His broken jaw that had been locked shut snapped open so wide and so fast that the hinge popped audibly and then snapped back into place with a crack that made Phei’s ears ring, teeth clacking together hard enough to shear through his own tongue in a fresh fountain of blood.

Fresh piss ran down his thighs. Hot, this time. His body had found one last thimbleful of liquid to lose and lost it immediately, the stench blooming thick and acrid in the already choking air.

His eyes bulged... his pupils blew wide and then wider, expanding until there was nothing left of the ice-chip blue, the whites around them pressurizing until a thin capillary burst in the left one and flooded the sclera with fresh red.

Blood erupted from the corners of both eyes in thick, pulsing ribbons, as though something behind them had ruptured under impossible cosmic pressure. Then from his ears — twin dark trails running down his neck and pooling in the hollow of his collarbone.

Then from his nose, a slow thick drip that turned into a flood, pouring over his lips and chin in a steady scarlet waterfall.

He tried to scream.

Couldn’t.

Whatever had entered him had gone past the place where screams came from and reached somewhere older, deeper — somewhere the part of Jonathan that was still Jonathan had been hiding — and it had dragged that part out into the open and was making it watch.

Inside his skull, the Cosmic Dragon Face unfolded like the birth of a black hole.

Reality fractured.

He was no longer in the bedroom. He was nowhere and everywhere at once — pinned beneath an infinite cosmic weight while every memory of his life was replayed in perfect, excruciating pain that targedted his very soul.

His soul was stretched across the void, flayed layer by layer, each nerve ending exposed to the raw, burning indifference of cosmic judgment. Pain without end. Helplessness without mercy. He was dying — he knew he was dying — heart stuttering, lungs seizing, brain hemorrhaging — but the Dragon wouldn’t let him.

It held him right on the razor edge of death, forcing him to feel every millisecond of the abyss.

His tongue bit through between his teeth with a wet crunch. Fresh blood bubbled up from his mouth, mixing with the foam and the piss and the shit and the tears of blood until his entire face was a glistening mask of ruin.

And then — without another sound — the seizure stopped.

His body went limp in the middle of a convulsion, collapsing sideways into his own filth like a puppet whose strings had simultaneously all been cut by a god who had grown bored. His eyes stayed open.

Pupils blown wide as saucers. Blood leaking from every hole in his head in slow, steady pulses.

Still breathing. Barely. The shallow, insect-like breaths of something that had forgotten what breathing was for — a broken, ruined thing kept alive only by the Dragon’s whim.

Phei hadn’t moved.

His face hadn’t shifted. Same smile. Same tilt of the head. Same patient crouch.

Whatever the DxD Element had just done, it had done it entirely inside Jonathan — and Phei, on the outside, had felt nothing but a small, almost pleasant warmth in his palm, like the sun kissing his skin.

He turned to Eira.

Raised one eyebrow.

"...What did it do?"

Eira shrugged with the effortless grace of a being who could have answered the question exactly and had decided, for her own reasons, not to.

"I don’t know exactly, Master. But proceed. Whatever he saw... it seems he saw enough."

Phei sighed.

Looked down at the man who’d been one of the most powerful legal minds in America less than a day ago, and who now lay twitching in his own piss and blood and shit with blood leaking from every hole in his head like a broken faucet.

Disgusting.

He pressed his thumb to Jonathan’s forehead — lips curling with open revulsion at the damp, clammy, blood-slick skin that still felt warm from the cosmic violation — and intoned the next words without ceremony, voice flat and final.

"Cosmic Dragon Slave Mark."

Purple-void light bloomed from his thumb.

It was not warm, not gentle or the golden-green of Healing Touch, nor the soft amethyst of the Mark that had bloomed on Roxanne’s underbreast.

This was a color that should not exist — something the human eye registered as purple only because it had no other category to file it under, a hue that made the brain scream wrongness.

The light poured from Phei’s thumb into Jonathan’s forehead in a slow, inexorable stream — and then the real hell began.

The mark did not simply brand him.

It invaded.

Jonathan’s body, already a ruin on the razor’s edge of death, convulsed as the purple-void light sank into his skull like molten needles forged from the abyss itself.

Every nerve ending in his brain lit up at once in white-hot, soul-shredding agony.

The Cosmic Dragon Face that had already flayed his mind open now fused with the mark, dragging the last screaming fragments of Jonathan Montgomery through an endless cosmic forge.

Flesh bubbled and blistered beneath the thumb.

Bone beneath the skin cracked and re-fused in real time, the sound like wet gravel being ground under a boot. His eyes — already leaking blood — bulged wider as the light bored straight through his forehead and into the soft meat of his mind, rewriting every synapse with dragonfire and void.

He tried to scream again. Nothing came out but a wet, gurgling choke as his throat seized, vocal cords fusing and splitting and fusing again in the purple inferno.

Wings of void-light spread across his temples and fangs bared themselves across his brow.

The dragon’s head burned itself into his skull like a seal pressed into living meat, the edges crisping, smoking, eating down through skin and muscle and bone until the mark sat directly against the surface of his brain.

Every memory of power, every courtroom victory, every woman he’d broken, every deal he’d made — all of it was dragged screaming into the purple maw and remade as absolute, helpless devotion.

Jonathan remained motionless for a long, suspended heartbeat — a heartbeat that felt like centuries of conscious annihilation.

Then—

He inhaled. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

It was wet as it was loud and violent, ragged, full-lung intake of a corpse being yanked back across the threshold it had already crossed by claws made of pure cosmic cruelty.

His lungs re-inflated like bellows being kicked open by a giant — chest expanding so hard the cartilage between his ribs snapped and re-knitted with audible wet cracks that echoed through the ruined room.

Spit and blood and thick ropes of mucus sprayed upward in a fine mist as the air rushed past his torn vocal cords.

His eyes rolled back so far the whites showed, then snapped forward again, the pupils contracting from blown-wide to pinpoint in less than a second as the Dragon Face seared the final brand into his soul — a leash that would never break.

His spine arched violently.

Vertebrae popped back into proper alignment in a long, sequential ripple — a crackling sound like knuckles cracking, except it ran from his tailbone all the way up to the base of his skull with the wet pop-pop-pop of bones being forced into submission.

The kneecaps that had sat off-center realigned themselves with a wet click that sent fresh lightning through nerves still raw from the earlier torture.

His broken fingers straightened with audible snaps, the nails growing back in — not slowly, not naturally, but in a single rapid bloom of fresh keratin that felt like a hundred tiny knives pushing outward from beneath the beds.

His teeth re-rooted into their proper sockets with a series of small, ceramic taps that grated against raw gums. The patches of mismatched skin smoothed.

The bite marks on his neck faded to nothing.

The blood at his eyes and ears and nose dried, flaked, and fell away as black dust.

Within four seconds of the inhale, Jonathan Montgomery’s body was whole again. Cleaner than he’d been in years, actually — every old golf injury, every poorly-set rib from his rugby days at Yale, every soft sign of a fifty-six-year-old body in expensive decline — gone, burned away in the purple forge.

But the mind and soul...

The mind had been broken and his soul rebuilt into something that belonged to Phei.

He sat bolt upright as though someone had jerked him upward by an invisible chain bolted straight into his soul.

He blinked once.

Twice.

His hands rose to his own face — touching his cheeks, his lips, his forehead — checking, with the dazed disbelief of a man verifying his own existence, that he was still there.

His fingers found the new mark burned into his forehead and stilled, tracing the raised, pulsing dragon head with something between reverence and the last dying scream of the man he used to be.

His gaze found Phei.

And something — something enormous, something Jonathan Montgomery had never experienced in his entire life of commanding courtrooms and dictating outcomes and buying judges by the half-dozen — settled over him with the quiet, crushing inevitability of a collar clicking shut around his throat forever.

He did not hesitate, much less struggle.

He did not even blink again.

Jonathan Montgomery rolled forward off his heels, pressed his forehead flat against the ruined carpet in total, abject prostration, spread his hands out on either side of his head like a man awaiting execution — and in a voice that came out clear and steady and completely his own for the first time in weeks, yet utterly hollow of anything that had once been Jonathan Montgomery —

— called out one word.

"Master."