Disclaimer: Please see Part 1 Chapter 1...
SHADOWED SOULS Part 5
Chapter 10
Rutherford Sirk howled as the Watcher, Wilson, lunged and managed to grab the ex-Watcher by a leg, inadvertently deflecting Sirk's aim sufficiently enough so he missed Faith as she gave another Oligarch a serious drubbing.
"Abominarchus!" Sirk roared, shaking off Wilson, but then clapped his hand over his mouth in obvious horror as if realising what he'd just said.
For a momentary pulse of a second, nothing happened.
With an awesome bellow, a trashcan next to the elevators writhed and expanded and elongated upwards and outwards into a gargantuan, shaggy biped with a big club, and massive tusks protruding out of it's jaws, whose head brushed the ceiling tiles as it twisted this way and that.
"A troll!" yelled Xander in warning as everyone made for cover.
"Bloody hell! No, it's an ogre!" Spike yelled warningly, grabbing Xander's arm and forcing him back as the young man hefted his preferred weaponry of an MP5 – one of those from the pile in Angel's office, similar to the ones that Robin Wood and Grey Miller had chosen.
Without super-powers but both possessing military experience – Robin's in the original Gulf War as a US Marine and Xander courtesy of Ethan Rayne's Halloween magic – the two men, like Miller, were both more competent with traditional weaponry over the Slayers' martial arts and sword/axe combinations.
"What difference does it make?" Xander demanded, but he obediently crouched down between the two vampires.
"Plenty!" barked Angel. "An ogre's got a thousand pound weight advantage over a troll and they're virtually indestructible! Plus -"
An Oligarch demon uttered a dreadful shriek as it failed to get it's protective shields back up; the ogre simply plucked it from where it floated in mid-air like the other Oligarchs as if on an invisible pedestal and bit it in half with a single chomp.
"They eat anything that moves." Spike finished for his grandsire.
"You idiot!" screeched another Oligarch at Sirk, "What the hell kind of booby trap is an ogre? Get rid of it!"
"I CAN'T!" screamed back Sirk in clear terror as he wiggled his fingers to reinforce his protective shields from the thing.
"OF COURSE YOU CAN'T, YOU TWIT!" Wesley's own impressive lung capacity sent his words echoing around the room clearly even in the din. "Because the booby traps you set when Angel and Spike were out of the way were a Doomsday failsafe you thought you'd never need to use, weren't they Sirk? And even if you ever did have to activate them, you never intended to be within five miles of this building at the time!"
"WES'!" Angel gasped in relief as the Englishman nimbly dodged the ogre's attempted grab, the creature plucking up an easy chair instead and stuffing that into its maw and crunching down with teeth the size of headstones.
"What did you do?" yelled Wesley. "Sirk?"
The sorcerer moaned and looked about him, his eyes wild. Sirk's ego had never accepted and therefore never prepared for the possibility of anything going wrong with his grand master plan, and now it had, he wasn't able to think on his feet and implement damage control.
With an insane shriek, a ceiling fan morphed into a red-eyed pterodactyl with razor sharp teeth; thunderous bellows and mighty screams sounded from more distant parts of the building.
"Shit!" cursed Angel. "He must have transmogrified monsters and scattered them throughout the building!" He glared at Sirk; it was too dangerous to try and get the man, not with his hellish booby traps littering the place.
Ducking as the ogre swung at the attacking pterodactyl with the tree-trunk club, Angel yelled, "Everyone, get clear, NOW!"
Suddenly Spike dived from his position crouched by Angel's side and took down two Watcher soldiers who were about to dive into the far right elevator. "NOT the elevators you idiots!" roared Spike, grabbing one guy's useless MP5s and tossing it at the invitingly open doors – which snapped shut to reveal that that particular elevator had undergone a metamorphosis into a giant Venus fly-trap type thing suspiciously reminiscent of the flesh-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. A second later the blond vampire and the two soldiers ducked as the carnivorous horror spat the MP5 out at a rate of knots, hitting Wilson squarely in the back of the head and sending him crumpling to the floor.
High-pitched shrieks sounded as Dawn, Kennedy, Harmony and Faith dashed up to the upper level and collided with three women coming the other way.
Who really weren't women, as the fact that they had snakes for hair and mouths full of sharp pointed teeth amply testified. Amply being the operative word: barely covered in diaphanous white gossamer gowns, the females were stark naked underneath and improbably – impossibly, in fact - voluptuous. Huge but pertly gravity-defying breasts strained against the translucent material, with perfect wasp-waists and long shapely legs tapering down from plump thighs and fat buttocks, like some soft-porn Tomb Raider fantasy straight out of those Sin City style graphic novels, written and 'drawn' by men with no understanding of how human physiology or the laws of bio-physics worked, namely that a real human woman would need to have a back as thick as an oak-tree and the musculature of an elephant in order to support such an awesome frontage.
Utterly ignoring the two Slayers, Harmony and the human girl as if they weren't there, the snake-women screeched and surged down the steps, the Watcher soldiers in their path taking to their heels as they at least clearly recognised what they were. Andrew Wells stood staring at them in frozen terror until Illyria grabbed him by the back of his trench coat collar and threw him across the room in Angel's direction, tilting its head and regarding the approaching horrors indifferently.
"Mah-mah-mah-mah." whimpered Andrew incoherently as he landed in a heap.
Rolling off the two Watcher soldiers he seemed to be using as a mattress, Spike hutched back next to Angel, grabbing Andrew and hauling him effortlessly into place next to him.
"Maenads, pet," the blond told the trainee Watcher, not unkindly, "ancient Greek monsters – they're wild women who tear human men to pieces and eat their flesh raw. Maenads are actually Ithric demons – they're only ever female. They mate with the man even as they're killing him to reproduce –" he stopped as Andrew's eyes rolled back into his head and he fainted.
Willow, now!
Hearing Buffy's telepathic cry, Angel looked up sharply just as Willow threw up her hands and screamed unintelligibly in a language Angel didn't understand. Instantly the ogre, pterodactyl and Maenads winked out of existence; racing forward, Buffy bounced of a couch and catapulted her body through the air, slamming both booted feet squarely into Rutherford Sirk's chest as he balanced on his invisible mid-air pedestal. Sorcerer and Slayer went crashing down, and Buffy subdued him by the simple process of punching him in the face several times, before dragging him upright and thrusting him at Giles, who caught him in a far from gentle grip as the few remaining Oligarchs abandoned the fight and teleported away.
To be continued in Part 5 Chapter 11
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