Warnings: Eventual Homosexual Pairing(D/N/D), Violence, Blood/Gore, Strong Language

Disclaimer: I do not own DMC, and I'm getting really fucking tired of saying I won't be making money off of any of my stuff.

Dante paced like a caged wolf around his office, nursing a beer a little too adamantly. It was his fifth bottle that hour, but the alcohol had the potency of water in his blood. It would take many more drinks to even produce a buzz, so he certainly wasn't downing the bottles for his nerves. Rather, the cool liquid felt refreshing slithering down his throat. His building was once again slowly steaming him, and he felt as if those chilled bottles of booze were the only thing sustaining him.

However, he wondered if he wouldn't need something for his nerves before the day was over. Nearly a week prior, he and Trish had boarded the ferry to Fortuna as agreed. He was the only one who rode all the way back to Capulet after their arrival. The hunters had found that Fortuna Island may as well have been Fort Knox. A high wall surrounded the premises, and those men in white were littered all over the city. Trish had convinced Dante to return to Capulet and leave her to reconnaissance because there was no way he would go unrecognized in such a place.

So he had obediently returned home to await her arrival back on the mainland. To his misfortune, however, he was beginning to worry about Trish. She hadn't tried once to call, and he never got her cell number. Lady was the only one who had Trish's number, and she was still gone on her job. As his luck would have it, Dante never cared to remember Lady's number either. And speaking of Lady, he was starting to worry about her, too.

"Damn," sighed the hunter, laying back on his desk. He left the cold and empty bottle sitting beside him, pressed against his bare hip, while he pushed his fingers into his eyes until they ached. He hated worrying about anything. It flew in the face of his carefree, laid-back disposition. And his worries were always in vain. Many times, his instincts had drove him to rush to his friends' rescue only to find they needed his help as much as they needed a third arm. It pissed them off, too. Lady had mistakenly assumed that Dante thought her weak the first few times he butted in on her jobs because his gut had screamed she needed help. Trish hated feeling like she was under his surveillance all the time though she never said so. Dante had learned to rein himself down, ignore his urges, but sometimes, his inner voice was so loud, overwhelming, that it nearly drove him to insanity. Sadly enough, Trish and Lady weren't his responsibility, and they could take care of themselves. If only that could stop him from fearing that they could be endangered at any moment and he wouldn't be there to save them.

How bad could Fortuna be? It sounds like some kind of peaceful religious community like... The Vatican or something...

"Miss me?"

One blue eye popped open, wide as it came to focus on the figure standing in the doorway. The awkward angle at which he moved his neck to see over his own chest was a tad painful, but Dante was too distracted by the woman staring back at him to care. Her voice was familiar but she wasn't in the least. Her hair was cut in a bob, the neat strands platinum blond with dark roots. Her skin was a dark tan, and he knew she had no tan lines because her outfit was too scant to leave anything to imagination. Her attire equated to the modesty of a revealing swimsuit, her entire front revealed through a v-neck held together by a zigzagging, red ribbon. Dante was fairly sure the odd loincloth-like fabric hanging between her legs was the only thing covering her intimate bits because he would be thoroughly surprised if she was wearing underwear. Her boots were as white as her outfit and came all the way up to her thighs. Surprisingly enough, her sleeves came to her elbows, ruffled and widely cuffed with red, while white gloves covered the rest of her arms. Feathery protrusions stood out from her shoulders like the wings of a teal colored bird. It was only when he noticed the silver of her eyes that he had the sense to inhale her scent.

Trish.

"Lady Gaga?" he asked mock obliviously, a smirk twitching on his lips. Trish sighed, seeming offended, a hand leaving one of her hips to shrug. Dante laughed heartily, slapping his thigh once he sat up. He knocked the empty bottle at his side over but paid it no mind as it rolled over the edge and clattered loudly to the floor.

"That regal look suits you."

"I dress to impress," Trish replied, her arms wide apart and palms to the ceiling as she did a little curtsy motion with her hips. She then pulled her entire appearance off like a simple costume. Dante fleetingly wished he could conjure disguises for himself. It was an ability that would certainly come in handy.

"So? What'd you find?"

"Quite a bit, actually. You may want to find a more comfortable seat, sweetheart. We're gonna be here for awhile."

Trish proceeded to relay what she had found to Dante while he reclined in his desk chair. As he had guessed earlier, Fortuna was a heavily religious community. Trish said that it seemed the townsfolk's entire lives revolved around the church. They had not one service on Sunday but a morning and evening mass every day she had been there. It was a monarchy with His Holiness, the leader of the Holy Knights of The Order of the Sword—the men in white—being in charge of the church and the town as a whole. Somehow, Trish had managed to join their ranks, hence her odd disguise. Most unsettling of all, however, was that they worshipped his father, Sparda—a demon—as a god.

"How did you convince them to let you join?" Dante was curious as to why, in a religious town, a scantily clad mystery woman would be allowed to join a battalion of elite soldiers. Then again, they did worship a demon. Perhaps their holy book allowed for more tits.

"I bargained with them," Trish answered quickly. Dante quirked a brow impulsively, and he realized after doing so that it was a result of how suspicious the blond's answer had sounded. It was almost as if she was hoping he would accept that simple answer and drop the subject, and the room was suddenly too quiet and tense for Trish not to be hiding something.

"Trish?" Dante canted his head like a confused dog might. "Bargained what?"

Trish was quiet for what seemed like several minutes, her back turned to Dante. She had stood from perching on his desk when he asked the initial question, and she was now staring at the doors as if they were speaking to her, hands on her hips and foot tapping rapidly though no music was playing.

"I gave them Sparda."

"You what?" Now he was standing, too. Dante's hand fell on the blond's shoulder, turning her to face him. She stared up into his shocked face, looking like a child being scolded. For once, she didn't feel at all like Dante's mother. Rather, he felt like hers.

"Why the fuck would you give them Sparda?" Dante was too appalled to be angry, to Trish's luck. It didn't matter how gentle Dante normally was. He never just got a little angry; he flew into rage, all of that pent up frustration released at once. It was true that the people who were rarely angry were the scariest when they did happen to be royally pissed off, and there wasn't a better example than Dante. He would never try to hurt her, of course, but Trish didn't enjoy being yelled at—or "roared" at because that term seemed far more accurate.

"I had to," Trish retorted in her defense. "If I didn't, there's no telling how long it would have taken me to gain their trust."

Dante sighed, shaking his head as he turned to stare at Sparda's empty frame on the back wall. "How the fuck didn't I notice that?" he mumbled, his fist clenching at his side.

"Look," Trish cooed, putting her hands on the halfbreed's stiff shoulders, "you can get it back. I'll help you. Besides, they don't plan to use it for awhile anyway."

Dante sighed, and Trish could almost imagine steam coming from his nostrils as if his anger was flooding out of them. "So what are they planning anyway?"

"They wouldn't entrust me with the details of the full operation, but apparently, they're going to resurrect Sparda."

" 'Resurrect Sparda'?" Those words prompted Dante to whirl back to Trish. A hundred thoughts flooded his mind. The image of Vergil's lifeless body in a tank of green goo, waiting to be revived, as ridiculous as it was, entered his mind. Then his father's body replaced Vergil's, and the two alternated places in his mind. Those thoughts evoked memories and those memories pained him. Part of him knew resurrecting someone was somewhat wrong, but the other part of him wanted whoever was in that imaginary tank to come back to life.

"What do you think they mean by that?" His blue eyes were distant, cloudy as he seemed to stare at the air in front of him.

"I'm not sure," Trish replied, sending Dante into a state of anxious dismay though he was a master at hiding it. "That's why you need to go there tonight and find out."

"How am I supposed to get there, Trish? I don't own a boat."

The blond's pink-glossed, glittering lips quirked into a smirk. "I bribed a ferryman. He'll be waiting for you at ten tonight."

"What did you bribe him with? The key to the end of the world?" Trish punched him in the shoulder, but Dante only smiled. It was mostly plastic, but a small fraction of it was real, at least. Trish returned the gesture regardless.

"I have to go back now. I don't want them wondering where I disappeared to." Trish headed for the door, turning to blow Dante a kiss as she always did. Dante pretended to inhale and choke on it, prompting an eyeroll and laughter from Trish.

"See you tonight, Dante."

Dante stepped onto Fortuna's docks, the port familiar though he had first seen it during daylight. The moon was nearly full, its milky light seeming to glitter in the air. During the daytime, Fortuna was several degrees hotter than Capulet City and very humid. At night, however, the air was warm and sprinkled with droplets of brine. It was smooth, soothing to breathe. It felt like breathing dusk itself. As Dante ambled toward the doors into the town, he heard the surrounding waves gently lapping against the stone walkway. Despite the looming sense of danger and malevolence, Fortuna seemed such a tranquil place.

"Good, you're here." Dante halted, turning his head to stare at Trish—or 'Gloria'—over his shoulder. "I was starting to think I would have to come back and get you."

Dante whirled around, the tails of his coat whipping through the air. Shrugging as he always did and pacing a few steps forward, he replied, "Give me more credit than that, Trish. I show up about sixty percent of the time."

"But you show the other forty percent at the most inconvenient of times." Trish stared with her hands on her hips and head ever so slightly tilted. Dante sighed, putting his hands above his head in surrender.

"Okay," Dante sighed, dropping his hands to swing at his sides, "you got me. But since I am here, can we get this show underway? I've only waited a week for this."

Trish laughed warmly and quietly. "Of course. I already have a job for you."

"What kind of job exactly?" Dante's arms crossed and his head fell back in the slightest, his eyes trained on the woman.

"A castle," she answered, prompting a quirked brow from the halfbreed. "I was snooping through some of The Order's files the other day, and I noticed something... suspicious."

"You don't say," Dante snorted. "Why do you think I'm here? This whole place is suspicious."

Trish ignored his rude comment, continuing. "Look at this map," said the blond as she retrieved a folded parchment from inside the breast of her suit. Her nimble fingers unfolded the crumpled paper, and she let it dangle between them so that he could hold the opposite end. Dante felt the warmth from her body lingering in the paper. Each with an end pinched in their fingers, Trish moved her fingertip across the page in an arc along the cresecent shore of the island.

"What do you notice about this?" she asked, referring to the dense forest and mountains sketched on the map.

"There's nothing there?"

"Precisely. Now, look at this map."

Trish removed yet another map from her bosom, and Dante briefly wondered what all she was storing in her rack. She placed her smaller hand in his and dropped the tiny folded square into his palm. Dante unfolded the delicate sheet of paper, careful not to rip the parchment that felt ancient.

"I stole this one from the captain's desk. Do you notice something different?"

"Yeah," Dante laughed, "there's a huge-ass castle up in the mountains."

"Mhm... Fortuna Castle in Lumina Peak," informed the blond, pointing to the printed titles as she said them.

"I guess ya' can't get more suspicious than a secret castle." Dante was already mapping the route to the castle with his eyes, memorizing every destination, every twist and turn.

"I asked a few of the knights about it, and they all adamantly denied its existence." Dante's eyes shifted to the woman, his expression curious. Dante folded the map up, sliding it into the denim pocket on his upper thigh. "Well, I guess we'll just have t'see about that, won't we?"

The halfbreed headed toward the doors in the distance on the opposite side of a drawbridge. The bridge was up, but it was barely an obstacle for him.

"Oh, and Dante?" Said hunter paused in his tracks, waiting for her to speak with his back turned. "Don't get caught."

With that, Dante saluted the huntress over his shoulder before clearing the bridge as if it was mere playground equipment.

Three blood soaked corpses lay at his feet, growling and snorting as the last remnants of life faded from their bodies. They exploded into crystals of ice, leaving behind only snow saturated with blackish blood. Dante swiped his finger through the dark liquid, staining his fingertip. It appeared to be ordinary demon blood, but Dante learned otherwise when it crystalized on the tip of the digit and slowly began to spread down its length. The halfbreed sniffed the dark ice, scribing the scent into his memory. Lady would have called him crazy if she had watched him lick the blood threatening to freeze his entire body solid. Dante expected his tongue to become a block of acrid ice. Instead, he found that licking the ice helped to remove it.

"Interesting," he mumbled, cleaning his finger before the ice could engulf his hand. The melted blood left a bitter and burnt taste upon his tongue—something to remember those strange demons by. Their bodies were almost akin to that of a dinosaur, spiked with jagged icicles. They seemed strangely more intelligent than the average demon. They moved slowly their heavy bodies, but their moves weren't as typically easy to predict.

"Frosts," Dante declared, giving the species a name while he wondered what other sorts of creatures he might encounter. Those thoughts disappeared quickly, however, as he stared up at the castle looming in the distance. There were many towers and spires stabbing the sky, making the castle feel ominous. It was surrounded by a wide moat, a long bridge leading up to the enormous gate. Without a doubt Dante could say that no one ever ventured into the mountains anymore. A person would have to be blind not to notice such a grand structure jutting from the earth, impossibly tall and roughly peaked almost like a part of the mountains itself.

Whatever they're hiding in there must be pretty big.

Dante's boots clinked on the metal grates of the bridge as he approached the gate. He could feel eyes on him, smell the scent he had inhaled only minutes ago. When he whiffed the air, however, he found a different odor lingering just beneath. It smelled musty and brisk like the air just before a thunderstorm drifts overhead—the scent of ozone. He spotted a writhing mass in his peripheral vision, but it had disappeared by the time he looked. It seldom mattered; he already knew that it was a demon stalking him. A new one, in fact, and that peculiar scent made him eager to hunt it down.

The doors of the castle swung open with a shrill squeak when Dante kicked the crack between them. It wasn't a very stealthy method of entry, but the enormous hall he then stepped into was vacant of anything living. Massive pillars stood floor-to-ceiling, chandeliers swinging between them as if a perpetual draft was blowing them. Chairs and benches were arranged on the sides as if to observe a speaker on the stage against the far wall. Just over the balusters of the catwalk above Dante could see the upper section of a larger-than-life painting. Though he couldn't see the entire thing, Dante felt there was something off about it. He couldn't put his finger on what, but he just felt the need to examine it. It was more of an urge than a need, however, as if whatever it was hiding wasn't of the highest priority at that moment.

Committing the painting to memory, the halfbreed gave the hall a thorough once-over before choosing a pair of doors on the right. The moment he opened the doors, a pungent odor wafted to his nostrils. Demons—a half a dozen, at least, in the hallway. A throaty giggle drew Dante's attention to his left to find a patchwork sack hobbling toward him on peg legs. It was roughly shaped like a human, having four limbs and being bipedal. One of it's limbs, however, was a wide, curved blade, the other the wooden arm of a marionette. Come to think of it, they reminded Dante of the Marionettes he fought on Mallet Island years ago. For some reason, watching them lumber about made the term "scarecrow" come to mind.

Dante charged at the first Scarecrow as if in a joust, skewering two onto his blade. He slammed their bodies into the rigid, cold floor, causing their loose stitches to expel a sickly green liquid. It looked like bug guts, and judging by the fact that the Scarecrows smelled like insects, Dante was betting it was some sort of demonic equivalent.

Dante found that the Scarecrows were weak, impish demons. The two he skewered died and disintegrated on his blade. He slung the blood from Rebellion before swinging her around and cleaving two more demons in half. He brought his blade down in an arc to end another and impaled the final Scarecrow in a display that would have had Țepeș creaming his fancy trousers.(1) With the demons slain, Dante headed up the hall to see if there was a source for their appearance. Instead, he found a grand display of four odd contraptions that appeared to have drilled into the glowing plates beneath them. Centered between the four plates wasn't a large door, but an alcove so high and wide that whatever was beyond its small door had to be important.

Looks promising, mused Dante as he headed for the door. It opened into a spacious courtyard, reacquainting him with the raging blizzard he had weathered to reach the castle in the first place. The blizzard seemed far stronger there, however, as if that atrium was its epicenter. The halfbreed's visibility was diminished to near zero, but he could make out a structure in the distance. Approaching the far side of the courtyard, Dante found that said structure was a gate. A hellgate, to be exact. It appeared new, and when Dante ran his gloved palm across it, he felt the tell-tale smoothness of the stone beneath his bare fingers. It had definitely been erected recently. It felt incredibly frigid against his gloved palm, and the cold radiated into his bones. It was as if the blizzard was coming from the gate itself.

"Hm," grunted the hunter, scratching his stubbly chin. Were they planning to summon a demon? There was no other explanation as to why they would have created a hellgate. If they had already summoned their demon, Dante would have crashed their party and kicked its ass six ways to Sunday. However, the courtyard was as empty as the rest of the castle.

Shrugging, Dante turned and scoped out the area. His eyes just barely located a doorway along the far side of the right wall through the thick snow. He had come to Fortuna Castle to find what The Order was hiding there. A gate to Hell seemed like a big enough secret to call his job well done, but Dante couldn't ignore the feeling that the castle had more dark truths to be uncovered. Thus, he made his way for the door he had discovered rather than going back the way he came, careful not to slide on the thick ice that coated the ground.

Several minutes later found Dante in an elegant bedroom. He felt a bit like a scientist collecting data for a list of new species as he had encountered even more unfamiliar demons in the graveyard he had just exited. Their bodies reminded him of a lobster, but they were hidden in a thick cloud of black. They floated through the air, watching him with fluorescent blue eyes and lashing at him with pincers that dangled beneath their black covering. They rarely attacked in any other method than attempting to stab him with a telescopic claw. Dante had found that defeating them required him to first gun them down with Coyote as they were untouchable when shrouded in smoky blackness. After a book of German folklore he had recently dug from his attic and read on a boring night, he dubbed them "Mephisto."

Dante sighed, thinking the luxurious bed to his right looked terribly welcoming in the wee hours of the morning. He gave half a thought to taking a nap but noticed that the bed seemed to have been slept in recently. Dante recalled Trish's demand that he not get caught, and he was able to resist. Turning away from the bed, however, was ever so painful. The halfbreed exited into the next room and was surprised by what he saw. If he wasn't feeling awake before, he certainly was after that.

The first thing Dante noticed was the entire chamber at a glance. It was obviously a room in which to torture people as cages hung from the ceiling with gunny-wrapped corpses inside. Enormous panels of metal lattice spanned the length of the ceiling. Spikes of metal protruded from their undersides, and they looked as if they could be lowered to the floor to eliminate any unwanted prisoners trapped inside. Centered in the room was a rectangular pool of shallow water. It fed into drains along the left wall while gentle jets on the bottom of the pool kept it filled. It was obviously there to catch any fluids that might leak from tortured subjects and clean them away easily.

Those weren't the most shocking aspects of the room, however. Jutting from the walls of the upper level were irregular chunks of stone. It looked, disturbingly, as if the floor had been busted out and the room renovated recently rather than being from the medieval ages when a torture chamber was a common commodity of most castles. Dante's suspicions were confirmed when his eyes came to focus on what was in the center of the room.

Chained to the floor by unearthly bindings, a man thrashed wildly about like an animal caught in a trap. His back was to Dante, but he appeared to be quite young—no older than 23. Swollen scabs trailed down his back, the crusted blood very dark. The wounds had to be recent. Dante wondered, however, why they had not healed flawlessly. The man was definitely a demon. As if his scent wasn't enough, his arm was obviously demonic. Armored by navy and scarlet scales, its crevices gave off a surging blue glow. His hair was speckled with blood, but Dante could tell that, beneath the stains, it was white. The man was too busy struggling against the glowing beams of light and obsidian cuffs restraining him to notice Dante standing on the platform above. When the creak of a door sounded from below, however, the hunter crouched to stay out of sight.

A stately man stepped into the chamber, and Dante got his first glimpse of those white uniforms the girls had been yammering about. The man paced around the thrashing devil in the center of the room until he came to stand before him. Once Dante could see his front, he noticed that the strange man perfectly fit the girls' description of the man who had asked about him during their ice-cream break at the café.

Very slowly, the captive ceased his thrashing and turned his head to glare at the man. Dante could seldom see his face, but he felt the hatred rolling off him in waves.

"What do you want?" he ground out through grit teeth, voice rough and filled with exhausted panting. His sides moved inward and outward rapidly with his breaths.

"I came to... see you," replied the man in white. His face appeared somber as he stared down at the man, his hands behind his back.

"See me?" demanded the chained man, his voice quiet. It didn't stay that way for long. "Why the fuck would you come to see me? !"

The man opened his mouth as if to give some long-winded reply but closed it without a word. He settled for, "I'm sorry..."

"Oh," the chained man laughed bitterly, "you're sorry?"

"Yes," the brunette replied, sounding ashamed to say the next string of words that left his mouth. "I'm sorry it had to come to this."

"Oh, really? You're sorry? What do you expect me to do? Forgive you? Forgive you for turning me in to Sanctus like some kind of check?"

"No, that's not—"

"Fuck you!" shrieked the chained one. "I know exactly what you did! And you expect me to believe that you're 'sorry'?" His voice degenerated into guttural screaming. "Four years! Four fucking years I've been locked up in this place! Were you 'sorry' when they beat me until I was fucking unconscious and dragged me here? ! Were you sorry when they threw me in my own little special cage? !"

The snowy-haired man was visibly shaking while the man-in-white's face had gone pale enough to match his uniform.

"I didn't see sunlight," said the chained man almost in a whisper. His next reply began as screaming but faded out as trembling and weak—the voice of someone biting back tears.

"I didn't leave that cell for four years! And I never saw you doing anything to change that."

The chained man's breaths were shaky with the occasional squeak. He was obviously crying, his head slumping toward the floor. He took a few moments to compose himself while the other man just stared on in horror and sorrow. When the chained man's head finally canted back up, he broke out into a fit of raspy, mocking laughter, and Dante could almost imagine the maniacal expression on his face.

"You look surprised," he said, but he was obviously thinking aloud. He sounded amused before his tone regained its acidic edge. "What? Did you think that after all I've been through I would still be your little pet?"

Both men paused and stared at each other as if waiting for the other to speak. When nary a word was uttered, the man's snowy head of hair drooped and he muttered the words, "Go away."

Rather than obey what the man said, the brunette leaned forward as if he wanted to touch the other man. He kept his hands at bay, however, but started to speak. "Ne—"

"Leave me the fuck alone!" roared the chained man, and the other man recoiled as if he had been scalded. He remained frozen in place as the other man gasped convulsively, trying futilely to conceal his tears. Eventually, he straightened back up, regaining that stiff posture he had entered the room with.

"As you wish," he said quietly, exiting the way he came. Dante watched pitifully as the chained man let his sobs turn into bawling. He cried briefly before he broke into laughter again and all noise faded out. He then shook his head as if denying something he told himself within his mind. Dante gave him a moment before he attempted to get up so that he could jump down to the lower level. He needed to speak with the young man. Someone who hated The Order for being betrayed, he was just the kind of person who would have no qualms with telling Dante all of their secrets. However, before Dante had the chance to move more than an inch, the doors opened again and someone else entered the room.

The chained man glanced over his shoulder before snorting and growling, "Whadda you want?"

"What should I m-make of this brotherly attachment you have for C-c-c-c... Credo?"

The burly man with the stutter. Dante remembered Lady and Trish speaking of him.

"You were listening at the door? ...Heh, 'attachment.' The only thing attaching me to Credo is my attachment to wanting to beat his ass before I'm dead."

The bulky man in uniform gave a sinister laugh. "Of course, you are incapable of affection, j-j-just like the rest of your k-kind."

The young man didn't reply to that, seeming at a loss for words or just unsure of whether what he wanted to say was really true.

"You didn't answer my question."

"Oh? P-p-p-please repeat it for me. I'm afraid I m-missed it," replied the uniformed man in a snide tone.

"Why are you here?"

The bulky man brandished a whip that Dante hadn't seen coiled at his side as he circled the younger man like a buzzard. He let the leather tip trail through the water and tickle up his captive's back, around his shoulder as he finished his final round.

"To give you your daily beating, of coure. And t-to offer you a p-p-proposal."

"Like what?" The younger man didn't sound particularly eager to hear what the other was going to say.

"All you have to do if you want to be free is g-g-g-g-give us Yamato."

Yamato? Vergil's sword? Surely, they couldn't be speaking of the same Yamato.

"Never," the chained man growled. The burly ones expression shifted from playfully malevolent to mercilessly cruel.

"N-no matter," he replied, keeping his voice down though he looked as if he wanted to scream. "Once you are d-d-dead, we can just extract the sword from your body."

"That's the only way you'll get it," barked the younger man, punctuating his sentence with a pained yelp. The whip had cracked across his bare back, reopening the slowly healing wounds there. The man with the stutter kept violently beating him, turning what was his back into a unrecognizable hunk of bleeding, torn flesh. He definitely reaped some sick sense of pleasure from mangling his captive, but the younger man steeled himself against the attack, unwilling to cry out in pain. When it was finally over, the burly man was breathing sporadically, sounding as if the whipping had excited him to the point of insanity. He forced his breath to steady and straightened his posture. When he had finally composed himself, he asked, "Why do you deny our p-p-purpose?"

"It's not my purpose," replied the other man. His voice was strained and his bitterness had become agony, too pained to be angry.

"Foolish boy," said the burly man, chuckling evilly and shaking his head. "You know n-nothing of your own purpose."

"What do you mean?"

Without answering, he made his way for the exit.

"Hey! I asked you a question! What the fuck do you mean? !" The door was slammed in the midst of his final sentence, and the beaten man sighed in exhaustion. "Fucker..."

Dante waited a few moments to affirm that no one else was standing at the door before he jumped down to the lower level. His boots found the floor with a mild splash, catching the captive's attention. He attempted to crane his head far enough to see Dante, but his position prevented it.

"Who the Hell're you?"

Dante seldom replied until he was standing in front of him, arms folded and head tilted to scrutinize him. He bared his teeth slightly and glared. His eyes were a deep blue, but the emotions embedded in them made them incredibly dark. His hair was disheveled and clung to his forehead in matted strings. The whip had licked his left cheek, and the long slit it left behind thin trickles of blood all the way to his clavicle.

"You the executioner or something?" he asked, his eyes obviously spotting the hilt of Dante's sword. "Just hurry up and get it over with."

Dante snorted with only the slightest hint of humor. "I'm not here to kill ya', kid."

"What'd you call me?" growled the younger man. If looks could kill, Dante would have been a dead man. Still so feisty for someone who had been locked away for four years.

"I'm the good guy."

The man laughed. "Those guys think they're the good ones, too. How do I know you aren't entertaining the same delusions?"

"Well," Dante breathed, crouching in the sanguine water, "how about a deal?"

Unexpectedly, the younger man smirked. "I'm listening."

"If I get you outta here, you gotta spill all The Order's dirty secrets. Got it?"

The captive's face became shockingly innocent, and his tone was pleading. "So if I tell you what they're planning, you'll stop them?"

"Definitely," replied Dante, his voice full of sincerity and void of frivolity. It was strange that the man had suddenly become to trusting ans hopeful, but maybe he just truly wanted The Order's evil plans stopped.

The halfbreed began examining the younger man's bindings as soon as he shook his head in confirmation of their agreement, moving around his body to get a better look. He noticed briefly how bloodstained the captive's pants were from all the blood trailing down his back before he came to find what bound the young man to the floor. It was a small rectangular tablet that looked to be made of obsidian but couldn't have been because it was strong enough to hold a demon down. There were strange letters engraved into its silken surface, and it glowed purple where it touched the floor. It reminded Dante of the hellgate, and he was certain it had been crafted by the same people.

Most peculiar, however, were the beams of light that kept the captive bound. They were the same neon purple that glowed from beneath the tablet on the floor. Uncharacteristic of light was the way they were unstretchable. Surely, if they were only beams of strange light as they appeared, Dante would have been able to stretch them by pulling the obsidian cuffs on the man's wrists and ankles—where the beams began—farther from the tablet—where they ended. Unlike light, however, they were limited, just as chains, in their leeway. Dante mused to himself that he might have been able to wrench them lose in his trigger, but he sometimes lost control of his demon side, especially when around so much blood. He wouldn't want to just forget freeing the young captive and end up butchering him instead.

"I'm gonna be honest with ya', kid. I don't have any idea how to get these things loose, but I know someone who might."

Dante skipped using the spiral staircase in the room at the far end and instead used the wall to propel himself back onto the platform from before. Just before he left the room and his newfound informant to his own devices, the hunter called, "See ya' tonight, kid."

With that, Dante was gone. The young man snorted, blowing a strand of hair hanging at his nostrils. "If I'm still alive by then..."

1. That note is kind of random, but I wanted to clarify that "Țepeș" is referring to Vlad Țepeș or Vlad the Impaler.

A/N: In case anyone was wondering, I've had to change my plans yet again. I'm adding all my serial stories back to FFN. It will take me awhile to get the last two chapters of TCOS done because I now have to edit sexually explicit chapters. I'm debating on what to do with Black Ambrosia. I'm considering just getting rid of it completely. Or I may just submit the whole thing to AFF so I won't have to waste time editing it. If you want more info on what's going on, visit my profile.