Chapter Text
Dante watched the hundred-faced lion as big as some buildings she’d seen in the backstreets cleave apart her team of three like they were little more than wax paper, instead of some of the finest Seven South Section 2 had to offer.
Reggie, the newbie, bisected with the beast’s massive claws. It made her wince, one of the five lives she remembered at The Library coming in full force as she relived being split down the center by The Red Mist herself.
Garland watched with a horrified look and mostly frozen limbs as all of the lion’s eyes turned to him angrily. His stocky, well toned frame and short black hair framing serious eyes, which narrowed as he held out a hand. “WINDSTONE CUTTER!” He shouted to the stale air, to which it moved and coalesced in his hands, creating a sword with a burst to solidify it into steel and silver. He brandished it and ran at the lion in a fury before the lion batted the weapon away, along with him a moment later. He hit a pillar and coughed before shouting again. “WINDSTONE EXECUTIONE-” Crushed against the massive paw of the beast. Killed instantly, by Dante’s assessment. His file said he only used one weapon, though. Weird, but she didn’t think much of it for now.
Hex, Garland's brother, was a bit spineless - Especially seeing family get killed so quickly. The small knives that he held were dropped, and his life was ended mere moments later.
This left Dante, the head of South Section 2, watching as the corpses of her team fell to the floor, all while staring from the still-open elevator.
She sighed and took out her sword, weighing it in her hands. The small cross guard glinting in what little light the elevator had. It wasn’t her rapier, instead a more standard broadsword as given to The Seven Association. She missed her old blade.
Dante looked up, delaying the inevitable for a few more moments as she made eye contact with the lion. Black body and a hundred porcelain-like masks, all looking akin to an array of felines, existing and not. It wound up its hind legs and readied to dash.
She sighed, and stabbed the sword into her heart, allowing herself to scream this time, denying every piece of survival instinct in her body as she twisted the blade to hurry along her death.
It hadn’t gotten easier. Her vision quickly faded as she gave into death with open arms. She’d done it plenty of times by now, after all.
E.G.O.
“Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”
Loop: 1
The silver 15-hour watch face was closed with a clack as she looked to her teammates. “We’re not going in there.” She said with a scowl, pointing to the elevator that led to the parking garage she watched everyone get slaughtered in.
Hex exhaled with a clear annoyance. “...Miss Dante, I don’t know if you know this but we’re being hired to collect information or deal with an urban legend.”
“There’s a distortion down there, we’re not prepared to handle it. This distortion, or…Abnormality, or whatever the proper term is, is a creature that knocks on the door of a Star. And we’re only four people in total.”
Reggie held his claymore and five-shot revolver nervously, blonde hair running down his neck and shoulders, covering an eye. The spark in his eyes showed a desire to prove himself. He was a prodigy with a good heart, a newcomer to South Section 2 that rose through the ranks at an unprecedented speed.
“...I trust Miss Dante. If she says something’s dangerous-”
Garland whistled sharp, taking over the conversation. “If a mission isn’t dangerous, Fixers aren’t paid for it. And you taking a step back is odd, considering you’ve gone on three missions now where you completely take over and lead the team to victory in a bout of tactical genius, so why are you getting cold feet about a place we haven’t even entered?”
“...Consider it…A gut feeling.” she responded, looking to her now closed watch somberly.
Garland rolled his eyes and pushed past her. “Sure thing, boss. We’re going in, and you can go with us or stay out here and get demoted. Which are you choosing?”
She sighed and walked into the elevator leading to the parking garage. “I’ll take a more tactical viewpoint again.”
“Again?” Hex caught.
A slip-up she passed off easily. “Because I’ve taken a tactical point on the other jobs I so wonderfully guided everyone to victory with, so shut it and follow my orders, Hex. ”
/////
Loop: 3
She’d gotten a strategy down, sighed, closing her watch. “Down there is gonna be a hundred-headed lion with eyes like rubies and faces like porcelain. Two faces have only one eye. Stab the empty sockets out, and then…we’ll see what happens next.”
“How do you know all this, huh?” Garland asked aggressively.
“Cuz I’m magical, asshole,” she said, glaring at the man and holding her watch aloft, the face now an amber-yellow, matching a new shield-like weapon by her side. She closed it with a loud click. “Now listen to my requests, if you please. I try not to pull my rank over people, but I’ll do it if I have to. So please, Garland.”
Loop: 4
“…And once the eyes are stabbed out, the masks fall away and it roars. Be on guard for that, it’s loud and uses the moment of distraction to go in for a kill on someone…”
Loop: 5
“...When all its masks fall away, It gets more agile, but stabbing it in the back of the spine should be-”
“How the hell do you know all of this?!” Garland interrupted. Dante rolled her eyes and growled.
“Because I’m the Director of South Section 2 and I’m goddamn incredible. Now get OVER it and TRUST me! ”
She stomped into the elevator, Reggie followed nervously. “...I…I trust miss Dante with my life!”
Garland smiled like a kid who got away with shoplifting. “Well I’ve heard shit about her weird-ass abilities, and frankly, I worry it’s some Wing bullshit, some strings attached. I’m not dealing with it.”
“Then stay out here and get demoted. ”
Dante punched the button to the first floor of the parking garage, thinking about how to win the two co-workers over in the inevitable next life she’d need to deal with. She walked to the corner of the elevator and sat down angrily, Reggie too nervous to speak up and ask if something was wrong. It was a good thing too, because in this moment, everything was wrong. The Seven were commissioned by the Hana to learn as much as they could about the Distortion and the Library about a month or two ago, made endlessly harder when the Library was suddenly uprooted and is now practically an urban myth - and not in the usual way.
…Dante was sent to the Library, back when it was an…Urban Nightmare, was it? Thought it’d be easy, then she was killed five times, each more vivid and painful than the last. After the fifth death, her next memory was waking up in a random part of the backstreets, smack dab in the middle of nowhere and having to battle out of syndicate infested territories, before plunging a sword she stole into her own heart to spite the people that would take in killing her slowly, before she found herself all the way back where she started with a silver pocket watch in hand. Dante didn’t talk much about her watch. Didn’t want it stolen… To be fair she wasn’t even sure if it could get stolen, but she owed her life to it five times over, so she wasn’t gonna risk it… Not in a million years. She’d done three jobs with it so far. Piping up and taking charge of the operations, leading the groups to against-all-odds perfect successes with nothing so much as an injury or surprise.
…Nobody knew that those jobs costed, in total, Dante taking her own life…18 times.
“Focus, Dante.” She said quietly to the newly-cleaned air of the garage. She lowered her hand to her sheath. This was loop five, the last one she used was Malachite, so her weapon should be…
The rapier. Tourmaline, wonderful. Malachite was one of her favorites, but it was near unusable because of the number of eyes on the Lion. The elevator door had been open for about a minute now, but she’d been lost in thought. It was time to focus. She stood up and gripped her watch-assigned fencing blade, looking her only coworker up and down. Reggie was good. Good enough to take down a distortion with some help? She wasn’t sure. A revolver with enough electricity to power a Nest for a day and Claymore about as tall as him, and twice as heavy (despite being wielded like it was a paper swan and hitting like a roadroller). His nervousness was his greatest flaw, so Dante assumed commands would be efficient. Despite being new he was a bit of a suckup, in a cute way. Got her coffee (later machiattos, her preferred caffeinated drink), shined the section’s swords, and was already very trusting of the higher-ups, like they couldn’t steer him wrong.
She took a few slow steps to the portal of the elevator’s exit. “Reggie. Follow my lead, and execute every command. If you do that, we’re both gonna come outta’ this in one piece, and I’ll get you something nice to celebrate your first big successful mission, alright?”
“O-Of course, Miss Dante!”
“That’s a good kid. Now - let’s get to it.”
Dante left, walking with her rapier and treating it like a cane, the blade a messy collage of gemstones and catastrophe of colour. After walking twenty paces, she stopped and pointed her blade to the right, highlighting a barely-moving shadow. It knelt down, Dante did too.
“Remember, fire on the missing eye.”
The moment the last drop of air exited her lungs for the reminder, it pounced. Dante jumped out of the way, the massive beast’s claws creating a crater and spraying stone like a shotgun blast. She swiped twice with her newly made blade, barely not quite landing either strike in the eye. CRACKRACKRACKRACKRACK - The feeling of static and sounds of lightning filled the area as Reggie piled five bullets into the area around the beast’s masks, causing the thing to rear its neck out and roar a deafening sound that shattered every car’s window in the garage’s floor. One eye down. Dante winced and focused, making a rough gesture as though a command to fire into the single-eyed mask’s empty socket, to which her blade understood. Seemingly from nowhere, a gemstone-crafted rapier manifested and pierced into its eye with a shocking accuracy and remarkable speed. Dead on. She thought to herself with a coy smile, as all of the porcelain masks fell to the floor and nearly evaporated into a blackened smoke, revealing a black and gray lion with a massive mane.
“The outside is an exoskeleton - cut the mane and strike its flesh!”
A piercing weapon wouldn’t be too great at cutting through thick fur, so Dante resigned herself to distraction duty. With a trusting look at her partner in crime, she fired a second blade at the lion. It struck the thing in the stomach, more than enough to turn the beast’s attention to her. Dante started running. It was stronger and more precise than her, and its speed wasn’t lacking either. The only thing Dante had going for her was being akin to a mouse. Smaller, able to react, able to assume, able to notice patterns.
A minute passed, she’d been able to land two more cuts in between her hysteric dodging, meaning another two swords were waiting in the wings.
Two minutes. Reggie had carved down the mane somewhat whenever he could get close, causing it to bleed a black oil-like substance. Dante nearly slipped on it several times trying to dodge, but she held herself together. Every time it switched to paying more attention to Reggie she made it regret that choice, firing another sword or trying to land a cut…At one point, she hit it dead in the proper eye. Five minutes. Reggie was noticeably starting to slow down. A prodigy, but someone who was new to the fixer business nonetheless. Dante was getting tired too, but she was determined to stay fast. Ten minutes in, things were really starting to fall apart. Dante was getting slower, and Reggie had to throw himself out of the way of most attacks to avoid them. On the bright side, the beast looked more like a cougar now. The mane almost fully trimmed down.
…Dante had come to a conclusion about a minute ago, though…She skidded to a halt on the oil-slicked asphalt and brandished it like an accomplished fencer, grinding her teeth together and narrowing her eyes. It was now or never.
She whistled, short and loud, hoping Reggie would get the hint. With rough two-handed swipes, she emptied her last swords into the beast’s head and shoulders. It lunged at Dante with a renewed fervor, as though it knew that she was getting tired. Dante caught the razor-bladed paw with the rapier, pushing the beast away and making a new cut across its face, firing another blade at its head, which the animal dodged and shattered. Reggie dashed in from the shadows and struck at its side, twisting the broadsword as hard as he could. The beast knocked Reggie away as quickly as they arrived, skidding across the oil-slicked floor before hitting a car with a heartbreaking thud.
Dante wasn’t giving it a chance to kill. Another two cuts from her as she moved forwards, grabbing onto the lion’s fur and stabbing into its side like a pincushion, every blow she made sent another sword into the animal’s spine with a rough motion as it started to roar again and thrash around. It slapped Dante down with the tail, the first time it had used it as a weapon. A secret tool, or a last ditch effort?
Another five lightning flashes that seared the lion’s flesh when she hit the floor, giving her just enough time to struggle to her feet and lunge at it - stabbing her sword in before it jumped back, ripping the blade from her grasp, and before she could react - Jumping right back at Dante to knock her to the floor. It managed a nasty slice down her arm with two claws in particular, her blood mixed with the slippery oil as she fired off the final two blades she had in store into its lower jaw. The lion’s voice started to grow raspy and coarse, but it still had some fight in it. For a moment, Dante accepted her death as the lion raised its paw to crush her into the ground. Another five loud crashes knocked the animal’s killing blow away for just long enough for Dante to move to the side, her nondominant left hand and forearm being crushed under the weight - incredibly painful but twice as good as her head.
Like a guardian angel, Reggie stabbed the beast in its head.
Then waited a moment, before taking the blade out and stabbing twice more.
The lion fell to its side and splashed in the blood-oil it had spread around the garage as it finally stopped moving, before it seemed to fold up into an egg shape. Still bleeding, Dante stood up…And kicked it angrily, pulling out the blade from its new prison, and falling to the floor exhausted, resigning her uniform to a week at the dry cleaner’s.
It was a few minutes before there were sounds of anything other than heavy panting from both her and Reggie, but when those minutes passed he perked up ecstatically.
“WE DID IT MISS DANTE!” He shouted, the celebration echoing through the empty place as he hopped to his feet, his usually teal uniform tattered and blackened.
“Good work, recruit!” Dante shouted with a wide smile and an attempted mirror of his boundless energy. Reggie walked over with a wide smile (though took his time, not wanting to slip on the oil), helping Dante up. The walk back to the elevator was long and slow, yet it had this underlying sense of joy. Another successful excursion by Section 2. Headed by the great Dante. She was sure this’d result in more work for her, because of course it would - no good deed goes unpunished - but otherwise? This was another rousing success. Another chapter to add to her legends around the office. The two didn’t share many other words on the way back, not even as Dante hit the button to open the elevator…But it didn’t open right away.
Weird, she thought. Was it called up for the sake of-
The door opened, a silver weapon meeting her gaze as she dodged backwards. Reggie was caught off guard. “M-Miss Dante?” He said, turning to her, and away from…
Click.
Bang.
A horrific echo sounded through the garage as several chunks of flesh and blood from Reggie’s chest flew five meters back.
…Dante looked up with dread, dismay, and a burning fury which only doubled as she met eyes with Garland, holding a smoking blunderbuss. He chuckled, from the easy kill or Dante’s shock? She wasn’t sure, and didn’t care.
“...Did you know, for some reason, my employer hired me to gloat, Dante?... I imagine they want their fixers to have a fun time, I guess.” He said with a sigh. “I was expecting you two would die a short succinct death, but damn…Guess I was wrong. You really are a miracle, girl.” He locked in another hefty shell, to which Dante angrily took out her sword, scraping it a few times against her arm Just enough to draw blood. This squeezed a sad laugh from Garland. “Sweetheart…If you think you stand a single chance against me with your current state, you are sorely mistaken.”
“...I know…what was the plan.” She asked quietly. “You’ve me fucked over, killed my one piece of backup, I’m dead to rights. Gloat away, Garland.”
“That was another thing they requested. Killing you after your cohorts. The plan though? My employer wants that lion…thing. I’ll just say you died n’ leave it at that…Called it the King of the Plastic Jungle. Something…Symbolic, apparent-” Dante jabbed the blade into her heart.
Garland’s eyes went wide, especially as another five blades were pierced through her head, the force making her fall back. The final thing she heard before she died was a shocked and appallingly succinct word:
“... What? ”
Loop: 6
Dante closed her watch with a huff. “Garland, do you use a gun?”
“I use a sword, ma’am.”
“...You’re here to betray us for the distortion down there for whoever hired you. Drop the act and I’ll let you run along.”
"...I’m sorry? Ma’am, dare I say you’re being fucking assanine."
“Take off your vest, if you don't mind.” Dante said with a smile crawling across her face.
“Why?”
“Order from a higher-up.”
Garland looked at Dante flabbergasted. “This has nothing to do with the mission.”
“And here I am asking you to take your vest off, so do it Garland.”
It took another few moments of tense silence before he slid it off, tossing it to the ground with an angry puff. “What do you want?”
“You to not be able to hide it on your body. You use a Windstone workshop weapon. So, if I remember right, your summon words were…Windstone Executioner.”
His eyes widened to pin pricks, and on his side green gusts manifested into a stocky gun. One she’d seen blast a hole in Reggie moments ago. Dante smiled wide.
“M-Miss Dante, if you’ll recall I-”
“Your weapon is noted down as a sword, sir. No other weapons, apparently. At best this is a lapse in protocol, and at worst reason to fire.”
Garland fired back furiously. “Your weapon’s put down as a sword and-”
“Quote - ‘Sword that shifts occasionally through methods as of yet unknown. Other weapons unused.’”
“Jackass! Just because you’re the Director doesn’t mean fucking anything! ”
“Hand over your weapon if nothing else, please?”
“Why should I?”
“As the head of section two, I have full authority to punish my subordinates, and you don’t use the gun enough for it to be noteworthy. Would you rather get fired instead?”
Garland cackled, his attitude momentarily getting the better of him as he pointed the gun towards Dante, a threat she didn’t care for… But an idea came to mind. She couldn’t get him to say he was planning to stab her in the back...So she could goad him into doing something else stupid.
She took the blunderbuss with a smile, pressing it to her shoulder. “Shoot me then, traitor. There’s no reason for you to not execute the biggest problem that stands in your way.”
“M-Miss Dante?” Reggie built up the courage to say something, wiping the hair out of his-
Bang.
The arm was sent across the building. She smiled and grasped a the weapon by her side, adrenaline and shock powering her for a moment. Windstone weapons take a while to manifest, so she had plenty of time to…
Shk.
Beryl, the silver sword of Loop 6 was stabbed into her, and as always she welcomed death with open arms.
Loop: 7
“Shoot me then, traitor. There’s no reason for you to not execute the biggest problem that stands in your way.”
“M-Miss Dante?” Reggie built up the courage to say something, wiping the hair out of his-
In a moment, she flipped the blunderbuss upwards. The shot completely missed her, crashing into the roof of the building and making a small bullet hole. Dante grinned.
“You attempted to attack the Director of Section 2 for no good reason, my friend.”
“You goaded me into it!”
“You pulled the damn trigger, dumbass. Now get out of the way or I’ll call some extra hands from The Seven to tie you down.”
He sighed, squinted, rolled his eyes and crossed his arms all within the span of two seconds. “Come on Hex, fuck this shit, let’s just leave the two of them to die.”
“Sounds like a great idea.” Hex replied, walking away with his brother.
…Dante turned to the elevator and entered, Reggie followed in a half-stunned shock. “...So we’re going to find a distortion down there, and the strategy for killing it is that two masks only have one eye…”
/////
Iori flipped through various files curiously, knocking her knuckles against the wooden table to busy her hands. Her burner phone vibrated as she got a text.
“Couldn’t capture target. Give it more time.”
She smiled.
“Dante was in the group, right?
“Yes, she sniffed out my plans before we even got into the building.”
“Wonderful…Well you’re evidently not very good at your job if she figured you out so fast” Iori texted, lying through her teeth. “The job is off. I’ll have someone else manage then. Goodbye.”
“No please! Give me another chance.”
Iori knew he was after the ahn price for the relatively simple job, but frankly she couldn’t find it in herself to care. This was a job he was meant to fail from step one. “Do not contact me again.” She sent to her would-be assassin as she took out a particular file.
Dante |||||||. Seven Association South Section 2 Director.
Finally, the pieces were starting to come together. She couldn’t be more excited as she flipped open the file and began reading intently.