The silence before the storm seed eternal.
Spectre stood still, as if carved out of chaos itself. His silhouette was a solid speck of darkness on the stage where even the light hesitated to enter. The black cloak rippled in all directions, even in the absence of wind. Its body was shrouded in dense shadows, which coiled around its limbs like faithful serpents - and its face... or what looked like a face.
A skull.
Simple, naked, unchanging.
Without flesh. No emotion. Just an opaque white skull - empty eyes where the end of hope lurked and an eternal smile that didn't laugh... just sentenced.
The cross on his back shook as he took the first step.
A low, almost imperceptible sound escaped from his throat - or perhaps it was the throat of the world closing.
"I wanted you to run," he said. The voice reverberated not in the air, but in souls.
It was low, deep, scratchy inside. It sounded like a forgotten mory of a trauma that never happened... but that you would swear you had felt.
Eva gripped Balmung's handle tightly. She felt the weight of the spear, but more than that, she felt the weight of the instant. Ti itself seed to slow down - not because Spectre stopped it, but because the world seed to hesitate before seeing what was coming next.
"I don't know what you are," she muttered, "but you're not getting out of here in one piece."
Then... he disappeared.
Not with an explosion, not with a scream.
Not with speed, but with denial.
As if the surrounding space had decided it no longer wanted to contain him.
When it erged, it was less than an inch away from Eva, its skull turned slightly to the side, watching her like a curious scientist looks at a rare insect. His black eyes, two caverns of total absence, stared at her with aggressive silence.
She didn't hesitate.
"Stay away from , demon!" - And she spun the Balmung in a horizontal arc that would crack the air if it were made of glass.
The mystical blade of the spear, forged with draconic fire and ancient incantations, was supposed to cut through anything living or dead.
But it didn't.
Spectre raised a finger. Just one.
And it touched the sacred tal.
The sound that echoed was not that of shock - it was that of a thousand voices shouting at once.
The spear stopped. And then, as if ti had been rewritten at that point... it cracked.
"This weapon... carries faith, not truth," he said coolly. "And faith... lies."
Eva stepped back, eyes wide, heart hamring in her throat.
But there was no ti.
Spectre moved - but it wasn't a human movent. It was as if his body distorted into lapses of presence and absence. A blur of cloaks and skulls that crossed the battlefield in broken, unpredictable lines.
He was upon Xiao Liang before he had ti to draw Goujian.
"I've seen your na on a thousand ancient scrolls," whispered Spectre. "You... are a legend. It will be a pleasure to break it."
The Chinese man, however, was no fool.
With the coolness of soone who has trained every heartbeat like a sword, Xiao spun on his own axis, releasing the ancient blade with a snap that seed to split the air.
The sword glowed deep blue, like the bottom of an eternal lake.
Xiao struck seven blows in a fraction of a second - precise, lethal, millitrically designed to hit his opponent's vital and arcane points.
"Die!" he shouted.
But he didn't land a single one.
Spectre dodged effortlessly. His movents obeyed neither physics nor logic. He contorted like solid smoke, bent like a living idea - he didn't move to evade the attacks, he just stopped being where the blows would land.
"Nice blade..." he muttered, appearing upside down above Xiao, like a marionette disobeying the laws of strings. "But it's in the wrong hands."
Xiao jumped back, but Spectre didn't chase him.
Instead, he snapped his fingers.
The ground beneath Xiao shattered.
From the abyss, arms made of bone and shadows rose as if hell had been planted under the warrior's feet.
Xiao cut the first ones off, shouting: "I won't fall for tricks!"
"They're not tricks," replied Spectre. "They're echoes. Fragnts of what I've already devoured."
Ten more arms appeared. And then more.
"I'm not killing you... yet," said Spectre, his voice almost gentle. "I'm dancing with you. Enjoy."
Arthur roared with rage.
The sound was human, but the emotion was not.
Tizona glowed in his hand with the holy light of a thousand battles as he ran in a straight line, sword raised above his head, like a warrior from ages past.
"You monster!" - he roared. "You touch the holy ground of the Church with rot! I cut you for every soul who has cursed this world!"
Spectre turned to him, calmly.
And walked.
He didn't run.
He didn't attack.
He just walked.
Every step made the ground around him erode. The sacred marble of the Vatican rotted with his presence, as if faith itself was giving up its shape in front of him.
Arthur jumped. He scread.
He descended with the strength of all the heroes his blood had ever carried.
El Cid's sword touched Spectre's cloak...
...and stopped.
It simply... froze in mid-air.
Arthur hovered in ti, in the middle of the jump, his eyes wide.
"How unfair..." said Spectre, next to him, whispering into Arthur's ear. "You still believe in sothing. It holds you back."
He then closed his hand.
A black sphere ford in the air - dense, pulsating, like a hole in reality.
"You'll be a beautiful ornant in my library of souls," he added.
With a delicate gesture, as if releasing a butterfly, Spectre released it.
It passed through Arthur's chest without a sound.
Without blood.
The warrior's body fell, but his soul... his soul was trapped, spinning inside the sphere like dust in a whirlpool.
Spectre turned, facing the other two.
"One has already fallen."
"One is already trembling."
"And one still resists."
Eva gritted her teeth. "You don't know ."
"No... but I know the taste of your doubt," he replied. "It's bitter. Imperfect. Promising."
His arms opened and his robes expanded like the wings of a forgotten angel.
The skull smiled.
"How beautiful... I was beginning to forget what it was like to play."
The skull smiled.
And the sky... began to cry blood.
Red tears poured down from the heavens like corrupted holy rain, tinting the battlefield with the on of the end. Eva took a step back, panting, her face streaked with sweat and fear. Xiao was still fighting the skeletal hands that erged from the ground, his cuts becoming more and more desperate. And Spectre... just watched. Like an artist in front of his work, still unfinished.
It was then that the air... tore.
Literally.
In the space just above the black sphere containing Arthur's soul, a crack opened with the dry sound of fabric being torn - but it wasn't fabric. It was reality. A bright tear, silver and vibrant like a collapsing star, appeared violently and sucked in the air around it, making Spectre's robes ripple with fury.
He slowly turned the skull, his dark eyes fixed on the crack.
"Hm... Look at that..." he muttered. "It looks like the sealing of the Platinum Dragon Empress."
The sphere spinning with Arthur's soul shuddered.
It wedged itself in the center of the dinsional rift.
And then... it cracked.
"You've touched sothing you shouldn't have, skull." The voice ca from inside the tear.
And then he erged.
Vergil.
Walking from inside the rift as if it were an ordinary corridor. No ceremony. No epic glare. Just sure, firm, heavy steps. Her white hair seed to dance to the rhythm of the raw power emanating around her. His eyes were cold, calculating - and at the sa ti... amused.
Vergil raised his hand unhurriedly, holding the sphere that contained Arthur's soul, now trembling as if it were being crushed by an inverted gravitational field.
"Tsk. Locking souls in spheres is so... last century."
With a snap of his fingers, the sphere exploded into fragnts of bluish light.
A bolt of silver energy descended straight onto Arthur's fallen body. The warrior gasped, his chest heaving with air as if coming back to life after a thousand years of drowning. His eyes opened. His soul had returned.
Spectre watched in silence.
And smiled. "Oh, it's you..." he said, with a certain pleasure. "You look different."
Vergil walked up to him a few ters away, his hands in the pockets of the dark blue overcoat that flowed like silk under the storm of blood.
"How are you?" he said, his voice laden with a sarcastic elegance. "I'd love to know what you're doing here... but honestly..." He tilted his head "...I'd like even more to know what you think you're doing."
Spectre tilted his skull slowly to the side, curious. "I'm freeing the world from its illusions."
"Of course," replied Vergil, laughing lightly. "Because every skull in a cloak needs a monologue of greater purpose."
Eva looked incredulously at the newcor. "Who... who is he?"
Arthur, still panting, whispered: "The fifth king of the demons... Vergil Lucifer..."
"Ah... I wish I could find you, you bastard." Vergil spoke as the whole world scread with his aura... "But let's make sure no one gets out of here." He spoke before pulling out Yamato and... "Sealing."
A rune he had learned from Sapphire... he drew the rune with his sword, and the battle dinsion was sealed again. Or rather, reinforced.
"Only those who survive co out." Vergil said.
The knight seed to smile...
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