Enid jumped foward with tremendous speed, being able to stop Jane 0.2 seconds before she was able to hit Wednesday.
But that meant the werewolf was sent flying towards a pillar of the quad, making it break down and fall onto her as even more damage, thankfully her fur worked like a pseudo-armor.
Everyone turned their heads to see the new contender, the blonde werewolf standing up with her four paws, her lycanthropy was one few people were able to witness, and much less were alive to tell the story of an alpha werewolf, it was something you'd see once every hundred lifetimes.
Of course Jane was the only one who had seen more than one alpha, but that number didn't go over the 20.
Wednesday eyes widened open, her only way of showing some surprise, because she recognized the blue and pink stripes on the werewolf head, and the way it returned the look.
Wednesday wasn't one with looks, she'd only look at anyone in the eyes when she's either giving her regular witty remarks or talking with Dante, notherless she still recognized the only pair of blue eyes that would defy her.
"Enid?" Wednesday asked, only one single nod from the werewolf was enough to make sure.
But the werewolf got excited just from seeing Wednesday, and she let out a whine of happiness after seeing the goth girl, but only then her eyes lowered a bit seeing Wednesday.
That made Wednesday look down too, the visible blood on her shoulder was obvious, and now that she started getting used to the pain the complications came, her arm felt weaker, with less blood and surely something broke inside aside from the clavicule, making her arm literally work worse than it should.
Enid turned to see Jane, instinctively growling at the woman who tried attacking Wednesday.
"She killed Dante, Enid." Wednesday said, her tone was a cold wall that stopped everyone from actually looking at her feelings, only Jane was the capable of seeing through any facade, she was the one who saw the hate, anger and over all of those sadness.
"Hey don't be so sad..., he chose death!" Jane said with a smile as she saw Wednesday, he did actually chose afterall, given the two options of fighting her and being raped, he chose the first one.
Obviously she would've killed most of the people in here, probably she would've blown this entire town and school without much issue.
"I'll at least let you try ok?" Jane said while she dodged a full speed werewolf who tried blizting her.
"Fool." She muttered as she pointed at the werewolf and with a burst of invisible magic Enid was pushed once again towards the stone wall.
"I did hold back a little too long, dragged the fight and let Dante slip a bit closer to my level, I won't be as gentle." Jane said as her smile faded away into a straight face, her muscles relaxing as she seemed eerily calm, barely even moving the muscles around her eyes to look around towards both Wednesday and Crackstone.
She stared at both of them, who seemly became alarmed, they didn't even try hurting the other in the moment of vulnerability, like two rabbits fighting just to realize there's a wolf standing some meters away, just that a wolf wouldn't be a fair comparison for Jane.
'My only chance is to find a way to get us safely and escape... maybe I can ask grand-mama for shelter or a way to move faster...' Wednesday thought, but she knew she was running out of options once she started considering her family as ones, and Fester who'd be the closest isout of town because of some stupid bank robbery he ended up being caught in camera.
Clank! A loud noise echoed in the quad, breaking the tense atmosphere as the three of them looked at the door.
The closed door, and just now they realized the missing Laurel.
"Whiny cunt..." Jane said under her breath.
"Ye-" Just as Crackstone was going to agree he got his left arm destroyed, in an instant, he barely noticed how Jane took his arm off his body and stood on the roof of the quad.
Her perfect face was still calm, completely calm, even as she raised up the dust-made arm in the air and said.
"Don't think you're a contender here, there's a few able to even make me move, only 1 able to kill me and it's not you." Jane said as she saw Crackstone stare down at his now armless left shoulder.
Enid stood up on her four paws after getting her breath again, catching with her eye a small scent, she smelled Dante on that woman.
And just as she kept sniffing the air, she saw how Jane was covered in blood, not her blood, at least, Dante's blood, the same one she has already smelled before in her dorm after Wednesday ran some late-night experiments with him, opening him up or literally staring at the bones and Dante gave her the most explicit explanations.
None of that passed over her head, which was working only on feral instincts, not even before she understood Wednesday telling her that Dante was killed.
In the moment someone's injured or sick, she normally has two reactions, the first one is when she takes care of them for the entire duration of the thing, and the other one, one she learned from courtesy of Dante Wednesday, revenge.
...
...
...
Somewhere else...
A place where the gods have no jurisdiction or knowledge about, the place where inmortals go once their soul rots, left in the thick nothingness to disappear into the air.
Dante was standing in a set of stairs, the rocky stairs only went up.
"..."
Dante looked up, his face was emotionless, his mouth hanging open as if he wasn't able to understand where he was.
In the span of 1 minute he has figured out where he was.
He looked up, the stairs went up infinitely, but he recognized in each step marks of foots, barely some, like if someone just passed there.
But that wasn't the realization he had.
During the time Jane was destroying his soul, he noticed she intact succeeded to some extend.
She erased around a 50-ish percent of his soul, alongside with his body.
"But I'm not going back to any body part...?"
That was the question, surely there was a part around somewhere laying around he could go, a part of his soul should still be out there.
And he realized that part of consciousness he had laying around in the world whenever he 'died' was actually his soul, how he was able to control it only when his body wasn't functioning anymore.
He has reached for a similar state, but cleaner, no body parts left and his soul was free to roam in the world.
But his soul in the split of a second was caught off guard and moved somewhere among the realm of the death and the living.
...
...
...
...
Dante was in the middle of a library, like some sort of liminal space, the library extended infinitely to the horizon, every row of bookshelves also extending infinitely towards nowhere, and in the middle of there was a small table.
The only place that seemed to not extend infinitely was the ceiling, which had chandeliers hanging around, creating a cozy feeling when the place felt somehow tight even after being infinite.
He looked down towards the small table and wasn't able to see anything off with it.
The small table had two chairs, one of them slightly further from the table, like if someone used it and stood up without putting it back in place first.
As Dante looked around, he noticed a difference in himself.
He was not in his body at all.
He stated down and was only able to see a purple hue that leaned into a deep ocean blue, nothing that could resemblance a body, yet he felt the cold air around him.
Just as he kept wondering what exactly was happening the loud sound of a thick book closing made him jolt up.
He heard the sound of footsteps, small silent steps that kept approaching.
A sudden urge of fear made his soul tremble, and between running and fighting as the regular instincts work.
He froze.
He saw the figure of a man coming from deep within between two bookshelves, he saw a white haired man, maybe around his 40's, Dante barely saw some details until he finally got in front of him, the table acting as the only thing between them.
Normally Dante wouldn't freeze or run, as an inmortal his instincts were fighting, nothing more.
But after his soul is naked of flesh, it's like his soul had a mind of it's own.
As the man sat down, Dante finally was able to see him.
He had small wrinkles around his face, a beard started to grow on his cheeks and around his lips, his eyes were black like obsidian, yet they showed a fatherly care as he saw Dante.
"Sit down." The man said, as he put down the book.
Dante immediately moved, somehow sitting down even as his soul didn't have any shape.
The man looked at him, almost a face to face if Dante had one, but he looked at Dante as if he knew him his entire life.
Like a parent would look at their child or a man the dog they had since it was a puppy, not entirely because of the love they had for the other, but because they knew everything about other.
"Look at you..."
"You certainly look different after death." The man said, his voice calm and tentatively joking.
"You're God?" Dante asked right away, the appearance of the man and the way he talked like if Dante was a children of his, that only gave him a narrow view of who the man is.
"Not in the slightest... but I am an object of veneration in different cultures, outcast cultures." The man said as he waved his hand, dissmising the idea of himself being anything close to godhood.
"We're not here to discuss about me you know, we're reunited to speak more about you." The man said as he brushed his hand over the book, and just now Dante realized how the leather cover had something written on it.
"The unrighteous odyssey of Dante." Dante read, and that made the man smile.
"Yeah... I normally don't make people lives books, but yours is a special case..." The man said with a fond tone.
"Because I'm inmortal... well I WAS inmortal." Dante said already knowing what the man's answer would be.
It's obvious, not a single creature has looked at him the same after they knew his condition, not a human or outcast has ever kept their gaze, even his friends has shown to some extend a mixture of feeling weird or horrified whenever he happened to show how not mortal he was.
Dante kept twisting into his own thoughts as his gaze lowered more and more, his eyes wandering towards his own soul.
"You're wrong."
"Huh?" Dante raised his gaze, the voice of the hand was like a wake up call, only to see a smug grin on the man's face.
"I think you're special because... out of all the inmortals that had lived, you're the first one to understand completely your power." The man said, making Dante face change into one confusion.
Dante normally thought of himself too powerful for a mortal, and too weak for an inmortal.
But he just now realized, thanks to the man's words, how wrong he was.
Jane is a regular inmortal, one who only heals back and doesn't care about pain after hundreds of years enduring it.
But Dante was different, his regeneration was faster than hers, the pain has become the first thing he'd never cared about, he has reached a point where he can somehow create things out of nowhere essentially while just needing a small bit of it.
He is a monster, not the pinnacle of inmortals, he's over that, like a star shinning over everyone that stays grounded to earth.
"You mean?"
"You realized it! The inmortals power isn't immortality, it's just an effect of it."
"Your real power is the control you have over the soul." The man said with almost the happiest smile Dante has seen, he'd be surprised, but Dante already had a sense of this.
He already thought immortality wasn't his inherently power, he thought it was some sort of reversing.
Now he has realized how truly his power works.
He never reversed anything, he projected his soul physically and used it to create things using the air around it and shape-shifting it into the things, using the already existing thing as a blueprint.
"For example..." The man stood up and grabbed the book, opening a page which had a moving oil written on it, the black liquid spiraling around until it formed a picture.
The figure of Dante naked in the middle of a dark room, and with that, he passed through the metal door of the dark room.
"You see! You shifted your own body using your soul to pass through the gaps in the atoms! Not even me used soul control like that!" The man kept yelling excited.
"I see..." Dante said as he looked into himself.
"Shift my body using my soul." Dante muttered, and with that, his soul started to chance into his actual body.
As he turned back, he even used bits of his soul that remained outside to create clothing, the Nevermore uniform.
"I have question." Dante said raising his head.
"Yes?"
"Jane said she erased my soul, yet I can see it, she lied?"
"No she didn't, but it's because you're a late born."
"Like I was supposed to be born at the same time as Jane, but I don't see the correlation with that and her magic."
"Normally the soul is the complete shape of the body, but as you kept existing in your mother's womb, your soul kept growing yet your body didn't."
"Thus why you can project it so easily, but that meant your magic output is really bad, the soul is normally the primary catalyst for magic, your soul is a lot bigger than you'd body and it flows out like if the entire water of the ocean tried to fit into a tiny river." The man explained as he raised his finger into the air, Dante could compare him to Gandalf or Dumbledore.
Only then after he started to think more thoroughly what the man said, the reason why Jane's soul erasing magic didn't work.
"Her magic works almost like the petrificating power gorgons have! They wrap around the body and do their thing, but my soul is in my body and out of it, so it only erased the part my body had, not the other!" Dante yelled with same enthusiasm the man had earlier.
"Exactly!"
"Oh man... I'm actually incredible..." Dante said to himself.
"Was your reason to show up here just to tell me how incredible I am?" Dante asked, finally calming down after 10 seconds.
"Well mostly that but... I'm here also to tell you, as you become a shooting star, there's other people just like you."
"Like me, as in immortals aside from Jane?"
"No, other prodigies, among their race, you're the prodigy for immortals, there's others for DaVincis, shapeshifters, sparks! Even that kid brought by the Gods is awesome!" The man started to come back towards his wholesome enthusiasm, like if he was speaking about a serie he loves.
"Normally you'd have one person to tell you that, but you're a special case, no one to tell you anything, you'd live like a regular person rather than what you can be, I'm here to tell you to always seek for more." The man said, as he sat down, his smile was still there, expecting a confirming answer.
"Why do you hope for me to say yes?"
"Entertainment obviously, as the oldest living being, I only find enjoyment in the life around me, watching you prodigies fight or befriend eachother is what brings me joy." The man said simply, his smile didn't brush off.
Dante looked at him shocked, like if he was seeing some sort of villain in a book reveal their unavoidable plan.
"I suppose... I can do that."
...
...
...
...
...
Dante opened his eyes, the water around him already filling his lungs as his body came back.
He looked around, the sense of the cold water all around his body, and as soon as he looked up he was able to see the red moon shinning over him.
He started walking towards the front.
He started to feel how he was closing by towards shore, his wet head rising from the water as he was finally out of the water.
He looked down at his naked body, and the he passed his hand over his wet hair.
"Man I forgot I threw my head into the lake during the Poe Cup..." Dante muttered.
Then he looked back at his naked body, more specifically towards his intimacy.
"Can't go on like this..." He said to himself, already thinking of ways to get some cover for himself, maybe some leaves would work.
Then as he kept thinking a quick idea blasted into his brain and he didn't let go of it.
He out both hands on his clavicules, feeling the scar that passed vertically right there, and he sank his nails down, the skin tearing up as it's the second time it happened.
Just as the day he was born, born with only his skin covering him of this world, never had a warm embrace more than his own blood.
Dante kept ripping his skin off, the skin going down until it reached lower than his knees, and only then he stopped.
His skin regenerated back, and the peeled skin of his chest worked like a loincloth.
Dante looked at the tip of his fingers, bits of blood gathered on them as he smiled to no one.
"God..."
"Wednesday would kill to see me..."