Chapter 899: Frey’s Strike

Vergil kept both hands firmly on Frey’s skeletal shoulders, preventing him from continuing to walk.

The resistance he received was almost nonexistent.

Physically, the man looked only a few steps away from collapsing for good, his muscles reduced to dry fibers beneath the skin and his divine energy so faint that Vergil had to pay attention just to recognize it.

Even so, every time he loosened his grip even slightly, Frey immediately leaned forward and tried to resume walking.

He did not look to the sides, did not consciously search for another route, and showed no sign of recognition.

There was simply a direction inside that mind, and his body obeyed.

"Frey."

Vergil shook him a little, without excessive gentleness.

"Wake up. Your sister is practically tearing her hair out looking for you."

The sunken eyes remained still.

Vergil snapped his fingers in front of his face, lightly slapped his cheek, and even released a small wave of sacred energy before his eyes to provoke some instinctive response.

Nothing worked.

Frey merely waited for the pressure on his shoulders to decrease, and the instant Vergil relaxed his fingers for a second, he dragged another step forward.

Vergil grabbed the ruined collar of his clothes and pulled him back.

"You’ve got to be fucking kidding me."

"He isn’t hearing you," Nivara commented from inside the inner world.

Her voice was calm, but Vergil could hear the concentration behind her words.

"His eyes track light and movement at a reflexive level, but there is no cognitive response directed toward your presence. He knows something is blocking his advance, but he does not appear to interpret that thing as a person."

Crymsaria made an uncomfortable sound.

"And he keeps trying to walk even in that condition. Something is very wrong here. A body like that should be begging to lie down, not trying to cross a desert that looks like it’s made of ground-up corpses."

Vergil passed a hand in front of Frey’s face once again.

"If you can hear me, blink."

Frey did not blink.

"If you can’t hear me, blink."

Nothing.

Vergil closed his eyes for a moment.

"Excellent."

That was when Qliphoth spoke.

Unlike the others, she sounded more curious than alarmed, as though Frey’s condition had become a technical problem that needed to be taken apart piece by piece.

"Vergil, inject a little of your demonic energy into him. Very little. Don’t try to convert anything and don’t touch the divine core. I want to use your energy as an extension to examine his body from the inside."

Vergil frowned.

"You can analyze his mind like that?"

"With our connection, I can follow your energy through almost his entire structure. Nervous system, spiritual channels, brain, soul, and any seal that might be hidden. If someone is messing with his head, there should be some trace of it."

Vergil watched Frey for another moment before nodding.

He placed his palm against the god’s nearly skeletal chest and released an extremely thin thread of demonic energy.

The black power entered slowly, avoiding any aggressive behavior, and began traveling through the internal channels while Vergil carefully controlled the amount.

The difference between his energy and Frey’s divine essence produced brief natural resistance, but nothing that prevented the analysis.

Within seconds, Qliphoth was already using the flow as though it were a network of microscopic roots spreading through the body.

Frey kept trying to walk throughout the entire process.

Vergil had to hold him by the shoulder again.

"Anything?"

"Wait."

Qliphoth remained silent for almost a minute.

Vergil could feel her attention moving through the god’s body, examining the brain, passing through the spiritual structure, and reaching deeper into regions where thought, memory, and identity stopped being purely physical concepts.

When she finally spoke, there was strange disbelief in her voice.

"There’s nothing."

Vergil narrowed his eyes.

"What do you mean, there’s nothing?"

"Nothing wrong."

He looked at Frey.

Then looked again at his physical condition.

"Qliphoth, he looks like a mummy that learned how to walk."

"I’m talking about his mind."

Qliphoth deepened the analysis again, as though confirming her own results.

"There is no mental corruption. I found no spiritual parasite, curse, submission seal, memory alteration, personality fracture, or any pattern of hypnosis. In fact... mentally, he is in excellent condition."

Vergil took several seconds to answer.

"Excellent."

"Yes."

"He doesn’t even know I’m standing in front of him."

"I know."

"He keeps walking like a dead man."

"I know that too."

Vergil ran his tongue across his teeth, clearly losing patience.

"Then how the fuck is that an excellent mental condition?"

Crymsaria answered before Qliphoth could develop a hypothesis.

Her voice had lost much of the playful tone it usually carried.

"Because maybe it isn’t mental manipulation."

Vergil looked at Frey again.

Crymsaria continued:

"If Qliphoth finds nothing inside the mind, there’s a chance the command isn’t actually there. It could be something external. A connection to a greater consciousness, maybe some existence whose perception is too vast to need to invade the brain directly. It could influence direction, intention, or even fate without altering his thoughts. Beings with higher consciousness can do things far stranger than simple mind cont—"

She did not finish.

Frey moved.

There was no preparation, no buildup of energy, no change in posture.

One instant, he was dragging his feet like a corpse.

The next, his right arm vanished from perception.

The fist hit Vergil in the chest.

The explosion was monstrous.

The ash-covered ground collapsed for hundreds of meters around them, and a circular shockwave swept across the surface of the Inverted World, raising a gray wall that expanded until it disappeared over the horizon.

Vergil was torn from the ground with such violence that he could not even react for the first several kilometers.

His body crossed the black sky like a projectile, breaking layers of space through the sheer pressure of the impact while heavy pain spread through his chest.

His eyes widened.

"WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!"

Still flying backward, Vergil forced his body to rotate.

Yamato left its sheath in a single motion and cut the space behind him.

A violet rift immediately appeared in his path, and Vergil passed through the rupture before the force of the blow could throw him even farther away.

The other side of the cut opened exactly where he had been seconds earlier.

He emerged from the fissure with one hand already on Yamato.

Frey was a few meters ahead.

Walking.

As if nothing had happened.

The arm that had just produced a blow capable of sending Vergil flying for kilometers once again hung loosely at his side.

His steps remained short and dragging, his shoulders slumped, his dead eyes fixed on the same distant point.

There was no sign of aggression.

He did not even look at the man he had just struck.

Vergil stood still.

"No."

Frey took another step.

Vergil looked at his own chest, then at the skeletal god.

"No, no. Wait."

Nivara also sounded surprised.

"I did not detect any significant increase in energy."

"Neither did I," Vergil replied.

Crymsaria spoke immediately.

"His body shouldn’t be able to withstand that either."

Vergil reappeared in front of Frey.

This time, he did not touch him immediately.

He only watched those impossibly thin arms, the bones visible beneath the skin, and the legs that trembled almost imperceptibly with every step.

"How did someone in this condition just hit me like that?"

Qliphoth began examining the energy residue left by the strike.

"That is exactly the problem. I’m not sure it was only his strength."

Vergil frowned.

"There is something strange about the moment of impact," she continued. "I can’t identify any external energy, but there was a difference between what his body should have been able to produce and the actual result. As if some rule had been ignored for a fraction of a second."

Nivara immediately became more cautious.

"Then we should not provoke another response."

Crymsaria snorted.

"I’d like to see him try that again."

"That is why you do not make decisions."

"I would make an excellent decision."

"You would turn this into a fight."

"Exactly. Excellent decision."

Vergil ignored both of them.

Frey tried to pass him again, and this time Vergil simply walked backward alongside him for several steps, carefully watching for any bodily change that might precede another attack.

There was none.

Frey seemed to have completely forgotten that he had just attacked him.

Qliphoth was the one who finally suggested a solution.

"I think we should stop trying to solve this here."

"I agree," Vergil replied.

"Overload his head enough to knock him unconscious and take him home. Seris can examine this better."

Vergil considered the suggestion.

Qliphoth continued:

"She is the Queen of Witches. If this is a spell, curse, conceptual manipulation, spiritual bond, or some kind of external interference, Seris has more tools to clear his mind than we do here. And if even she finds nothing, at least we’ll know we’re dealing with something beyond conventional mind control."

Vergil sighed and looked at Frey.

"Sorry, brother-in-law."

Frey kept walking.

Vergil waited until he was close enough, raised one hand, and struck the side of his head precisely with two fingers.

It was not a brutal blow.

He mixed physical impact with a small controlled discharge of energy, striking nervous and spiritual points at the same time to momentarily overload consciousness.

Frey blacked out immediately.

His body began to fall forward, but Vergil caught him by the clothes before he hit the ground.

For several seconds, he watched in silence, waiting for any unexpected movement.

None came.

His breathing remained weak but regular, and that absurd compulsion to walk had finally stopped.

"Finally."

Vergil lifted Frey’s thin body and threw him over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

It was hardly a dignified image for a god, but Vergil was not particularly interested in ceremony at that moment.

Frey hung completely unconscious, one arm on either side of Vergil’s back, his dirty hair nearly touching his waist.

Crymsaria laughed.

"Freya is going to kill you when she sees how you’re carrying her brother."

"Freya is going to thank me for finding her brother."

"Then she’ll kill you."

"Problem for later."

Vergil held Yamato in his free hand and looked around.

The desert remained exactly the same, as though the colossal strike from minutes earlier had meant nothing to that world.

Frey’s footprints continued forward, stretching in a line that vanished beneath the black horizon.

Something still existed in that direction, and as much as Vergil wanted to immediately discover what had drawn Frey onward for so long, continuing deeper into a primordial prison while carrying a man in an unknown condition seemed like a particularly stupid decision.

Yamato left its sheath.

Vergil made the first vertical cut.

Then the horizontal one.

A massive violet cross appeared in front of him, and the four sections of reality slowly separated.

On the other side of the rupture, the familiar signature of the path leading back toward the regions connected to Helheim began to appear.

Vergil sheathed Yamato and adjusted Frey on his shoulder to keep him from slipping.

"I’ll leave this with Freya and ask Seris to try fixing him."

He looked one final time at the footprints leading deeper into the Inverted World of Exile.

The curiosity remained.

So did the discomfort.

This did not feel finished, but he had more immediate priorities now.

Vergil entered the dimensional opening carrying Frey.

"I still need to see how the Valkyries are doing."