Chapter 50: To Hell With Love

  The edges of Dante’s vision blurred. The air seared the walls of his throat, his chest, like he had inhaled boiling steam. His eyes watered so badly that the world became a blur of colour and light. Deafening shrieks nearly burst his eardrums, no doubt from the abomination of a phantom that rose from the shadows. Its slimy—but crushing—grip around his body loosened enough for him to slip through.

  Dante crashed down in a graceless heap of limbs and dust. He alone had fallen.

  His hands scrabbled against the heated ground. He pushed himself up, craned his neck upward, and his breath hitched.

  The tentacle which had wrenched Felix’s head upwards in an attempt to rip it off had disintegrated.

  Felix was looking at the sky.

  And it was burning.

  A stripe, a clean slash through the blue, and through it poured harsher sunlight. Sunlight that once soothed Dante's scarred skin now prickled it, as though it were sunburn compressed into seconds. The skin of his exposed right hand reddened rapidly as he watched.

  The invisible shield that had protected the Earth for millennia had a gaping hole burned into it.

  The next victim was the phantom who had ensnared himself, Ace and Jude.

  Half of its massive body simply evaporated, matter converting to superheated vapour in an instant. Flesh, bone, cartilage—all of it flashing into plasma that glowed white-hot. New cursed flesh tried to crawl across the wound, the phantom’s regeneration struggling against the heat, but it was nearly for nought. Felix’s gaze had no doubt landed on it and burned through.

  Where Felix’s eyes landed, reality followed. The buildings before them did not catch fire—fire would have been a mercy.

  They vaporised.

  Felix had looked at the world, and the world had simply ended in that direction.

  Dante's mouth opened. Shaped the word—stop—but nothing came out. His voice, stitched together by his own curse moments ago, was unbound and ruined once more. He tried again, desperately, forcing air through his damaged throat.

  Only a wet, rattling wheeze emerged.

  “Fe—” A broken sound, barely audible even to himself. Dante doubled over, the heat bowing his body. It was building again. Felix's gaze was going to turn, and a sick feeling roiled in his stomach, like a premonition.

  The phantom spoke of a reality that had devoured its ally, Proteus.

  Felix had a Shift.

  But if Felix's Crux held only Leonhart within its protection, everyone—and everything—else would burn.

  Dante felt everything—the horror of watching Felix destroy the world, the agony of his burned body, the desperation to reach him, to stop him, to save him from himself. Every emotion screamed inside a prison of ruined flesh and dead nerves.

  Useless. All of it was useless if he kept it locked inside. What use was a feeling heart without the ability to express it?

  His hand moved to his chest, pressing against his sternum where, beneath skin and bone, his Golden Core pulsed. He pressed so hard that he could break his ribs. His Essence built beneath his palm, pressure mounting like a dam about to burst, until finally his hand pushed through.

  Dante’s vision split. He could see two hands now—one solid, real, pressed against his chest. The other translucent, ethereal, and moving with ease within him, as though it were cutting through warm water.

  The fingers of his third hand brushed past his Golden Core.

  Dante could see it. Wisps of black smoke coiled around it like serpents, circling a smaller golden sphere at the centre. The gold pulsed with warmth, but it was wrapped—suffocated—by an invisible membrane. A layer containing, suppressing everything he was.

  Indifference.

  Dante’s hand clasped his Core and yanked.

  His back arched. Useless legs spasmed. His mouth opened in a scream that produced no sound. Every nerve that still functioned fired at once.

  Agony drowned him in a cascade of colours: first red, then white, then black.

  And finally, a gold flare exploded before his eyes dimmed for good.

  ===

  In this Severed Canto, all shall abide.

  In this Cleaved Paradise, all shall bear witness.

  To his heart laid bare, to his final act.

  ===

  In the story of Icarus, the sun could not be blamed for its lack of grief when he fell—it loved too abundantly to dim its light.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  And so it was with Dante when he bore the Sun into being under liquid gold skies. His Shift was a domain soaked with his being.

  His Core hung outside his body, suspended between his trembling hands. A thin, golden fibre of Essence was all that kept it tethered to his body. The golden sphere shimmered, devoid of the cold blanket of Cursed Essence.

  It had sought refuge in Dante’s once-broken spine, unravelling from the small of his back as Saturn’s unspooled rings.

  Dark ribbons emerged like wings, like limbs he had never possessed—Saturn's ladder made manifest, the golden stairway of contemplation inverted into bands of shadow. They punched into the scorched ground, just as his fists did, pushing him toward action. His useless legs hung limp, but the ribbons—triple the width of his waist, long as his lengthy indignance toward the Venerated Elders—bore his weight, lifting him upright like a marionette held by divine strings.

  They moved with his will, extensions of his desperate need to move, to act. Debris from their stampede pelted his body as he launched toward his students, but he paid no heed, focusing his remaining strength on his exposed Core.

  The golden sphere swelled with heat and light until it became something Dante had to cradle. It grew to the size of his torso, then larger—large enough to embrace, large enough to shelter.

  Large enough to hold his students.

  I shall entrust the future to all of you.

  The Sun pulsed in his arms, warm and alive, radiating a light that did not burn but protected. Golden radiance spilt across the scorched battlefield, gentle despite its intensity. The ribbons struck like blades. They cleaved through the phantom’s massive appendages with surgical precision.

  Ace and Jude dropped.

  The severed tentacles that had been holding them aloft released, and suddenly they were hurtling through superheated air toward the scorched ground below.

  The air cut Dante’s cheeks as he surged toward them. He intercepted Ace first, ribbons coiling around the boy's torso mid-fall and yanking him toward the waiting Sun’s embrace. But when his ribbons reached for Jude—Dr. Lee’s only daughter, trumbling helplessly through the air—they slowed. They swooped below her like a cradle, catching her fall as though she were a butterfly.

  Dante could have tucked Jude into the Sun, but the severed appendages started to crackle.

  Felix’s gaze was upon them.

  Dante twisted in the air, Saturn's ribbons reorienting his body, throwing his back between Felix and the students. The heat slammed into him—his shirt bursting into flames, the flesh of his shoulders and spine sizzling.

  Dante only bit down on his lower lip until it bled. Collapsing was not an option—not while Leonhart and Kazuya remained in danger. Ace threw everything he had to break free and help, but his techniques died before they could manifest, thought failing to become form. And when Dante's eyes landed on Jude's helpless face, it was Dr. Lee he saw staring back.

  The man whose blood brother Dante was convicted of killing.

  The memory crashed through Dante—kneeling before the Elders, their judgment absolute. Divine justice, they had called it. For that transgression, his spine was broken, his life forfeit.

  Or so they intended. They should have been more vigilant.

  How fitting, Dante thought bitterly as a red spot manifested before him. Jupiter’s justice.

  The massive disc of swirling crimson and rust erupted into existence, the storm that had raged for centuries, the eye of divine retribution made manifest. It positioned itself between Dante and Felix's destructive sight. The edges of Jupiter's storm glowed white-hot where Felix's gaze touched it, plasma boiling off in brilliant streams. The great red eye stared down at Dante—accusing, condemning, damning.

  You killed his brother. And now you dare protect his child?

  Yes. Dante confessed, reaching out and seizing the eye of the storm in his left hand—divine judgment made a shield. This justice, this retribution, I’d have much preferred!

  Against his throat rendered useless, Dante screamed. Sun in his right hand. Jupiter's eye in his left. His ruined body between them, a broken axis around which his life’s thoughts and emotions spun. The burning ribbons yanked him forward violently. They cut through the air like meteors trailing the night skies.

  Dante cleaved and sliced. His ribbons cut through phantoms’ flesh—once, twice, how many times, he could not say.

  At some point, his eyes must have closed.

  Or perhaps they had stayed open, and his mind had simply shut down. Like pages torn from a book. One moment, the phantoms held Kazuya and Leonhart in their grips. Next, they were with Ace and Jude.

  Dante had no memory of saving them. No recollection of the moment between threat and safety.

  But they were safe.

  That was enough.

  Through the agony, Dante held gratitude toward the phantoms. The first phantom was still pulling itself together, cursed cells multiplying endlessly, holding Felix’s destroying attention through sheer stubbornness.

  They were no normal phantoms. Whatever these things were, they were far stronger than Faust.

  Dante’s head lolled, his chin dropping to his chest. Through the haze of pain, he saw his left arm.

  Or what remained of it.

  His hand existed in fragments—thumb solid, fingers fading to transparency. Jupiter's eye gleamed through the gaps in his dissolving grip. Ah, Dante could only think in words. Everything. Shift.

  Dante cast the Sun to the earth. The students had to be far away. They should not have to witness his death.

  From whatever that remained of his core bloomed a brilliant red rose. It had petals made of crystallised frozen flames.

  The Rose of Venus, harbinger of both love and ruin. They should have all died, but somehow one managed to survive.

  Dante cast aside his shield and affixed his eyes on Felix. Even in profile, even without meeting Felix’s gaze directly, Dante could see gold concentric rings gleaming at the edges of Felix's eyes, visible even from this angle—layered circles of molten light that rotated independently, ticking like clockwork mechanisms.

  For his final act, Dante had a single dying wish.

  Burn the Rose.

  Dante wanted to leave this earth without carrying this stupid, stubborn love with him into whatever came next. Hell or paradise, he did not care. Though the former seemed the more probable destination.

  Dante’s lips curved into something that might have been a smile. With his last strength, he catapulted himself toward Felix.

  Blood filled Dante’s mouth as he tore the Rose out of his Core. His next breath smelt of iron, and he choked, sending a spray of blood in Felix’s direction. The cavity left by the Rose's roots was haemorrhaging into the space where his lungs should have drawn air.

  While drowning in his own blood, Dante held the Rose out toward Felix in his crumbling hands as an offering.

  As a plea.

  Burn it.

  His bloodstained smile widened, and he thought, with perfect clarity:

  Burn us free.