(Of a) Dying Breed

Breaking the News

Silence settled over Dante and Lexi as they left Phineas behind. It had been a lot – the information that Phineas had bestowed upon them. The gravity of the situation, the choice they had been presented with, weighed on her mind.

She glanced at Dante – his brow furrowed, eyes downcast and dark – and cleared her throat. "You okay?"

"Peachy."

Silence, again. Dante's change in demeanor worried her.

"You're not...what he said back there. You're not seriously considering it, are you?"

The questions stretched and grew until it filled the space between them in whispered echoes across the void.

"...I don't know."

Dante couldn't seriously be considering this. "What do you mean you don't know? It's an innocen-."

"Innocent? It's Mundus' child!"

"But it hasn't done anything!"

"And who's saying that it won't, huh? Make sure it doesn't? Killing that thing i-."

"But it doesn't have to come to that! I'm sure Vergil already has a plan fo-."

"Yeah? Well, plans change!"

Lexi could almost see the frustration, exasperation, and confusion rolled off of him in waves, but instead of dealing with them, he reverted to something he was more comfortable with: anger. She knew that she should have backed off in the moment, they were both worked up, but she was too stubborn to drop it. "So, what? You're just okay with k-."

"I don't know!"

Before the argument could continue, the tower came alive. An electric-blue beam shooting out and destroying the bridge, missing them by inches.

Despite his foul mood, Dante forced a grin. "Good. We finally have his attention."

Lexi regarded him with a sideways glance. If Dante thought that their conversation was over, he had another thing coming. First thing was first, though, they still had to work together to take down Barbas; neither of them would be of much use to The Order if they were dead.

Electricity hummed close to Lexi's back as she and Dante rushed between the broken pieces of the bridge left suspended in the air.

Red and blue streaks floated all around them once they managed to break through a screen and into the otherwise white corridor inside of the tower. The Raptor News theme droned low in the background.

The world pixelated as they stepped through another screen at the end of the corridor. The room that they stepped into was dark. Illuminated by a half-transparent floating screen along one wall and half a dozen orbs of soft light set into the floor in a large circle.

A harsh red light bled into the room and with a mechanical howl the bloated face of the propaganda machine himself materialized, cackling as his demonic eyes bore into them.

"This is Bob Barbas, just doin' God's work."

"Hey Bob," Dante called, defiantly flipping the demon the bird. "Put a spin on this!"

Lexi crossed her arms over her chest at Dante's display – it wasn't funny and she didn't think that it was cute and she wasn't going to laugh. She was still upset, dammit.

Barbas' head disappeared only to reappear on-screen behind his nightly news desk. "My personal view on the terrorists is that they are disgusting, degrading, ghastly, sleazy, prurient, and generally nauseating... The worst of them is Dante." Dante nodded along with him, proud to be the main focus of the demon's ire. "The whole world would benefit greatly by his non-existence."