Alex snapped his fingers and Korrilla disappeared . Raphael gaze lingered on the spot where she had been before moving back to Alex .
He had always prided himself on his ability to read the tides of power, to manipulate, to control. He had entertained himself with mortal arrogance, believing himself untouchable. But now, as he gazed upon the impossible horror standing before him, he realized how blind he had been.
Alex’s form was no longer something that could be measured in mortal or infernal terms. He had known the alien shapeshifter was strong—an anomaly, something beyond the usual ilk of adventurers that dared challenge him. But this… this was beyond his wildest expectations. His arrogance crumbled like dust before the sheer, oppressive weight of the thing Alex had become.
The air itself recoiled, thick with the suffocating presence of a god-killer. His mere existence bent reality around him, warping it with his presence. The blackened flesh, the shifting abyss of his form, the wings of unraveling entropy—they all screamed of something Raphael had only read about in the most forsaken of infernal tomes. The scent of blood, of divine essence twisted and reforged into something wholly unnatural, filled the room like an omen of doom.
Raphael’s smirk, his confidence, his bravado—all had vanished. His lips parted, yet no words came, only a strangled exhale of disbelief. He should have known. He should have realized something was wrong the moment his artifacts could no longer spy on Alex. The moment his eyes had been blind to the shapeshifter's true nature. And now… it was too late.
His gaze snapped to Yurgir, desperate for some kind of reassurance. The orthon, his hound, the commander of his hunts, stood frozen in place. His monstrous, battle-hardened hands were trembling, clutching a rounded metallic object—one of his infernal bombs. A failsafe. A last resort.
But by the look in Yurgir’s eyes, Raphael knew the truth: even that wouldn’t be enough. The bombs, the weapons, the plans—they were all meaningless against the being before them. Yurgir, the infernal general who had commanded legions, who had slain creatures of legend, was afraid.
The cambions flanking them were no better. Their hands gripped their weapons, but none dared strike. None even dared to breathe too loudly. Their demonic eyes, once burning with bloodlust, were now wide with the primal terror of creatures who had finally met something greater. Something they had no hope of defeating.
Raphael took a step back. His legs felt like lead. He wanted to will himself forward, to regain the control that had always been his, but his instincts betrayed him. Run, they screamed. Run. Hide. Flee while you still can. But where? There was no sanctuary from this. No bargain, no deal, no trick that could unmake what stood before him.
For the first time in his existence, Raphael understood what it meant to be prey.
And Alex… Alex was the predator.
Raphael took a deep breath, struggling to steady himself.
'This worm will not kill me.' He forced the thought into his mind, attempting to redirect the raw, unrelenting terror clawing at his insides. He had been afraid before, had felt moments of doubt in his long, immortal existence.
The dark pillars in the corners of the room ignited with a ghastly light, and the chamber filled with the tormented wails of countless souls. Their agonized cries echoed through the air, feeding the growing tension. Raphael clenched his fists, willing himself to focus.
And then there were those eyes.
Alex’s abyssal gaze settled on him, twin voids that swallowed all light, all hope. No illusion, no deception could hide from them. He saw him. Every weakness, every sin laid bare. Raphael shuddered under that piercing gaze, all deception rendered powerless before a being that saw through all lies.
With a snarl, Raphael’s body ignited in a violent inferno, his form swelling as he roared in defiance. The blinding light consumed the room, washing away all shadow in a desperate attempt to drown out the inevitable.
When the light receded, the monstrosity that was Raphael stood revealed.
No longer a mere devil, his infernal majesty had cast aside the last vestiges of his mortal shape. Wreathed in searing flame, his head was a grotesque fusion of three animalistic faces—skin stretched taut over jagged bone. Three smoldering, golden eyes radiated malice, tusked mouths twisted into snarling grimaces. His body pulsed with infernal heat, molten veins running through blackened flesh, laced with dark, bone-like armor that jutted across his torso and down his digitigrade legs.
The crystal embedded deep within his chest pulsed, its trapped souls screaming as they were consumed, fueling the storm of power about to be unleashed.
A blinding white sphere of hellfire materialized before him, a miniature apocalypse contained within his grasp. 'This would end it.'
He hurled the infernal meteor with all his might, his monstrous mouths twisting in fury as it roared through the air toward Alex.
Alex did not move.
His hand rose—slowly, deliberately.
And then the infernal fireball stopped.
The silence was deafening. The air crackled with energy as the flaming mass hovered in place, inches from Alex’s outstretched palm. Raphael’s many eyes widened in disbelief. The hellfire trembled, its violent energy siphoned away, flowing into Alex’s waiting grasp. And then, with an anticlimactic shudder, it simply ceased to exist.
Raphael barely had time to comprehend the horror of what had just happened before Yurgir let out a derisive laugh.
“Raphael… fuck you.” Yurgir spat, his voice thick with bitter amusement. “I knew it. I knew one day you’d piss off someone who was out of your league.”
His fists clenched, and without hesitation, he turned and sprinted. His massive frame barreled toward the wall, stone shattering under the force of his escape as he smashed through it and hurled himself off the floating island. He had a better chance of surviving the endless abyss below than facing that.
The remaining cambions hesitated, their eyes darting between Raphael and the yawning hole Yurgir had left behind. Their wings twitched, instincts screaming at them to fly. To flee.
But then Yurgir reappeared.
Right next to Raphael.
He stood there, confused, his escape cut off before it had even begun. His golden eyes darted around wildly before landing on Alex, realization crashing over him like a wave of ice.
“No one leaves,” Alex said.
His voice did not simply echo in the chamber—it resonated, scraping against their very minds, burrowing into the depths of their sanity. It was absolute.
Raphael bared his fangs and inhaled deeply before all three of his faces opened their mouths, releasing torrents of hellfire. The flames roared forward, an all-consuming tsunami of destruction. The temperature in the chamber skyrocketed as the souls trapped in the crystal embedded in his chest burned away, each sacrifice fueling the ever-growing inferno. The heat became unbearable, reality itself beginning to waver from the sheer force of his flames.
The pillars flared, sending even more souls into Raphael’s grasp, feeding him. Empowering him.
As long as he stood in this chamber, he would not die.
As long as the souls fed him, he would endure.
But as Raphael’s infernal blaze crashed against Alex, it did not devour him. It did not consume him.
It bowed.
The flames bent, curving around Alex as though repelled by an unseen force. The roaring inferno became a gentle wisp, flickering against his form before being drawn into him. Swallowed. Claimed.
And as Raphael watched his most powerful attack unravel into nothingness, the weight of the truth settled upon him.
He had made a mistake.
A fatal one.
Then it happened.
The souls, once obediently flowing into Raphael’s infernal core, froze in their tracks. The once-unbreakable cycle of power siphoning to sustain his unholy strength halted.
The wave of hellfire, roaring and all-consuming just moments before, weakened, flickering like a candle struggling against the wind. Raphael gritted his teeth, his monstrous, tri-faced form twisting in shock as the flames sputtered out entirely. He could no longer sustain them. His own power—drained, siphoned, denied.
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Alex raised his hand again, his fingers curling ever so slightly—
And then, with a sickening crack, the dark pillars in the chamber exploded into jagged shards, their unholy constructs reduced to ruin. The souls trapped within them, held captive for centuries, howled as they drifted free, shimmering specters rising into the abyss, seeking release from their torment. What had once fed Raphael now abandoned him entirely.
Raphael's three monstrous faces twisted with fury, all six of his glowing yellow eyes wild with disbelief and fear. This was impossible.
"DO SOMETHING, YOU WORTHLESS PIECES OF FILTH!" Raphael bellowed, his booming voice a mixture of rage and desperation as he turned toward his cambion soldiers.
But it was already too late.
Alex moved—faster than thought, faster than light, a blur of void and entropy. His blade swept outward in a single, elegant arc.
The cambions barely had time to react.
A horrifying shhhhk echoed through the chamber as the upper halves of their bodies separated from their waists, their bisected torsos collapsing onto the cold stone floor. Their weapons, still gripped in trembling hands, clattered against the ground. Their wide, terrified eyes remained frozen in place, their expressions of sheer horror unchanging.
Then, the true nightmare began.
Wisps of spectral light rose from their corpses, the remnants of their immortal souls untethered from flesh. They did not ascend, did not drift to whatever fate awaited them. Instead, they gravitated—pulled toward Alex, swirling in a macabre dance around his outstretched palm.
His fingers closed.
The souls disappeared, devoured, their essence drawn into the abyss that now was him.
Raphael staggered back. Genuine fear—raw, unfiltered, absolute terror—etched itself onto his monstrous visage.
Raphael staggered back, his monstrous, triple-faced form trembling with unrestrained fury and terror. The once-mighty devil, the master of his own House of Hope, the self-proclaimed lord of deals, had never imagined this. Never, in all his years of scheming, did he foresee his own destruction coming at the hands of something so utterly beyond comprehension.
He should have known.
Standing before him, was not a mere shapeshifter, not a trickster, not a warrior.
It was death incarnate.
Alex stepped forward, slow and deliberate, his presence bending the very fabric of reality. The air around him pulsed with an aura of cosmic inevitability, the certainty of an execution long foretold. The infernal storm that Raphael had conjured faltered, its embers smothered in the abyssal silence that radiated from the god-killer before him. The dark, fragmented halo above Alex’s head pulsed with unreadable power, the void of eternity staring Raphael down with an apathetic gaze.
“You look surprised, Raphael,” Alex said, his voice calm, steady, terrifying in its certainty. “I thought you knew everything. That’s what you told me, isn’t it? That you always knew the outcome?”
Raphael bared his fangs, his monstrous faces snarling in unison. “I am Raphael! I am—”
“No,” Alex interrupted. “You were Raphael.”
Before the devil could react, Alex moved.
A single step, and the distance between them vanished. Phalar Aluve—reborn in Alex’s grip, an extension of his very will—sang through the air. The dark edge cleaved through infernal flesh, cutting deeper than the material world, striking at the very essence of Raphael’s being.
A horrible, distorted shriek tore through the chamber as Raphael’s form buckled. The soul-laden gem embedded in his chest flickered violently, desperate to hold onto what little divinity remained within him. His wings flared, his claws lashed out in desperation, but Alex was already behind him.
Raphael collapsed onto one knee, his body barely held together by the scraps of magic that clung to him.
Yurgir, stood frozen, gripping the last of his explosives. He had never feared death, never flinched from battle. But this… this was not a battle. This was the natural order of the cosmos being rewritten, and he was standing on the wrong side of history.
Alex turned his gaze to Yurgir, his void-like eyes narrowing. “You swore loyalty to Raphael once.”
Yurgir tensed. “I did.”
“And now?”
A moment of silence. Then, the Orthon dropped his weapons, sinking to one knee.
Alex smirked. “Smart.”
Raphael coughed violently, ichor dripping from his mouths as he tried, in vain, to rise. “You… you think you’ve won?” he gasped. “I am eternal… I will rise again… I—”
“No,” Alex murmured, placing a clawed hand on Raphael’s trembling chest. “You won’t.”
A pulse of eldritch energy rippled outward. The House of Hope itself trembled as Raphael’s body was consumed—not burned, not decayed, but devoured. Shadowy tendrils coiled around his form, pulling him into the abyss that was Alex’s will. His screams echoed, not through the air, but through the very fabric of the Infernal Realms, his soul ripped apart piece by piece as it was dragged into Alex’s abyssal grasp.
Raphael felt what it was to be nothing. To be forgotten.
And then, he was gone.
The chamber fell into silence.
Alex exhaled slowly, flexing his fingers as the last of Raphael’s essence faded into him. The air around him was heavy, reality still trembling from the sheer weight of what had just transpired.
He turned his gaze to Yurgir, who did not move, did not dare breathe too loudly.
“Go,” Alex commanded. “Tell the Hells what you saw here today.”
Yurgir nodded once, his throat dry, his mind racing. He turned , his form shimmered before dissipating.
Alex looked around at the remnants of the room. What had once been a place of false promises, deception, and infernal dominion was now just ashes. His work here was done.
With a thought, the darkness around him receded, his form shifting back, the abyss tucking itself away into the corners of his being.
Then, with a final glance at where Raphael had once stood, Alex turned—and disappeared into the void.
----------------------------------------
Alex appeared at the top of Ramazith’s Tower, stepping from the ether as though the very fabric of reality had yielded to his command. The moment he arrived, the air in the room seemed to still, the weight of his presence pressing down upon the gathered allies like a force of nature.
All eyes snapped to him, their expressions a mixture of relief and awe.
His gaze lingered on Hope, who was cradling her unconscious sister, Korrilla, in her arms. The raw emotion in Hope’s expression was undeniable—pain, gratitude, disbelief. She clutched her sister tightly, as though she feared even now that she might lose her again.
“We will never hear of Raphael, ever again,” Alex said, his voice calm. A small smile touched his lips.
Shadowheart was the first to move. She stepped forward without hesitation, her deep eyes searching his, and then she wrapped her arms around him in a tight embrace.
Gale, standing nearby, exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. A slow smile spread across his face, weary but genuine. “You did it,” he said, shaking his head in amazement. “Of course you did.”
Rolan and Blackhand exchanged glances before giving him a firm nod.
Astarion, smirked. “Well, well, look at you. Destroyer of devils. What’s next, conquering the heavens?” He gave a mock bow, but there was something real in his amusement, something almost fond.
Lae’zel, studied him with her sharp, calculating eyes before offering him a deep, measured nod. “You have slain a great enemy. There is honor in your victory.” She crossed her arms but remained rooted where she stood, watching him intently.
Amanita, however, said nothing. Her crimson eyes lingered on him for a moment, her expression unreadable, before she turned away, moving to the window. She gazed out at the city beyond, as though lost in thought, her fingers drumming idly against the sill.
Hope carefully laid her sister down, her movements gentle, almost reverent. She then turned and rushed toward Alex, her steps light but urgent. Shadowheart, who had been standing close, instinctively slid to the side, her arms wrapping around Alex’s as if anchoring herself to him. He raised an eyebrow, puzzled, but before he could speak, Hope grabbed his wrist and shouted in his face.
“Pinch yourself and check! We’re not dreaming the last of our lives as we die screaming!”
Alex sighed but decided to humor her. He pinched the skin on his forearm and looked back at her expectantly.
Hope’s smile widened, and she let out a triumphant laugh. “Ha!” she cheered, throwing her fists into the air like a victorious child. “This is incredible! You are incredible! You are spectacular!”
She twirled in place before taking a deep breath, arms outstretched, basking in the moment. “What a wonderful, jubilant, glorious day.”
But then, her gaze drifted back to her sister, and the light in her expression dimmed. A shadow of sorrow settled over her features.
“She was an entire person before she ever made that choice,” Hope murmured. A sad, wistful smile played on her lips. “When we were children, she always kept the last piece of pastry for me. She bloodied the nose of the bullies who pulled my hair. She was… she is my sister.”
She looked up at the ceiling, taking a shuddering breath, as if steadying herself. “Despite all the years I’ve lost, I still have love in my heart for her.”
Alex stepped forward slightly. “Where will you go now that you’re free?”
Hope straightened, forcing a small smirk. “I will go back to the House of Hope.” She let out a soft chuckle. “That’s what Raphael called his residence. A fitting name, don’t you think? I don’t quite know where anywhere else is anymore. But with a lick of paint and a thorough cleaning, this could be a lovely little house.” Her gaze flicked back to Alex, the mischief returning to her eyes. “After all, who would ever want to think of Hell without Hope?”
Her smile faltered slightly as she turned back to her sister. “I hope she will say sorry one day… and I will tell her she’s forgiven.” Her voice cracked slightly, but she pressed on. “I hope I’ll find all the pieces of my mind that fell out of my head over all those years… and that I’ll be able to put myself back together again. I hope the echoes of pain will fade, and memories of sorrow will die.”
She exhaled, glancing at everyone in the room, her gaze warm and understanding. “And I hope you all have a happy ending of your own.”
She reached into her clothes and pulled out a pair of gloves. She held them out, turning them over so that they caught the dim light of the tower, revealing their intricate craftsmanship.
The gloves had been crafted from a supple, dark material that shimmered faintly under the glow, as though infused with arcane energy. Their surface bore glowing, intricate symbols—circular patterns and angular glyphs that pulsed softly, exuding an ethereal radiance. The fabric, though appearing delicate, had an undeniable resilience, suggesting they had endured countless battles without a single tear.
Each fingerless glove had been seamlessly stitched, the faintest traces of silver thread woven through its seams, reinforcing its structure while maintaining an almost weightless quality. A faint golden aura flickered around them like a living thing, a testament to the potent magic imbued within.
“These gloves increase the constitution of the wearer,” Hope explained, her voice gentle. “They make you strike stronger… and they can heal you, too.” She extended them toward Alex, offering him a soft smile. “Take them. A gift.”
Alex took the gloves, his fingers brushing against the enchanted fabric. He looked down at them for a moment before meeting Hope’s gaze. “Thank you,” he said simply, his voice filled with genuine gratitude.
Hope beamed at him before stepping back. She turned toward the center of the room, where the glowing pentagram pulsed faintly with dormant magic. Gathering her unconscious sister in her arms, she walked toward it, the light illuminating her delicate features one last time.
She turned back just before stepping into the sigil. “Don’t forget to visit,” she said with a smirk, though her eyes glistened with unshed tears. “Hell might need a little more hope… but I think you could use a little of it, too.”
And with that, the pentagram flared to life. The room filled with a rush of radiant energy, and in a blink, Hope and her sister were gone.
The chamber fell into silence. The magic faded, leaving only the faint warmth of her presence behind.
Alex exhaled, his gaze moved to the gloves she had given him.
A gift.
A promise.
And perhaps, just a bit of hope.