The club district pulsed with the raw, throbbing energy of a thousand desires. The atmosphere was thick with ambient Lust sin, a pervasive haze that clung to every shadow and amplified every beat of the bass. Ethan moved through it, cloaked by the neutral Sloth inertia, a ghost in a carnival of excess.
He found the target in the VIP section of a notoriously exclusive club. Valentina Rossi, a criminal enforcer with a reputation for both ruthlessness and insatiable appetite, was the host. Her aura was a blinding, pulsating node of pure, animalistic Lust, feeding on the desires of those around her.
Ethan slipped past her guards, the Reality Warping causing minor, localised blips in the security cameras—a momentary flash of static, a fleeting elongation of a shadow. He had to be quick.
He isolated her in a side room, a private lounge steeped in the scent of expensive perfume and cheap champagne.
Valentina turned, her eyes narrowed. "Who are you?" she purred, her voice husky with the raw power of the soul.
Ethan didn't respond. He focused, pushing the Wrath to its peak, drawing the raw, chaotic power of Reality Warping to the surface. The air around him shimmered, distorting the fine art on the walls, making the shadows writhe.
He channelled the two destructive forces—the cold fire of Wrath and the negating chaos of Reality Warping—into a single, focused point: the sigil on his hand, aimed directly at Valentina Rossi's chest.
"Annihilation," Ethan whispered, the word a terrible, final judgment.
The moment of Annihilation was a localised implosion.
There was no sound, no explosion, no flash of light. Instead, it was a momentary, terrifying absence. A vacuum where reality itself seemed to fold inward. A perfect, instantaneous sphere of nothingness that extinguished all light, all sound, all spiritual energy, and all physical presence within its radius.
Where the Lust soul had been, there was simply a brief, horrifying void.
Valentina Rossi's body shuddered violently, then slumped. Her eyes were vacant, her spirit utterly extinguished. Not dead, but a living shell, her essence completely negated. The Lust soul was gone. Utterly, irrevocably, uncollectable.
The backlash was immediate and devastating. The targeted annihilation of a soul, especially using his most volatile power, tore through Ethan's core. His senses reeled. He stumbled back, gasping, the taste of absolute nothingness burning on his spiritual tongue.
His core screamed. The Reality Warping raged, threatening to tear him apart from the inside. He had barely survived his own attack.
It was in this brief, exploitable window of utter spiritual vulnerability that The Fangs struck.
They materialised not from a Gatewalk, but from the surrounding shadows, coalescing into human form with chilling silence. Two of them—a male and a female, dressed in black, armoured with the chilling Shadow Law of Lucien's elite.
They didn't waste time on taunts. Their objective was clear: neutralise the asset.
Their first attack was not physical. It was a focused, spiritual assault of anti-chaos. They raised their hands, and the shadows around Ethan solidified, congealing into a localised zone of absolute order.
The effect was instantaneous and agonising. Ethan's Reality Warping power, already in a desperate internal battle, was violently suppressed. The chaotic energy recoiled, slamming back into his core, making him scream as his very essence was forced into rigid, infernal compliance.
The Fangs had been specifically designed to counter him. Their Shadow Law created null zones that forcibly imposed order on chaos, making his most dangerous power his greatest vulnerability.
"Asset compromised," the female Fang stated, her voice flat, inhuman. "Reclaim the energy. Destroy the host."
They attacked with precise, coordinated strikes. Their blades, made of solidified shadow, crackled with negative energy. They weren't trying to kill him outright, but to sever his connections, to extract the precious infernal energy without destroying the host body.
Ethan fought back with raw, desperate Wrath. Cold fire flared from his sigil, but The Fangs used their Shadow Law to dampen the flames, making them sputter and shrink. He tried to absorb their energy with Gluttony, but their Shadow Law was pure nullity—it offered no energy to consume.
He was fighting two entities designed for his specific counter. His core, destabilised by the Annihilation, was unable to maintain effective defences. The Reality Warping was crushed, leaving him without his most unpredictable weapon.
He barely managed a desperate Wrath-fueled burst, throwing a wall of dark fire and debris between himself and The Fangs. It was enough to buy him a fraction of a second.
He ripped open a ragged, uncontrolled Gatewalk rift, fueled by sheer, desperate will and the remnants of his burning Wrath.
The Fangs were fast, their Shadow Law allowing them to traverse the warped reality of his Gatewalk. He felt a searing pain as the male Fang's shadow blade grazed his back, drawing not blood, but dark energy.
He materialised in a back alley, miles away, collapsing onto the concrete. He was severely wounded, his infernal sigil bleeding dark energy.
He lay there, gasping, the pain secondary to the terrifying realisation. The Fangs were not just assassins; they were anti-Ethan weapons. They had neutralised his Reality Warping, dampened his Wrath, and were immune to his Gluttony.
He had destroyed one soul. Eight more remained. But Lucien had sent hunters specifically designed to nullify his unique power set. He had walked into the ultimate counter.
The price of redemption was now measured in the suppression of his own chaos.