Ethan dragged himself into Lucien's cold, sterile sanctuary. He hadn't used a Gatewalk, fearing total disintegration. He had walked, using the minimal energy of the Sloth inertia to keep his fragmented core from exploding.
The Reality Warping was visible now. The obsidian walls of the room were rippling, subtly stretching and contracting like liquid metal. The ambient temperature dropped and spiked in irregular, nauseating waves.
Lucien rose from his desk, his expression shifting from cold satisfaction to professional alarm.
"Your arrival is unnecessarily… loud, Emissary," Lucien observed, his voice devoid of sympathy. "You are an inefficient, volatile asset."
Ethan ignored the words. He staggered to the desk and forced the release of the Greed soul. The massive, crystalline soul of avarice was sucked from his sigil, leaving behind a terrifying vacuum.
Lucien looked at the depleted energy surrounding Ethan. "The Greed is secured. Four souls of the thirteen. Adequate progress." He tapped the shadow abacus—the fourth bead solidified.
"But the cost is unacceptable," Lucien continued, circling the desk, his presence imposing. "Your core is degrading. The Gluttony core is overwhelmed by the Sloth and the Pride, and the volatility is threatening the integrity of the collected assets. You are losing control, Emissary."
Lucien didn't care about Ethan's pain, only the loss of his utility.
"The time for your subtle, intellectual games is over. You attempted Gluttony on the Greed soul and failed, necessitating a destructive Wrath flare. Your tactical subtlety is now a liability," Lucien dictated, his voice sharp with finality.
"The remaining nine souls are not simple targets. They will require speed and absolute force." He gestured to the shadow abacus. "Your remaining time is dwindling. You will switch tactics. You will prioritise Wrath for every extraction. Focus the fire. Burn through the hosts. Destroy the spiritual armour. Move fast, and move with lethal force."
The demand was a death sentence to Ethan's fragile moral code. Wrath was the simplest, most destructive, and fastest way to purge a soul, but it would eliminate the need for control. It would make him a pure, unthinking force of destruction.
Ethan felt the toxic residue of the Pride soul surge in defiance of Lucien, only to be crushed under the cold logic of the command.
He looked down at his own trembling hands, his gold eyes staring into the infernal reflection. He realised the horror of the choice: the subtle, controlled Gluttony was the last remnant of Ethan Vale, the man who sought a higher order and rejected pure destruction. The mandated Wrath was the pure, unadulterated programming of the Emissary of Hell.
I will become the thing Seraphina must kill.
The Revelation
As Ethan stood paralysed by the devastating psychological blow, a silent, encrypted message appeared on the obsidian desktop, projected by a tiny, disposable node left behind by Elias.
The Pale Choir, working tirelessly and unseen within the fringes of Lucien's logistics network, had intercepted an internal data packet—a low-priority command related to the storage and transfer protocols for the collected souls.
Elias had risked everything to decode the packet, which was encrypted with a high-level demonic cypher. The message was concise, technical, and absolutely horrifying.
The souls collected—Anima, Sloth, Pride, and Greed—were not being used to pay for the freedom of Ethan's soul, nor were they being used to simply balance a ledger of cosmic accounting.
The data packet detailed their true purpose:
Function: Power Cells for the Tenebris Rift Engine.
Target: Stabilisation of a localised, high-energy dimensional rift.
Goal: Phase transition of the 9th Legion's staging ground from the Lower Voids to the Earthly Plane.
Lucien was not using the souls to buy Ethan's freedom; he was using them as fuel to initiate the Infernal Invasion.
Ethan Vale was not the Emissary of Order; he was the Emissary of the Apocalypse. The 13 souls were the required fuel load to stabilise the dimensional rift long enough to drag a significant portion of Hell's armed forces onto the human world.
The sudden, brutal truth hit him with the force of a spiritual supernova. His sacrifice, his damnation, his hunts, and his every agonising moral choice had not been for salvation, but for the catastrophic destruction of the world he had died to save.
He looked at Lucien, the cold, aristocratic face now twisting into the terrifying realisation that his asset was compromised. Lucien had seen the data flash on the desktop and recognised the breach.
Lucien moved, his power surging to neutralise the asset. "You are unstable! You—"
But Ethan was faster. The combined shock of the betrayal and the shattering of his identity ignited the dormant Wrath not as a weapon, but as a desperate defence of self.
He executed a massive, raw Gatewalk—a tearing, violent, destructive rift powered by pure, desperate fury. He didn't care about the instability, the cost, or the subsequent destination. He needed to be gone.
He vanished in a silent, violent implosion of spacetime, leaving behind a ruined office, a screaming data terminal, and a terrified, enraged Arch Fiend who had just lost control of his most valuable weapon.
Ethan materialised back in the shadows of the city, utterly broken. He had nine more souls to hunt, and every one would now bring the world closer to total annihilation. His entire existence was a Lie of Salvation.