty years on this island…! And that filthy, h-hateful whore…picks him!"

Losing control of his anger, Lance kicked the dying man aside, turning him over and exposing his grotesque wounds. "YOU KILLER! W-WHERE IS GUIFI?! WHERE…" but the horrible sight of his chest ripped open by someone's bare fingers paralyzed him. "W-who… did this?!"

"P-Pegasus!…" he realized, trying to hold his guts inside with his last hand and coughing out his last breaths. "I s-should have k-killed you both… Now we're all going to b-burn!"

The Master of Death Queen Island then rolled his red eyes and lost the breath of life, slumping to the ground, ending four decades of terror, torture, murder and pain.

Pegasus Lance shook in place. Now everyone who he thought could be responsible for this last wave of bloodshed were crossed out. Everyone he desperately listed above Guifi's name. It couldn't be… but he was the only one left.

A pair of steps sounded behind him, stepping from around the terrain and dragging something heavy.

A buzz of terror coursed through Lance's body and he slowly turned, his red eyes beholding his friend. "G-Guifi!"

The big, round bulging eyes of a terrifying red-skinned mask with large tusks stared back, its teeth grinning as if elated to see a friend. It looked like the face of a demon of Asian folklore, similar to the one he saw on the worship totems raised by the island's thralls. Winged decorations protruded out the flanks, big white brows went around the eyes and it lacked a nose or any sort of breathing opening, yet it was tightly stamped on the youth's face like he was born with it.

The youth himself was impossible to not mistake as Guifi Taitano, possessing the same stature, skin tone, green jeans, wrist bands and scars on the Phoenix star points of his body, yet the hair had grown into a full shade of white, losing any former traces of black fibers the teenager still had, and the cosmos emanating off of him was nothing like the seething, burning energy of the polite boy who repressed all his angrier instincts.

Instead, it was like a crystalized mass of boiling blood to Lance's cosmic eye; a ruby of impeccable perfection of both consistency and shine floating in the universal darkness of the universe they all lived on, purged of all its previous impurities by a fire hotter than Lance had ever seen in either Guifi or Death Queen Island. A fire that could only come from the cosmos if one was snapped beyond all reason, placed in a locale of utter insanity and then left there until one's very soul either broke under the horrors of the Goddess or took them into one self.

Though ignorant of most of Sanctuary's mythologies, Lance understood then and there, by the sensations provided by the Cosmos alone even to a blunt, uncut gem of a Saint like himself, that what stood before him was not a man, but an avatar of pure hate and insanity, filled to the brim with the same ridiculously hot flames he saw the Queen's Mouth expel every day. A being whose every step left prints of his bare feet on otherwise rock-solid ground, whose every meeting with your eyes would make the world grow much darker to you, and under whose touch you could be made to pay most terribly for the worst of offenses made unto him.

Lance's eyes lowered unto his hand, on which Compass Nova was dragged, and the shaking man begged with a bloodied mouth. "P-Pegasus… h-help me! W-What he did to the others… P-Please! P-PLEASE H-He's… he's going to K-KILL ME!"

Gulping, Lance tried to speak. "Guifi… w-what happened here? What d-did he do to you?!"

The masked man stood silent.

"G-Guifi?"

More silence.

There was the strangest sensation that Guifi seemed taller.

Lance's eyes narrowed and he gritted teeth, sweating. "GUIFI, just S-SAY SOMETHING!"

Finally, the masked youth tilted his head slightly, his neck creaking like wood. A familiar, though graver voice was heard. "…. You're late."

Finally getting a familiar stimulus to anchor himself to reality, to see this thing as Guifi and not some kind of demon, Lance released his held breath. "I…. I know. I'm s-sorry!"

What a stupid thing to say.

Guifi seemed to agree with this thought, judging by his quietness.

"Guifi… I…" Lance then felt his courage to get to the next part disappear, but he forced himself to push through. "I saw what happened to… Nina. I'm… sorry."

The name did not seem to trigger any reaction.

Except from Nova, who squirmed at the fingers in his neck tightening ever so slightly. "H-help me!"

Frustrated, Lance laid hands on his shoulders. "Look, it's… going to be okay!" The sensation of his arms was alarming to Lance, being hot to the touch and as rocky as petrified bark. You're… angry, I k-know."

"You promised." The masked man's grave voice reminded.

Small tears formed in Lance's eyes, both in guilt and in sorrow at the static tone in Guifi's voice, like he was trapped in time.

The Pegasus Saint could only slump his head in shame. "I know. I did. But… that's my failure! Let go of Compass. And let me help you." He begged. The masked man, however, simply would not say anything. "G…. Goddamn it, Guifi, answer ME-"

THOOM!

Blasted into rocks by the kick, Lance crashed right through them with a pained scream. Hurled into the Emerald Meadow itself, Lance landed with pained rolls into the soft flower beds until he crashed unto the rock walls on the other side of the grove.

Lance coughed and climbed out of the rocks, holding the impact point with a grit of pain. "T-That attack…!"

The masked man beheld his pitiful sight. "You keep calling me that… Guifi." he mocked, his hand cooling its cosmos. "The 'landless dreamer' is dead. He burned down to ash… thanks to you."

Coughing and holding his sore chest, as well as trembling in shock at the force he was struck with, Lance rose from the flower beds in alarm, seeing Guifi drag Compass into the Meadow. As the masked man's brown feet landed on the flowers, Lance's eyes widened in reeling as the contact seemed to caustically ignite their petals immediately, searing a path through the otherwise pure grounds.

If his Master couldn't enter this place, then this new Guifi seemed to have no problem doing so.

Gathering himself, Lance confronted him once again. "W-What are you saying?! You ARE Guifi!... Aren't you?! I can feel it in your…" but he then gulped, not capable of lying about his Cosmos being the same as before. "I can s-see you! What the f-fuck happened?! Where did you get that mask?! TAKE IT OFF!"

But the man seemed at best annoyed by his demands, shaking his head. "Would you… quiet down? I just had… the worst morning of my life." He lamented; his tone tired. "Just one of those shitty, reality-hitting days where life just holds you down…. and takes a big fat dump straight into your throat. All because of you."

A cold shame washed over Lance, silencing him.

"Ever since we met, I feel like all I've done is put up with your ignorance, Lance." The masked man made clear. His chest didn't even seem to move to breathe as he spoke. "And all I've ever asked of you in return…. was one. Simple. Thing."

The Pegasus Saint stepped away, unable to meet the mask's gaze.

"And you… couldn't even do that." Tossing a yelping Compass to the floor, Guifi folded his arms. "You know what you are, Lance? A terrible, terrible friend. A selfish, ignorant little shit who can't see past his own nose and keeps making others pay the price of his immaturity. Even me…"

Tears of helplessness rolled down Lance's cheek and he looked away, surrounded by flowing petals. "I know."

Guifi's head, however, then tilted to the side, an Amazonian mask signal for a coy smile. "But you know what?... I forgive you!"

Lance's eyes snapped back up. "W-What?!"

Nova just crawled away in fear, thinking Guifi was distracted. Guifi's foot, however, pinned Nova down, making him scream. "I'm a good friend… unlike you, Lance. I understand the pain and hardships you went through. In fact,… I want to help you."

"H-Help me?! What are you talking about?!"

"I got a chance to vent all my frustration out on those… Black Saints. So now I'm thinking clearly. I'm going to help you think clearly, too." His hand then descended on Compass. "Right after this one!"

"N-NO! L-LET ME GO! P-PEGASUS, SAVE ME!" Nova screamed, before his breath was cut short by Guifi gripping his throat with a scalding hot touch.

Then, to Lance's horror, as the Bronze Saint begged for help, Guifi's grip of Cosmos grew darker and darker, almost pitch black, causing the armor in Nova's body to start darkening as well.

A terrible understanding crossed Lance's mind and his white aura brimmed. "G-Guifi! STOP IT! L-LET HIM GO!" but the masked man ignored him, focused entirely on corrupting Nova more and more. Gritting his teeth, the Pegasus made his cosmos explode and he dashed at him with raised fist. "I SAID STOP IT!"

The cosmic punch exploded right on Guifi's check, throwing him off of Nova and sending him flying to the Meadow's edges. Nova released a gasp of breath and his armor began returning to its normal tones.

"G-GO, NOW!" Lance shouted at him, which Nova obliged with a shocked look of terror. Lance then braced himself, seeing the rocks of the meadow's edge collapsing over Guifi, knowing that sooner, rather than later-

A burst of flames exploded out of the collapse, tossing boulders and embers all over the Emerald Meadow. Lance guarded himself while Nova panicked, dodging the bigger rubble pieces and taking cover far away from the action. The Pegasus Bronze Saint looked up and saw, with gritting teeth, Guifi coming out of the rocks with his orange aura of fire cosmos burning all around him.

Tense like a stretched band, Guifi rubbed the side of his face. "You… hit me."

"What the hell were gonna do to him?! Turn him into one of t-them?!" Lance shouted, keeping his fists raised. "Guifi, stop this shit right now! Take off that mask and come with me! PLEASE! I can help you!"

Seeing blood from his cheek on his fingers, Guifi rose his mask at him. "Help me?... You?!" The island then began to shake beneath their feet and Guifi's aura began to burn brighter and brighter. He felt his heart beat faster and faster. "You… you should be the one in my place!"

Lance felt as if an unseen shadow of fire was descending on all of them, particularly Guifi, and he tried to match this rise of cosmos with his own.

"You … you should!" and the masked man's aura thickened endlessly, surrounding Guifi with blood-red energies and embers that stuck to his skin more than more. Lava shot through his veins and he beheld his tense hands, seeing them being faintly wrapped in that same shadow of flames that Lance felt. His eyes beneath the mask drowned in their crimson irises. "You SHOULD!"

And with a great storm of wind and embers that battered Lance back with a scream, Guifi Taitano was completely swallowed by the rising energies of burning hatred, his voice morphing into an animalistic howl and his aura blasting forces in every direction like a compressing piece of mass reaching its critical point! Braking his heels on the flower beds, Lance beheld in horror as these waves of crimson fire danced around his best friend like a cocoon's silk and the phantasm of the Phoenix projected itself above it, exposing its proud wings of fire, it's dancing tails of plume and its raised, screeching beak.

The entire island matched this transformation, burning all its hazardous lands at once, and Compass Nova saw Lance frozen in place. "PEGASUS, WE HAVE TO RUN! N-NOW!"

But the Pegasus Saint was transfixed, seeing the shell of cosmos growing bigger and bigger, adhering tighter and tighter to the silhouette of Guifi's body, feeling his own locked 7th sense meeting gaze with a power that both terrified him and spoke to an ugly truth deep inside Lance, a truth that the seers of Heart of Sasha had once detected in him. He saw Guifi's body in the energy seemingly grow, bulging its muscles, growing its teeth, extending his mane of white hair, as if he was being turned into some kind of animal, and Lance felt an incredible, sadistic evil burning hotter and hotter inside the body of energy.

Something monstrous would soon come out.

Unless… unless he stopped it!

Humming in concentration, Lance's hands waved in the air to form the stars of Pegasus.

"W-WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" Nova shouted in the chaos, trying to not get hit by debris.

Lance ignored him! He had to focus harder than ever before, tune himself with the cosmos on a deeper level than ever, or he wouldn't be able to slay this new evil before it birthed. As his hands finished their waving, the Pegasus constellation shined all around him.

"Burn, my COSMOS! Make me shine…" and he adopted his Charge Fist stance, pointing a left palm at his target and clenching a right fist aside like a braced spear. "… like the knight of Pegasus!" the image of an armored man with a lance riding the winged steed then overlapped with Lance's pose, matching its weapon with his fist.

He then hesitated, feeling still deep inside that sea of fire in front of him a last vestige of Guifi.

But it was burning away, leaving nothing but that ever more polished ruby of vicious evil.

Asking everyone he's ever cared about to forgive him, from Noah to Guifi himself, Lance shed his last tears for his friend, tensed his body and made his rising cosmos explode, shooting him into his target. "PEGASUS… The attack sonic-boomed through the Meadow, reaching Mach 2, Mach 3, Mach 4 and then Mach 5, leaving a trailing image of himself and blowing away entire fields of the meadow's flowers, and his punch pierced through the emanating waves of burning flames like a knight's thrusting lance at a dragon's heart. "CHARGE FIST!"

The impact was blinding, a flash a bright white light accompanied by the shattering through dense layers of energy, and all Nova could sense was Lance disappearing into that horrible mass of energy and colliding with its core before a great sensation of galaxies colliding was felt!

Yet, to Nova's shock, while Lance pushed through that mass of energy and smashed a body from its insides straight through the Meadow's boundaries into a wall of rock, a much different person than the one swallowed by the fire was now pinned by his fist, making Lance's eyes widen. "N-NO!"

Pushing out the last transformative layers of energy with a mere raise of his mask, Guifi Taitano took the fist pressed against his pristine new armor and pushed it off, dressed in a Cloth of Athena.

Lance recognized it as a multicolored version of Black Phoenix's armor, immediately denouncing it as the Cloth of Phoenix. The crested round headpiece and wing-reinforced chestplate were of white and gold, rather than shades of black, while the three tails of plumes were composed of a shining set of fiery-orange plumes, much more beautiful than their mock counterpart. The greaves, gauntlets and fault were all a shade of light red, with a large red belt front with black wing engravings connected the fault to the cuirass. At last, a central ruby formed the lower beak of the cresting trident on the helmet, which in turn fit neatly around the mask's contours.

It was easily the most advanced Bronze Cloth Lance had ever seen…and its sheer, aggressive cosmos, which emanated like the heat of a volcano's mouth, had just stopped his signature move in its tracks.

The Saint of Phoenix rose hand to his own face, studying his prize. "After all these years…I'm… finally complete! I have finished my Path of the Cloth!" And as the last vestige of Guifi's soul burned away deep inside, only a black husk of darkness was left in his heart. "My ties are cut...Yet… all I feel is… this failure."

Backing away with a bloody gauntlet, Lance felt fear gripping him again. "G-Guifi…that armor…What h-happened to you?!"

The man in armor's shoulders shook in laughter. "You want the full story, uh? Want to know the depth of how much you let me down? How about a song instead?"

"S-STOP IT!" Lance demanded, backing away.

"Let's see…Itsy-bitsy Master went up Nina's spout!" he chanted, shocking Lance. "Down came Guilty, who took the Master out!"

"Guilty?!... That's not your name!" Lance shouted at him.

But the singing just trampled over his protest. "Out came the guts and out came the spleen! And itsy-bitsy Master bit dust under the rain! HA, HA, HA, HA!" he finalized, punctuated by a massive lightning bolt in the island. "Did you like that story? Of what our failure caused?! Yes, Lance… I am Phoenix Guilty. My new name… My Saint name… just like yours. Do you like it…. Red?"

Just when Lance thought this island had no more horrors to throw at him. He never told Guifi his old name. "… H-how…."

Guilty just kept laughing.

"W-WHO TOLD YOU THAT?!"

"What a cute little name! Did Noah pick it for you?"

Lance swung his fist again. "ANSWER ME!"

But a powerful punch from the Phoenix Saint instead landed right on Lance's guts, making his world go blank and punishing him for his rudeness.

Guilty watched him collapse into his hands and rose a finger. "First rule of Death Queen Island, no one is late! Everyone is always early! Unlike you!" He rose two, afterwards. "Second rule of Death Queen Island; you answer the Master's questions first, not the other way around!"

Lance backed away in a panic, barely recovering from the blow he just took. "He's… he's so much stronger!"

A ring of fire formed at Guilty's feet, charging his cosmos. "Third rule of Death Queen Island; you only tap out when I say you do! Fourth rule of Death Queen Island; a promise to a friend is to KEEP!" The ring then erupted with a cry of the Phoenix. Guilty lowered his gaze, rose his left foot and spread his arms wide and high, manifesting his cosmos into an illusion of a fire bird gliding across the background. "And anyone caught breaking the rules… dies!"

The spike of cosmos was felt across the island and Compass Nova gasped from the rock he was hiding behind. "That power level! It can't be a Bronze Saint's!"

"This can't be Guifi!" Lance's own thoughts concluded from it as he rose his arms.

"Since you've broken all the rules, Lance, you can DIE ONCE FOR EVERY ONE!" Guilty hissed, lowering his foot, dressing himself in the flying bird's flames and then punching forward. "HŌYOKU TENSHŌ!"

A great storm of fire shot out of the punch, accompanied by the cry of the Phoenix, unleashing not only a massive firebird blast twice as large as a man that flew across between them, but also enormous wind currents filled with embers that broke Lance's guard entirely, paralyzing and exposing him to the full fury of the flap of the Phoenix's wings. It struck his entire body with a hellish locomotive force that sent him ripping across the meadow, setting the entire flower field ablaze and eventually crashing into a great demolition of rock and flames.

The island shook with the force, or perhaps with Guilty's loud cackle, and Compass Nova watched in distraught as the Silver-ranked Pegasus Saint got buried under a hell of cosmos.

Running through the rubble and cracked terrain, Compass Nova searched desperately for a path out of the Meadow, but wherever he turned, walls of fire emerged out of the ground or storming winds from the Hoyoku Tensho made barriers of rock tumbled down unto his path, trapping him inside the plateau with the other two.

He backed away from another collapsing exit, feeling terror gripping him. "O-oh Goddess…" he slowly succumbed to his trembling knees and hands. "I'm g-going to die here…"

Cackling in laughter, Phoenix Guilty enjoyed the bonfire, letting the meadow burn down entirely into a field of ash. "HA, HA, HA, HA! Go on… show me that grit that Pegasus Saints have, little Red! I want to show you so much how much my heart pounds with HATE for you!"

And just as Guilty said, and much to Nova's shock, there was a rumbling in the chaos of fire and rock and a battered, injured Pegasus did make his cosmos shine from within, blasting the weight off his body with a great burst of white cosmos.

But Pegasus was a poor sight, bleeding all over and shaking with the damage he just took. "D-DAMN YOU!"

His outburst only amused the new avatar of the Goddess. "HA, HA, HA, YES! Keep getting back up, Lance, no matter how hard I punch you down! Every muscle tissue in my body is filled with scars of hate for your sorry fucking sight and I want to let it out! I want you to feel me punching, kicking and burning every single bit of it all onto you! And I won't be satisfied… not until every single inch of your being intimately understands all the pain and horror this island can give!"

Burning his white cosmos, the Saint of Bronze demanded answers. "W-WHY?! Don't you know what you're doing?! This isn't you!"

The insistence in trying to appeal to his old self by the Pegasus only amused Guilty, though. "I told you, Lance… This is a place to reach your purer self. On Death Queen Island, you stand on the greatest forge ever used by the Muvians… But that was never meant for just swords and armors alone."

The implication in this revolted Lance. "W-What are you saying?! That this is a better 'you'?!"

The masked, scarred man merely laid out his arms, as if to display all his ugly scars, barky muscles and vicious armor in an answer of utter vanity.

"F-FUCK YOU!" Lance snapped. "THIS ISN'T WHAT YOU SAID YOU WANTED TO BECOME AS A SAINT! YOU WERE NEVER GOING TO BECOME A KILLER!"

Guilty's head tilted slowly. "You promised me things, too. Didn't you?" he countered, before burning his aura, a mere rousing of energies that seemed to be accompanied by an increase in the island's tremors and geysers. "But if you have a problem with what I've become, Lance… Come. And take my place!"

Roaring out a battle cry, the Pegasus Saint dashed at Mach 5, unleashing a flurry of punches that rattled the air with supersonic thrusts. Guilty's armored arms expertly parried each individual blow with a cackle from the man, stopping each furious punch in its tracks with but the graze on the curves of his forearms and a loud snapping sound per each one. Lance swung his leg up, colliding it with two Phoenix arms raised to block it in a clash that blew away the flower ash around them and cracked the earth. Rolling aside to dodge a vicious fire claw swipe from Guilty, Lance's hand touched the ground and pushed his whole body up, allowing him to back-kick the Phoenix straight in the masked chin, blasting him back a good foot or two.

Stumbling back, the Phoenix merely laughed and gestured his fingers invitingly.

Immersing himself in more and more white cosmos, Lance continued his assault, closing in once more with an overhead punch that only barely knocked Guilty's head aside. His white-padded knee then slammed explosively on the Phoenix chestplate, but once again Lance's hard-landing hits felt like they were striking the target boards back at Heart of Sasha, making them shake but not crack at all. In sheer frustration, he unleashed a series of rapid-fire kicks and punches that assaulted Guilty all from head to toe, rattling him with more blows than he could possibly read throu-

Lance's fist was suddenly caught by the wrist, startling him, and Guilty laughed as he swung Lance down, hammering on the ground so hard that the ashy ground cracked and sunk under the force, making the Pegasus scream!

Guilty's other hand then lifted Lance by the neck. "HA, HA, HA! TRY HARDER, PEGASUS!" and his knuckles smashed Lance's stomach once more in a heavy hit that taught the Pegasus what real pain was. The Phoenix' battering continued, punishing Lance over and over with successive punches to the exposed parts of his chest, digging fire knuckles deep into flesh barely protected by Lance's defensive white Cosmos. Guilty's leg then swung up, painfully burying its knee right into Lance's crotch, paralyzing him with sheer pain, before the Phoenix Saint hurled him into the air. "This is how you DO IT! HOYOKU -!"

Dizzy with pain as he fell, Lance still sensed the fire cosmos amassing once more and Guilty striking the pose of his technique. The Pegasus amassed cosmos into his clenching fists.

Taking aim at the falling ragdoll of a Saint, Guilty swung his fist. "- TENSHO!" and the gigantic firebird catapulted once more from his punch.

Seeing everything turning into fire and completely upside down, Lance thrust his hands at the attack. "B-BARRIER!" and concentric rings of cosmos were cast out in a large, round, transparent shield of energy which took the phoenix blast head on, allowing it to explode all over its fragile surface.

The masked Guilty rose head in alarm, seeing his attack stopped in its tracks. "What?!"

The Barrier cracked, being nowhere near powerful enough to bluntly stop the strike, but the natural lack of concentration in fire-elemental cosmos prevented Hoyoku Tensho from piercing through, giving Lance a precious microsecond to correct his falling unto his feet and escaping the path of the attack before it burst along with barrier into a shower of flames and broken cosmic glass!

Seeing Guilty guard himself from the cosmic chaos, Lance reacted immediately. "CHARGE FIST!" and landed his signature attack full force unto Guilty's less-protected stomach, pushing the bastard all across the field into the Meadows's borders.

This was made with such force and viciousness that the desperate Nova saw Lance practically tackle the Phoenix Saint through the plateau's edges, blasting a path through it and shooting out the other side into the air, creating a way out!

Leaving the flames, burning flowers and crumbling plateau, the two battling Bronze Saints fell with a scream unto their new combat field; the Phoenix Shrine grounds! Dropping with clumsy rolls unto puddles of blood and acidic water, the two groaned, suffered and growled at the first sight of each other after recovering, immediately launching into new exchanged of punches that made the island shake on first impact!

Finally escaping the meadow, Compass Nova panted in fear and ran down the shrine grounds, hearing loud screams and blows coming from the sacrifice floor, especially from Pegasus, but all his bravery had evaporated after everything he witnessed since he got caught and he just wanted to follow Lance's advice and leave!

Unfortunately, as he reached the edge of the Burning Swamps, his feet screeched to a halt at the sight of the countless lava fields completely out of control, erupting into huge billows of molten rock many times taller than himself that washed over the few safe paths like waves of a raging sea. Cardinal Net would be pointless if the hazard levels were getting this insane.

By the Goddess, it was one horror after the other!

Back at the shrine grounds, Pegasus Lance, drenched in his own blood, screamed from taking another insanely powerful punch to the face! He braked his inertia with his heels but felt on the verge of breaking in two under the damage he was taking. Gasping and holding his arm, he saw with great distraught that Phoenix Guilty didn't seem even scratched after all the blows he took.

In fact, Guilty laughed at the fight they were having. "I like the way with which you handled that Hoyoku, Lance…. Like a true Saint, not letting the same blow land twice! But really,… how long would you say you have before your body snaps in half?"

Panting and cleaning the blood off his face, unsure which was his own or from the puddles, Lance tried to rationalize the situation. "H-How can he be so much stronger?! And faster?! It has to be the Cloth! But… what if it's not? His cosmos is so… fucking diabolically strong now! I'm hitting him as hard as I can and it feels like I'm hurting myself more than him!"

Trying to ignore these fears, Lance charged once more with a war shout, but his raised fist was parried from within by Guilty's intruding arm. The Phoenix's foot slammed up on his chin, knocking him back silly. Stumbling like a doll in a storm, the Pegasus tried a more complex approach, feinting Guilty with a rising dash kick but rolling around the adversary instead as the blow missed so he could land behind him. Blocking a blind blow from Guilty, Lance then swooped in with a punch through Guilty's defenses, but a blindingly fast knee exploded on his chest out of nowhere, rendering his efforts asunder.

The pummeling continued; the three-tailed Phoenix laughed, grabbing the stunned Lance by the neck and hitting his torso over and over, loving the sight of the Pegasus bleeding and screaming more and more.

"MORE! MORE! MORE!" the masked man growled as he paused his punching, letting the bruised Lance slump down in his grip. "Fight for me, friend! "

But Lance just coughed and gasped, utterly overwhelmed.

Seeing no reaction, Guilty pressed Lance down, pinning him on the floor and reaching for a littered battle axe used during the sacrifices. "I want MORE out of you! MORE! For everything I had to go through because of you and your weakness! Scream, Lance! Scream at the top of your lungs! Cry for help, like we did! And hate me! HATE ME! OR I'LL RIP YOU APART LIMB BY LIMB!"

Hearing the axe's edge dislodged off the ground, Lance's tired eyes widened in terror, seeing its cracked, bloody edge raised to the volcano light, brimming with the Phoenix' power, before Guilty's grip swung it down on him at the speed of sound!

In a nanosecond, the stars of Pegasus exploded with Cosmos, filling him with power in a moment of survival!

Grabbing Guilty's grip by the arm, Lance leveraged his side up, letting the axe smash into his reinforced shoulder plate in a shock of pure cosmos! Digging crude metal into pristine, white Lemurian Bronze, Guilty reeled, sensing the volcanic energies of Phoenix clash against the indomitable spirit of the Pegasus somewhere between the axe's edge and the armor!

At the end of that interminable micro-second of collision between Cosmos, the entire battle axe suddenly shattered to pieces and the light of the Pegasus Cloth shined out, blinding Guilty. With a scream, Lance caught Guilty by the neck guard and pulled him into himself, blasting his knee into Phoenix's stomach. His punch then blasted across the Phoenix's helmeted head like he never had before, getting Guilty off of him.

Still reeling with the gore he was almost subjected to, Pegasus Lance charged in with a flying knee blow, smashing Guilty into a pile of rocks and giving himself the breathing room he needed to recover. "How about THAT, you B-BASTARD?!"

Moving rocks and severed Black Saint bodies off of him, Guilty laughed, pleased. "M-Much better. I almost felt that!" and then he locked mask eyes with Lance's red orbs. "But not enough! You're still hitting me like a stupid fucking girl! You need to drive your attacks deeper, bloodier, with much more hate!"

A shill went up Lance's spine. Even Guifi's teacher didn't sound like this, like some kind of animal was voicing him. "G-Guifi… killing me… isn't gonna bring her back! You KNOW THAT!"

The masked man coughed, showing the first sign of damage, an especially noticeable sight since Lance had the constant feeling this person wasn't breathing at all otherwise.

"You fool…of course I know it! I don't want that cunt back!" he hissed, horrifying Lance. "Always taking care of me… always soothing my wounds, telling me I wasn't a monster… Making me feel things I didn't deserve to feel…Why would I want her back?!"

Lance stepped back. "W-what… what the fuck are you saying?! DON'T TALK ABOUT NINA LIKE THAT!"

The monster stood up, firm. "That stupid slave… she was doing nothing but distract me! Now I understand everything my Master was trying to say. I should have accepted his words long ago and killed that bitch myself sooner! This power in my body… " he then looked at his hands, seeing something others couldn't, and laughed. "I… I never experienced anything like it! It's not even power, it's…. as if the Goddess herself is pumping her love for me through my veins, like her beautiful arms are wrapped around my neck… telling me these feelings, these dreams of fire I've always had, are all okay…that I can embrace them."

Assaulted by these words and by vague memories of the dreams he's been having in Death Queen Island, Lance stood in quiet distraught. The Goddess? Could he possibly mean Athena?

The monster's ugly words went on, entranced with the sight of himself. "And she IS beautiful, more than Nina ever was… Her smile is so confident, her eyes so sharp yet reassuring, her touch, like a torch of purifying fire. All my doubts, all my fears,… gone in her embrace!... And as she takes me into her bosom and kisses me… do you know what she whispers into my ear, Lance?"

Another fearful back step from the Pegasus. "Guifi…!"

"She asks me to wash her skin with a bucket of your warm, hateful blood!" he revealed, shaking shoulders in laughter. "And as her avatar, her Phoenix Saint, her knight… I will oblige! So scream! Hate! Suffer in my hand as much as you possibly can before you die! Cause when I drain you of your fucking blood… I want revenge from you, Lance, but most of all, I want to satisfy my Goddess!"

Feeling his entire skin crawl at these words in utter disgust and revolt, Lance exploded his newfound cosmos and launched at the Phoenix, clashing hands with his and pushing him back with the sheer momentum of his rocketing. Guilty's heels braked through the ground, though, splashing the blood puddles, and his powerful both withstood the bull charge, burning its fire energy.

"Looks like that second wind of yours is vanishing pretty fast, uh, Lance?! Maybe you should have trained harder in that mountain you love so much! Gotten a couple more wolves to chase you down! HA, HA, HA, HA!"

With a flick of wrists and a pull, Guilty then launched the maddened Lance by the grips over himself, launching him into the air. With a shout and a hand thrust, Guilty then blasted Lance with a burning cosmos blast, crashing the Pegasus through a boulder rise bordering the shrine ground.

The Pegasus Saint bled and coughed as he crawled out of the rubble, seeing his vision of the enemy shaking and his own thoughts barely coherent anymore. "S-Shit, what am I going to do?! I'm completely fucking outmatched!" and as he struggled to rise, he indeed felt the surge of energy released earlier die down, like the last flare of an extinguishing candle. "But I need to do something or…"

As fire rained from the sky, Guilty folded arms and shook his masked head at his sorry sight, finally seeing panic in the Pegasus' eyes. "Now I recognize you from our old days… crying and sniveling on the ground, wondering why you couldn't break a simple wooden plank, just wishing that Silver Saint would come get you out of Sasha's. Seems all it took to make you lose that new arrogance was to leverage the power balance a little bit against you…"

Slowly getting back on his feet, Lance tried desperately to focus. "F-Fuck you!"

His crude resistance only seemed to amuse the new Master of Death Queen Island, though. "How feisty! Where was that bravery so far, friend? Did you leave it on the ring of the Coliseum?"

The sudden reference to his battle with Kastiel made Lance wide his eyes. "… Shut up! That's got nothing to do with you and what you're doing now!"

"Doesn't it? Don't you just wish now you had tried a little harder, Lance? Did it upset you when I asked you to take Nina? Did it hurt when my Master knocked you out? Did it frighten you when you realized you were just a paint coat away from being the Black Pegasus?" Guilty confronted, lowering arms. "I assure you, Lance… it was nothing compared to what I was made to feel on this very floor just a moment ago."

The Pegasus Bronze Saint's words in his throat fell dead, disarmed. He couldn't react in any way to all of this but accept his failure in silence.

Knowing this caused him more pain than any of his blows, Guilty continued "You wish things were different, right? But if you had spent as much of that anger… as much of that hate from when you tried to kill your teacher… helping me, your friend…. They could have been. How does that feel, Lance, to know you're nothing but a guilty little shit who failed everyone around him, like me?! That my future… our future died because of you?!"

The words struck like hammers on a heart made of glass inside Lance's chest, making his face quiver in pain and release new tears of shame. Then the acid rain came, dripping slowly on the puddles, but eventually increasing into a downpour. It sizzled on the Pegasus Cloth, but Phoenix looked completely undisturbed.

Seeing him beaten emotionally, Guilty charged his cosmos. "But now… I have a new future. A better future! As the Saint of Phoenix, I've been forged by the Goddess into a new man! A hammer of fire that will reforge the Earth into the perfect, honest hell it is, all in her name! And if you don't wish to join me in burning this imperfect fucking world to the ground, friend,… I'll just lay you on my anvil and incinerate you too!"

"I'm…. I-I'm sorry." Lance asked, seemingly solemn and regretful. His cosmos, however, then flourished once more, and he rose his narrowed eyes in pure anger, manifesting it into a shockwave. "But FUCK YOU!"

Battered by the wave of white light, Guilty's guard broke and he stumbled backwards and, before he could concentrate again, a bullet-like force struck his chest painfully, digging a powerful white cosmos blow deep into the crust of his armor.

Guilty screamed, holding the wrist piercing his armor. "Y-You PUNK!"

"You're NOT GUIFI! He would never say those things about the girl he loved!" Lance spat at him, digging his blow deeper. "You don't get to pretend you're my friend, Phoenix Guilty! I owe you nothing! And I'm not gonna let you take a single step outside this island, much less hurt anyone else!"

"G-gah…. H-ha, HA, HA! A fight to the death it is, THEN!" Guilty welcomed. He tried to swipe Lance to rip his eyes off, but the Bronze Saint blitzed away, reemerging just above his side to land a powerful side kicked to his helmeted head that knocked the round metal piece off and dropped the Saint of Phoenix.

Shining like a star in the air, Lance focused his cosmos into a greater amount than ever before, manifesting the image of the Pegasus knight making its steed spread its wings. "PEGASUS… CHARGE KICK!" and he dove unto the downed Phoenix like a great comet of white cosmos, sinking foot into his mask and blasting him with everything he had unto the ground!

The impact was fearsome, exploding the floor into an expanding dome of energy that then burst and ripped the basalt in every direction, quaking the island!

It was over.

With the light of the blow capable of blinding fighters and onlookers alike, Compass Nova shielded his eyes and tried to keep his balance on the tremoring terrain. "P-Pegasus! Did you do it?!"

However, despite the magnitude of the attack, Lance's scream was heard and he was seen sent flying off the shattering explosion of light, landing with a pained roll. The blinding flare caused by the prior impact then seemingly burned from the inside out as wave after wave of Phoenix energy erupted back and Compass saw, with horror, Phoenix Guilty climbing out.

"Not so bad…I could feel your desire to kill this time!" the man silhouetted by the fire complimented. He left the flames to reveal himself barely fazed by the blow, sporting but a few scratch or two on his mask. "But your hatred, Lance, is still a tiny matchlight compared to mine! If that's all you can manifest, then I'll just put an end to this!"

"Y-you and your fucking h-hatred bullshit! You're doing nothing but the same you've always said I do! And WORSE!"" Lance growled, recovering. "Guilty, I'm burying you here on this island, together with all your stupid bullshit! It's least I can do for Nina; not let the boy she loved g-get his fucking soul raped by Athena for a single more second!"

But the man in mask laughed at this.

It made Lance grit teeth. "YOU T-THINK THIS IS FUNNY?!"

"You ignorant fool! You really can't see anything wider than your childish little spat with Sanctuary, can you?! Now I see why the Master laughed at me, too..." Guilty mocked. In fact, the thought of Lance picturing him getting dominated in mind and body by such a frivolous deity was hilarious. "Tell me, Lance, what makes you think I'm talking about Athena?!"

A blunt pause occurred in Lance as his thoughts reset entirely at this. "W-what?!..."

"Don't worry, Red… I'll show you my muse… It will be your last sight, before I make your mind snap in twain!" Instead of explaining himself, though, Guilty simply gathered his energies, striking the pose of his firebird attack once more, casting out the same paralyzing charging winds as before. His fist was once again dressed in fire and he thrust it. "HOYOKU TENSHO!"

"This is it! I'll disarm his technique and strike him by surprise!" And he thrust his palms joined by the wrist, casting his move. "BARRIER!"

The transparent dome of rings formed once again in front of him and the massive blast of wind and fire collided against it, casting an image in the skies of the Phoenix's sharp talons clashing with the knight's raised shield in a sparking impact of universal energies.

This time, however, just before it crashed, Lance jumped over its top and used the crashing burst of Barrier to propel himself into the air over a surprised Guilty. "The direction that fire blast technique is limited, but my Charge Fists are not! So long as I block its winds, I can outmaneuver it!" and he dropped down with the last of his cosmos. "CHARGE FIST!"

The knight's spear descended on the vulnerable firebird, aiming for the neck! At this distance and momentum, the impact would be as lethal as unavoidable!

Yet, as their reflexes slowed time down, Guilty's body leaned in, moving his head out of the attack's way. His gloved finger then rose, immersed in cosmos, straight at Lance's face. As it seemed like it was about to dig into his forehead, though, the two Bronze Saints seemingly struck past each other in the air, landing back-to-back.

Lance himself was utterly confused, having the strangest feeling he just lost consciousness of how that trade of blows went. He stood up straight, incapable of feeling anything but an incredible painful sensation of a long, hot nail being dug deep into his skull by the frontal lobe. Touching his burning forehead, Lance gasped weakly, seeing fresh, scalding blood in his fingertips.

The Pegasus Saint sweated uncontrollably, feeling his heart beat faster and faster and the hot nail melting into a wash of warmth all over his brain, seemingly wrapping it in a cage of burning, thorny vines.

His eyes froze on Guilty, turning. "W-what… What d-did you do to me?!"

Guilty's shoulders shook in chuckling. "I ended this charade!"

All of a sudden, the background of where they stood seemed to shatter like a great, illusionary window, replacing Death Queen Island with utter, silent darkness.

….

Then the howling began.

A howling of both the gods' breath and that of their beasts.

As the ground beneath his feet grew colder and colder, Lance heard the wind blowing by getting louder and louder. It was a sound of familiar horror, transporting his mind back to the prison he stayed on for nearly 4 years. Naked forests cropped out of the previously volcanic ground, surrounding him with tall, dense meshes of shadows. The cold around his legs turned to snow and ice, rapidly going from Death Queen Island's 90 degrees Celsius to 60… below zero.

With his Pegasus Cloth evaporating into nothing, Lance's body immediately frosted with this thermal transformation, stiffening as he collapsed unto the snow. His forehead burned and burned, bleeding from the punctured wound on it but also shining with a cracked, triangular mark.

"G-Guifi….!" he called, feeling his muscles turning into rock-solid frozen flesh. His arm rose in plead at him. "Guifi, p-please!"

But the masked man laughed and waved a finger. "Nah-ah-ah. It's like you said, little Red… I'm now Phoenix Guilty!" and he then began to vanish into nothing, abandoning him as well. "And you can stay in your hell for all eternity… just like you left me in mine!"

Gasping in terror as he was left all alone in this nightmare, Lance looked down, feeling intense coldness coming up his body. He paled at the sight of his limbs growing black and breaking as shadows of stalking wolves emerged from the forests, surrounding him.

Breaking piece by piece, the Pegasus' hand reached out. "S-Someone… h-help me… N-NOAH!" but the rest of his body cracked more and more, seemingly made of porcelain, until fissures grew even across his face, past the triangle of light around his forehead wound. Tears of blood, rather than water, began forming in the corner of his eyes and the triangular seal finally snapped under the pressure. The last thing he saw before losing his senses were the shadowy wolves growling and pouncing on his body pieces.

…

…

And in the dark sky, a single bright star burned!

{==============|SSII|==============}

After the terrain disarray caused by the winds of that last firebird attack, the Compass Bronze Saint struggled to move away the rocks on top of him to free himself. He panted harshly after moving a particularly large one. His whole body was filled with blood. He stood up, though his legs trembled and wavered every second he remained so.

He looked back to the grove and saw Guilty walking away from Lance, who just stood on his knees with a dumbfounded look on his face.

"W-wait!" he called out to Guilty, who turned to him. "What did you do to him?!"

Guilty chuckled. "Phoenix Genma Ken. Lance will now experience a hell that will shatter his very soul, just like I have. I wouldn't disturb him if I were you. He's in the middle of a delicate process of becoming my new Black Pegasus." He then paced towards him. "Now… back to you."

Compass gulped and panicked, crawling away. "N-no! No, STOP! Someone help me!"

Guilty raised his finger. "Fifth rule of the island: no shouting at the Maste-"

A loud scream was heard and something exploded behind Guilty, who stopped in his tracks. He turned around and both him and Compass widened their eyes.

In a mass of black, burning energy, Lance was standing back up, eyes narrowed in pure rage and dripping out tears of blood as his fists tightened. Blood was still dripping from his Genma Ken wound, but the tiny puncture point was burning brightly with a broken triangle symbol. A massive, black aura of fire loudly raged all around him, making his hair flow rapidly and overwhelming the two Saints dormant 7th Senses.

Guilty widened his eyes, shocked. This was not a Black Saint's cosmos! "L-Lance?" he also noticed the light on his forehead. "Is that… the memory seal on him?! My Genma Ken must have…"

"GUILTY, I won't let you get away with this!" roared Lance, stepping forward. "Even if it's the last thing I'll do, I'm saving you from this f-fucking hell they put you in!"

Saint Guilty and Saint Compass both widened their eyes, utterly shocked. Guilty closed his fist, not understanding what was going on. "You fucking punk, I hate you! Why won't you stay dead?!"

Lance narrowed his eyes further and locked them with the mask's. He wasn't sure what was going on, but he was sure of one thing; he was going to use every ounce of his new cosmos to bring this monster down!

{======================|SS2|======================}

Chapter End

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Next Chapter: Side Chapter 2 - The Curse of Hatred - Part 6 of 6: The Greatest Cruelty

Description: Determined to put a stop to Guilty's rampage, Lance uses every ounce of his strange new power-up to battle the Phoenix Saint. However, as the battle progresses, it becomes clear that Guilty's own new powers, and their source, are far more sinister than initially suspected.

And that Lance's options are narrower than he thought.

Author Notes:

There's a bunch of stuff to discuss about this chapter. First of all, a note should be made on its particularly violent nature. Even back in V2 this was always supposed to be the lowest point of the Side Story, where the characters are driven to their rock bottom. However, 2012 readers will know that this doesn't mean the setbacks are over for the Death Queen Island side story.

However, this chapter is also an exercise to see how visceral I can make a story. I wanted Zebulon_Wallace to be the beta-reader this time particularly because she's seen a lot of violence and darkness in movies and novels so she was perfect to help me push myself more in that direction. There are limits to the violence of any nature I am willing to explore, but I still think it's an important exploratory exercise, especially since I'll have fewer contextual opportunities better than freaking Death Queen Island to do so.

One thing I forgot to mention last time was the etymology of Compass Nova; in V2 he didn't have a name, but this time around I made sure to include it since I knew he would be meaningful to the story. Usually, I name my Saints after some kind of reference to SS lore or their constellations, but with Compass/Pyxis being a relatively recent set of stars, it doesn't have that many cool aspects to point at, so I ended up referencing supernovas that are a part of it.

With the Master, who is killed off in this chapter, I never really had a name for him cause I think the character works better that way. Number 1, I wanted to give the readers the possibility to wonder if he was the Saint Seiya Guilty from 'present times' (even though it might be super obvious that he wasn't) and Number 2 I just think naming him would be too humanizing. The point of his character is that he's supposed to be a man utterly corrupted by Death Queen Island's philosophy, even more so than the Guilty we know from the story.

Finally, poor Nina was subconsciously named after Nina from Breath of Fire. There was no particular reason, I just like the character in those games, especially the 2nd and 4th ones.

Next chapter will be the finale of Side Story 2, btw. It's already finished, it's PRETTY BIG and Jenny DeVic will be beta-reading it. I'll spend the month of June working on the first chapter of the new story Arc.

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 30000 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.

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