Dante hit the ground, but there was no impact. No sound of boots striking stone. No dust cloud.
He landed in silence. Absolute, suffocating silence.
He stood up, his body humming with the violent violet energy of the digested Resonance Core. He checked his hands. They were trembling, vibrating at a frequency that blurred his outline. He wasn't just unstable anymore, he was oscillating between realities.
"Vocal check," he tried to say.
The sound didn't travel. It fell out of his mouth and died instantly, absorbed by the air. The atmosphere here wasn't gas, it was solidified time. Thick, heavy, and resistant to change.
Dante adjusted his perception. The Silvergrin rippled, the liquid metal extending into thin filaments that tasted the air.
Analysis:
Location: The Lost District (The Blind Spot).
Status: Temporal Lock.
Mana Density: Critical.
Entropy Levels: Zero.
He looked up.
The sky was not black or grey. It was the color of a bruised plum, stagnant and filled with motionless lightning bolts that hung like cracks in a porcelain ceiling.
And then, he saw the city.
It was New Babel, but not the New Babel of steam and soot. This was the First City. The architecture was elegant, white marble and gold filigree, untouched by the Industrial Revolution.
But it was wrong.
Everything was frozen in the millisecond of its deletion.
Dante walked forward. He passed a horse-drawn carriage. The horse was rearing up in panic, its mane suspended in mid-whip. The driver was shouting, his mouth open, veins bulging in his neck. But he was made of grey ash.
Dante reached out to touch the wheel of the carriage.
Bzzt.
A spark of violet static jumped from his finger to the wheel. The wheel didn't rust, it simply vanished. The carriage collapsed on one side, silent as a feather falling.
"I am a virus," Dante realized. "I am the only thing moving in a static image."
He walked through the street. It was a museum of terror. He saw alchemists running, clutching papers. He saw mothers shielding children. He saw a man pointing at the sky, his face twisted in a scream that would never be heard.
They were all statues of compressed ash, held together by the memory of who they used to be.
The Resonance Core inside Dante's chest pulsed. It tugged him forward, pulling him toward the center of the district. Toward the Spire of the Origin.
It was a massive tower in the distance, twisting like a drill bit into the stagnant sky.
"Okay," Dante thought. "Get to the tower. Find the truth. Try not to erase the floor I'm walking on."
He took a step.
CRACK.
The sound was like a gunshot in a library.
Dante froze. He hadn't made the sound.
He turned.
The ash-statue of the horse driver he had passed earlier... moved.
The head snapped toward Dante. The grey, dusty eyes opened. They weren't human eyes. They were voids of white static.
Then the horse moved. Then the woman shielding her child.
One by one, the "ghosts" of the Blind Spot turned their heads. They looked at Dante. They felt the foreign object—the Entropy—intruding on their perfect stillness.
Intruder, the collective thought slammed into Dante's mind. Variable detected. Isolate and Purge.
The horse driver's mouth opened wider, unhinging. He didn't scream. He simply rushed forward, his body moving with a jerky, frame-skipping unnaturalness.
"Not good," Dante muttered.
He reached for his Transmutation Daggers.
The driver lunged, swinging a whip made of solidified grey smoke.
Dante sidestepped. The whip hit the cobblestones, shattering them into pixels of light.
Dante drove his dagger into the driver's chest.
"Decay."
Usually, this would turn flesh to dust. But the driver was already dust.
The entropy rushed into the statue. The driver didn't die. He bloated. The grey ash swirled, mutating, growing extra limbs. The driver's arm elongated into a massive, spiked club of compressed history.
"Right," Dante cursed, dodging a backhand swing that decapitated a nearby statue. "You can't rot what's already dead. You just make it unstable."
Dante sprinted.
He ran down the marble avenue, his boots skidding on the timeless stone. Behind him, the "Museum" was waking up. A mob of ash-creatures, glitching and jerking, poured out of the buildings. They moved in silence, a tidal wave of grey hate.
Dante checked his inventory.
Transmutation Daggers (Ineffective).
Mercury (Standard).
Basilisk Venom (Too valuable to use on minions).
The Environment.
He looked at the buildings passing by. They were held in Stasis.
"If I can't break the monsters," Dante theorized, "I'll break the floor."
He stopped, turning to face the horde. He slammed both hands onto the ground.
He didn't use Decay. He used Assimilation.
He didn't eat the stone to heal. He ate the Stasis binding it.
It tasted cold. Like licking a frozen flagpole. But he pulled. He siphoned the binding energy of the street.
SNAP.
The reality of the street asserted itself. Without the Stasis magic holding it together, three hundred years of aging happened in one second.
The marble crumbled. The cobblestones turned to sand. The beautiful white buildings on either side of the street groaned and collapsed inward, aging into ruin instantly.
The wave of ash-monsters was caught in the collapse. The ground beneath them turned to quicksand. They sank, clawing at the air, buried under tons of time-accelerated rubble.
Dante stood on the edge of the destruction, panting. He wiped a trickle of blood from his nose.
"Time always wins," he spat.
He turned back toward the Spire.
But the sky ripped open.
It wasn't a natural tear. A vertical line of white light appeared in the bruised purple sky, slicing through the clouds.
Two massive, porcelain hands grabbed the edges of the tear and pulled.
Lady Vespera stepped through the hole in reality.
She didn't look like she had in the Foundry. Here, in her element, she was terrifying. She floated, her dress weaving itself from the white static of the dimension. Her eyes glowed with the same light as the sky.
"You broke my door," Vespera announced. Her voice boomed, echoing from every surface. "And now you are breaking my history."
She pointed a finger at Dante.
"Pause."
Dante felt it instantly. The air around him solidified. His coat froze mid-flutter. His lungs stopped expanding.
He was trapped in amber.
Vespera floated down, landing softly on the ruins of the street Dante had just destroyed. She looked at the devastation with a sneer.
"You are a crude instrument, Silvergrin. You see a painting, and you only see the canvas you can burn."
She walked toward him, frozen in his struggle.
"I will cut you open," she whispered, caressing his frozen cheek. "I will retrieve the Core from your heart. And then I will leave you here as a statue. A monument to the man who almost mattered."
Dante couldn't move. He couldn't speak.
But his mind was racing.
Stasis vs. Entropy.
She has the home-field advantage. The environment supports her.
But I have the Core.
The Core in his chest was burning. It hated the Stasis. It wanted to be free.
Dante focused inward. He couldn't move his muscles, but he could move his mana.
He visualized the Core. He visualized the Basilisk Venom in his pocket.
He couldn't reach the syringe. But he could dissolve the glass vial inside his pocket using a micro-burst of entropy from his hip.
Concentrate.
A tiny flare of heat at his waist. The glass vial shattered.
The Distilled Basilisk Venom soaked into his clothes. It touched his skin.
It burned. It felt like acid.
Dante didn't scream. He couldn't.
But the venom entered his bloodstream. It mixed with the Resonance Core's energy.
System Alert: Catalyst Detected.
Entropy Levels: EXCEEDING SAFETY PARAMETERS.
Reaction: CONCEPTUAL DISSOLUTION.
Vespera raised her hand to carve his chest open.
Suddenly, the air around Dante didn't just thaw. It died.
The "Pause" spell didn't break. It rotted. The magic itself turned black and flaked away like dead skin.
Dante inhaled. The sound was like a vacuum imploding.
He looked at Vespera. His eyes were gone. In their place were two pools of swirling, black tar. The Silvergrin was gone, dissolved into a mist of mercury that floated around his jaw like a halo.
"You..." Dante's voice was a distortion, a chorus of crumbling stones. "You are in my way."
Vespera stepped back, genuine fear flickering in her eyes. "What are you?"
Dante took a step. The ground beneath his boot didn't just crack, it ceased to exist, leaving a void of white nothingness.
"I am the End," Dante said.
He lunged.
Vespera threw up a wall of Diamond Stasis.
Dante didn't punch it. He ran through it. The diamond turned to graphite, then to smoke, as he passed.
He grabbed Vespera by the throat.
For the first time in three hundred years, the Ageless Queen felt her skin wrinkle.
"No!" she shrieked.
She blasted him with a point-blank wave of time-reversal energy.
It hit Dante, pushing him back. His skin flickered—young, old, dead, unborn. He was fluctuating wildly.
He released her, stumbling back. The Basilisk Venom was eating him alive. He had seconds before he dissolved into nothing.
He looked at the Spire. It was close.
"Run," his logic screamed.
Dante turned and sprinted toward the tower. He left a trail of unmaking behind him—footprints where reality had been deleted.
Vespera fell to her knees, clutching her throat. There was a handprint there. A handprint of withered, aged skin.
"Kill him!" she screamed to the empty city. "Kill him before he reaches the Throne!"
The Spire loomed ahead. The door was massive, inscribed with the Seven Axioms of Alchemy.
Dante didn't stop to read them. He slammed his body against the door.
The Core in his chest resonated. The door recognized the frequency.
Welcome Home, Aspirant.
The massive doors groaned open.
Dante fell inside.
The doors slammed shut behind him, sealing Vespera and her rage outside.
Dante lay on the floor of the Spire's atrium. The Basilisk High was fading, leaving him broken, smoking, and half-dissolved.
He looked up.
He wasn't in a room. He was in a library.
But the books weren't paper. They were floating shards of light.
And in the center of the room, sitting on a simple wooden chair, was a skeleton.
It wore a lab coat similar to the one Silas wore.
In its lap was a notebook.
Dante dragged himself across the floor. He coughed up black bile.
He reached the skeleton. He touched the notebook.
It wasn't written in code. It was written in common script.
Title: Project Ouroboros.
Subject: The Creation of God.
Entry 1: We have made a terrible mistake. The Origin is not a power source. It is a Prison.
Dante stared at the words.
"A prison," he whispered.
"Yes," a voice said from the shadows of the library.
Dante spun around, his daggers raised.
A figure stepped out. It wasn't a monster. It wasn't an ash-ghost.
It was a man. He looked perfectly normal. He was drinking a cup of tea.
He looked exactly like Dante.
Same face. Same hair. But he had no Silvergrin. His jaw was whole.
"Hello, Dante," the double said, taking a sip of tea. "I've been waiting for us to arrive. You're late. Again."