Jez gave a sad chuckle. “It occurs to me we’ve never truly held a conversation. As ourselves, I mean, with all our pretenses stripped away. And yet our lives have so deeply affected each others’. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

“Not really! Frankly I’m happy keeping it this way.”

A sigh.

“You are about to be locked away, Dorian. In a prison in the Labyrinth, forever, where you can harm no-one again. The Infinity is about to join every plane of the Multiverse, and make each plane its own great node through its Infinity Hearts! Soon the Multiverse’s last great holdout, Fate’s forces, shall fall—and I shall sweep the rest of the Upper Realms—”

“So you have come to gloat.”

“If you like, you may call this gloating.” He sounded amused. “I think I’ve earned a little gloating.”

“…Fair enough.”

“I’m here to thank you, in a way. You, Dorian, you are who taught me that it takes violence to reshape the world. You taught me that sometimes to love the world is to hurt it.”

Dorian had nothing to say to that. Was it his fault that Jez was the way he was? Please. If it wasn’t him that taught Jez this painful lesson someone else would’ve. It was the way of the Multiverse.

“I wish for you to know—what I do… is only out of love.”

And Dorian couldn’t suppress a laugh. “Oh, come on!”

“Pardon?”

“The worst part is I think you really mean it.”

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Quantity] 804.8 -> 865.3

He waved aside the notification, gritted his way through the pains. “You truly do believe what you’re saying, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” said Jez. He sounded baffled.

“You don’t love me,” snorted Dorian. “You don’t know me! You don’t know almost every creature in the Multiverse! How can you claim to love us?” He shook his head. “You throw around the word so easily. ‘Love.’ It’s so cheap you’ll give it out to anyone.”

“As opposed to making love so expensive you give it to no-one but yourself?” said Jez. “Or do you even give love to yourself, Dorian?”

“…”

“I don’t need to know you to love you,” said Jez softly. “I don’t even need to like you to love you. The fact that you think, and feel, and live, just like I do, makes you worthy of love.”

“Yeah, that’s shit.”

“I... don’t expect you to understand.”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” Dorian yawned. “You’ve won! Congratulations! You got anything else?”

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Quantity] 865.3 -> 913.5

“Do you hate me, Dorian?” It came out in a whisper, so soft Dorian thought for a second he’d hallucinated it.

“Why do you care?” He said it without venom. Genuinely curious.

“I.. worry sometimes.” More of this soft graveyard whispering. “Kaya says she thinks I’m ingenuine. Just like you do. But I know what I feel in my heart. And I do feel love—to you, to all the creatures of this plane and the rest of the planes of the Multiverse! All I wish is to break this endless cycle of cruelty. All I wish is for us to be linked in soul and life. I just… want us all to be happy. The way my mother, and father, and—and sister—never got to be. Is that so hard to believe?”

Dorian was struggling to see how this child at a confessional got to be the pre-eminent threat to the order of the Multiverse. Really? What did he want? A head-pat and a cookie?

“But good feeling alone shatters when it makes contact with the real world. Good feelings must be backed by hard action. And so I do. And… I hurt people. So, so many people. To get where I am now you must cultivate an eagerness to do the violent, necessary things….things utterly against the principles of The Infinity, which aim to make a community of peace and harmony.” Another sad chuckle.

Dorian was starting to see how this child got to be the pre-eminent threat to the order of the Multiverse.

“I don’t want to hurt people, Dorian,” whispered Jez. “But what other choice do I have? If I don’t hurt people, people will hurt people. People like—to be blunt—people like you.”

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Quantity] 913.5 -> 966.8

“But… it never resonated with me. This… justification. It felt so weak. An excuse to wash my hands of the blood. These men, and women, and children—they did not need to die. They died to fulfill my vision.” Jez’s voice sounded wobbly. “And who am I, to force my will on these poor souls? Who am I, to force myself on the Multiverse?”

“Isn’t it a bit late to be having these doubts?” snorted Dorian.

“It is never too late to doubt yourself,” said Jez. “These doubts have been with me since the beginning. And they’ve only grown more intense as I, too, have grown. Study history. To be in my position, especially as I gain power, is striding down an increasingly narrow path, with thousand-stride drops on either side. It is so easy to descend into tyranny, or megalomania. Doubting myself is the only way I can find sure footing. The only way I can know what I do is true.” There was a breathlessness to the way he spoke.

“Oh, don’t worry! You seem plenty megalomaniacal to me.”

“Perhaps I am. I… try not to be. But perhaps past a certain level of power it is impossible to resist,” sighed Jez. “I ask myself these questions every day. And then I ask myself just one more question. One… I guess I can put to you now. Am—am I a monster, Dorian?”

“Probably best I sit that one out.” All Dorian could think was, why are you asking me?

“Truthfully I… don’t know,” said Jez, his voice wavering. “And—and that scares me, Dorian. You have no idea. It scares me more than anything—”

And then there was a thunderous crash, followed by a painfully loud BOOM!, which saved Dorian from having to hear any more of this strangeness.

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Quantity] 966.8 -> 1032.7

But it was not from his Bloodline Quantity crossing a thousand, which was impressive in its own right.

It was from several qi-bombs going off at once.

Sirens went off. Shrill and bleating, first in this cell, then a second somewhere high above, then a third, out in the distance. There was a flurry of curses and shouts, footsteps trailing off into the distance.

Dorian grinned and stood, stretching out his arms, gave his new batlike wings a little flutter.

Shit was about to go down.

***

Dorian whistled, swinging his legs as explosions went off one by one. Felt a little like when he’d been a boy on parade day, listening to all the firecrackers go off. A celebration! Though with just three happy parties. Everyone else was busy screaming, by the sound of it.

And he was waiting on the other two.

…Aaaany moment now.

A surge of shouts outside his door. Oh? Blasts of qi. The smell of smoke, stone shattering, boost clattering. And then—

Clink-clink!

What a lovely sound. The door eased open, and Sun poked her head in.

They grinned at each other. That grin only troublemakers knew—that grin you wore when you got away with something. And this was something big indeed.

But she was all business a moment later, bounding across the cell and slapping a cuff on his chains. It had an anti-magic effect. They cracked right open.

“Come on!” she yelped. “Gerard needs your help!”

Gerard did indeed need his help, and quite badly.

They burst into a corridor. Three Empyrean guards lay badly mangled, strewn haphazardly on the floor with their guts strewn even more haphazardly about them. Then there was Gerard. Standing over them.

The corridor was not big enough to hold his full transformation. But even half-transformed his wings blocked out the whole corridor, so dark you couldn’t see them really; they only looked like a yawning nothing, a void. You could only pick them out by the edges—feathered and sharp, huge talons curving cruelly at the ends.

His suit was badly stained. Long gashes ran down his chest, spurting blood. But his face showed none of it; instead there was only a hyena smile. His eyes were two lurid yellow marbles behind cracked lenses.

Ten Empyrean guards attacked him at once.

Qi and Law carved through the air. And Gerard laughed, blood dripping down his front, and flapped his wings.

A gale of Spatial Law struck them head-on.

Spatial Whirlwinds bloomed in the air. Caught their attacks, bent their qi like gravity bends light, sucked them into maws in the air gaping like open wounds in reality itself.

And it wasn’t only their attacks. A corpse was sucked in. Light fixtures broke off, whirled twice in the winds before vanishing in the void chasms. It was his signature attack.

And he used it now because he saw Dorian and Sun standing right behind his attackers.

Dorian smashed his new hammers for fists together, and struck.

[Fists of Falling Star, Rising Moon!]

He hadn’t truly appreciated the degree to which his physique had improved until that moment. You knew you reached a certain level of physical power when strange things started to happen the moment you moved, like the laws of physics no longer knew what to do with you. There was a sonic boom. The instant his heel left the floor. Then there was no ‘in-between.’ One moment he was there, the next he was there, gone at the speed of thought. His fist, blazing fiery qi, sank into the metal, and it did not behave like a metal. It behaved—and felt—like a sort of very dense liquid. His fist simply went in there, and it bent with it, and he went further still, and in it went—and all the while the guard stood there frozen in his own time.

Fascinating.

Needless to say Serpent’s Senses was on.

How this would’ve gone mere hours before was—he’d hit the man’s back; the man would go flying. But the man only started to move at all once his fist was already halfway into him, and by then he’d had a little wiggle and felt some wet sacks—organs, probably? Bursting. Gingerly he pulled the fist out.

And then the man went flying.

The poor guards started to turn only then. Hard to turn and keep your footing in the face of Gerard’s assault. They were still Empyreans, and no physical slouches of their own. Their eyes blew out wide. Their faces contorted to snarls. On a Multiversal level their reaction times were still quite impressive.

Still though. For him?

He grinned.

Too slow!