Chapter Text
Vergil takes it all in… what the Qliphoth took away to bear fruit. The carnage wrought by its roots, which nourished themselves upon innocent blood. Its weight.
Redgrave City is still in ruins. Its remains mirror an undying giant—skyscrapers split open, girders exposed like decaying bones, and streets buckled in fresh wounds where Hell once dragged its claws over the Earth. Moonlight spills through the gaps in broken towers, but does not settle. Shadows bend away unnaturally—a drifting veil at twilight’s end.
Vergil’s footfalls echo across the empty wasteland. Yamato rests quietly by his side. Once, he would have proclaimed with pride: This is the birthright of a son of Sparda.
“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” A voice drifts beside him, dry as dust. “Beyond the written word… Whether you are man or devil, you must keep walking. Otherwise, all the insight you have gleaned will mean nothing.”
V stands a step to his left, half-real, half-memory. Cane in hand, coat fluttering without wind, his expression is familiar… like an old scar.
A toppled traffic light sparks beside him. Its red glow stains the air in an upward bleed. It flickers weakly before dying.
“You haven’t missed anything,” V follows Vergil’s silent gaze. “No books speak of it… what comes after redemption.”
“Redemption… Is that what you’d call this?” Vergil’s voice rings hollow. “To be serenaded by ghosts… To simply… exist.”
“It is a gift most do not enjoy.”
The two men stand alone under the waning moon’s sepulchral glow. It is a quiet moment, where fading light swallows the nightmares.
It is the path before him—his chance to move forward.
The traffic light flickers to life. Its ember glow gutters once… twice… before vanishing into the night.
Hallowed legends speak of the world’s end… The mighty winter that follows when beasts devour the Sun and the Moon. They are a distant memory, his readings of these tomes. The writings and teachings of a people no longer of this world. So why, then, do these things come to mind now?
Like an eager omen, the world answers. True night descends as a chill permeates the ruins of Redgrave.
Vergil remains still.
The air thickens… Sound dulls… The faint creak of steel rings from the unknown. A loose sheet of parchment flaps in an empty breeze, skittering along the asphalt before coming to a stop in the middle of the street.
At the crossroads.
It does not flit to the ground. It is not torn up by rising winds. It simply stops, dead, like a man hanged to death before a faceless crowd.
Then, it rips. Slowly. Tearing into strips before vanishing.
V’s eyes darken, knuckles white as they grip his cane. “That’s… new.”
Vergil’s shadow stretches ahead of him, slowly becoming one with the dark of a moon now swallowed. It peels away from his feet and swirls at his side, a darker stain against the pavement. The abyssal depth around him stirs like waves unleashed from the tides.
They congeal… marginalia, bleeding into the pages of reality. Their encroachment births that which should not be. Legions of twitching soldiers that rise from the pooling dark. Vaguely humanoid, they move like overstrung marionettes, their joints snapping into place as their limbs spiral. The ugliest aspects of man, woman, and beast animate their twitching advance.
“Those… are not demons.” V breathes uneasily.
“No… They are not.”
They are wave functions that refuse to collapse; probabilities swollen past the mercy of observation. If madness had a shape, they would claw themselves out of its belly and feast upon its guts. Dripping from them is the inky blood of the world itself. A hundred screams for a hundred eyes, they squelch open upon their bodies, their gazes capturing existence like memories entombed. Flowing from their necks are dull yellow cloaks, manes of wriggling skin playing at fabric. They stink of decay. They harken to the end.
The very sight of them is enough to break the human spirit.
Click.
Yamato peeks out of its sheath, and the air ripples with corruption. Vergil’s demon shifts under his skin, scorning its mortal coil. Its voice comes out with his own.
“They’re simply in the way.”
Building pressure erupts into one thousand divine cuts. For a vanishing moment, the blade is exposed, and the world, warped into prismatic sheets severed along the contours. Gliding across the ruins, Vergil casts judgment upon these abominations, who come apart like spiralling ribbons.
But the forces of madness do not recede.
Severed appendages dissolve into squibbles of ink—the logos itself—that binds the cradle of being. They were the writings, and they are bound to shape ephemeral.
A golden light weaves them back together as the Yamato simmers in its sheath. His back turned to them, his silver hair slicked back, Vergil glares into the abyss.
Pulsing blades of azure run the reforming creature through. They are nary guided… for they are his lethal intent given mass. They know exactly where to strike.
The creature’s shrieks are not of this world, but neither are its death throes, as its bulging muscles erupt into sinew that crushes the light swords in layers.
Vergil’s off-hand calls to the boundary between the unseen and the manifest, opening to rip a phantom blade into existence. Demonic will rings a perfect echo of steel. An ode to his father, and his nightmares reborn.
ZHAK!
A blinding blue light carves his power into a scar upon the heavens. The heavens that bore the misfortune of existing behind the creature now sundered by the Mirage Edge.
The black letter of the world swirls out of the felled creature's insides, its two pieces melting into nothing… as if it were never there.
Something massive tears through the ground, rising to strike the devil. An amorphous brute—pressure incarnate—its bulk folding gravity inwards as it tears through inertia.
KSSSHHH⸻KRAK!!
Bestial greaves and gauntlets blazing take the place of his twin blades. Vergil stands his ground, bringing the power of an archangel crashing down. Bounded thunder flays the atmosphere as light warps under the crushing strikes of Beowulf. His blows detonate the air as he rips into the creature’s torso. One. Two. Three. His punches and kicks move in a flow, like water, as they compress reality tighter and tighter around the beast until it bursts into an inky black deluge.
It rains not burning blood, not blighted guts, but necrotic tar that takes form. The blotches quiver and shape into a buzz of rippling rorschachs. Wings bloom from the liquid that shapes a thousand faces, and two thousand eyes. They rise in swarms. Their bodies drip, staining the air in oily contrails. Their descent is biblical, wings whispering like countless pages being turned at once.
V watches their approach, his form shimmering as his cane and body dissolve to ebon dust.
“The Catterpillar on the leaf…”
“Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.”
V’s words flow through Vergil’s mouth.
Their voices bridge north with south.
“Kill not the Moth, nor Butterfly…
“For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.”
An azul shadow rips forth from the Yamato’s humming fury. Heaven and Earth collapse into destruction’s maw, as the teeth of chaos strike. One bite gouges the million wingbeats.
When creation is stitched anew, the first sound is the click of the blade enveloped once more by its scabbard—the thing that holds its madness. Quantum bonds rip themselves from the wombs of the gaps, reforming what once was… a world severed to the causal marrow of time.
The Devil’s shadow returns to its roost. Vergil takes in the winds of creation. His outward breath fogs in the air, carrying untold intensity.
“Are we done playing games?” he asks the great beyond.
“Quite…” It responds. “You gripe like a sour child, Son of Sparda… but lies are beneath you, are they not? You cannot tell me that little rampage brought you no… amusement.”
It is nothing… yet everything at once. A mere intonation, the beginnings of a voice… and it shakes all of creation.
Vergil’s coat billows in the shockwaves, his face cold and unmoving as the voice goes on.
“The divided son, made whole… Your story has long run its course,” it booms. “Still… Your presence on this world, when twilight’s dawn is nigh… it is most troublesome.”
“So you’ve decided I am to disappear…” Vergil scoffs. “How droll.”
“No, I have not decided.”
A low rumble rolls along the world, as gorges part along the ground. Reality bleeds more putrid ink, as all the realms chant the same sound…
Holy.
Holy.
Holy.
The air fills with the stench of old books left to rot, of iron and oil, and something alive. Something dying.
“I have simply thought it… and so it shall be.”
He speaks from every reflection, every shadow. All Creation quakes and squeals under the weight of a new world coming. A vast, suffocating pressure comes upon the land, as forbidden knowledge spills from the shatterpoints of a wounded sky.
Truths too great to be held by mortal minds.
All the dark of the true night gathers, before shifting into a jaundiced light. His radiance… a darkness in light inverted, a paradox that twists consciousness. His form shimmers as it tears from phantasia, a crown encrusted in light and shadow. In blind stars nailed into place, frozen just short of their blinding demise. With it comes a torrent of nightmares. Time stutters. Space folds. Cause slips from effect.
Then, the visions.
They stab into Vergil’s mind: Paths unchosen, roads unwalked, all leading to the Prince of Darkness and his tormentor’s chair. Where the legacy of his father lay shattered in the void of true evil… Where the angel’s blade ran through his own flesh and blood under the pale sky of Mallet Island…
Where redemption curdled into rot.
The voice takes shape. The layered text that founds all that is, warps to give him form. He bursts forth from the seams of the wounded world—an anachronism that incarnates from a future where the other world has arrived. He reaches through time, forging the base of the crucible before the dew of existence ever graced him. His body is latticed by the very scripture that once lined creation itself. Adorning him is a kingly shroud of sickly gold. Verses hang from his shoulders like ceremonial chains, their inky letters still writhing, still forming into something new… yet something older than novelty itself.
The clouds convulse like torn veils, their undersides glowing a sick, prophetic yellow. Light bleeds through them in broken shafts, firmaments cut apart. The air vibrates with a sound like a thousand distant trumpets, all choking on the same breath.
“…!!”
His gasp is silent… as the shadows peel away from Vergil’s unperturbed face.
“The tomes of madness,” he says. “would tear the soul from a human heart… or crush a devil where it stands… But to a Son of Sparda,” he breathes through his nose. “… they speak sweet nothings.”
“You…! WHAT DID YOU DO?!”
“It was your delusion, that this world would cradle your coming… and it is through delusions that your poison rots the bounds of creation.”
Amid Vergil’s words, that regal form of a King draped in sickness falters. The ink that swirls into the vessel that would hold him… unfurls. It peels off of him like the rotting derm of a carcass too decayed to wear.
The crown is a symbol. It represents a divine right to rule. But here, the circlet of light and shadow, of blinded black stars that eclipsed Heaven itself… it quivers. It sheds cosmic dust.
“Did you think I would not discern it? Corruption is something I have sought my whole life,” Vergil scoffs, raising his katana before his thumb undoes the lock with a click. “Endlessly walking in what I thought to be the footsteps of my father. Of the power he wielded.”
“How dare you?! This world… is mine by right! It is ALREADY mine!”
“Wrong.”
Ceding to his single word, the logos unwrites itself. For when the Yamato gouged the empyrean pillars to slay the dark swarm, it had severed not just plain reality… but the demiurgic miasma that warped and twisted it to the whims of a being from beyond. What reforms from such a feat… is too young to bend to that influence.
It had been a shadow, then… but now, that power ignites into a hellblaze, erupting out of Vergil in a transcendent surge. Ethereal wings unfurl from his absolute presence, as scales and jetstreams envelop him.
It is his original sin manifest… When the fallen lord of the unseen world ate the fruit of the righteous man’s covenant… it clads him in the Truth.
A light burning blue.
“This world… was my Father’s home.” His eyes are a blazing white—bursting with an avenger’s flame. “And upon his blood that flows through my veins… I swear to slay all who would come upon it with ill intent.”
In the heart of this storm, where the forces of madness encroach upon the frontier, he finds his resolution. The answer that makes whole the poet and the sinner… the Son of Sparda, who wakes up to justice.
“Especially ticks like you… who suck upon the blood of those who dare to dream.”
“You IMPUDENT morta—”
“Begone, now.”
Everything stops… before Yamato corrects the world. A singular iai strike brings forth a blossoming sphere of annihilation. Sound, space, light, and shadow… they are all consigned to oblivion.
The crown shatters first, before the script of being returns to nothing.
Silence crashes down like a holy book closing, and the clouds part not to Moonlight… but a clean, unblemished sky.
Vergil stands alone amid the settling dust… And for the first time since the world had begun to warp, creation is allowed to write itself again.
Now, he hears no other.