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“Yeah, no,” Sandalphon says immediately when Gran brings up the idea for the first time.
Gran stares at him, perfectly unimpressed, for exactly two beats before he continues with his briefing. “Anyway, the mission is scheduled in two days, but we might have to deploy as soon as tomorrow, so please be ready just in case. We’ll get a smaller ship as soon as we get close to the island, so you’ll have somewhere to stash your things at least until we split up. Everyone okay?”
There’s a chorus of assent from the gathered group. Lucio’s cheerful agreement comes two inches from Sandalphon’s ear where he’s forgotten to threateningly glare him away.
Once Gran dismisses them, hanging back to carefully slide their previous few mission records into the crew file, Lucio turns his annoyingly bright face on Sandalphon. “Sanchan!”
“What,” Sandalphon patiently replies, giving him his most neutrally displeased face.
“It is not every day I get to work so closely with you,” Lucio tells him solemnly, eyes and grin competing in the width event of the obnoxiousness Olympics. It’s an expression Sandalphon has never seen on Lucifer’s face before—and he’s glad for it, because if Lucifer ever looked at him like that he’d have probably died on the spot from shock. “I look forward to this precious opportunity!”
“I'm so glad,” Sandalphon tells him in a voice entirely devoid of sarcasm.
A few masterfully deflected attempts at conversation after, he finally manages to make Lucio flutter off somewhere on those ridiculous wings, mostly by baring his teeth at him in a painful approximation of a smile. It only takes one more insistent offer to try Lucio’s “special fine wine saved for centuries” to “celebrate the occasion” until he’s finally free to leave—and that, of course, is when he’s stopped by Gran.
“Sandalphon,” Gran says, in a calculatedly absentminded voice without even looking up from the file. “Please stay a bit.”
Gran continues very pointedly flipping through the file, ignoring Sandalphon drumming his fingers impatiently on the hilt of his sword, until everyone else leaves completely.
“So,” Gran begins once the room is completely empty. He finally sets down the file, leaning back against the table, and fixes Sandalphon with a considering look. “I know you have grievances, so let’s hear them now.”
Of all the times for Gran to pick to be a responsible crew captain instead of a silent protagonist, Sandalphon thinks, this is possibly the worst one—but then Gran just stares at him, expectant and perfectly calm, and Sandalphon realizes that maybe he can be both at once to devastating effect.
“Working with—Lucio isn’t the issue,” Sandalphon pleads with him convincingly. “But you can’t be serious about Belial!”
“Cagliostro declared the crystal perfectly safe,” Gran counters. “Is this a personal prejudice? Sandalphon, you know we need all the help we can get.”
“He’ll kill me!” Sandalphon says, voice too shrill for his own liking. He winces.
“I don’t think he will,” Gran says. “Besides, with Lucio around—”
“Why don’t you care about my life, Singularity,” Sandalphon mutters just loud enough for Gran to hear him.
“Sandalphon,” Gran says, having heard him and adjusted his voice to be appropriately more soft and gentle. “The wellbeing of every member on this crew is my top priority. You know that.”
“You’re sending me out with—a sword bimbo that got eaten by a shark and had to be shat out into the ocean,” Sandalphon reminds him, appropriately bitter at the recollection. “And Belial, who stole Lucifer-sama’s body. Can’t I go with Seruel instead? Or carry the swords—”
“I can carry the swords myself,” Gran tells him, serenely. “And both you and Lucio have worse synergy with Seruel’s abilities than I do.”
“And that’s why you want me dead,” Sandalphon summarizes.
Gran crosses his legs, making both of them stare at his shoes for a moment, and then shrugs lightly. “I think you’re being overdramatic, Sandalphon. You don’t have to call on Belial if you don’t want to. I don’t want to leave him with Fif or Ferry, either—but I think between the Speaker and the Supreme Primarch, you should be able to handle one contained primal beast spirit.”
Sandalphon winces at the mention of Fif, because that’s absolutely a valid point. “Singularity,” he tries in a last ditch attempt. “You’re very strong, and I think Belial is kind of fond of you—”
“Thank you, Sandalphon,” Gran tells him. “You're dismissed. Please rest up for the mission.”
Sandalphon groans in frustration, but Gran doesn’t yield, so he stalks off to his quarters to get some quality nightmares in before the deployment.
“Lucifer-sama, I do this for you,” Sandalphon sighs, and eyes Gran’s backpack. He’s halfway into vividly fantasizing just shoving the crystal into any spare space he can find and booking his way out of there as soon as they land on the island, but Gran catches his eye and gives him such a purehearted smile, so entirely devoid of any malice, that Sandalphon instinctively checks that his armor is still intact and his organs are still in place.
“—And perhaps for myself as well,” he finally admits grimly. “In my defense, Lucifer-sama, I did not know a blue haircut could be so intimidating.”
“Ready to disembark?” Gran asks him, adjusting the sleeves on his jacket with a strange kind of cheer. Sometimes, Sandalphon thinks, Gran is a bit too excited to face the unknown.
Sandalphon tries to hide that he feels exactly like a wilted cactus as best as he can, lest Lucio get any bright ideas about cheering him up again, and sighs only half as dejectedly as he feels. “Yes.”
“You might want to put that away somewhere,” Gran advises, eyeing the crystal Sandalphon has surreptitiously left on the table and covered with an extra waistcloth for personal reasons. He beams at Sandalphon, because clearly Sandalphon isn’t feeling enough guilt as is. “I look forward to watching your sword work.”
“My sword work is good enough without Belial,” he halfheartedly argues, and Gran nods as he pats his shoulder in sympathy.
“We are a professional crew,” he tells Sandalphon sagely, and somehow wields six swords at once. “I believe in you.”
Then he turns, raising three of the six swords he’s wielding in a salute, and Sandalphon cringes as Lucio replicates the move with his katanas and thoughtfully reflects the sunlight directly into Sandalphon’s eyes.
They disembark.
The moment they split up on the island, Sandalphon mentally prepares himself to meet Lucifer again a few centuries too early.
Lucio’s foosteps make absolutely no sound across the dense foliage. Sandalphon notices, and tries to quiet his own, because next to Lucio he just sounds like he’s rolling through the underbrush in full regalia—then Lucio seemingly notices his efforts, and kindly starts pointedly crunching leaves underfoot as if he’s trying to be considerate. Sandalphon scowls at his back, and gives up.
He adjusts the makeshift sack from the spare waistcloth that he’s slung over his back. Belial’s crystal, held securely within its confines, vibes negatively in the direction of his lower back and ass.
He probably likes it, the pervert, Sandalphon thinks, and scowls again.
The moment the first enemies show up, Sandalphon dumps the sack directly onto the forest floor and resolves to forget it after the battle. His sword feels perfectly balanced in his hand, a special kind of zen creeping over him as he grasps the familiar handle and falls into a stance he’s fallen into a thousand times. It makes the battle pass by regretfully fast, actually, in perfect triple flashes of his sword wiping out enemies in one strike while Lucio looks very beautiful and barely touches his katanas next to him.
“Sanchan,” Lucio smiles kindly at him when it’s finally over. “You’re forgetting your—”
“Thanks,” Sandalphon snaps, and hauls Belial back over his ass. If anything, it feels like the negative vibes have dragged down his morale.
They keep walking, Lucio pointedly crunching leaves and Sandalphon trying to keep from breaking his heels off on the intertwined roots of the forest floor and stabbing through every single leaf in the process.
The sad part is—they don’t even need Belial there at all, not with the ease with which the enemies fall to Sandalphon’s reliable blade and Lucio’s charming twinkling. His presence barely even registers, outside of a menacing aftertaste in the back of Sandalphon’s throat—though maybe he’s just imagining that.
He wonders if shattering the crystal would kill the trapped spirit, or release it instead. The horror of the second possibility outweighs the temptation of the first, and so Sandalphon refrains from bashing the sack against a tree when Lucio isn’t looking.
So he just lugs it along, watches Lucio thoughtfully gaze at the trees around them like they haven’t been walking past the same CG-esque scene for the past hour, and sighs anytime Lucio dramatically brings up his katanas into a fighting stance ahead of him and proceeds to do next to nothing with them while Sandalphon does all the work.
“Lucio,” he finally says.
Lucio turns immediately, acting for all intents and purposes like Sandalphon just demanded a kiss from him. “Yes, Sanchan? You called for me?”
Sandalphon pauses a beat before resheathing his sword, for moral support in cutting through the bullshit. “I thought,” he says, picking his words very carefully. “You were supposed to be helping.”
Lucio widens his eyes dramatically at him and twinkles harder. He brings a hand up—unoccupied, of course, because he only bothered to use one katana during the whole battle—to his mouth. Sandalphon strongly suspects he’s just hiding his smile behind it, the bastard. “I just…really like watching Sanchan fight,” he says, with perfect dramatic timing. It would be the picture of perfect innocence—had Sandalphon not seen Lucifer before, extensively, and categorized every single one of his innocent faces (all of them).
As it is, Sandalphon knows he’s being a bastard, and he’s doing it with Lucifer’s face, so he clicks the sword back into place in annoyance and sighs. “Never mind.”
Lucio can’t leave it at that, of course, so he falls behind to tap a gauntlet supportively against the shoulder Sandalphon conveniently isn’t carrying Belial on. “If you are tired, Sanchan, we can take a rest here. After all, this would be a lovely setting for the human ritual called a picnic—”
“As if,” Sandalphon snorts, and brushes a leaf out his hair absentmindedly. “Gran and the others are probably waiting for us already.”
“Right you are!” Lucio brightly agrees. “How responsible! Ever so befitting of the Supreme Primarch.”
Sandalphon stares lovingly into the back of his head, identical to Lucifer’s as long as he doesn’t turn around and keeps his mouth shut, and idly wonders who and why replaced all of Lucio’s brains with rocks.
They’re about halfway to the rendezvous point when Lucio makes an aborted noise and suddenly vanishes.
For a blessed moment, everything is quiet.
Sandalphon freezes immediately; but outside of a faint wail, he hears nothing else approaching, and it’s unclear where exactly Lucio has gone. He draws his sword, already on edge, and prepares to summon the wrath of Lucifer himself through his conveniently cross-shaped gloves; but the forest is silent, save for the far-off chirping of birds.
He walks forward, slowly, sword held forward and ready to cut down anything that did him the favour of cutting down Lucio first. Then he steps forward a tad too fast, heel skidding on sudden empty space, and almost barely catches himself from sliding down a deep, dark hole with Belial perched above his ass like the world’s pointiest and lewdest snowboard.
The adrenaline of the near-miss quickly morphs into pure rage that cannot even be tempered by the good fortune of not impaling his ass on Belial’s summon stone. He clambers to his feet, unsteady and scrabbling for purchase on the uneven ground in his heels, almost vibrating with the power of his now-unleashed anger.
“You IDIOT,” he growls into the now-empty forest around him, and flings the stupid katana Lucio dropped directly into a tree. The tree takes no elemental damage from it, so he doesn’t even get any satisfaction.
“Sanchan?” he hears someone call in response from deep within the hole. “Are you there?”
“NO,” he yells back, and waits for the sound to carry.
“Ah, wonderful, Sanchan, are you fighting an enemy? I heard you say—”
“YES,” he yells back, and drops the other katana Lucio kindly left him directly into the hole blade-first. “OOPS.”
“Thank you!” The hole gushes gratefully. He ignores it. There are more pressing issues on his mind—such as: would Gran allow him to leave Lucio in the hole and claim him as a casualty of the mission, or would he insist on them all backtracking just to retrieve his undoubtedly beautiful and very valuable self? Would Belial take the opportunity of no witnesses around him to finally strike? He crouches next to the hole, and thinks very hard as he sets Belial down carefully away from his ass to prevent any accidental impaling.
“You think, about your ass, a lot,” the crystal whispers at him. “Sandy. Hahaha.”
He wraps it firmer in the spare ass carpet and tries to pay it no mind. While Lucio figures out his hole problem, he figures he might as well rest—it’s not like he can do much to help him, anyway, unless he strips off the red ribbon from his armor and tries to see if the combined length with his belts would reach Lucio; but he’d rather pitch headfirst down the hole himself than strip for Lucio, so he waits.
Thankfully, he doesn’t have to wait long. Just as he finds a comfortable spot, he hears the telltale chant of Lucio’s voice, and in rapid succession he’s hit with Revelation before Out Of The Ashes explodes violently into brilliant light from the hole and takes all the ground in a 10 meter radius along with it.
Lucio rises from it like a warlike angel, a katana in each hand, beautiful white wings—identical to Lucifer’s down to the sheen—spread behind him like a harbringer of Sandalphon’s certain mental breakdown.
Sandalphon buries his face in his hands, half-hidden by the wings he’s had to flare out on instinct to stop the impact from sending him into a tree, and tries not to weep.
In the end, they keep going.
They’re about to enter another battle, Sandalphon hoisting Belial’s summon crystal into a tree stump in a renewed effort to ditch him somewhere unnoticed, when Belial’s crystal glows to life in his hands and promptly scares the shit out of him.
“Singularity?” Belial drawls lazily. “I’m ready to come—to your aid, of course,” he continues in a voice dripping with lewd. “Oh. You’re not Singularity—” which is the point Sandalphon gives up and just drops him, risk of shattering the crystal be damned. “Ouch. How rude of you, Sandy. After I’ve been working so hard from the backline, too.”
“Like hell you were,” Sandalphon scowls down at the ground. “Creep.”
“I love it when you yell at me, Sandy, but how about you summon me and take me for a real ride?”
Sandalphon’s upcoming caustic answer dies in his throat as Lucio shouts; Revelation washes over him again, familiar golden light knitting itself into a barrier that flushes into blue around him, followed by Awakenings flaring to life around Lucio. The previously silent forest suddenly thrums with creatures, so they must be getting close—but they’re also surrounded from all sides, so there’s no way to effectively zone them to deal with them one by one. Lucio wipes out another few waves with a blast of Out Of The Ashes, Sandalphon throwing out Ecliptica on the heels of it to wipe out the creatures that rush in to replace them—but it’s too many, more than they can deal with at once, and it shrinks their space as he backs away towards Lucio.
He doesn't even notice how much they've been boxed in until the back of his armor plates hits Lucio's, shrinking the space he has to manoeuvre in.
“Come on, come on, Sandy,” Belial hisses from the ground. “I could help you. Let me help you. Call me.”
Lucio unleashes Paradise Lost, and the light washes over Sandalphon hard, clearing his mind and sharpening his resolve into something temporarily stronger and brighter. He follows it up with Ain Soph Aur, watching with satisfaction as Ecliptica arces twice like brilliant lightning in the space around them, and then dimly realizes it’s still not enough.
“Call me,” Belial sings again, and Sandalphon snaps.
“Fine,” he hisses, and then shouts. “Belial!”
“Thought you’d never ask,” Belial groans, and then the entire clearing is awash with violent pink light and dark feathers as Belial bursts from the crystal in all his bastardous glory.
The wash of feathers means that most of the attacks coming from all directions don’t hit as hard, but it also means that Sandalphon can’t fucking see shit. He grits his teeth in frustration, feeling the dark aura settle around him—Cunning Horseplay, it thrums, as Belial grins at him. “You’re not Singularity, of course, but you’ll do in a pinch,” Belial winks.
“Now, let’s see,” Belial says, voice growing darker and more lecherous. “How about this?”
There’s another flash of violently pink light, and Lucio glows with it for a moment before it fades away as Belial spreads his wings triumphantly. Then it arcs out around them, washing over every single enemy and reverberating so far out that Sandalphon can’t really see where its effects even end. The attack of every single enemy suddenly drops, and so does their defense, Sandalphon’s sword easily cleaving through two enemies where before he cut down one—Death Sentence, he realizes, and grits his teeth.
Belial doesn’t stop there, though. He sweeps down, lips against Sandalphon’s cheek, brushing over it to his ear, before he whispers the next part just for his ears alone. “Eager to taste the forbidden fruit, hm, Sandy? Let’s see you choke on it, then.”
Sandalphon’s wings flare out in a blaze, power suddenly surging through his body, and Belial ascends away from him with laughter that reverberates in the trees around them—then Paradise Lost bursts into helpless radiance around him, followed immediately by Ain Soph Aur, before when his wings give out and he plummets to the ground.
He lands, hard, dimly aware of Lucio calling his name and Belial cackling something about Gran and trying things in the distance.
Sandalphon wonders, sadly, if this is how he dies—exactly like he lived, with Belial shitting on his life and the wrong person wearing Lucifer’s face haunting him to the end.
(But, hey—at least all the enemies are dead.)