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Dante sat on the dust laden leather sofa, his long legs propped up on the desk, his head tilted back. His hand didn't hold a half eaten slice of pizza, nor a cheap magazine. Instead, his fingers slowly, repeatedly traced the gold plated rim of a broken amulet. Its chain was ice cold, draping across his palm like a hibernating snake.
He won. Mundus was sealed. Mallet Island had collapsed into the sea. He had saved Trish, bringing something resembling salvation to his late mother’s soul.
Yet, why did his chest feel so terrifyingly hollow?
Dante closed his eyes, and instantly, the darkness behind his eyelids warped into the blazing crimson fires of the demon island. He saw the silhouette of the dark knight, Nelo Angelo. The knight stood there in his cold, blue-black armor, a flaming broadsword raised to strike. They had lunged at each other without hesitation, without question. It was a perfect choreography of death. The two halves of Sparda’s blood clashed, echoing through the ancient stone corridors. Dante had laughed. He always laughed when he fought, it was the only way he knew how to feel alive.
Until the knight’s helmet shattered.
Until the face hidden beneath the cold steel was exposed under the blood red moon.
It wasn't a demon. It was a man with a face identical to his own, though his features were sharper, colder, his silver hair slicked back despite being matted with blood and feral demonic energy. And around his neck, catching the moonlight, was the matching half of the amulet.
Vergil.
The moment the sword pierced through Nelo Angelo’s chest, Dante heard something shatter. It wasn't the sound of iron armor cracking, but the rhythm of his life missing a heartbeat, permanently.
Dante snapped his eyes open, staring blankly at the dark ceiling. He raised his right hand, his fingertips still tingling with the ghost-sensation of Vergil’s body dissolving into motes of blue light, leaving the half amulet to clatter onto the stone floor. He had killed his brother with his own hands. This time, there was no river in the Underworld to break the fall. This time, there was no turning back. Vergil was dead, slain by the very younger brother he had once despised as weak.
Dante let out a laugh, a dry, choking sound that caught in his throat. The vibrant red coat hanging on the rack across the room looked like a fresh pool of spilled blood in the shadows. He had never hated the color red so much.
Ten years ago, on the summit of the Temen ni gru tower, they had stood facing each other just like this.
Dante remembered that rainy night vividly. It was freezing, but his blood had been boiling. He was nineteen, arrogant, reckless, and fueled by a burning hatred for the so-called "power of Sparda" that Vergil worshiped. When Vergil drove Yamato through his chest, Dante hadn't felt despair. He had felt a surging defiance. Their battle then, though brutal, still carried the rhythm of a childhood game escalated with lethal weapons. They knew each other's every move, every swing, every parry.
“We are sons of Sparda” Vergil had always said, his nineteen-year-old voice carrying the absolute pride of a future king.
But on Mallet Island, that knight hadn't uttered a single word. Nelo Angelo had no voice. He had only agonized grunts, choked beneath the shackles of Mundus's slavery.
Dante pushed himself up, grabbed the bottle, and drank straight from it. The harsh liquid burned his throat, but it did nothing to soothe the chill radiating from his bones. A bitter truth began to dawn on him: for the past ten years, while he lived a life of freedom, laziness, eating pizza, and drowning in debt within these four walls, where had Vergil been?
He had been in the deepest trench of Hell, tortured, his soul torn apart and remolded into a mindless puppet assassin by the very monster who had murdered their mother. Vergil had endured that agony for ten long years, utterly alone and trapped. Meanwhile, Dante had forgotten. He had chosen to ignore it, chosen to believe his brother died after falling into the abyss that night.
To the heart and mind, ignorance is kind.
If he had known Vergil was alive, would he have ventured into the Underworld to find him? If he had recognized Nelo Angelo just a moment sooner, could he have saved him?
Those "what ifs" nailed Dante to his leather chair like iron spikes. His shadow stretched long across the floor, distorted and solitary. He realized he was a traitor. He had betrayed his promise to protect his family, betrayed the very blood running through his veins. He had cheerfully enjoyed his life as a heroic "devil hunter," only to end up as his own brother's executioner.
The office door creaked open. Trish walked in. She bore the exact face of Eva, his deceased mother. She looked at him with worried eyes, her golden hair radiant under the dim streetlights filtering through the window.
"Dante," she called softly. "Are you staying up again?"
Dante didn't look at her. He couldn't. Every time he looked at Trish's face, he saw Eva, and immediately after, he saw Vergil, the eldest son left behind in a burning house at eight years old, and abandoned once more by his own brother at Temen-ni-gru.
"I'm fine," Dante said. His voice had dropped, entirely stripped of its usual mocking, playful cadence. It was as flat as a stagnant pond. "Go get some sleep."
Trish stood in silence for a long time. She was a demon created by Mundus, she might not fully grasp the complexities of human psychology, but she could feel the suffocating atmosphere of guilt and despair wrapping around the man before her. Quietly, she sighed, turned, and walked away, her footsteps fading into the stairwell.
The office plunged back into a deathly silence. Dante looked down at his hands. These hands had saved the world, but they had destroyed the last piece of his family. He didn't want to "dance" anymore. The reckless bravado, the acrobatic flips, the taunting jests aimed at demons... everything suddenly felt grotesque and absurd.
Half a year after the Mallet Island incident.
The Devil May Cry office was now unsettlingly quiet. The loud rock 'n' roll music that used to blast from the old cassette player was gone, leaving the device to gather dust. There were no shouts from Dante playing video games, no empty pizza boxes strewn across the floor. Trish had left to find her own path, leaving Dante alone with the empty walls.
Dante had changed. Regular clients and brokers like Morrison began to notice a frightening shift in the silver-haired devil hunter.
He no longer smiled.
During a routine extermination of a demon nest on the outskirts of the city, Dante faced a high-ranking demon of an ancient arch-fiend lineage. The creature lunged violently, roaring curses in an arcane tongue. If this had been the Dante of ten years ago, or even a year ago, he would have stood his ground, fired a few stylish rounds from Ebony & Ivory, and taunted the beast about its hideous appearance. He would have turned the battlefield into his personal stage.
But tonight, Dante just stood there.
His crimson coat flapped gently in the night wind. His eyes looked at the demon, yet seemed to stare right through it, into a void. When the demon's claws were inches from his face, Dante merely tilted his upper body. His movement possessed no flair, no flashy evasion. It was minimalist to the point of being cold.
Slash.
Rebellion swung in a straight, decisive, and merciless arc. There wasn't a single wasted motion. The demon was cleaved in two, black blood spraying onto the pavement, but not a single drop touched the hem of his coat. Dante sheathed his sword, the metal clicking shut with a dry, hollow sound.
"You... you are not human..." the demon wheezed before dissolving into ash. "You are colder than any devil..."
Dante didn't reply. He turned and walked into the darkness. He felt no satisfaction after the kill. He didn't feel like a righteous hero. He felt like a machine, a mobile tool designed to terminate life.
He realized that when he took Vergil's life, he had also killed a part of his own soul. The vibrant, rebellious, profoundly human side of him had died alongside Nelo Angelo on that mythical island. What remained was a Dante who only knew silence, a Dante who was slowly morphing into a second Vergil, cold, detached, with a heart encased in ice.
He stepped into a small, roadside bar to escape a sudden downpour. The bar was empty, save for the dim orange neon lights reflecting off the bottles lined up on the shelves. From an old speaker in the corner, a familiar melody began to play.
A melancholic, yearning saxophone riff drifted through the air, bringing with it a devastating wave of nostalgia. Dante sat on a barstool, pulling his hood low to shadow his eyes. He ordered a glass of hard liquor. The music seeped into every cell of his body. The song spoke of a careless whisper, of a betrayal that ruined a romance. But to Dante, that careless whisper was his own silence for the past ten years, it was his ignorance, his failure to realize that his brother was suffering eternal torment in the depths of hell.
“Tonight the music seems so loud,” he thought, echoing the lyrics. “I wish that we could lose this crowd…”
He wished the crowd would vanish. He wished the world would vanish. He wished he could go back to that rainy night on the summit of Temen ni gru, so that instead of drawing his sword, he would have grabbed Vergil’s hand and pulled him back, regardless of whether they both fell into the abyss. At least, if they fell, they would have fallen together, and Vergil wouldn't have become a lonely ghost in Mundus's shadow.
But time never truly heals anything. It merely calluses the wound, turning it into an ugly, aching scar that throbs whenever it rains.
Dante raised his glass, looking at his own reflection in the amber liquid. In the dim light of the bar, his hair seemed longer, his face more angular. For a fleeting second, he thought he was looking at Vergil.
"Cheers, brother," Dante whispered, and downed the glass.
Years bled into one another.
The name Dante remained a legend among devil hunters, but people no longer spoke of a cocky, red-coated youth who loved pizza and fought to the beat of rock music. Instead, they spoke of a new "Dark Knight", a sullen man wearing a darkened crimson coat faded by wind and frost, a man who walked through the shadows with two guns and a massive sword, striking absolute terror into any creature of the Underworld unfortunate enough to cross his path.
Dante had relocated his office. Or rather, he no longer cared where he was. He drifted from city to city, country to country, like a phantom. He accepted the most dangerous contracts, not for the money, he often tossed the reward money to the impoverished or left it on the tables of roadside diners, but because he needed a reason to keep moving.
Because if he stopped, the silence would consume him alive.
Tonight, he stood on the ledge of a skyscraper in an unfamiliar metropolis. The night wind howled, whipping his coat around him. The city below was a brilliant sea of lights, but to Dante’s eyes, everything was washed out in black and white. The nostalgia of the old days had completely withered away, leaving behind a gray, vacant reality.
He pulled a coin from his pocket, a coin with two identical faces that he had picked up from a recent job. He flipped it into the air. It spun, catching the pale glint of the moon, before landing squarely in his palm.
Heads or tails. It didn't matter anymore. His fate had been sealed the day he drove his blade through Nelo Angelo. He was alive, but he was merely a walking corpse fulfilling a duty, exterminating demons to pay off a blood debt for a family that no longer existed.
He thought of Vergil. The pain no longer throbbed with the raw intensity of the days immediately following Mallet Island. It had crystallized into a dull, heavy ache, a suffocating weight pressing down on his every breath.
“Now who's gonna dance with me?” the question echoed in the void of his mind. “Please stay...”
But there was no answer. Vergil would never return to clash swords with him again. Their dance had ended in blood and tears. Dante’s feet, the feet that had once taken arrogant, playful steps on the peak of Temen-ni-gru, were now as heavy as lead. They had lost their rhythm. They had become guilty feet.
Dante slipped the coin back into his pocket and turned away from the edge of the roof. Ahead of him lay the endless darkness of the city, and beyond that, new missions, new demons waiting to be destroyed.
He would keep fighting, keep walking in this cold, unbroken silence until the demon blood inside him stopped pumping, or until he found an adversary strong enough to send him to the other side, where, perhaps, Vergil was waiting for him with Yamato in hand, ready to begin a new dance. A dance free of deception, free of Mundus’s strings, and free of the guilty whispers of the past.
But until then...
Dante stepped onto the cold concrete. One step, two steps.
No sound, no rhythm.
Only the silence of a legend who had already died on the inside.