**Saga 0: The Ash Years**
🗓️ Location: Outskirts of Eastern Europe | Nightfall, 2006
Snow crunched beneath boots as Pietro darted toward the ruined nave, hands blurring with speed. His sister was no longer pulsing energy like a landmine, but he didn't trust it—not with a stranger wrapped around her like that.
He found her sitting on damp stone, wrapped in a black coat that clearly didn't belong to her. Her hair draped over Dante's shoulder. Red threaded through the air around them, faint… but tethered somehow.
"What the hell is this?" Pietro snapped, skidding to a halt. His eyes landed on the tall man kneeling at her side. "Who are you?"
Wanda stirred, slow—dream-heavy—but her hand gripped Dante's sleeve with childlike certainty. "He helped me. It's okay."
"'Okay'? You almost collapsed half the cathedral! You were—" Pietro stopped, tone tightening. He saw something in her. A calm. A softness. And it scared him more than her power.
Dante stood up slowly, dusting snow off his coat with indifferent precision. His crimson eyes met Pietro's like locked sights. Unafraid.
" you don't need to know who am i," he said evenly. "But if you want her alive, you'll stay close and shut up."
Pietro's jaw tensed. "Friends don't show up mid-chaos with demon eyes and a haunted trench coat."
"No," Dante said, pulling something from under his coat, "but monsters usually follow me. Try not to get killed kid."
▫▫▫
A shot rang out.
Not from him—from the treeline 150 meters northeast. Dante's head tilted at the same time a glowing round screamed past his cheek—barely missing him and Pietro. Snow hissed where it struck. Burned on impact.
Pietro jerked Wanda behind a pillar. "Snipers! Gunned weirdos from earlier!"
Dante moved. Not rushed—*anchored*. As if the world turned around him.
Left hand out, he twisted *Redshift* from its holster—six-chambered, steel-black, its surface engraved with infernal runework like veins under skin. Each bullet shimmered faintly with unstable distortion. Time-touch cartridges. *Hellsteel-cored.*
He raised it into the night.
**Bang.**
The treeline cracked. A scream—one of the shooters evaporated in place, bullet phasing through layers of armor and the metaphysical space behind it.
[Sin Output: Controlled Wrath + Tactical Precision]
> *Reward: Memory Mark (Auto-replay Target Pattern)*
Two more hostiles emerged, charging down the slope covered in frost and glowing wards—*former cultists warped by mutation.* Spines along their backs. Skin stripped raw and half-gray, twisted in servitude.
Dante reached for his other weapon.
It uncoiled from his back—not drawn, but released.
**Ruin Reaver**.
The black-metal blade hissed like a sleeping curse, curved just slightly, not impossibly large—but it felt bigger in the mind than in the hand. Its body shimmered textured, as if parts of it didn't exist in this plane.
Etchings flexed red.
The cultists screamed something in a cracked tongue—rushing.
Dante stepped sideways, pivoted…
**Slice.**
The sword blurred—a single arc across the snow. One attacker's head fell behind his body. The other lunged—and Dante didn't move more than his wrist. A flick. A twist and the blade slid under the ribcage and *tore the soul* from the body with it.
He let it hang for a moment—shimmering, twitching—then crushed it in his hand.
[System Acquisition: "Bitter Zeal" – Soul Thread (2/7)]
> *Wrath Echo Strengthening… Binding Sin Mark Growing.*
▫▫▫
Behind him, Pietro stared—part weirded out, part impressed.
"What are you?" he whispered. It wasn't asked in awe. It was suspicion, worry, Fear for his sister.
Dante didn't answer. Instead, he loaded Redshift silently, the revolver clicking open with unnatural fluidity. He stared once at Pietro and said without inflection:
"Whatever follows us now isn't mercenaries. They're priests of broken gods. You can run if you need to."
"No," Pietro growled. "I won't leave her alone. Ever."
Dante stared at him for a long heartbeat.
"Then keep her steady. We're not done yet."
▫▫▫
The wind shifted again.
From the north came something larger—armored, buzzing with null-energy. A pulse that **dampened reality** in a bubble. Dante's coat fluttered lightly as his aura resisted.
Pietro tried not to flinch. "I hate this already."
Dante just lowered his blade slightly, body loose, voice low like thunder warming its throat.
"Good.
Then you're paying attention."