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The Clergyman moved like a spider that had forgotten what gravity was. Everyone readied their weapons, both the physical armaments that Theodore had crafted for them and the name of their Personas on their lips. Rei ducked behind Zen with a fearful whimper.
“Stray lambs!” the labyrinth’s guardian bellowed from between stitched lips. “Step forward and bow to my holy wrath in the name of God!”
That’s when Minato started to laugh.
It started off as his usual quiet, dry chuckle. Then it bubbled up from his throat like acid, burning a manic grin into his lips as it spilled out. His teammates’ eyes fearfully glanced between each other and him as he stepped towards the four-armed beast, his grip on his sword lazy.
“God?” His normally passive voice was eerily icy, still as quiet as usual but now a much more dangerous kind of hush. “You want to talk about God, huh?” That horror-movie smile never even twitched as he spoke. “You have no idea what God is. But I do. Oh, I do.”
It appeared in the space between moments and yet it had been there the whole time, sprouting from his shadow like a monstrous butterfly from a twisted cocoon. One hand made of darkness and leather and steel curling around his thin shoulder, its bear-trap jaws hanging open in a silent snarl. Of course, seeing their leader summon such a powerful Persona was nothing too strange, especially to the other members of SEES, but this was something more than that. This was the kind of power, the kind of control over something like Thanatos, that rolled off him in waves of dark ecstasy they could feel behind their eyes, chilling the blood in their bodies. This was letting something great and terrible pour through him, something he’d been keeping chained up in his head and his heart for far longer than any of them had known him.
“This is a god. A god of death. Incidentally yours,” and he grinned more, and the monstrous priest looked almost scared, “but so are a lot of my friends. Gods. We make gods dance on strings and fight with swords and spells for us. I look your god and your devil in the eyes and I make them bow and obey me. What does that make me?”
He’d been stepping closer (or has the room shrunk just to catch on his every utterance) with each word and now he stared it down, less than half its size and yet so much bigger, so much more terrifying.
A Persona is a part of you, part of your soul. It needs no instruction, no command, beside a thought.
But it made him feel so powerful to say “Make it last.”
Thanatos shrieked and obeyed, and the Clergyman screamed and tried to flee but Minato was already there, smile as sharp and cold as his blade as it arced up and—
Shadows didn’t bleed but Zen reached down and covered Rei’s eyes all the same. For once she’s not so hungry. The Yasogami kids just stared, and even cool, collected Mitsuru felt her stomach rise, claw up her throat. Aigis blinked, robotic and unmoving: but even the metal girl shivered.
It took some time after he was done before the Shadow’s body began to evaporate into black haze. But its scarred head was the last to go and before it did the blue-haired boy leant down and whispered just softly enough for everybody to hear.
“I am God, and you are the heretic. Your sin is your existence, and my judgement is absolute. I am your God and I have abandoned you.”
Thanatos was gone again (unless you watched Minato, just from the corner of your eye, and saw the shape of something dark and vengeful lurking in his eyes and his skin, heard the echo of a steel whisper in his voice) and he calmly slid his sword away, stretching languidly as he turned back to the group.
“He wasn’t so tough, right? You guys okay?” he added as an afterthought. As they all mumbled a hesitant yes, Yukiko pointed out the heavy chest behind the alter with a little too much haste and they all moved to gather around it—
and he guessed he should feel bad, even guilty, but the way that none of them could meet his eyes made him feel so, so very, very good.