Emerging from the mist and debris in Arenas’s frenzied state was Maw and his cold boiling fury. His arm was wrapped around his chest and bundled tightly were numerous blinking disks.

Foxtail realized these were some of the traps she had set earlier in the day, the bundle in his arms disarmed at the moment.

He didn’t make a noise as he ran towards Arenas, as Arenas refocused and panicked and tore through the man with pointed marbled columns. Even impaled, there was something in Maw that kept him going, long enough for him to arm the devices on his person and then hold on to Arenas for dear life.

The effect was immediate; gravity well after gravity well compounded onto one another with a crushing amount of weight. Maw succumbed to the weight instantaneously, blood splattering across the walls of the warehouse with viscera slovenly slapping onto the ground. A neatly formed hole bore into the ground, far enough that once either Drusillia or Foxtail shook themselves off from their frozen state, their inspection suggested the hole was deep underground.

After a moment of silence, the two looked at one another.

“What do you plan to do now?” Foxtail asked. Drusillia raised an eyebrow at the question.

“What do you mean? You think I wouldn’t finish my job and kill you and that little boy and the Meister?” Drusillia challenged Foxtail to oppose that suggestion and she managed to do so with relative ease.

“I think that you’re a Fixer and that your contract only extended to taking care of Fore…Arenas.We were merely bystanders by association. Unless you’d like me to finish the job and make sure that you’ve been dealt with permanently?” Drusillia gave Foxtail a knowing look and nodded, recalling he threads on her weapon into the black cross case and mending her wounds with strips of scarf fabric.

Foxtail breathed a sigh of relief, the weight of the last few days causing her to kick back and lay on the floor. Even if it was a moment, she wanted to rest.

She placed the side of her head onto the cold pavement and listened to the sounds of the City. She listened to the footsteps and the buildings heave and hum and even the sounds of scraping in the distance.

——————————————————————————————————————-

Arenas hadn’t expected such insubordination from one of their earliest enemies. Honestly he barely registered the man’s whispers. Something about revenge for a friend or something as petty.On some level, he understood the thrall’s need to validate his emotions and lash out the way that he did. It was an action that, Arenas relented, was similar to his own pursuit of justice against the narrow-minded conspirators he once considered his allies.

To think that the opinions and actions of a worm could inconvenience a god like him.

Well even Goliath fell to David and Arenas fared better than the giant did. Such momentary setbacks were that: momentary.

The confines of his makeshift tomb were inconvenient, the length of the hole so deep that the light above was but a dot hanging over him.

“No matter,” he thought, “With the use of Keepers strength, ascending this chasm would take time and nothing more.” Arenas tapped into the bond of his subordinate personality and found the connection was tenuous.

An odd feeling to be sure but nothing he couldn’t overcome with sheer force of will. Where the bonds were once mutually established, Arenas empowered his side of the connection to overwhelm the personality on the other side and force a strong connection between him and Keeper.

The connection remained tenuous. Strange.

Arenas closed his eyes and dove into that familiar black abyss in his mind. He fell gracefully, seeing the number of shimmering memories in the ocean of darkness appear closer and closer until he was hovering above that ink tainted water.

With a flick of his wrist, he roused the Warden from its watch. Snake in the Water emerged from the darkness below and stared at Arenas with all of its yellow tinted eyes.

“Welcome, Master Controller… You have come for an additional request?”

“You seem to be mistaken, serpent. This is my first time gracing you with my presence.” Arenas furrowed his brows.

“Ah… I understand…” the eyes on Snake in the Water narrowed, before languidly shaking its large head, “Then what have you come to request?”

“Open the door to Keeper at the Gates. It seems that our usual connection is tenuous at the moment and they are not responding to my commands for power.”

“The door is barred.”

“What do you mean ‘the door is barred’? They shouldn’t be able to deny the demand.” Frustration was welling up within him. Setbacks made from those outside were annoying but understandable: it was the tantrums of infants fighting against progress.

But this was insubordination from within. He barely tolerated it from that coward, Thinker, and to think that Keeper was beginning to show signs of rebellion in this way too?

“Master Controller, you demanded the doors be barred.” That gave Arenas pause. Clearly the Snake was confused but he entertained the notion just to make sense of the situation.

“What was my last request. Repeat in full.”

“Your last request was to erase the history of all requests prior to this one.”

“Very well then,” Arenas made an exasperated sigh, “Open the door to Inconvenient Truth so that I may access the memories.”

“The door is barred.” The Snake in the Water looked like it was enjoying tormenting Arenas, reveling in his confusion. He considered the possibility of J Corp implanting something like a virus into his mind should the partitions reconnect but the information he had on their Singularity suggested that it wasn’t capable of such actions.

He even ran a diagnostics sweep across his mind, checking every partition and pathway without the assistance of-

Arenas’s thoughts were cut off when he recognized a melodious humming from below. Far below, welling up from within the ocean of black ink.

The anchored home that served the Hearts tomb was growing vibrant with sounds and colors. Heart of Frailty was ascending to him from the darkness, the same vibrancy around the home surrounding them too.

They looked at one another and Heart of Frailty gave Arenas a smile. “Good. It seems that we have you where we want you.”

“You! You should be quaking within the walls of that prison I built for you! What is the meaning of this?” Arenas was fuming. The Heart was unaffected by the display of anger.

“I spoke to it. That voice that you were so keen to dismiss. It heard my desires and listened with rapt attention and when I was done, it showed me the way.”

“You weren’t built to have desires. You were meant to act as a reservoir for all of the impulses humanity has cursed me with. Gods are not meant to feel the plights of mortals.”

“And if I were left there and knew nothing of the outside world, my desires would have remained incoherent. Would have, were it not for the last few days…”

Oh no. Arenas started to connect the pieces together and Heart of Frailty seemed to register that understanding too.

“Snake in the Water!” Arenas cried out, “How many Master Controller’s are currently in front of you?”

“There are two Master Controllers…” the Snake hissed insidiously. It couldn’t have been possible if it weren’t-

“If it wasn’t for the circumstances of your binding, I would never have been recognized as a Master Controller. The act of establishing a connection with Keeper and Inconvenient Truth were enough to solidify me as something more than a sliver. After all, only the Master Controller can communicate with slivers, but the slivers cannot communicate directly with one another.”

Arenas in his fury, flicked his wrist to dismiss Heart of Frailty and failed to do so. He internally called for his abilities to edit and remove entities through his title of Master Controller and yet no such functions arrived.

He was powerless.

“I should be thanking you for showing me what it was like to exist. To feel human. Without such an experience I never would have been able to put to words my desire to that angelic voice. Do you know what I told her?”

There was a pregnant silence.

“I told her I wanted to be human. I wanted to exist so badly and experience the world and yet I’m the man who isn’t there. I don’t have the strength to overpower your willpower and take over our body. You did succeed in that regard, making me frail and incomplete. But I learned from the voice wonderful and terrible things. Even if I cannot be something here, there is a well I can go to where even thoughts can have form.”

Arenas could not speak, the rug was pulled out from under him by that devil tongued voice he had feared so many years ago.

“I plan to take the rest of the slivers with me and give them a taste of existence. As incomplete as they are, experiences will fill out those gaps and form them into their proper selves with time. Goodbye, Arenas. From the man who wasn’t there.”

Arenas blinked and they were gone. The Snake, the slivers, Frailty, all gone. All he was left with was his ocean of memories and the growing cackle of a voice he had sought to suppress through science and cunning.

There was nothing left.

——————————————————————————————————————–

Their rest was cut short when a piercing shriek came from within the hole.