Soul woke to a boot in his ribs and an annoyed, "Get up."

It was a few hours before dawn, to judge by his tower room's narrow window.

"You're to go with the Fourth," said the man who'd kicked him, and Soul squinted up at him through the light of the mage-lantern on his belt, made out red hair that was nonetheless not as brilliant and damningly carmine as his own eyes, and grumbled an irate, inchoate query that earned him the kind of scowl that meant he was coming close to getting kicked again.

"Why is none of your business," the man said, and Soul dragged himself into a sitting position, scrubbing his hands over his face and back through his hair in a futile effort to get the ghost-pale tufts out of his immediate field of vision. "All you need to know is that the battle-mages think themselves clever and have mounted a covert attack on the city. You're going to intercept and kill them before they can reach the fortress, which seems to be their goal. Get into your armor and report to the Fourth at Temple Square."

"Unless you're going to help me with my armor, go the fuck away, Spirit," Soul growled, wobbling a bit when he stood and stumbled the few steps it took to get to the opposite end of his room where his armor sat.

Green eyes narrowed. "I could have you flogged for insubordination," the older man said, earning an irate snort from Soul, caught halfway through pulling on his undershirt.

"You could have me flogged for no reason at all, don't trouble yourself with finding one," Soul said, fumbling with uncooperative leather. "Don't you have someplace better to be?"

Spirit did, and left with one last warning that Soul had better get his sorry carcass to Temple Square without delay.

Soul had gotten dressed, abandoned all hope of breakfast, and realized only after he got into his armor that he had to pee - was in fact halfway to the damn temple - when a few things clicked into place in his head and he came to a stuttering stop in the city's dark streets, boots scuffing across wet cobble. Primarily what stopped him was his brain reminding him that the battle-mages, in centuries of war, had never once drawn this close to Death City, not even with all the magic that Medusa and the other witches could bring to their aid. That was with good reason: Shinigami's presence there was too strong, and his son too powerful, for their enemies to have ever even located the sprawling fortress-city, let alone mounted any kind of attack on it. Even Asura, blood traitor that he was, could not show Arachne and Medusa the city of his birth; he would never be able to see or return to it again, so long as his father and brother wished him in exile.

That they apparently had made it into the city and not the abandoned necropolis that it masqueraded as meant that someone, somewhere, had leaked some very critical information and quite possibly an artifact or two.

Soul broke into an uneasy jog, dread creeping into his stomach. He wasn't keen on joining up with the Fourth, but at least with them he'd have numbers going for him. Getting caught alone by battle-mages was not how he wanted to die, even if things seemed too peaceful for the moment. It was awfully quiet, though, considering the fact that the bulk of the soldiers had to have been mobilized nearly an hour before Spirit had bothered to wake Soul up. All Soul could hear as he drew near the temple was the slap of his booted feet and the rain that had begun right around the time he left the fortress, and his steps slowed the closer he got because the quiet was rapidly changing from reassuring to very, very alarming.

On the one hand, Soul didn't have time to deal with an unfounded attack of nerves; on the other, ignoring instinctive reactions got people killed. He stopped again and slipped into an alley, pressed his back to a wall and took a long, slow breath. His sense of the earth beneath his feet was as solid as it had ever been, and through it he could feel the dim buzz of the other Weapons in Temple Square, wet and tired but not in danger, not alarmed. He'd lived too long in a hostile environment to be jumping at shadows, so once his heart had slowed to something approaching normal he stepped out of the alleyway and moved forward again, the Temple spire looming above -

He was still too far away for the explosion to knock him off his feet, but he felt the rumble and practically went blind at the flash of fire, had to shake his head to dispel a rush of panic. Before he could make a conscious decision he'd shifted his fingertips to claws and leapt, clambering up the nearest wall in a rush that had nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with instinct. The rooftops would be safer, no one looked up for threats, and he sprinted across wet shingles, leaping gaps with a disregard for things like traction and where he might land that probably would have earned him a dressing-down had anyone cared about whether or not he broke his fool neck.

There were no more explosions after that but there was fire and the flash of lightning, and a sickening flare of battle-mage power that made his stomach do outraged loops. He shook the feeling off as best he could, stumbling a little on a landing and nearly twisting an ankle, and didn't shift his hands back, because he was running into a fight and fingers like blades came in handy. When he at last reached the square he came to a skidding halt on the edge of a roof overlooking it, one wrist pressed to his mouth in revulsion at the scene below.

Soul had been raised on horror stories about the enemy, how their magic was a perversion of the natural order, how the witches wanted to consume and destroy the magic that made up the very foundation of the world. How Medusa and Arachne had betrayed them, had corrupted Shinigami's eldest son, would do anything to secure all three of the power focuses on Ragnarock's prison because they didn't understand what would happen should they weaken it too far.

More than anything, though, he heard stories of Medusa's battle-mages, whose magic his people were not resistant to as they were the witches'. He had grown up with stories of the Reaper, who destroyed whole legions with fire, a woman who seldom executed an attack that did not kill. Now that he was older he listened to his so-called brothers mutter about the Reaper's daughter, whom they called Scourge, a woman who threw fire and lightning and searing light at her opponents and whose every move seemed to result in catastrophe. Certainly he'd seen the ranks of his fellows dwindle, and Kid had always exhorted them to display especial courage and focus when it came to effecting her death.

He'd honestly believed they were exaggerating. Not in a way deserving of his ridicule but in the way soldiers did, building an already legitimate enemy into a legend.

He'd been wrong.

The only reason the square was illuminated was because there was fire everywhere, creeping along the awnings of shops towards the buildings and consuming the corpses strewn across the cobblestones with sullen determination that defied the weather. Steady rain had also done little to diminish the fact that the entire square seemed painted in blood, and Soul swallowed bile. There was only a moment to notice details, though: there was a battle still raging on the blood-slick temple steps, a dozen or more of his kin throwing themselves against a single slight figure with a fervor Soul could only label desperation.

Well, the Scourge was in the city; if there was ever a time for desperation, this was it. Soul slipped off the roof, one eye towards the fight, and got down to the ground via a series of windowsills with only minimal scrambling despite the distinct tremor that had begun in his hands. So long as he was undetected he had the advantage, or at least a chance of survival, and maybe he didn't like Shinigami and maybe his kin had treated him like an unwanted, possibly rabid dog his whole life, but he didn't want it to end like this. As soon as his feet hit the ground he ducked underneath the closest stall, hoping that the fire consuming its awning wouldn't force him out of hiding before he came up with some sort of plan.

He wanted to wait until she was done, try and ambush her from hiding as she moved through the city, but that was, he knew, more of a result of the fact that he was fucking terrified than because it was a valid plan. Going after her when she wasn't distracted was asking for it, because she'd be certain to realize he was there before he could get a hit in, and as soon as her attention focused on him he was a dead man.

Soul had come up with no less suicidal option than rushing headfirst into the fray when she leapt out of the crowd of enemies mobbing her in a perfect, high arc, landing in the lower tier of the square's pond-sized fountain. Her attackers took the movement as retreat and surged forward in an angry rush of limbs shifted into razor-sharp blades, prompting her turn and climb up the fountain spire, where she waited, crouched low, watching them from a height of some ten feet.

It was all the opportunity he was going to get, since calling blades out of the stone at her feet might skewer the others and would give him away besides. Soul dashed forward as the other Weapons formed a wary circle and waded into the fountain, fumbling earth magic into armor that might thwart enough of her attacks to keep him from dying on the spot should she target him. He was halfway to the middle of the fountain when he saw her smile.

The hair on his arms stood up and he remembered - fire and lightning, and he was standing in a fucking fountain -

He gave up on earth-armor and fucking grounded himself in time to avoid the full force of the attack, though the shock still locked his jaw and limbs for a stunning, incredibly painful heartbeat. The others did not fare as well, but Soul couldn't waste time dwelling on that. Instead he forced uncooperative limbs to move while the Scourge stood in a lithe movement and indulged in a derisive snort, strained upwards and buried fumbling, blade-tipped fingers in the meat of her calf. She shrieked and stumbled, and Soul had to snap all of his effort from staying grounded enough to resist lightning back into maintaining some semblance of armor because her response was fire.

His response was scythe-blades erupting from the stone of the fountain, which shocked her into jumping away - or trying, anyway. Her leg was too injured to function and Soul still had ahold of it, so the attempt was cut ingloriously short by Soul's shoulder refusing to come fully out of its socket. She twisted as she fell, and Soul had another instant where he was certain his heart had stopped when glass-green eyes met his, promising death, and he didn't even know how to defend against the light that began to collect in her open palm -

Her head hit the side of the fountain with a sickening crack and the light winked out of existence, leaving Soul with a hammering heart, a shoulder he thought might never work again, and the distinct feeling that he'd somehow cheated death. For something like a full minute he didn't move, just stayed half-sprawled in the fountain heedless of the fact that its water was slowly being replaced by blood, and tried to remember how to breathe, tried to comprehend the reality of what he'd just done, tried not to be sick from stress and pain.

What ultimately snapped him out of his stupor was not the fact that he knew he didn't have much time to deal with the woman whose leg his fingers were still embedded in, nor the all-eclipsing pain in his shoulder; it was the coalescing of the souls of the dead, faint silver light fighting against the fire's sullen gleam on the water.

Soul watched them gather, confused by the sudden violence of their deaths, guttering flames strengthening into a steady glow as they drifted up and away, heading towards the fortress in the encroaching dawn. The Weapon-souls he sighed over; the battle-mage souls made him swallow hard as they fought the pull of Shinigami and Kid's magic - but he'd been taught often and painfully over the course of his life that only Shinigami, his son, and a select few elite warriors, Spirit among them, were allowed to consume the souls of their vanquished enemies. It'd never made sense to Soul that a practice that made Weapons so much stronger should be forbidden to the vast majority of them, but he'd always supposed it had something to do with control.

Still, no use wasting time gawking. He set aside his twisting stomach and managed to get his legs under him properly without aggravating his wounds too much, then grabbed the Scourge's leg with his good arm - the left, why did he have to go putting his dominant arm in the line of fire - and dragged her still-unconscious body close enough so that he could attempt to free his arm. It took longer than he wanted to manage it, but a cursory shove against his shoulder and then his elbow afterwards didn't result in the vision-whitening snap of a joint popping back into place, so Soul was inclined to count that a victory. At least his legs seemed uninjured, stable enough after a few minutes of blank staring that he didn't fall when he climbed out of the fountain, hauling his enemy's body along with his one functional arm and doing his best not to give her another head injury in the process.

If she was going to insist on not dying - and if the initial hit to her head hadn't done it, he had no illusions that time would finish the job, not given the way her kind supposedly recovered from wounds - then he was going to insist on getting something out of this suicide mission. Slitting her throat would only mean that no one would believe him when he claimed to have fought and killed the Scourge. Better to capture her alive, be seen carrying her into the fortress and down to the dungeons, and if he wanted to manage that he was going to have to move quickly lest she wake up and finish him off.

With that thought in mind, Soul draped her across the fountain wall, arms still dangling in the water, and hooked the blades of his left hand into the - ridiculously tough, what did Medusa make it out of - leather of her armor right at the nape of her neck. It took more effort than he liked and a foot braced against the low wall but he managed to claw his way through, opening up her armor in a line that followed her spine from neck to hips. He was out of breath at the end, and would have been sweating if it wasn't pouring fucking buckets, but there no point pondering how out of shape he'd become after a few months cooling his heels in Death City while Kid tried to decide if he could be bent to his will or not. He caught her padded jacket with gentler claws and tore at that, too, at last exposing the tattoo, seething with nauseating witch-magic, that curled over the nape of her neck and down part of her spine.

It was a pretty thing, for all that the magic that imbued it made his stomach roil, bold calligraphic lines that gave physical form to a bit of impressively complicated magic. Soul stared at it for a moment, committing the firelit lines to memory, then pressed his claws to the skin just above it with a frown as he collected his own magic in his fingertips. He'd been taught that this required attention to form, that he should etch Shinigami's sigil into the skin of his enemies, but he'd seen it done once before and no such technique had been employed. He was dooming her to a slow death by cutting her off from the magic that kept her alive; Soul saw no need to add insult to grave injury by branding her with her enemy's mark, and so he flexed his fingers till blood welled around the blades and dragged them across and through the mark and its magic until his skin crawled with it.

He knew when the link broke, as much because the clammy feeling left his skin as because some vital something seemed to leave the woman in front of him, a held breath let go, some strange draining of vigor from her complexion despite the fact that the light was questionable at best. Not surprising, he guessed, though perhaps a touch disturbing, though that might have been the fact that he'd just shortened her lifespan to a few weeks at the outside. Such was war, though, and she'd gotten better treatment at his hands than she'd probably have gotten from anyone else. The others would have slit her throat and to hell with any potential glory involved in bringing her in alive; the Scourge was simply too dangerous to let live. Perhaps that made him foolish.

It wasn't worth worrying about, so Soul washed his hands as best he could in the clouding water of the fountain and nearly wept at the pain involved in negotiating the woman's slight form up and over his shoulders so he could carry her back. She was a tiny thing, this supposed legend, hardly up to his collarbones and anything but threatening once she'd been robbed of the ability to kill him with one negligent strike of her magic. That didn't confer much of a sense of security, though, and Soul allowed himself only one grim look back at the carnage in the square before he began his plodding return to the fortress.

By the time Soul reached the fortress gates and had to deal with the guards, he was well past thinking that getting incredulous stares as he dragged the Scourge down to the dungeons would be an enjoyable experience; more than anything he just wanted to forget that the whole cursed morning had happened and go back to bed. The guards stared, disbelieving, and tried to stop him, and Soul was just tired, tired and covered in blood and his shoulder felt like it would never work again, so he didn't really bother trying to play nice.

"Get the fuck back," he growled when they tried to bar his way, tried to tell him that he'd have to wait while they fetched someone higher up the chain of command, and he wondered, distantly, if perhaps he'd inhaled more smoke than he thought for his voice to have become so hoarse.

They shied away enough for him to push past, and maybe it was the fact that he'd bared all of his pointed teeth when he spoke and maybe it was the blood dripping all down his shoulders from his unconscious cargo, but they didn't try anything when he did.

It didn't stop them from running to tell on him, though, and Soul was about halfway to the dungeons when someone dared step in front of him again.

This time it wasn't a guard, though, and Soul stopped, scowling as viciously as his battered state would allow.

"Brother," Wes said, and Soul hated, hated, the way his brother's eyes had changed color to a dark, dried-blood shade when he submitted to Shinigami, "what have you done? What happened?"

"Spirit sent me to the Fourth," Soul growled, baring his teeth again just because his brother's were so glaringly no longer pointed. "I almost made it to Temple Square before the Scourge set it on fire. She killed everyone there, lured the survivors of the explosion into the fountain and hit them with lightning. I tripped her up and she hit her head and here we are, and if you don't mind I'd like to get her into a cell so I can get my shoulder seen to, because it feels like it's been torn apart."

Wes stared at him in silence just long enough for Soul to really want to punch him, then said, "What are you playing at, brother? What are you trying to accomplish with this?"

"What the fuck are you on about?" Soul growled, the fingers of his right hand flexing in impotent anger. "I knocked her out, it seemed a waste to just kill her when I could bring her in alive. I've broken her link to the witch, why would I have left her there? She destroyed too many of us for me to feel like killing her would be even trade. Let Kid execute her, I don't care; but make sure they know who brought her in, who fought her to a standstill. I want everyone to know that it was me who defeated the greatest warrior the enemy has ever had, Wes, so don't you go telling Kid anything but the truth."

"You think you can win their trust without doing what I did," Wes said, and his tone was not unkind, his eyes almost sympathetic. "For this, I can't say you won't. But Kid will still know, and Shinigami, and Spirit and Azusa and the other Death Scythes."

"I don't care what they think," Soul said, shifting under the Scourge's weight and wishing more than anything for a bath. "I just want to be treated like I have a right to exist. Why the hell would you think I care what Kid thinks of me? You were brought up with the same beliefs I was, brother; Mother would weep if she saw you now, bowing to the death god. Let me by, before the Scourge wakes up. If you want to help, send someone down to the dungeons with some fresh bedding and food for the both of us, since I'm sure no one's on guard duty down there."

"I hope this ends the way you want it to," Wes said, and stepped aside, eyes unfathomable as Soul pushed past him, glaring.

Though he'd initially thought to deposit his prize in a cell and be on his way to the medic, Soul decided halfway there that he would probably be better served taking the Scourge with him, if only because it was really a job for someone with two functioning arms to divest the woman of her weapons and armor and make sure she didn't have any life-threatening wounds. Not that the medic liked it, especially once he realized what Soul wanted him to do and who he was tending to, but Soul's glare was enough to cow him. It was probably the blood, though he supposed it might have been the fact that he dragged the man out of bed without even the slightest consideration for the hour.

Still, he got a sling for his shoulder, dry clothes, and assurances that he would heal if he could manage to rest his arm, underlaid heavily with the implication that his freakish lineage was the only reason it had any chance of healing properly or quickly. That was fine; Soul was used to it. He did heal fast, one of the few advantages he had, and he was more than willing to take what bonuses he could from being descended from a man commonly regarded as contagiously insane.

The Scourge was another matter, one that the doctor wasn't pleased with having to deal with, but she was unconscious and obviously no longer a danger and so he consented with only moderate complaint, rolling his eyes at the mess Soul had made of her armor in favor of actually undoing the buckles and laces and pulling her out of it the same way she must have gone in. He left her in her undershirt and soft breeches, pronounced her unharmed aside from the head trauma, her mangled calf, and the wound Soul had inflicted to remove her from her magic, and told Soul quite bluntly to remove himself and his prize from his infirmary before he called someone to do it for him. Soul rolled his eyes near to give himself a headache, got the woman situated across his shoulders again with some help from the doctor, and resumed his trek downwards.

It was a long walk, too, considering that his people had worshipped a death god and been at war for a lot longer than living memory could recall. Beneath the fortress and the city was a real necropolis, set up as much to house the honored dead as to serve the death god and his necromancer children. Soul trekked through halls of bone, door arches capped with skulls, walls gilded in intricate patterns of femurs, recited in his head the names of the bones as he identified them: radius, ulna, tibia, fibula, clavicle, scapula, all arrayed in dizzying designs and harboring a silent magic that lay heavy on his skin like the hush of snow, waiting to be disturbed.

Down and down he went, reciting bones in his head, mandible, maxilla, patella, sacrum, increasingly jittery over time after almost dying and skin-crawlingly aware of the burden he carried. He tried to convince himself that he just wanted to resume his interrupted sleep, but what he really wanted to do was collapse, have a little breakdown about the entirety of his morning and then sleep because at least if he was asleep he wouldn't have to think about it.

His feet kept moving, though, and he finally reached the door to the prison to find that the only word in his head was cranium, because there were skulls leering at him from the door arch as he fumbled the lock while trying not to drop his awkward cargo. Eventually he wrestled the door open and stumbled through, grumbling at the shriek of old hinges and then blinking in surprise when he found himself standing in a warm pool of light. Wes had sent someone ahead of him, it seemed, if the place was lit up; normally the dungeon stayed dark and vacant, as his people were not in the habit of taking prisoners.

There was food on the rough guards' table and small magical lights along the wall, fresh straw-stuffed mattresses in two of the cells, and all Soul could think was that he could have told whoever brought this stuff to stay. Wes had helped, but only just enough; Soul still had to manage with one good arm and no one to assist, no one to guard the enemy's most dangerous soldier but him, and certainly no reward. No surprise, that. He was just glad that his brother had thought to have food left, because he'd never gotten breakfast and his belly was more than willing to remind him of that fact.

Food would have to wait just a little longer, though. Soul shuffled over to the cell furthest from the door and somehow managed to deposit his burden onto the mattress without hurting either of them, though it was a near thing with the strange contortions required to succeed at the maneuver. Once she was arranged on the cot in a reasonably comfortable position he returned to the guard area, securing manacles and leg shackles once he'd made sure the key hung beside them actually worked.

He bound the woman who had once been one of the greatest threats his people had ever faced, and once it was done he stared down at her for a few minutes, scowling at her incongruous appearance, wishing she looked like the monster she was. So deadly and so - delicate, almost, despite the blood on her and the fact that he'd seen her take down a whole group of his people in one grotesque sweep. She was a pretty thing, really, small and finely built, hair in wild disarray where it wasn't matted with blood, and the moment Soul realized he thought she was attractive when she wasn't posing an active threat to his continued existence he removed himself from the cell with all possible haste, the door shutting behind him with the heavy clatter of a setting lock.

He decided not to dwell on that traitorous sentiment and focused instead on eating the bread and cheese that had been left on the table, which had the added bonus of getting him away from the woman who'd nearly killed him multiple times in the space of five minutes. Eating with his left hand was annoying and Soul would have given a lot to have avoided entirely the circumstances that led to his right arm being bound in place against his chest, but things had turned out rather well, considering. That Spirit or whoever had given Spirit his orders had likely intended Soul to go out and get himself killed was a fact that wasn't lost on him, but he'd gotten used to that over the years. They'd been trying to kill him since he was old enough to fight, sending him half-trained against the strongest battle-mages Medusa had to throw at them in the hope that he'd take out a few key players in the process of dying, that perhaps his bad blood would win them an important victory in the process of being snuffed out.

Not yet, and not today. They'd sent him to die and he'd brought back their greatest enemy, save the witch; perhaps Kid would let him be now, send him back to the front lines where he wasn't being watched all the time, where he could at least die doing something genuinely useful instead of cooling his heels while Shinigami's son tried to convince him that becoming a lich would cure him of his inevitable madness. He had no doubt that it would, if only because sacrificing all free will tended to negate the effects of madness on one's behavior, at least. That it would have left him trapped inside his own head as he spiraled into insanity seemed unimportant to everyone but him, which made sense, he guessed. After all, they wouldn't suffer for it.

Soul finished the food and settled back into the rickety chair with a sigh, kneading his tender shoulder with a wince. It would be a while mending, even given that he healed faster than most, and that kind of injury would make every moment of the recovery unpleasant. It hurt in a way that made him wonder again just where Spirit had gone, what had been more important than the fact that the Scourge was in their city. They might want him dead, but that wasn't worth letting the likes of her run around. Where had Spirit been, where was Marie?

He decided that sleeping was a better use of his time than wondering why nothing made sense, and heaved himself out of the chair to curl up on the cot in the cell next to his prisoner's.