The East District.
The moment he put on "Pale Death," Vincent felt himself take hold of a terrifying force called "death" — power potent enough to actually pose a threat to the Sequence 2 Angel before him.
But the price was that it would rapidly drain the life right out of him, turning him into a corpse, into its own slave.
Vincent gritted his teeth, fighting with everything he had against the sealed item's negative effects, focusing his will to split that force — capable of unmaking even the concept of "death" itself — into two.
One half shot forward like a bullet, straight at Derek Augustus. The other locked onto the "Forbid" he'd cast — because of course, anything capable of eroding the concept of death itself could just as easily erode a "Forbid" too.
Derek Augustus retreated violently, attempting the same trick as before, using "Exile" to counter this force of death — but every successive "Exile" he cast dissolved the instant it neared that death-force, weathering away, vanishing, as though it had aged through countless millennia in an instant.
Derek Augustus made a decision at once. He activated the power of Balance, carving the surrounding space into a series of independent "battlefields," then nesting them layer upon layer, like Russian nesting dolls.
This obviously couldn't stop the force of death outright — but as each nested "battlefield" was weathered away and shattered in turn, it also slowly consumed the force's momentum, bit by bit.
By the time who-knew-how-many layers had shattered, the force of death had finally been worn down to nothing.
It felt like a long stretch of time had passed, but in reality only a few seconds had gone by — still enough, though, for Vincent to have finished weathering away Derek Augustus's "Forbid."
With the "Forbid" gone, Vincent tore open space with ease, slipping into the Spirit World, racing forward through that richly colored realm at full speed.
As he ran, he quickly pulled the mask off and threw it back into the Secret Door, cutting off "Pale Death's" harmful effects on him, and at the same time spoke the great serpent's honorific:
"Wandering soul that will not depart,
"Servant of the True Creator,
"Eye that gazes upon fate.
"Honored Angel of Fate, I ask for your presence. I ask for your help."
The moment the words left his mouth, Bernadette's voice cut in: "It's caught up to you."
Vincent glanced back hurriedly, empowering himself with a fresh layer of the Emperor's New Clothes, then quickly pulled out the gold coin Renet Tinicole had given him, channeling spirituality into it to activate it.
The next instant, Derek Augustus, hovering in the Spirit World, suddenly stepped forward — as if distance meant nothing to him at all — closing the gap to Vincent in an instant, a hand wreathed in the rules of "Confinement" and "Execution" reaching for Vincent's face, only to pass straight through his head.
Facing the "Balancer" now within arm's reach, Vincent opened his mouth and spoke the Words of Order:
"You are guilty."
"You have killed."
Derek Augustus froze for a moment. Then, suddenly, the space of the Spirit World around them began collapsing inward at a bizarre, blistering speed — with Derek Augustus himself squarely at the center of the collapse, and beneath that collapse, an endless void of darkness.
He halted his own movement, forcibly repairing the collapsing space with the power of Balance, then thrust his right hand forward, fingers curling loosely: "Deprive."
Vincent lost his lifesaving "Emperor's New Clothes" ability.
His expression shifted. As he projected the Spear of Longinus, he also let the Sword of Damocles fall from directly above Derek Augustus's head.
Between the two — one carried devastating power terrifying enough to make even an Angel wary, while the other targeted higher beings specifically: the higher a target's standing, the greater the damage it inflicted.
But Derek Augustus simply waved a hand, exiling both spear and sword off into the void, then stepped forward once more, closing the distance to Vincent, his eyes flaring with a spiritual impalement aimed straight at his soul.
Without the Emperor's New Clothes to protect him, taking an Angel-level spiritual impalement head-on would, in short order, leave him utterly helpless, at his opponent's mercy.
At that critical, split-second moment, a pure, ice-cold light flared to life on Vincent's forehead — a diamond-set circlet shaped like a vertical eye: the Sage's Diadem!
The vertical eye set into the circlet seemed to spring to life, radiating a sacred light utterly devoid of warmth. Bathed in that light, Vincent's body instantly turned illusory, transparent — no longer a body of flesh and blood at all, but dissolved into countless streams of sprawling knowledge-symbols and pure information!
The lightning of the spiritual impalement plunged into that stream of information and simply vanished, like a mud ox sinking into the sea, producing no effect whatsoever.
Derek's hand closed only around a shifting, sparkling mass of information, flickering with countless points of light.
The physical concept of "grabbing" something meant nothing to a stream of pure information! This was the core ability of Sequence 2, the "Sage" — becoming a living being of information itself, sidestepping ordinary physical laws and even parts of the rules that governed everything else!
That stream of information slipped through Derek Augustus's fingers like flowing sand, streaming away into the deeper reaches of the Spirit World.
In that moment, Vincent finally understood the feeling Bernadette experienced every time she attended a Tarot Club gathering — once transformed into an information stream, each strand of information was both him, and not entirely him.
It was, at once, independently whole, and unified as one.
This was exactly how Bernadette was able to split off a small portion of her "soul" to attend the gathering, while the majority of her "soul" remained within her body — reabsorbing the separated portion once the gathering ended.
In that instant, a strange thought struck Vincent — if he were living in a highly information-based world, this single trait of the "Sage" alone would let him move freely through networks as pure data, like some kind of artificial intelligence out of a science fiction film.
To truly kill a "Sage," you'd either need to eliminate every network entirely, leaving them nowhere to hide, or send another Sage — another artificial intelligence — into the network itself to hunt them down.
Unfortunately, the world of the Lord of Mysteries was still a backward, medieval setting — who knew how long it would be before networks were even invented.
Born at the wrong time, truly.
Still, for Vincent, becoming an information stream had another use entirely: just as Bernadette could split off a portion of her soul to attend gatherings Beyond the Grey Fog, Vincent could just as easily split off a portion of his soul into the Nation of Disorder.
And then...
"Exploit."
Vincent "exploited" the Spirit World's own rules, putting instant distance between himself and Derek Augustus, then pulled out that ancient horn once more, blowing into it with everything he had.
"Amplify!"
"Distortion!"
"Bestowal!"
"Black Box!"
"Chaos!"
As that space-shattering blast of sound released, Vincent threw out every ability he had like they cost nothing at all. Sure, at Sequence 3 they weren't much on their own — but that didn't mean they were entirely useless against a Sequence 2.
Enough ants, after all, can still bring down an elephant.
Besides — Vincent had never once thought he could actually take this "Balancer" down. All along, this had only ever been about buying himself a chance to run.
To be continued…
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