It had come as a shock to Kenji when he first discovered that the Shard was with Batgirl.
When they had first arrived in this world for the quest, his mind had been primed for a cliché scenario. He had fully expected the "Vampire King", Nightwing holding the artifact like a dark scepter, acting as the quintessential final boss, and a simple victory condition: defeat the king, loot the body, claim the prize. It was supposed to be clean, simple, and predictable.
So when Vandalieu had messaged him after his revival to reveal that the Shard was actually in the possession of Barbara Gordon, Kenji's entire mental map of the mission did a 360. It was a bit of a curveball he hadn't prepared for, but at the end, the target didn't affect what they needed to do for the quest.
Though he didn't know how things would go, it was the sole reason he had insisted on their staying close to her. To try and see if they could get a chance.
Van had attempted to 'liberate' it from her on multiple occasions. Each attempt had ended in failure. That was when they had quickly learned a frustrating rule of the Shard's existence, it could only be interacted with when it was physically out in the open.
Whenever Barbara concealed it, the artifact seemed to slip into a sort of sub-reality, becoming untouchable, unreadable, and conceptually absent.
Frustrating.
And now… it was finally out.
Kenji forced himself to stand. His muscles screamed, but his eyes were locked on the rooftop.
'Finally', he thought, his heart hammering against his ribs. 'This whole nightmare is about to end. We get the Shard, we finish the quest, and we leave this dying world behind.'
He took a confident step forward. Now they just had to be careful with Barbara and the shard's power, he thought, and then he froze.
'What was the Shard's power again?'
He blinked. How could he have overlooked something so vital? How had he spent weeks in this world, fighting a war, trying to find a certain object, without ever asking the most basic question, What does it actually do?
A cold, oily prickle ran down his spine. As he felt a slight pressure in his head, shaking his head, he tried to think about the whole time he was here, why had he never asked or wondered what the shard could do.
He immediately pulled up the Group Chat.
Kenji: Does anyone know what the Shard actually does? Has anyone thought of what the shard can do? Has anyone thought of the shard besides finding it.
Silence stretched for several seconds. Then, the replies began to trickle in.
Vandalieu: ...No. Now that you mention it.
Erza: Neither do I.....I realized just now that I never even thought to ask about when Barbara used it.
Sora: This is actually… terrifying. How have I.....why didn't I...I knew I wanted to ask about it, so why did I forget.
The alarms in Kenji's mind were now ringing loudly. Van was indifferent by nature, but he was meticulously thorough when it came to his own survival, so he should have wondered about the shard at least once.
Erza was a veteran of a hundred guild quests where information meant the difference between life and death at times, so it shouldn't have been odd for her to want to know more about the shard, yet she never asked to.
And Sora? Sora's entire thing is survival based on information strategy, and he, too, never wondered.
For all four of them to have ignored something linked to the primary objective's power was impossible, at least one person should have at least asked once.
No, this was something else. He had a feeling that all of them forgetting to question the Shard's existence, even while they stared right at it, was something the shard itself was responsible for.
Barbara had even used the shard four times if the locator's ping four times was an indicator, and not once had anyone in the resistance, or them asked her about the weird things she did. That should have been their first clue, sadly, it was too late for things like that.
"Well, I guess we're finding out the hard way," Kenji muttered, downing another potion. He felt the liquid's magic stitch his remaining wounds together. He had consumed more potions in the last hour than in the previous three months combined.
Kenji: Converge on Barbara. Now.
On the top floor of Nightwings ' building. Barbara stood over Nightwing, her boot pressed firmly into the center of his chest. In her hand, she held a star, or at least, that was the only way Kenji could describe it.
It was a jagged, pulsing fragment of violet-white light that seemed to bend and warp the very air around it, drawing in the smog and light like a miniature event horizon.
Kenji began his rush towards the building. He saw a swarm of vampires, survivors of the initial skirmish, rushing toward the palace to protect their fallen king. Barbara didn't even bother looking away from what she was doing, unbothered by the army of vampires coming towards her.
She didn't even look at them. She simply leveled the glowing star at Dick Grayson.
The scream that followed was unlike anything Kenji had ever heard. It was the most harrowing scream he'd ever heard, it sounded unlike anything his ears had ever heard in his two lives.
Kenji stopped in his tracks, watching in morbid fascination. Under the purple glow, the "King in Black" began to shrivel. It was like watching a time-lapse of a corpse aging centuries in seconds.
Dick's flesh turned to grey parchment, his eyes sank into his skull, and his once-powerful frame collapsed inward until there was nothing left but a pile of fine, light-grey dust that shimmered with a faint, dying violet light.
The Shard pulsed, and the wave of energy expanded across the rooftops. Dozens of vampires in the immediate vicinity suddenly stiffened, their red eyes turning a deep, sickly purple. They stood perfectly still.
"Absorption and mind control," Kenji muttered, his Danger Sense thrumming from the moment Barbara had brought the shard out. "Great. Just what we needed. A god-tier thrall-maker."
But the Shard wasn't finished. It pulsed again, and this time, the purple light flowed backward, surging into Barbara's own body through her arm. She threw her head back and let out a roar that shook the foundations of the city, shattering every window for blocks.
As she roared, the vampires around her began to grotesquely mutate. Their muscles bulged, tearing through their clothes like wet paper; their bones cracked and reformed into jagged spikes, their presence spiked from low-tier fodder to mid-high class threats in the blink of an eye.
"Okay… that's significantly worse," Kenji whispered. He could feel the pressure of their combined bloodlust pressing against his gravity field.
Then, as if the fates themselves heard him and decided to raise the stakes, the humans across the battlefield began to drop. Like puppets whose strings had been cut.
[System: Gamer's Mind has blocked 'Mind Hex']
He saw Erza falter in the air, her armored wings flickering as she nearly plummeted before catching herself. Van staggered, his eyes glazed for a second before his mental resistance kicked in and he straightened up.
Then the physical drain started. Kenji felt a terrifying tugging sensation in his gut, like he was losing something. He looked around and saw faint, purple wisps of smoke rising from the bodies of every person on the field, living and dead, and flowing toward the Shard.
She was harvesting the battlefield.
"Enough of this!" Kenji yelled, panic finally bleeding into his voice, he could feel her power growing from here. He reached out with his hand, activating his Gravity Manipulation, attempting to wrench the Shard from her grasp.
It didn't budge. Barbara's grip was like iron, and the Shard didn't seem to like the attempt at separating it from its host.
The artifact retaliated. A stream of purple lightning erupted from the fragment. One moment, it didn't exist, and the next, it was striking Kenji directly in the chest.
He felt like he was being sucked through a straw. It was as if his soul was being cut apart, it was an agonizing pain, as if his internal organs were being vacuumed out through his skin pores.
"ARRRRGGGHHHH!"
The scream was torn from his throat. His health plummeted, he was fading. dying.
BOOM.
A massive, ornate shield slammed into the ground in front of him, severing the beam. Kenji collapsed to one knee, gasping for air, his vision tunneling into a pinpoint of darkness. He fumbled for another potion and poured it over his chest and down his throat.
Erza landed beside him. "Do not get hit by that again, Kenji."
She didnt know what it was, only that she had been sure that Kenji had been about to die right that moment.
"No kidding," Kenji wheezed, his voice sounding hollow.
The battlefield was a nightmare. People were being harvested like wheat. Those hit by the lightning were erased instantly, leaving only scorched outlines on the pavement; those in the radius were being slowly drained of their life force to fuel Barbara's power. IT was already at high class, despite being at low class when this entire war thing started.
Kenji released a massive burst of gravity, pushing the mutating vampires back, and pulled Erza and Van toward a slightly more defensible position, shielding the remaining human survivors behind them.
"We need a plan. Now," Kenji said. He looked at the rooftop. Barbara stared down at the battlefield. She jumped from the top floor, landing with enough force to create a twenty-foot crater in the center of the intersection.
She looked different. Her skin was translucent, deathly pale, and dark, violet veins mapped her neck and arms like a toxic web. Fangs glinted behind her parted lips, and her hair floated as if she were underwater.
"She's a vampire now," Kenji muttered, his eyes narrowing.
"You," Barbara growled, her voice layered with a thousand whispering echoes that seemed to come from the shadows themselves. Her purple eyes locked onto Erza and Van with a manic, flickering intensity. "I knew it. I knew I was right not to trust you. I saw it in your eyes the day you arrived, that hunger for My power."
She pointed the Shard at Them, her hand trembling with a possessive, twitchy energy. "You were here to steal from me! You want my power! You want to take away the only thing that can save this world from the dark!"
"Barbara, listen to me....!" Erza didnt even get a chance to speak.
"NO!" she screamed, her voice rising into a pitch of pure hysteria. "Well, I won't let you take it from me! It's mine! It's mine, mine, mine!"
Her breathing became ragged, a desperate, wet wheeze. She clutched the glowing fragment to her chest, her fingers clawing at the light until her knuckles bled. "It's mine… my precious."
Kenji paused. The tension of the apocalypse, the weight of the battle about to start, yet even all that could not stop him from snorting at the last phrase.
A snort escaped him. Then a chuckle. Then a full, genuine laugh that echoed strangely through the silent, purple-stained air.
Barbara's head snapped toward him, her expression twisting into something truly monstrous. As she snarled at him. God, at that 'my precious', he just couldn't help but see Gollum in her and laughed again.
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