Encore

Alucard

It all goes well. Terrifyingly so.

This is a perfect moment for everything to twist and go wrong. But the Night Horde comes in the same numbers it came before and not an endless wave. They aren't invulnerable: they burn where they're splashed by water, they recoil when they try to claw the ice, they're stabbed by pikes and sliced by swords and burst at the strike of his whip. And this time, the screams elsewhere in the city are occasional, rather than a rolling din of suffering.

The big chatty one explodes, like before, with particular force.

"The ground's going to give way now," he tells Sypha. "You know, in retrospect -"

The ground gives way.

He yanks them together with his whip, Sypha slows both their falls with a burst of air, and they hit the ground alive though more roughly than he expects. Oh, he forgot she wasn't very good at that to start.

"This was your plan?" Sypha demands. "And you called mine stupid?"

"You're complete and utterly right," he tells her. "Now we've got to run through the next section so we aren't crushed by wall machines."

"Why?"

"Ask Sleepyhead, I didn't build the fucking things!"

"You insisted on going down this way!"

"It's not my fault, Gresit makes people stupid!" She hadn't been yelling at him back then. Back then it'd been an accident. "I should've explained," he apologizes. "I didn't mean to make you. I just... I was only thinking how it was fast going this way."

She nods grudgingly. "We are in a hurry."

"That too." He steels himself and adds, "We, um, do fall down a bunch more. At the end of the wall machines, the platform crumbles and we have to jump to these giant gears."

"Why are there giant gears?"

"I have no idea. And nothing happens when those come apart either, I don't know, it's magic."

"The gears, which we have to jump onto, are also going to crumble."

"He did a really shitty job of building this place, I told you earlier. But after we get onto the scaffolding next to it, then when that crumbles, we'll fall through another hole and that'll finally bring us to Alucard." Everything had been the same with Sypha, there was no reason to think Alucard's coffin wouldn't open this time. And Sypha was here, she wouldn't take no for an answer. She'd crack the stone in half if he wouldn't come out.

"...what was the cyclops pathway like?"

"I don't know. I didn't check, I was fine with getting back onto solid ground and never going into this architectural clusterfuck again."

"Well," Sypha says, with only a bit of irritated tightness. "Finding the sleeping warrior is what's important. Lead on."

She looks considerably more grumpy after they've fallen through the final hole but by then they're done. She'll forgive Trevor once Alucard pops up and she gets her messiah.

"Come on!" he says, jumping to his feet. Sypha is still lying on the rubble, so he grabs her hand and pulls her upright. "We're here, see? Right over there!"

He runs forward, stomps on the floor panel, Alucard's spooky fucking coffin with its spooky half-filled cannisters of blood hisses, and the lid actually slides off just like it did.

Alucard floats out.

It's a little weird, actually. He remembers this, but it's colored by remembering the rest of it. In a few minutes Alucard will put on a shirt then burrow into his ridiculous black jacket and gloves, clinging to them like a turtle to its shell for the rest of the trip but he's going to insist on fighting half naked right now. He's also going to hiss and snarl and otherwise act completely -