We emerged from the portal together, covered in soot and dried blood. Things felt semi-real once more.

  Takezo spat a wad of blood onto the ground of the ravine, and dropped down onto a rock. “I need a moment.”

  So did I. I had so much blood on me I didn’t bother changing. Still, I removed my helmet, and breathed in the fresh air. “This doesn’t feel like victory at all.”

  “I’m almost dead.” Takezo spat out more blood. “You’ve got a piece of her steel in your throat. But we’ve got the soul. It’s a success.”

  Right. I pulled off a gauntlet, and touched my throat. Indeed, a part of it felt metallic. I didn’t feel a thing though. Not in my breathing, not in my blood flow, not even an itch or anything else.

  I pulled out my phone, took a selfie, and look at it. The black steel ran through my throat, over two inches in height at the thickest spot, almost all the way across. By how it felt when her fingers dug into my throat, the steel ran almost all the way to the spine.

  This was a completely mortal wound. Well, not much I could do about it now.

  Though, another thought bothered my mind. Shadow?

  Time froze and Shadow appeared. “Well?”

  How I still held the phone with my selfie up in front of me, I could now see both my picture and him. Yeah, I could see how everyone recognized it. He looked younger, more handsome, with blue eyes, blonde hair, and this unexplainable allure.

  But the general features were the same.

  “Are you my father?” I asked.

  “No, but I’m the memory of him. I don’t have his memories, but I do have the memories of him that the system has, if that makes sense.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s not my place to. My role is to help you with the system, not to get into the family matters of the template from which I was made. But if it helps, out of the thirty-something descendants he’s got, you’re the first one from those that haven’t met him that has found out.”

  Heh… that actually helped. The first one. Probably the first time I was ever the first at something. “Have I met any siblings I don’t know of.”

  “Lillith and Cassandra.”

  Right. I didn’t meet them by chance. They came to check me out. “Thanks.”

  He vanished, time unfreezing.

  I sat down as well. For a moment, we rested. The sun had yet to break, so we allowed ourselves a moment to recover.

  Sunrise did arrive, eventually, at which point I got up. “Better?”

  Takezo stood up, stretching. “Yeah. I’ve mostly healed. That lightning slash must have really pissed her off.”

  It did. Because she actually got injured, she kicked him with a heavily committed move. That allowed me to catch her with the leg still up, and everything afterwards happened as a consequence.

  I stopped above the coffin with Francesca’s body. This wasn’t the place to wake her up, in the middle of a ravine next to the portal that took her to her death.

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  I picked up my things instead, piled them up, and then raised the coffin together with them.

  Takezo also gathered his stuff.

  We headed out of the ravine. The bleeding sun of the dawn washed over the fields, giving them a magical touch. This was a much better place.

  We walked to the town, and stopped in eyesight of her grandparents’ house. We set the coffin down in the tall grass, both of us breathing hard.

  Takezo stopped next to me. “She’ll be Hell confused.”

  Most likely. I opened the coffin. While I raised her and placed her into the grass, Takezo moved the coffin away, so it wasn’t in view.

  I took the crystal from my pocket, and focused. The vision of Lucifer I had when learning the skill strongly implied souls could be a lot more than just transferred. I pressed my mind against the soul in the crystal, and slipped inside.

  World around me shifted. I stood next to a shining globe. All around me floated fragments, like pieces of glass each displaying something. Her memories, fantasies, thoughts, dreams, everything that made her soul.

  A strong feeling of sickness filled my stomach. I wasn’t supposed to be here. This was the innermost sanctum of her very being. I had no right to intrude here. Nobody did.

  But I had something I wanted to do here.

  I shifted through the fragments, trying to make sense of their arrangement. They floated around most likely due to the death. But they had likely been arranged in her life.

  All of her worst days were here, not peeking at me from all sides. Her hand shaking as she wrote a note in lipstick on a Milano bathroom mirror, her knees purple and scraped as she threw up gin into a Porta Susa urinal, her mother screaming at her from the door.

  Her father arguing with her in his office, her face carrying a welt the shape of a palm, her hair drenched in her own vomit, one she most likely had fallen asleep in the night before.

  The post-apocalyptic wasteland of the future Tokyo, and the horror when she realized she couldn’t pass back through the portal.

  I moved that fragment to a side. In its vicinity, I found many others. I did my best to not look at them, just moving them up on a pile.

  Everything with the portal, with future Tokyo, with Takezo, with me, no matter how positive or negative, I moved on a pile. My eyes had watered in the process. To her in her memories, we looked like angels that had come to save her from the nightmare, only to fail again and again.

  I moved the energies of the soul, and sealed away that pile. She was going to be better off without these memories. And I could drink myself out of it.

  I wasn’t really sure how much of a seal I made around the memories, but it had to suffice. This wasn’t a place where I could summon Shadow to ask him how to the devil thing better.

  With a focused thought, I exited her mind, and blinked back to consciousness in reality. I knelt above her body.

  I placed the crystal on her sternum, focusing. The actual process had nothing to it. I pushed the soul from the crystal into the body. It did the rest.

  Her lungs shuddered and she coughed once, twice, and blinked at the morning. Her eyes sprung open, gaze darting around before it focused on us, still disoriented. “Cosa? Dove sono?”

  “Sorry, we don’t speak Italian.” I rose. I really tried to smile, but didn’t manage. “We found you lying here in the field, so we came to check if you were all right.”

  Francesca stared at me, at the sky, at the lines of blood and sweat on her arms. “I… guess?” In a swift move, she sprung her, and jumped to her feet. “Yeah. I’m good.” She stretched haven’t. “Haven’t felt this light in years.”

  Right, her body must had been wrecked with the alcohol abuse and addiction. A new, artificially made body had no such issue. No addiction, no physical habits, no injures, no past diseases, a perfect new form, unburdened by her past.

  “Good,” I said. “Sorry, but if you’re all right, then we need to go.”

  “Okay… thanks, I guess.” She made a couple of steps away, but then frowned. “Why are you covered in dried blood.”

  “We’ve had a rough day,” Takezo said. “But trust me, you don’t want to get involved with this.”

  She bobbed her head for a few seconds. “All right.” She headed towards the town.

  We took a different, diagonal direction, so we weren’t following her. We did keep a side eye on her though, directing our path so that we kept a decent angle.

  Francesca reached the grandparent’s house, and jumped over the fence with a parkour-style jump. She reached the main door to ring the bell straight.

  Takezo pulled out a phone to call us an uber.

  The door before Francesca’s opened. An old man stood behind, her grandfather. She jumped to him to hug him, and he broke down in tears.

  I had the fight with myself to not do the same. But I kept it in, only with tears slowly rolling down my face.

  Even Takezo’s eyes glazed up.

  The uber arrived and we got in. “Train station,” Takezo ordered.

  We were done here.