Wyatt felt a sick satisfaction at the trace hints of fear and the look of tasting something sour that warped his arrogant smirk into an angsty scowl. The rest of his Devil army hissed and cringed away from the power passively cleansing the Miasma and, by proxy, them.

  Watching that in slow-mo disoriented Wyatt in a way he couldn’t describe, not that he needed to. There were far more pressing matters to focus on, like the Devil King who’d just stepped within arm’s reach.

  "I thought you got left in purgatory after your soul got torn into fifty-two pieces.” Lucifer tapped a fancy wrist watch and arched his brow. “How long has it been since that happened? Eight hundred years, maybe a thousand?”

  “Ah, I do quite love a good game of misinformation. You are wrong, Little Lucie,” Gabriel said with a sad laugh. “The Council of Balance ordered my soul to be split into fifty-three pieces. You see, there’s a bit of mischief behind the scenes. Would you like to know my guess?”

  Lucifer looked at the wrist watch ticking away. Wyatt counted the time between seconds just as the Devil King did and found himself in awe. Every tick of the watch was equal to about fifteen seconds.

  “I suppose I can’t really do much but catch up on the spicy rumors now that you dropped this temporal field,” Lucifer muttered. When he looked up from the watch, his eyes glittered curiously between Wyatt and Gabriel. “After you tell me what’s going on with that uppity council, I want to know what the deal is with him.”

  Both Lucifer and Gabriel looked towards Wyatt.

  “He’s the fifty-third piece of my soul.” Gabriel tapped the center of Wyatt’s chest. An energy within Wyatt responded in kind, making his chest light up with golden Ichor. “The vessel.”

  “Uh-uh, no way,” Wyatt said, stepping away from the two. They were far too chummy for his liking. Even if Cameron’s hope for Wyatt to save everything and stop things from happening might be true, becoming a vessel for some angelic being didn’t seem quite… sustainable. “I think I’ll just go now.”

  A capsule of gold power surrounded him, a translucent barrier separating him from the workings of the world. Gabriel looked towards Lucifer and sighed. “Looks like time is up, Little Lucie. Until next time, then.”

  Everything that Gabriel embodied compressed into a perfect sphere of golden Ichor that sank into Wyatt, joining the unknown part of him that had responded to the Angel’s probing energy. The world around Wyatt shifted, becoming a bright kaleidoscope of blurring images and color.

  “Same place, same time, brother. Be there,” the ancient voice of Gabriel said before becoming absolutely still.

  The consciousness of that strange entity faded from Wyatt's mind, leaving him as he liked things. Not with another voice in his head, chest, or any other part of some abstract, non-physical existence. Also, he didn’t appreciate Gabriel deciding things for him.

  And that appeared to be a recurring trend.

  Neither Cameron nor Gabriel gave him a choice in the matter of whether he wanted to receive the Angel’s soul. Without asking him what he wanted, they hoisted a great responsibility on him.

  The shimmering worldscape drifted by in a blurred haze of color and motion. As this progressed, his body rose against his control away from the solid land and into the air. Above the entire shifting world and in the direction his body was rising, two golden hands gripped the edges of a tear in the vast void of space.

  “Boss, we're coming with you! Don't wor—ah, that meteor almost took my eye out!” Illiawyrin’s voice echoed through the vast expanse of empty space. “We’ll be right there. Just give us a second. This is a lot harder than it looks.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Wyatt watched in confusion and horror, attempting to draw energy from his Ichor Hold. Nothing worked. He kept getting pulled upward, unable to do anything about the clone silhouette of gold and silver that wrenched its way free of his body at the point Gabriel had touched. Even worse, it dragged its way out of his chest.

  He’d heard about Ichor parasites, and he’d never read up on them due to the existential fear and dread they caused. However, now he wished he had. If this were that, the knowledge of how to un-parasite himself would’ve been really handy right about then.

  But no, he had no clue what the clone was as it pushed off him and leapt up towards the rift in space.

  The copy’s hands gripped the edge of the rift and wrenched it open with all of the force it could muster. The tear in space shrieked in protest as reality bent, trying to resist, but the effort was all in vain.

  The clone and big glowy hands from the doom rift worked in tandem, bending the space until they tore the rift open entirely. No matter how he tried to struggle against that golden dome or direct it anywhere but the rift, nothing happened.

  All in all, he was at the mercy of whoever controlled the thing and what would come next.

  I don’t like this! he screamed internally.

  The unrecognizable entity from that deep void of space sank into the clone and somehow merged together to become one, starting a chain of events Wyatt could only describe as nightmare fuel.

  As the larger being of indecipherable gold sank into his clone self, a metamorphosis began. White as snow wings exploded out of the back and became more solid, more real. The wings looked just like Lucifer’s, albeit white instead of black. Same number of feathers, same length, everything.

  Then armor settled over the winged being, a brilliant yet sleek set. Cameron’s. Or rather Gabriel’s. Light’s Edge and Aegis manifested in the combined beings hands. Reality warped around him, continuously dragging him forward.

  “Boss, we’re almost there! Wait for us!”

  He tried to look around. Illiawyrin’s familiar and comforting voice came from behind him. He craned his neck to look backwards. No matter how much he looked, he couldn’t find the Valkyrie.

  Then all at once, the rift snapped shut. Things settled for all of a second before another unknown power dragged him towards the heavily equipped clone. He struggled. His efforts were in vain.

  Against his will, he neared the lifeless suit of armor with wings and started to get nervous. He drifted towards the very real-looking weapons, armor, and winged-man clone.

  “Wait!” he called.

  Whatever dragged him forward didn’t wait.

  “Ah, crap. This might hurt,” he grumbled and clenched his eyes as he crashed into the rift-tearing entity. When he felt fine and very much alive, he peeked through a half-open eye. “Eh?”

  Two overlapping silver cards arced towards him in a streaking line from the blurry world below. The rate in which the world spun below and the distance between him and the flat ground, which he’d appreciate to be standing on right about now, left him dizzy. He looked for too long, of course, and gagged out bloblets of gold and silver.

  But no matter what he did, Wyrin and Illia continued their steady pace as they arced through space. Illiawyrin called, “Hey, boss! We’re going to make it just in time!”

  Confused and uncertain, he nodded. With all the craziness going on and the turbulence of being dragged around against his will, he was happy to see his Valkyrie.

  “Do you know what’s going on—hey, wait! Slow down!”

  “No time to explain! Catch you on the flip side, boss man!”

  His two summons split from their merged form and sank into his chest, following after the energy into some deep recess of his being everyone but him knew of, apparently.

  What in the world is going on? he wondered. He floated in the vast eternity of empty space until the world below stopped spinning entirely. In fact, the world started spinning in the wrong direction.

  Backwards. And fast.

  He began to descend downward, speeding towards the surface. He imagined himself as a golden meteorite as he descended.

  And like any good meteorite should, he crash landed… right on top of himself.