This shouldn't be a surprise if you've read this story to this point, but I'd like to formally condemn Donald Trump and anyone who voted for him. He's a pathetic little narcissist who's unqualified, incompetent, and the human embodiment of a malignant tumor. How he made it to the White House even once is baffling. Anyway,


If the androids, the Grimm, or Griswold Baine himself didn't kill Caspian, the stairs up to the top of Empyrean Tower would. Ten-plus floors back up to the surface. Thirty-five to the server room. They dropped their Holobands off there, in the back-alleys of the dark, digital metropolis. They spent less than a minute among server tower skyscrapers, with LED and Hologram windows. But he felt the beads of sweat beginning to gather at his hairline, and the moisture left beneath the Holoband as he peeled it away. As Caspian caught his breath, peeled his chestplate from claggy skin, Ichigo snuck away. Found the thumb drive where he left it, stuck in a recess between three towers at the center of the labyrinth. A fine layer of dust had settled over it.

Its indicator light still strobed blue.

They ascended again, up another 30 floors until they passed the tower's halfway point. They found another landing, its archway windows looking out over the ocean. His feet dragged toward the only way forward– a wide, low hallway. By its dimensions and the drab grey tinge found nowhere else in the tower it felt a bit like the tunnel into Sentinel Stadium. But the audience was silent, confined to the prison of light seventy-five stories below. And at the end of the tunnel, no dancing neon, no strobing spotlight. Just a wide staircase, ascending into white.

Along the way, Caspian noted the pictures hung along the hall. Two made up a sequence, only a foot and a half apart. In the first, two men lay in what looked like white coffins, propped up almost vertical against a white wall and a bank of Holo-consoles. The man on the left looked well on his way into a real coffin– unkempt grey hair slicked to his scalp by sweat, sunken cheekbones and glazed-over eyes. A kind of vacant stare that haunted Caspian, reminded him of the aftermath of a Grimm attack. The man on the right, in restraints, was relatively young, relatively fit. Horror etched deep into his twisted brow.

And in the second, he grinned ear to ear. New clothes, two thumbs up. A black placard narrated the photograph below.

"Frontline's Blaine Forsyth volunteers for the first human soul transference trial. Initial trial and all subsequent attempts were a resounding success."

A few steps down the hall in another black-and-purple frame, a team of scientists in sterile lab coats too similar to the ones he'd seen in Snow's memories. Griswold Baine stood front and center, beaming. And in thick hands he held a golden plaque announcing their success.

"Griswold Baine (Middle) posing with Soul Sequence, the team credited with quantifying the human soul."

He wondered how many of them knew their crowning achievement set the stage for the apocalypse.

The stairs at the end of the hall split at a marble statue of Griswold Baine, peeled away in two half-spirals into the next chamber. A grand, cavernous space making up the tower's circumference for seven stories. High arches between thirteen white marble pillars supported the ceiling, carved and embellished like the roof of a cathedral. And marble giants hung in suspended animation, purple glow of gravity dust spreading in veins beneath stone skin. The room reminded Caspian also of an observation deck, with the panoramic view of city, forest, and ocean behind foot-thick glass. Maybe a panopticon was a better analogy. Yet the circle of desks and console banks turned instead inward, toward the central column.

Upon it, three of the white twin-coffin structures he saw in the picture. An odd reflective tubing rose from the top of each, tangled together to meet within a circular node about the width of a tire but half as thick. Four notches in cardinal directions, like a clock minimalist beyond any function. At chest height, a blank Holoscreen and its accompanying console.

He knew they stood in the chamber where it had all begun– the first flap of the butterfly's wings that snowballed into the Apoptosis Project. He considered the arrogance of keeping Frontline's darkest secret in an oversized display case, level with ten thousand office windows and the airships that buzzed between them. But he'd just passed a marble statue of the secret's keeper, so dialed back his surprise.

He saved it for the explosion of noise from the far end of the room.

An unfathomable weight crashed into the hall, and sent Caspian to his back. Stone floor quivered and cracked, glass powdered from it to the ceiling, and a wave of warm rot billowed in. Two of the pillars supporting the ceiling, each six or seven feet wide, splintered like they were built from chalk, and white marble shards rained down into the hall. Deep cracks set into two more. The twilight sky and the city beneath it disappeared, and an abyss spread across spiderweb fractures. Leathery wings folded into swirling darkness. And some strange, black protrusion like the fruiting body of some malevolent fungus, reaching out to where he lay. The mushroom-cap was the top of an inverted skull– eight feet across, twin abysses for eyes crying tar. Crablike mandibles shivering in a silent scream.

One set of arms reached for him. Another dragged behind.

Fear took him over as he watched the wretched form unravel, watched tendrils spread like roots around the outside of the tower. And more, across the floor and ceiling. The Vestige– it must have been. But if that were the case, had Lazula and Lilly failed? Did Midas betray them?

"Get up!" a voice barked from over his shoulder. A hand of rigid armor ripped him back and onto his feet, and with a bristling tail, obsidian growing over his arms and his chest, Noxis led the charge. His claws shredded the side of the Vestige, where a neck should have been. But in the wake of each strike dark flesh knit and stitched, regenerating just as quickly as he could destroy. A flash of crimson from his eyes, a flash of shadow from his body. And his semblance spread until he resembled the wolf Caspian fought that night in October. With a feral snarl the faunus clamped down on the Vestige's skull, wrenched his head back and forth like a predator despatching its prey.

The mask cracked, tar sputtered from the wound. And a bone spear jutted out from within, skewering the jaws of the wolf. Noxis stumbled back in a haze of his semblance, black fragments falling from his hand as he clutched at his neck. One arm that hung limply from the Vestige crashed into his chest and sent him, crumpled, across the cold floor. Knots of tar bubbled on the ground around where he landed, erupted into tendrils and hardened into bone. Noxis stood, shakily. And began pounding at the bars of his prison.

A crimson jolt of energy from Rowan's cannon left a wide gash in the Vestige's side, but it again began to stitch itself. He cursed under his breath, watched as two of Laurel's shots rattled off against its mask, then looked to Noxis. He vaulted a desk, and opened a crack in his jail cell with Sanguine Storm's edge. Another bullet screamed over his head. Disappeared somewhere in gooey flesh, then dropped harmlessly to the ground below it.

The serrated hinges of the Vestige's jaw unfurled, and the air between them flicked and sparked with a violent crimson. A mote of jolting light appeared for a second among shadow, and burst forth with a scourge of dark energy. A black bolt a foot wide, bloody lightning flying at odds all around it to obliterate everything in its path. It split the floor, sent fragments of desks and seats in a hail to all sides. And an echo behind it all, the air itself screaming in agony as it tore apart. The Vestige shattered the cage it created, and its captive disappeared in darkness. The far window was gone in an instant– and so was he. Rowan lay to the side, covered in debris and losing his blade somewhere within it, blinking at the ruined stone where Noxis stood a second before.

Caspian watched the path of destruction. Watched Noxis's semblance sprout from his forearms and into a shield of bone. He may have survived the initial impact. But nobody could hope to stick the landing. Caspian was running. Tapped Moka on the way, and her semblance washed into his legs. Running faster. He shot his grappling hook into a podium set into the white floor; only spared enough time to watch its barbs click into place. And before allowing himself a half-second to look down, half a chance to second-guess himself, he jumped. He held down Undertow's trigger, burnt the sky with a streak of cyan, and the kick boosted him toward the faunus. Plunged Undertow back into its sheath, replaced it with Noxis's hand.

He found a hold between the spines grown from Noxis's wrist, felt his aura grind across their jagged edges, and tightened his grip. He clicked down the retraction lever in his grappling hook. He felt something click inside of it. Gained an inch, lost three. And the cord screamed with their combined weight. Around the side of Empyrean Tower, the Vestige crept like a flood in slow-motion. Heads rolled in the surf, their eye sockets empty, their jaws splitting open to swallow themselves and sink into the murk. A hundred arms grasped for them.

Caspian felt a needle-prick in his neck. Two against his chestplate, and one into his side. The gravity bolts glowed like a blacklight, and as Moka came to the edge of the drop and heaved, the purple nodes on her gloves did as well. Caspian planted his foot on the glass. Managed a couple steps upward with her help. The cord shifted again. He lost an inch or so, but his heart fell to the pit of his stomach. And still, the dark flood approached.

Noxis looked to Caspian. Looked to the faunus thirty feet above him, and the shadow creeping across the sunset's reflection. Grasping. Hungry. Again, to Caspian.

Noxis' semblance burned away, and he began to fall.

Caspian saw it in slow motion at first. Noxis falling, the wind tousling his hair and the fringe of his jacket. The workings of a smile he forced as he turned his head to the ground.

But reality's motion returned as six black wings screamed past, and snatched Noxis from mid-air. Caspian grimaced, thinking first it was some offshoot of the Vestige, or its spawn. But saw in its arms a shock of blue. A flash of white. And sunset glinting off the golden hilt of a blade. He retracted the grappling hook, and returned to the fight.

"You alright?" Moka checked, her arm resting on his as she looked him over.

"Yeah. Somehow. And you?"

Moka rubbed her newest scar, and rolled out her shoulder. "Just a little sore. I'll be okay."

"Good. Don't overdo it, okay? We're both making it out of this."

"I'll be okay. Promise!" And she was off again, with flame smoldering around her wrists.

He held Undertow's trigger, the beam kicked his hand back and left a smoking crater in the Vestige's side. As expected, the wound stitched slower than the ones left by Noxis's claws or Laurel's bullets. Then around the crater skin rolled and swelled, then erupted with half a dozen barbed tendrils. A couple smashed the flat of Sanguine Storm, all ignored Moka's advance, and descended on Caspian like a rain of dark arrows. Hard-light traced the air around his armguard, and his shield flashed to life just in time to catch the first. He pivoted around two more, lashed them as they passed him and split a fourth down the middle. Another caught his armguard– split and burned at its edges, but surged around his arm and squeezed like a python. He dug into it with Undertow, twisted and felt sinews split beneath his blade. He tore his arm free. But another speared him in the stomach, another in his leg. It constricted his calf and wrenched him upside-down, halfway to the ceiling and back down into broken glass.

He crashed side-first into a thousand pin pricks. He bounced, flipped over his back and his stomach landed in a thousand more. He lay a dozen feet before the view of the city, gasping for breaths of broken glass. Twenty feet before a six-winged silhouette. A cacophony, and more glass rained down on him. Stillness stunned the room. For a second he was face to face with Noxis, who pushed himself to his feet. Window fragments cracked beneath his boots. And from within the creature's wingspan, two more pairs. A folded-up parasol, itching with sparks. A sword nestled in its golden-tipped sheath.

Lazula nodded her thanks to the beast. Some unholy hybrid of human and Grimm, though it looked more like a demon than either. Four arms like a Beowolf's, clawed and sprouting spines of bone. Dark flesh webbed over gold-rimmed armor. Strands of bone mocking a quiff of hair, growing from behind a laughing mask. Abyssal eyes, a shadowed smile. Resplendence looked too small in its grasp. But its steel thrummed in some resonance Caspian felt rather than heard, and bone grew from each end of the halberd.

He recalled his vision from the night before. Something massive, formless, carried on the same wings. But even then it was only a near-match– a puzzle piece matching three sides, but the fourth didn't fit, and the picture didn't snap into clarity. The grinning mask regarded him wordlessly.

"Is that… Midas?"

Tar dribbled from the smile, ran along the mask's chin. "For now."

The sound of splitting stone drew Caspian's finger to Undertow's trigger. He ducked beneath his armguard, aimed Undertow up to the source. A tendril impaled the heart of each marble giant, swelled to feed them their crimson glow– Grimm's infernal flame. It spread in veins beneath marble skin, burned away the gravity dust suspending them. And as they fell, their joints cracked and split, filled in by strands of the Vestige. The crimson glow drew up into each head. Featureless faces ruptured, and it whirled and rolled like the mad eye of a stone cyclops.

A head turned toward him. Its torso followed, then its legs. The ground thundered with each step, and Grimm-flesh joints wound into a fist like the front of a minivan. He tumbled to the side, stopped himself and skipped back away from a stomp. Undertow hacked twice at its calf, but if it left a scratch, Caspian didn't notice before a flick of its ankle knocked him away, and a stone fist careened into his side. The air forced from his body, vision spinning, chestplate dented, he knocked against the floor and came to a stop feet from the Vestige. Its tendrils flicked at him, hungry.

A shadow overhead. And black wings descended to sever them with a golden halberd. An uncanny swiftness blurred Midas's form, and he set into the Vestige's side with whirling arcs of steel, bone, and lightning that drew up the hairs on the back of Caspian's neck. He saw the Vestige's form shifting, making a slow retreat from its progeny's assault. And the flesh behind each strike, burning to nothing. Caspian stood– slowly, at first, as a twang of pain rattled up from his knee. But he held his thumb down on the pad covering Undertow's trigger, and the strike he put into its side was golden.

Lazula twisted out her wrist, settled her fingers back into the grooves of Impetus's hilt. She didn't have the chance to sink it into the amorphous devil before. But assuming Midas's plan worked, at least to some extent, the Vestige was mortal. She charged forward to prove it. But her usual strategy– take a hit, return it tenfold– was nearly useless against the rolling, shifting, shapeless mass. She couldn't reflect the force behind her own blade either, as each slash felt more like it landed in gelatin than the neck of a Beowolf.

But she heard a crash from behind her, and the tearing of stone. Lilly backed away from a statue brought to life on black puppet strings, her eye line even with dark tendons in its knee.

Lazula placed a hand on her shoulder. "Switch me?"

"Deal."

In synchrony they split. First two steps walking, two more steps running, a final step with her shield raised into a fist larger than her. Would have wrenched anyone else's shoulder out of place, shattered every bone to their elbow. But marble shattered instead, and the tar holding its wrist in place splattered across the floor. It looked to her wordlessly, soullessly, as she ducked around another swing, and passed her blade through sinews behind its knee.

"GET DOWN!" someone shouted. The air screamed with heat and shadow, a pillar exploded, but everyone had avoided the Vestige's beam. She looked back to the stone puppet. Her vision was white. Then she was flying, and crashing, her own shield ringing in her ear.

Moka tried to slow its approach with her fist, but stepped back to wring out her hand, and again to avoid a backhanded swipe. It wobbled on the patch of ice the faunus threw, but still it advanced. Two fists above its head, bearing down on Lazula. She pushed herself up to her knees– then between the statue's. Its fist swung around, but she was ready. Planted her feet, raised Aegis, and an explosion of pure energy flung it through the window.

There were a few seconds of silence, then a thud. Like an explosion, far below.

Another thud echoed it– a marble foot slamming the ground where Moka stood a second prior. She threw a hook to the side of its knee, a jab below its kneecap. Each drove spines of ice through tarry viscera, out of the far side. It dropped to its other knee, aimed a fist for her instead. She hopped onto it, skipped once down its forearm and knocked its head aside with the heel of her boot. And Noxis, up to bat from the other side, shattered from temple to nose.

The red glow within flickered madly. Unbound. Sparks flicked to sear the air, caught both faunus in their fury. The head cocked, wrenched back, casting gravel down its shoulders and to the ground. It locked in on Moka, and a fist snapped shut around her.

Above screams of Grimm, above gunshots and the clashing of steel, Caspian heard it. The crash of stone, Moka's anguish. Midas soared above the Vestige, shredding its hide with two clawed hands and whirling his bone glaive with the others. Tar spilled out in his wake. He landed, flashed beneath the fruiting body to sever its arm and stopped beside Caspian.

He placed his hand on Midas's shoulder. Put everyone else out of his mind. For a second, as the darkness spread like a plague up his forearm, and he felt the cold of death creep through his veins, he wondered if he'd made the worst– and final– mistake of his life. But he choked back the feeling. The cobalt blue of his semblance cured him. And turning a hand toward the statue crushing Moka in its grip, one thought stood alone in his mind.

Destroy.

And in a sudden fit, like a man writhing in agony, the statue arched its back, clutched the ground, tensed each joint until the stone between them split. And the tar within each ruptured like a black hemorrhage. Only shattered stone remained, and Moka gasping for breath on top of it.

He waited a second until she struggled back to her feet, and turned his arm to the possessed statue approaching Lilly. His aura swept across his forearm like the tide of the sea, and he clutched the air. He focused, deeply, and its joints began to weep tar. It stalled. Stone scraped against itself, began to show cracks, and Lilly spun to face it.

A sudden squelch, like flesh rupturing, and Rowan was knocked to his back. The tendrils skewered Caspian as well– catching his neck, his shoulder, his hip and his arm, and shattering his concentration.

Lilly skipped away from a two-handed slam that ruptured the marble floor. Aside the slap that pursued her. Elysian Bloom's cover whooshed open with a rush of heat, glowed white-hot, and as it spun she channeled a plume of flame into the statue's chest until an empty cartridge clattered across the floor. The glow across the front of the statue persisted, and smoke trailed from its shoulders and waist.

Noxis nearly knocked her off her feet as he passed in a surge of shadow. He set his feet, hauled his bat into the statue's gut. Everything from its hips to its sternum exploded. The white-hot chunks rained down into the hall. A couple caught the Vestige– the flesh around them shifted and pulled. But the rest caught the mangled remains of the panopticon.

Smoke began to rise. Then fire.

But the sprinkler system wasn't an exception to Frontline Biomedical's state-of-the-art facility. A little white node about thirty feet up each pillar screamed, strobed like an ambulance. And hundreds of gallons of water spewed from each pillar, from the ceiling, from ducts hidden somewhere in the ruptured floor. A hard-light shield descended around the Soul Transference Machine, an oasis amid the storm. And all else in the ravaged graveyard of computers and hard-light sparked. Flashed. Caspian remembered the day before, the Prototype Grimm dredged from Midas's dose of the Vestige becoming that inverted Tree of Death.

And water trickling up from its roots, running along each branch. Lightning dust whirred in Undertow's haft.

"Everyone, to me!" he cried out, and vaulted over a mangled chunk of stone. He placed his next steps carefully– choosing between smooth wet floor and shrapnel. One by one the others did the same, dodging tendrils and the rake of two-foot claws. The last to join was Midas, shredding the back of the Vestige on a flyby, and appearing next to Caspian in a rush of shadow.

"I'm going to need help from anyone who has long-range lightning dust. If we shoot it off all at once, I think we can kill this thing– at least hurt it enough to force an opening." He aimed Undertow, and eager lightning sparked around its barrel. Past it, the Vestige's head, with its eyes of a dark absence and drooling maw, rolled down. Four more arms burst from its side, clutching at shattered marble, and another mouth bloomed like some massive, malevolent flower. A heavy tongue licked and lashed, tasting their fear in the air. Midas drew his bow. Lilly poised with Elysian Bloom, and Moka clicked her fists together,and sparks flicked up to her forearms.

"Three. Two. One."

And it all burst forth in a blinding flash. Caspian felt it in the air, felt it on his skin. Watched the residual sparks skipping across the inundated ground. The lightning flickered around the Vestige's mass, tensing its flesh. More tar dribbled from the abyss that swallowed the brunt of it all, and for a second Caspian thought his plan failed. But some chain reaction kicked in– a couple sparks, at first. Then a storm. The Vestige lit from within, throwing wild sparks at every angle like the conduit of a tesla coil.

It rolled back, the fruiting body head and arms burning away. Dark sinews stretched past their limit and snapped. A few at first, then the rest at once. Smoke trailed its disappearance from the edge. A few seconds later, a roll of thunder shook the floor from below.

"...Did we kill it?" asked Rowan.

"One way to find out," Caspian answered. He stepped forward to check but a sudden pang from his hip to his knee reminded him of the statue's strike. He caught himself, and limped the rest of the way to the edge.

It had landed in the other side of the garden from Snow. It remained, as a shadow. A blemish on white concrete.

"Not sure," he admitted. "But I think it's best we keep moving." A doorway carved into the widest pillar was his only lead on a path upward. He passed his sister. She was still, but the rainbow flecks in her eyes danced to some unheard rhythm. Lilly came to her side.

"This… This might be the way," Lazula muttered.

And Lilly finished the thought. "To free the souls inside of you."

Lazula nodded. Absently, as if she couldn't bring herself to believe it. "One more fight," she said, and bobbed her head with renewed determination.

"One more fight, and they're free."