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I once stood at the absolute apex of the food chain.
Before he arrived, my world operated on a primal, pristine, and beautifully simple logic: The strong devour the weak.
Humans, with all their sickening complexities, frail humanity, and weeping sentiments, were nothing more than mortal cattle wallowing at the very bottom. Hunting them was not a crime, it was mere physiology. Much like a tiger preying on a deer, or a hawk snatching a mouse, I would dissolve into the suffocating shadows of bustling alleys, listening to the chaotic thumping of my prey’s pulse. I savored the sheer sweetness of terror as it ruptured through their veins, right before snapping their necks.
I am a demon, and demons are the predators. That was the sacred order of nature.
Until that order was systematically broken.
My existence ceased to be easy. A crimson shadow began sweeping through the world, under and above, reducing proud predators into quivering prey. Every demon, from the wretched larvae crawling in the sewers to the arrogant lords occupying ancient ruins, was torn to shreds without a chance to resist. At first, it was whispered as a mere rumor. But then, an entire generation of fiends slipped into eternal oblivion, followed swiftly by scores of others. Those stronger than I merely laughed, mocking that those fools had likely crossed paths with a stray sorcerer.
A few weeks later, they weren't laughing anymore.
Names that had once held entire territories in absolute terror vanished one by one from the mortal realm, from hell, and certainly with no hope of ever ascending to heaven. Not a single soul ever returned. It was then that I was forced to learn a concept I had never required in all my centuries of living.
Fleeing.
Two decades ago, demons were the ultimate harvesters. Now, we were being harvested. There was a predator hunting us.
This hunter did not purge our kind for sustenance. No, I could smell him. It was the pungent stench of a slaughtering machine, fueled by a venomous, unadulterated engine of vengeance. Not long after, my own reckoning arrived. Someone, a worthless human who had walked into his office and slammed a stack of bounty money onto his desk, placed a target squarely on my back.
Under a fractured moonbeam piercing through the shattered roof of an abandoned warehouse, he stood. His leather trench coat, a violent shade of crimson as though freshly dyed in un-clotted blood, whipped furiously in the wind. He was towering, his broad shoulders radiating the suffocating, dense pressure of the Sparda lineage, choking the very air around us. Across his back rested a massive, ash-gray greatsword. Its hilt was adorned with the severed, calcified face of a demon frozen in a perpetual shriek of terror, a deliberate insult and a mockery to our entire race. His hands rested lazily upon the grips of a twin pair of pistols, one pitch black, one stark white, identical yet completely antithetical.
His hair was shocking white, falling wildly to obscure half his face, but from beneath those pale locks, his eyes locked onto me. Those eyes... were hollow, glacial, utterly devoid of any goodwill. Yet, the true horror did not stem from his sheer bloodlust. It stemmed from a profound, terrifying familiarity.
I froze. The ancient mind of a demon who had survived centuries began frantically clawing through its archives. A bizarre sensation crept into memories that had been buried under decades of dust.
This silver hair, this face, these sharp contours, even this suffocating half-human, half-demon pressure... I had seen it before. Not on a battlefield, and not in the pits of the Underworld, but at... a house. A courtyard.
Two silver-haired children chasing each other with wooden swords under the warm, uncorrupted sunlight.
He looked exactly like that half-breed brat I had curiously observed twenty years ago. A freezing shudder raced down my spine. It was him. The chaotic white-haired boy who ran across the grass while I slinked around the perimeter of the Sparda estate.
I remembered those windy afternoons. The mischievous half-breed brat running amok with a wooden sword, screaming self-made heroic declarations. And right in front of him was another half-breed boy who looked identical, only far less noisy. If that boy wasn't sitting in stoic silence, clutching a book tightly to his chest, then he was fleeing at full speed from his bothersome twin.
The memories of twenty years ago flooded my mind, vivid as a tragic documentary. In those days, I was merely a solitary entity, fascinated by the anomaly of these two hybrid children, choosing to melt into the canopy of the trees surrounding the estate just to watch. As humans often say, only the devil knows how deeply bound those two brats were.
They were twins, identical as two drops of water, yet utterly polarized in nature.
They were so identical that I frequently had to strain my eyes to tell them apart. One smiled more, the other harbored silence. Yet, the moment they crossed wooden swords...
Both of them smiled.
They fought constantly, not out of malice but because they relished it. If they were given any single thing, they would violently fight over it. If they were given two things, they would still violently fight over them.
It wasn’t the thing that mattered, it was their fight that mattered.
The one with the unruly hair always lunged first. The other always bided his time, waiting for the perfect window to counter-strike. I used to watch with twisted anticipation, waiting to see which one would finally bleed, down, and die! My eyes were glued to the climax when one would inevitably be driven into the dirt.
But then, the victorious one would merely laugh his stomach ached, added up 1 point for his score, and paused.
I never understood it. It was incredibly disappointing.
If you have won... why offer your hand to pull your opponent back up?
Occasionally, the human woman would step out, calling them inside for a meal. They would bicker all the way to the door over who truly won, while she merely chuckled, stroking both their heads as if the victory meant nothing at all.
I didn't understand. Does a caress on the head determine a victor?
Then, there were the rare occasions when the man returned. His scent... was a terrifying force that kept even the most savage demons in the region miles away.
Sparda.
I had never crossed paths with him, nor was I stupid enough to try. But whenever he was home, the children altered instantly. They ceased their bickering. Instead, they would trail closely behind his shadow, begging him to teach them the sword, their wide, mismatched eyes tracking his every movement with absolute, breathless worship.
Still, I did not understand. If you are powerful, it is enough to be powerful alone.
Why must always cling to one another?
That was my first glimpse into what mortals called a 'family.' A genuine one. Something a demon could never possess.
Until that night.
That night, the gates of hell broke wide open over the estate. It wasn't a battle, it was an execution. The human woman’s desperate screams, shrieking the names of her children, echoed through a sea of roaring fire. I nested deep within the highest branches of a tree, offering no intervention. I simply watched. It was the instinct of a creature that had survived by observing, remembering, and ensuring my own skin remained untouched.
After that night... the house was reduced to ash, and the woman vanished. The man never returned.
One of the children had disappeared. The only thing I witnessed was a single boy surrounded by a horde of demons, hacked and torn to absolute ribbons, unable to cry for help, yet stubbornly refusing to die. He eventually dragged his mangled body out of the wreckage and crawled away into the unknown. I assumed the tale had ended there.
I stared intently at the demon hunter before me as he raised his massive blade, ready to cleave me in two. Was this truly the boy who had been surrounded by demon hordes? Who then stood weeping before the crackling, burning ruins of his home, screaming desperately for his mother and his brother? Was that pathetic child now hunting the entirety of Hell?
Didn't he wander down to the Underworld, and get captured by the Demon King, or so the rumor goes?
Doesn't matter. I needed a distraction. I needed to strike a wedge directly into his psyche, a momentary shockwave to paralyze him long enough for me to flee.
What could I use? In this humiliating, powerless position, what could I use to possibly shake him?
"Mother!! Dante!!!"
I shrieked.
The demon hunter froze, a violent jolt paralyzing his entire frame. I seized the split second and fled. It seemed throwing his own childhood agonies back in his face was enough to temporarily derail his killing instinct. It didn't matter how, it only mattered that it worked. I needed to run.
Yet, he did not relent. After that brief, frozen fracture of time, a primitive, maddening fury erupted from him. He pursued me like a hound that had caught the scent of its life's singular quarry, bellowing a roar that echoed across both the mortal realm and the abyss.
"What did you say?! WHOSE WORDS ARE YOU PARROTING?!"
"Mother!! Dante!!! Help me!!!"
I continued to disguise the kid's voice, claw at his psychological wounds, manufacturing another desperate window to escape. Casting aside the pride of a superior species, I dragged my bleeding form into the deepest, darkest underbelly of the city as the hunter was left behind in a state of freezing shock.
Following that day, I chose to shadow him from the dark, systematically studying my enemy. I demanded to see what that shattered child had evolved into.
"The way I figure it, in this business, a lot of your kind comes around. And if I kill each one that comes, eventually I should hit the jackpot sooner or later."
What kind of psychotic, bottomless hatred was this? It was utterly absurd. Any slaughter that was not born of amusement or hunger was fundamentally insane. I loathed this creature. A human who pours his entire life savings into the lottery hoping for a jackpot is the most pathetic, degenerate fool alive, yet this half-breed had decided to play the lottery using the lives of demons as his currency?
I discovered he had taken the name "Dante," opening a miserable, debt-ridden shop, accepting any squalid job that involved the paranormal. He was that boy. The boy who once possessed a flawless family, a gentle human mother, and a twin brother.
So, both of those brats had survived? Through whispered rumors filtering from the depths of the Underworld, I learned that the twin who had vanished had been captured by Mundus. He had been tortured, his soul utterly broken and reforged into a hollow, memoryless puppet of armor known as Nelo Angelo. Meanwhile, the one who had crawled through the dirt to survive in the human world was now actively hunting the entirety of Hell?
For years following that revelation, I lived as a fugitive, scurrying through the cracks of the city, and every single encounter left me bleeding out under Dante's boots. His terror to demonkind was nothing short of a theology of death. Yet to humans, he maintained a flawless, sickening masquerade. A careless, wacky-woohoo-pizza man who craved junk food, obsessed over strawberry sundaes, neglected his electric bills, and laughed in the face of everyone.
Mortals genuinely believed they understood him. They did not. They merely perceived the exact illusion he curated for them. Some hailed him as a mercenary, some as a savior, while others dismissed him as a pizza-chomping idiot who cracked jokes while standing in a pool of blood. I used to sneer in silence. Humans are so pathetic, so easily deceived.
He smiled constantly. He smiled when signing contracts, smiled when teasing clients, smiled even when a demon impaled him clean through his chest and pinned him to a wall. No sane creature could smile through that.
Had I not known his origins... perhaps I would have believed that too.
Once, I watched a young human girl bring a box of pastries to his office. She smiled, and he smiled back. She blushed. I recognized that look, I had seen it thousands of times across human history.
A few days later... she returned, this time bearing a bouquet. He accepted them, then tossed them aside onto a desk. He forgot they existed. By the time she departed... the bouquet remained exactly where it had landed, rotting. He didn't spare them a single glance.
Then came an old woman, wishing to marry off her daughter. An uncle, trying to introduce his niece. A widow, begging him to stay for dinner. Some offered pity, some offered adoration, and some... genuinely loved him.
Mortals are truly bizarre creatures. They foolishly believe that if they are simply pushing him enough... they can carve a path into his heart.
They saw a cool, roguish hunter and foolishly imagined their love could thaw his frozen core. How profoundly ignorant could humans be? They didn't understand this half-breed in the slightest. Deep beneath that flippant, careless facade lay a life completely weaponized for absolute vengeance. He had committed spiritual suicide at the age of eight. His existence possessed no horizon for a tomorrow, no room for healthy attachments or a new hearth. Forcing romance upon him was like demanding a soldier standing in a raging inferno stop to pluck a wildflower for a lover, it was entirely meaningless, an absolute absurdity. He existed solely to butcher every demon that crossed his path until he located the architect of his ruin.
Foolish humans had no idea that his family, the true and only one, had ceased to exist twenty years ago.
I began to discern an absolute pattern. He never allowed anyone to stay. Clients, friends, allies, they all someday would leave.
Only demons, they always stayed, to die, and to be mounted as taxidermy trophies on his walls.
Irony at its finest, he remained completely blind to the truths I harbored.
I mocked him from the safety of the dark. With this trajectory of blind, obsessive vengeance, would these twin brothers eventually turn their blades upon one another? The younger brother dedicating his entire life to avenging his family, only to face the older brother who had been hollowed into a demonic thrall. How beautifully, exquisitely malicious.
But tonight, within this rotting library at the edge of the sprawling metropolis, he finally cornered me. I unleashed every century-old trick, every desperate gambit in my possession to break his perimeter, but everything shattered against his blade. Rebellion tore through my chest, pinning me brutally against the freezing stone wall. Corrosive black demonic blood erupted from my maw like a fountain.
It burned. An agonizing, systematic destruction was incinerating my physical form. Why must I endure this? All of this cosmic torment... because your precious family was snuffed out two decades ago?
I hated him. I saw with absolute clarity that he was the executioner of my fate.
Dante stood there, his features swallowed by the shadows of his coat, hollow and sickeningly void of emotion.
"You were there? What else do you know?" he growled.
I blinked, coughing up black bile. There? Where? But my mind, razor-sharp even in death, instantly connected the dots. A wheezing, mocking laugh rattled in my bloody throat.
"There? There where? Ah... 'Mother!! Dante!! Help me!'... is that it?" I sneered, weaponizing the most sarcastic, venomous imitation of that pathetic child weeping before the flames all those years ago. I could no longer salvage my own life, but I refused to pass up the opportunity to tear at this hybrid's psychological wounds.
He looked absolutely incandescent with rage, practically foaming at the mouth.
"What do you know about that night?! WHO DID IT?!" His voice was menacing and impatient. He savagely twisted the cursed greatsword deeper into my demonic core, systematically obliterating my remaining mana, leaving no path for regeneration. He was threatening to tear my essence apart in the most agonizing manner imaginable if I remained silent.
"I only know that..." I dragged the sentence out, feigning a confession, deeply relishing how his eyes flared with desperate hope before instantly crashing into darkness as I left him suspended in agonizing waiting.
“That what? WHO?!” Good, go on, go on, impatient half-breed, pathetic half-breed.
I loathe you.
In the final, thrashing throes of my demise, my unadulterated hatred and indignation ignited into a catastrophic, venomous flame. If I am condemned to perish, I will leave you with a curse that will erode your very soul! I will use the exact concept you worship to shatter you from within!
"That..."
I hacked up a massive clot of black blood, laughing hysterically as my clawed hands clamped tightly onto the blade currently murdering me, drenching the steel in the foul ritual of my dying curse. Enjoying the sight of his face twisted with anticipation and miserably impatient.
If I remain locked in this standoff, will you let thoughts of your family hold you back?
Would I be so kind as to tell you your twin is now under the slavery of the demon king who killed your mother? So you could go save him right now and spare yourself a less pitiful life?
Would you be so nice as to listen and believe in my tales, hesitating until you cough up blood, yet still not daring to kill me? Huh, Dante?
No, no way. Because curse you, Dante!
“Heed my words, half-breed...”
My voice, now a raspy, guttural hiss, echoed through the crumbling rafters like a desecrated anthem. No way I would show him any possible life that is any less pathetic than the one he’s having.
"… As divine hate slew me, shall thy blade strike through thy divine love"