Author's Note: To Helen Fegan and 'Cat', if you're still out there, the e-mail addresses you gave me for my posting list are no longer valid. I need new ones if you still want the posting update messages. And while I'm here, if there's anyone out there who wants to be added to my posting list, just let me know, and give me an e-mail address where you will receive a message when I've posted my latest. And yeah, yeah, I'm already hearing the " ...if that guy ever posts at all..." mumbling from behind your computer screen. Hey! I'm busy, damnit! And these are big stories!

78 - "Red Sands Part 2: War"

Emerald green beheld an ocean, aimlessly drifting in a calm, misted crest. They were eyes reflective of infancy and innocence, yet deep within the lucid jade burned a power beyond any mortal wisdom and experience, and nestled within the chubby, often-soiled palms of a mere human child. Ancient stone blurring in a furious stride, and distant portals, etched into the jigsaw pattern of the castle walls and holding behind sealed barriers the breath of nature, brushed across the glassy Hunter surface of his eyes, with feathery strands of brilliant fire nodding up and down in time with his step.

Alexander followed his mother down the corridor, his gaze directed elsewhere, and vacant, as if he sensed something greater. Fay blood fused with human now clashed and fought, and its long velvety journey through his veins now became coarse, almost wanting to burst from the winding trails through his diminutive body. It bubbled within his throat, and confused the child with the taste of dust and death having come from nowhere.

The call was strong, the voice was infusing into a subconscious ruled by dreams of toys and games and the scent of confection. There was a sensation of not yet pain, but a hollow chill having spread through his torso and eyes that unnerved him. And Alexander Xanatos did not like being unnerved.

"Hurry up, Alex." intruded a voice that somehow, though soft, and unassuming, won out over what crawled and scraped with the frigid touch of invisible talons inside the base of his skull. It was Fox, holding back her rapid stride in order for her son, who trailed behind with a stare turned vacuous, to catch up. The former television star held a young Trinity to her chest, and aimed with a maddening purpose towards the castle's main computer room.

"Let me go!"

Fox barely allowed the adjoining, argumentative tone to bother her, with so much threatening to bring destruction all around them. She merely tightened her grip on the slender arm and dragged a squirming, stubborn woman behind her.

"Oh come on!" she whined, a voice shimmied through a willowy neck and transformed into a shrill complaint. A tenor melodiously feminine, meant in all purpose to swan lightly across the air, though now coming across as an incessantly annoying shriek. "This is scoop of the century!! The gargoyles versus the Guild. If I'm going to be locked up here, I might as well take advantage!"

Fox sneered, curling pouting lips into a feline growl. "Advantage of a battle that may just decide the fate of an entire clan?!" she snapped back, dragging Nicole St. John by the wrist, forcing the young woman to follow.

Nicole fumed, "Excuse me for trying to make the best of my illegal imprisonment." She dug her heels into the floor bringing both women to an abrupt halt, with Fox nearly spilling the young, winged hybrid onto the stones. "But I'm a reporter, and I have..."

"A duty to report the truth." Fox finished, none too impressed with the constant drone Nicole often produced, thinking she was indeed capable of spouting truth and justice and any other excuse she could get to highlight her name in the media spotlight. "I heard the speech about justifying exposing the clan before." she hissed, caressing a snarl through her throat and an emerald fire in her eyes. "That's probably more detrimental to them than even the Guild."

"How will anyone ever know what has happened up here without proof?" argued Nicole. "And proof that isn't doctored by the bad guys?"

"Or doctored by you..." the billionairess offered, eliciting a wrinkle running through Nicole's features. "Besides, step outside and you're immediately labeled a traitor. You want a bullet through the stomach like Maria or through the head like Sara?" she passed to her a horrifying visual, the reporter having seen firsthand the death of Sara Jasper. The stench of blood and analgesic that had clung to her dreams, and twisted them into nightmares, and what Nicole had to fight so hard to cleanse herself of in order to stay objective. "Passing off your disappearance was easy enough," Fox continued, wrenching her long nails into Nicole's wrist, a trick learned from her past training to force compliance, "but explaining how a barely famous reporter was killed inside our home will be a little more problematic."

Dusky eyes widened, to the reality of her situation, and to Fox's purposeful iciness towards her. "That's not funny."

"It wasn't meant to be. The only reason I'm trying so hard to safeguard your pathetic existence is to further spare this family unwanted attention." Fox lowered a thin brow. "Ironic, isn't it?"

"Interesting choice of words, Fox. You consider those creatures family?"

"You're damned right I do!!" snarled the billionairess, almost insulted, as Trinity felt the tremor rippling through her carrier's chest in the power of her bellows. "And if you do anything to harm them in any way," Fox turned and yanked Nicole close, risking her own clandestinely ailing health when allowing her temper to flair, her blood to run hot, "you will see just how powerful my money and stature really are when you completely disappear from the face of this planet."

Nicole relented slightly and allowed Fox to guide her on, swallowing the boorish remark readily poised on the tip of her tongue. "Maybe I'll stay inside for now..."

"About time you proved humanity at least has SOME intelligence."

"Auntie Fox?" Trinity then chirped, slowing Fox's stride with an inquiring twitter, and ending a war between two stormfronts equally powerful and threatening a war themselves. "Where mommy an' daddy?"

Fox soothed a moistened breath through full lips, "They're...coming home soon, Trini." She wove a false truth, if only to spare her charge the reality in which her father had suffered.

Nicole noticed Fox's hand fall away from her arm, to stroke gently the ebony strands of hair draped like a midnight mountain cascade over the child's elusively horned brow and face, and shoulders wrapped in chocolate wing. The fact the entire clan had been informed of Goliath's condition through their commlinks, the fact he had endured such massive injuries, and in turn suffered a child's heart, barely served to tip the scales in which she weighed her choice of approval or condemnation. "Does Trinity know about Goliath?" she whispered to Fox.

"No." she answered flatly. "How do you tell a girl not even two years old that her daddy's been maimed?" As Fox approached the door to the main computer room, she placed her hand to the identification pad and allowed the security system to breed a thin shaft of light traveling across her palm and fingerprints. "Front page material, huh, Nic?"

"Cheap shot, Fox."

Fox merely pushed the reporter through the opened door, and into a darkness both tepid and having engulfed the windowless chamber. "Just get inside." Fox ordered, turning to search for her son, his presence lacking once more as he had drifted from her side. "Alex!"

He was standing across from her, somnolent, slowly training a weary pair of eyes to the lights above as if to look out beyond the layers of ancient stone. Beyond the skeleton welded from girders of steel holding together a structure venerable and well beyond its life expectancy, and the darkened, churning veil of stormclouds to see the stars with blessed faerie sight.

"Alex..." Her tone withered and trailed to but a whisper when realizing her child, the blood of queen Titania and the purebred genes of the Xanatos lineage taken human form, was sensing something far more than the impending battle above. And soon, his gaze traveled lethargically around and eventually settled upon her, and as if an electrical shock a chill ran the entire length of her spine with a chilled, eerie flame when under his dissecting scrutiny. It was as if he was somehow peering directly into her soul with abilities beyond simple tricks of levitation and removing souls, and she wondered, if he truly knew what ailed her. "Let's go, kiddo," she prompted quickly, reaching a hand towards him and splaying her fingers to tempt the child to her side, "we have to get inside."

"How come?"

"It's safer inside."

"Because of the bad men?"

"Yeah," Fox echoed, treating a child as almost an equal in intelligence but with the lexis he would favor, "the bad men."

Her fingers stroked the empty air in a gesture beckoning towards him, and Alex fanned away the dribblings of hair having escaped across his brow and into his eyes, seemingly hesitant in being constrained. Fox contorted her features for but a split second and yet Alex still picked up on the vestiges of frustration she would flaunt. With the comparable power of a nuclear winter held just beneath a swathing of fragile flesh, he yielded the distant impression of pain and sadistic ecstasy for his mother. "Kay." he relented far too reluctantly, his voice traced with the hollowed concave of magic. He stepped through the arched threshold of darkness contrasted by severe artificial light, and Fox sealed the doorway with the heavy steel barrier sliding into place, trapping the foursome within the secured chamber almost directly in the middle of the castle.

Placing Trinity into the massive leather chair, the child suddenly aware of the lingering scent of her father and thus calmed some when surrounded by his aroma swirling in an unseen haze, Fox turned around and quickly roused to life the slumbering machines with a single command.

"Did I mention I'm slightly claustrophobic?" Nicole whined, the reporter roving eyes still cognizant of a room she had never been allowed access until the most extreme of circumstance.

"Shut up, St. John." Fox waved her hands over the computer keyboard and powered the numerous monitors, to gain a better vantage to what was happening outside, spurred by the faint traces of yet another terrifying sound confused with thunder. "I'm trying to get a visual outside."

As Alexander drifted towards Trinity, the young hybrid cloaking her small form within the leather suede of her wings, Nicole noticed a distant thrumming over the low drone of the massive computer banks. "You hear that?" she whispered. "Sounds like...gunfire..."

****************************************

Fire erupted, thunder swayed, the volleys were in perfect, metallic sync and spilled over the edges of the parapets an angry scream, echoing for miles when danced across the dark ocean of swirling, lightning-streaked clouds. They scattered, and hid as best they could in a yawning courtyard slick and precarious and crossed with trails of fire and energy. The Wyvern weaponry controlled by a singular mind, a consciousness born and bred by wires and cold computer banks interlaced with the most modern of technology, teased their aim towards the Guild members, weaving deadly shots almost playfully past the fragile human flesh.

They stopped suddenly and huffed a breath of smoke into the air from hot barrels, allowing the Guild to hide themselves as best they could.

"Those were warning shots." warned Mother, standing and drifting mechanically, ethereally towards the Guild member she deemed the leader, being the only one who dared speak and now edged up in safety against a hollowed crevasse. "I assure you, the next volley will not."

Beneath the featureless mask of dark intent, he licked dry lips made so by the mechanical breathing system feeding filtered, tasteless air. "What makes you think such toys will rid you of our presence?!" he shouted from his hiding place, as the guns shivered in almost a human anxiety, and darted upon their hydraulic arms with sophisticated sensors hunting for any moving, humanoid target. Some hid successfully, others held an uncertain and risky stalemate with their own guns, similar to Black's large, long firearms, held against the cannons. "I have almost two hundred soldiers unloaded, and plenty more ready to give their lives!"

Mother lifted her light-bred body from the fountain, drifting into the center of the courtyard. The targeting lasers of the guns passed through the matronly hologram and continued their acquisition of the first wave of Guild soldiers, numbering nearly a hundred and fifty, and the brunt backed against a lower level platform opening into a backdrop of low-lying, lavender mists. "If you have not noticed by now, this castle is well-prepared to defend itself."

"As are we." he spit, rising from the cloak of shadows he used to conceal himself from the weaponry now idle, but nonetheless threatening to his forces.

"I give you a choice," Mother continued, "leave now, or face destruction. I do not wish to harm anyone, unless I am left with no alternative."

Black surveyed the situation with the eyes of a commander and strategist, playing the power of his forces against weaponry he was perhaps only partially expecting. The hidden cannons had opened up unto almost every main section of the exterior concourse, and his two attack helicopters held a rigid pattern surrounded by twenty steel clan robots and the Cyber-Biotics drones. Any other man would perhaps concede defeat in order to safeguard the men and women under him. Any other man, without a purpose spurred by death and pain. "Like the crusades a thousand years before, my dear lady," Black responded crystal clear, even with a stream of crimson laser having found a target upon his chest, "our quest is deemed almost sacred. And thus, it shall be followed through without hesitation."

"You are blind," Mother stated firmly, "and outgunned three to one."

The mask concealed a smile, unbeknownst to the computer generated entity Black had every reason to believe he could still win this fight, even in the face of such revealed weaponry. "You don't actually think I would bring destruction to three hundred of my people, do you?" he swathed lightly, a voice beguiling and tinged endlessly with arrogance. "Without a trump card?" Mother watched him, as he slowly moved from the crook having disguised his form and kept him from being the target of the Wyvern guns. His arms were held upwards, but however prepared to defend himself. "We now know the extent of your defenses, and thus, can now demonstrate ours."

A bright strip revealed itself along both of his forearms, and a sophisticated circuitry crackled with swelling energy. The strips charged on each of the Guild members' jackets, and expanded outwards into translucent shields, and a glaze of energy formfitting to their clothing and skin. The helicopters hovering just beyond the cornices and surrounded by the aerial defenses glimmered, a sheeting of energy coating the sleek steel hides. Even the rain slid off from these protecting buffers, but in pure technological fashion, Mother merely computed the new variable among a thousand others floating through her computer banks.

"I am sorry," she revealed, forging an emotion as best she could to mimic sadness, "I am programmed to cherish all forms of life, but I am also programmed to safeguard this clan at ANY cost." Her weaponry stealthily targeted the larger groups huddled together and activating their shields, and she moved the aerial forces hovering above into a more encompassing position as if a chessboard. The pieces falling well into place. "One last chance."

"The beasts are here," Black countered, "and thus we fight."

"Interesting creed. I hope it is worth your deaths."

"To rid the world of those who threaten it," Black released a hardened breath through the slits in his mask, and aimed his guns towards the nearest cannon turret, "it is." He pulled the triggers, unleashing a hail of deadly gunfire and signaling to the rest of his forces to commence. Nearly two hundred men and women, their dark suits sheathed in energy, opened up a loud, piercing fire from their hands towards the Wyvern defenses. Unassuming firearms, both bullets and energy beams alike, penetrated stone and steel far too deeply to be of standard issue, and in seconds, a few drones above and an entire cannon were rendered useless.

Mother hesitated, but seeing the damage wrought on both the courtyard and in the air, the attack craft slicing through the steel clan, the advanced robots unable to pierce the energy shields the helicopters boasted. Lost in a swirl of strategy and computer commands, Mother set into motion the extensions of her very self, a consciousness alive within the castle walls, her very essence being assaulted. The cannons chose their targets and fired, energy beams strafed across the courtyard and catching a few Guild members in the initial volley with the main turrets covering the courtyard.

One young man fell into the open, and into the targeting scanners of the left flanking cannon. It fired relentlessly, and paralyzed by the fear of dying he crouched into a ball and allowed his energy shield to deflect the heavy blows evident through the armor. But under such pressure, his energy field was pushed to its limits and soon expunged from the duress of protecting flesh far too frail, as the Wyvern cannon seized upon the opportunity and opened a hole through his back. A smoldering wound remained where a chest and lungs once rested, and he was toppled coldly, the cannon moving on immediately to other targets.

Mother noticed in a split second the young man's corpse fall, but suppressed what subprocessors and microchips produced an emotional programming in order to fulfill an encoding single-minded, and persistent at all costs. She returned to her battle, her resources almost entirely dedicated to this battle by force, with such an incredible amount of information saturating her systems. As her holographic form stood within the bedlam spilling across the stones, she controlled the cannons on every side of the castle, and the aerial robots playing a rebellious game throughout the clouds, and quickly shunted power and runtime to her defensive systems, shutting down non-essential machinery and support within the castle.

They were well trained indeed, the Guild, the chosen attack force sinking their bullets and energy blasts into steel and stone, and reloading either clips or energy packs by quickly shunting their weapons into the holsters on their belts, and automatically replenishing their ammunition. The pilots were undeniably veterans by the way they reined their helicopters with a touch both delicate and eerily precise, like drivers of chariots handling, nay taming powerful steeds. And with the sturdy shield generators buried within the thick hulls, giving off a crackle of energy, an entity to crawl and glisten across the raven skin, they swept past the Steel Clan and small, golden-painted drones and deflected the laser beams and energy blasts all too easily.

Stone crumbled and exploded, entire towers had chunks ripped from their foundations and sprayed into the air a dangerous rain of limestone, and the battle only a few minutes old greatly took its toll. Black watched from behind his mask the castle degenerate into trailing fires spread across the spacious quad and turrets, and almost smiled in the destruction of a nest breeding sadistic, feral creatures that threatened his species and very way of life, drawing devastation towards them.

And in the midst, an underling approached his leader quickly, a communications liaison between the away team and their secluded home base stumbling into the crook where Black found a temporary refuge to reload. "Sir!!" he screamed, his youthful voice though distorted through the mask's air filters, trembling with apprehension. "We have reports from our outside forces! An entire section of Manhattan is under attack...by some kind of enormous, glowing creatures..."

Black turned to face the younger operative, searching for any deception in eyes behind the frosted slits beneath a molded brow of carbon-plastic, but discovering instead alarm, that to match his voice and heaving chest. "Any resistance?"

"A military contingent has been called in to cordon and evacuate several blocks surrounding the destruction, and a few attack planes have converged on the creatures."

"Send the remainder of Echo squad to help." he ordered, far too calm it seemed when informed of such news, the owner of a cold heart. "The rest of us have a mission to complete."

****************************************

Another explosion rattled the walls, and shook his wings, a tremor rippling through the thick, membranous tissue of his wings tensed and held anxiously above his shoulders. Othello grimaced, his great, crisp hearing drowned and dulled by claps of thunder both natural and artificial. "Our home is being taken apart piece by piece." the stolid warrior grumbled, he like the rest of the clan forced to wait inside lest they reveal the greatest secret Wyvern held. He was tense, evident by his claws unconsciously carving trails across the stone archway he rested against. "Should we not aid Mother?"

"No." came Brooklyn's terse reply, studying the monitor on which displayed the war just outside.

"We cannot just sit here!" argued Shadow, his wings rustling with an anticipatory shudder. "One of this clan has already died! Are you going to ensure the rest of us suffer a similar fate?!"

"No one shows their face unless absolutely necessary." Brooklyn quieted the ninja only barely. "We need to not exist right now, unless they somehow breach Mother's defenses...and I'm well aware about what happened to my sister." He needled his voice, his grief over losing the clever sister kept simmering just beneath his skin, and shared in similar experience with the others, mourning silently. "But to keep the rest of you alive, I'm forced to forget about her death right now and concentrate on keeping us hidden."

Shadow ground his features, his stance and proximity denoting the basis for a challenge. But he instead backed away grudgingly, allowing the chance for Sata to move into position. "Far be it for me to question my leader," her tone trickled with a cynicism unusual for her, another war on a much more intimate front, "but is this quest to now conceal us what you believe is best for our long-term survival, or a temporary mending to a much larger problem?" Her words struck true, perhaps a more painful wound than if it had been a clean cut by her sword. "Or is it perhaps your own fear of failure keeping us from defending our home?"

Brooklyn deflected the casual barb turned warning to redirect his eyes towards the monitor.

The others waited for any outcome, Desdemona pressed against Othello's chest, despondent ever since she had heard the clever sister's sudden demise over the commlink channel shared throughout the clan, but none would come.

Lexington crouched on a corner embankment, a rolling arch sloped from the ceiling supports, his talontips pressed together broodingly, and his electronic eyes shaded by a lowered brow studying between the battle what made equals of the Guild against the Wyvern defenses. "Their weaponry is amazing," he whispered, his attention focused on the energy shields and firearms, "I've never seen shields like those...even Xanatos Enterprises and Nightstone Unlimited don't have anything like that outside of the research stage."

"Which means this Guild has a few connections," Brooklyn mused, a scowl tracing his beak, "or they're being funded by a larger source."

"And what larger force would that be?"

The scowl deepened.

****************************************

Thousands of years ago, they ruled. Whether gods, or fay pretenders alongside the true deities and playing with humanity for their own enjoyment, they were once worshipped, and helped to shape the course of humanity ever since the lower species first walked erect. They shattered continents in their wars, and fashioned the future paths for which those weaker could walk. Now the greatest of humanity's accomplishments were being torn apart by a slim essence of each somehow scavenged and given brief, powerful existence by a madman. Apep and Menhit, Sakmet and Septu, Egyptian myth became all too real as buildings crumbled beneath their near impervious forms and massive size.

Traffic backed up for an entire mile on either side of the street, with the city-dwellers fleeing for their lives through an entanglement of destroyed vehicles and fragments of buildings raining down from the sky. It was chaos on Earth, doomsday, the end of the world as prophesized by the less stable in mind on crude cardboard signs, and all confined to three city blocks being quickly evacuated. A shadow of the dragon king, the great serpent Apep trawled through the abandoned, flaming wrecks, feeding mercilessly on anything that moved. Septu waged a war, using his spear to cleave buildings, to deprive them of fascia both modern and conservative and gain access to their contents. Menhit hunted joyfully, the lioness playing with the structures above as if a jungle, she the vindictive queen. Ejected of their conscious minds by the method of their rebirth, they moved and acted and released upon the city center their one singular purpose purely on instinct.

War, anger, destruction and pestilence, Manhattan descended into sheer hell.

And its salvation at best came, as fighter planes of the U.S. military suddenly emerged from the thick veil of clouds above, circling the recreated gods in order to better see their target, and perhaps dispute their suspicions of the strange orders given. They chose the god alone and furthest from the rest, Set, the strange humanoid thing stalking with a hunched back and an oddly rhythmic, bobbing gait. With their targets confirmed, the airborne trio of metallic hunters descended in between the taller buildings, a daredevil decline between the most precious of obstacles to improve their chances to engage the creature, and let loose several Sidewinder missiles in a plume of smoke having erupted from underneath their wings. But they impacted near futilely on the creature's chest, the sapphire energy void distorting with waves of energy nearly bursting, yet holding obstinately firm. "Damnit! This thing is tough..." one pilot muttered angrily into his communications link. "We need reinforcements!" Broken from his rampage, Set howled in a scream erupting from the pain in his chest, and lunged and swiped at the planes skimming through the spires and dodging buildings at speeds greater than winds irritable and provoked into a wild tempest.

Two were fortunate to escape into the rising, speared warren of Manhattan, another was not. As the others pulled up and fled for their safety and that of the unyielding sterling monoliths that fell into their diverging paths, nearly swiping their wings across the mirrored glass panes, the third fighter plane fell prey to Set's claws scoring through the steel underbelly and completely severing the starboard wing.

"Hull's been compromised!! I'm going down!" The pilot struggled to keep his plane in the air, but the craft instead foundered, and with the damage he suffered his fatal trajectory was undeniably tolling to an occupied city structure. "Mayday!! Mayday!!" he screamed, and without sufficient lift, clipped the side of the building and took with his fatal plunge pieces of steel and glass, spreading into the air a stream of shards and jagged chunks of embellishment made debris ripped from the structure's exterior. Set watched the annoyance deflect back into the street, the damaged fighter plane leaving a flaming trail and gutting the asphalt, feeding a ball of fire erupting and washing against another building.

With his instincts and predatory nature only barely sated, Set moved on, carving his path of destruction.

****************************************

And beneath the false gods' singular, vainglorious notice, hidden into the winding, murky hollows lay one suffered by their forced re-appearance to this plane, if only but a mindless piece of them. Though they had drifted from sight, with only the sounds of their destruction reverberating between the spires, it was enough to spur both sorrow and revenge.

The sobs shook his great form, through her fingertips pressed to his skin she could feel his body shudder with hoarse, gasping breaths, and she could do nothing to alleviate the pain he experienced upon watching what seemed to be the violent death of his sister both cherished and beloved. Elisa draped over her husband in sympathy and exhaustion, crying too, and trying if anything to steady his form, lest he collapse and never again achieve the strength to rise. Mindful not to graze the graceful swell of her hip against the two hideous gashes running down almost the entire length of his back and haphazardly bandaged, she curled ever so gently her arms around his neck, and lay her lips to his sodden, sable tress made darker by the drenching rain. "Goliath," she whispered, feeling his taloned hand clutch upon her forearm, perhaps to remind himself of what indeed he had left, "maybe she survived, maybe she somehow got out of there..."

He glanced upwards to the building's spire almost completely destroyed by the rebirth of Set, now left a smoldering ruin in his wake and sporadically vomiting bursts of electrical fed flame and smoke. A vertical laceration left by the false deity's descent opened up the gutted structure like a fatal wound, with broken, blackened girders dangling outwards from exposed office floors. "...n-no one could have...survived that..." he admitted openly with a voice of granite scraped over steel, his hoped crushed, and maybe beyond any redeeming. "...not even a gargoyle..."

Elisa dragged her fingers across the twin trails drawn from eye to chin, wiping away the tears he had shed, though merged and diluted into the rainwater sheeted across his skin. "I'm so sorry. I know you...loved her..."

Goliath's features contorted, and anger reigned in ebon eyes frosted by liquid crystal, the tears though dried by the torrid heat of rage forcing adrenaline through the bloodstream weakened by tremendous loss, a dangerous symmetry in his wounded state. "...loved her...yes...dearly..." He gritted his teeth against the numbing pain having spread across his entire backside, and the narcosis settling over him and forcing upon him the delirious effects of severe fatigue. But only his sheer will would keep him going now. "...and I will be damned..." his voice grew in strength, from a whisper to a growl evaporating the droplets of rain passed through the stream of breathed fire, "...if I let her sacrifice go to waste..." He staggered to his feet, a shaken journey to rest at a height of over seven feet, though stunted by a hunched, tormented posture. "...we must...stop these so-called gods..."

A veiled brow rose in surprise, beneath the rain-slicked threads of raven adhering to tawny skin. Elisa shook her head, seeing her mate tramp away towards the ruined DeMoro building, his stride tortured, and every step labored to the point of near collapse. She had seen this behavior before from accident victims, he was delusional, and a danger to himself in such a traumatized mental state. "Goliath, you can't!" she called after him, this urge to blindly protect only compelled by hallucination, fatigue and the anesthetizing shock of losing his sister. "You're severely wounded, we're alone and all communications to the castle have been blocked somehow! I'm getting static, the Guild must have..."

"I WILL NOT SURRENDER MYSELF!!!" he screamed, an empty growl bellowed over the raging storms, and perchance enough to reveal his presence in the emptied side street. If he would stop, he would topple, his balance impaired by his wounds and the lack of majestic wing. In his near-deranged condition, to him, if he were to falter in his duty, he would be not the leader he was chosen to be, and thus he staggered on, away from Elisa, and towards where Sobek's gods unleashed their power, blindly. "I am...a protector of this city!" he continued, peering with white eyes under a bruised brow swelling and bloody, and over his shoulder without a wing to impede upon his sight. "...I cannot...I will not give up...I will die first..."

"YOU ARE DYING!!! Or can't you see the trail of blood you're leaving behind?!!" Elisa snarled, doing anything to safeguard the life her husband deemed unworthy to save, her boots slicked in his blackened fluids spilled and diluted with the streams of water washing across the street. "You can't wage war against gods, or whatever the hell these things are, without dying!! Without leaving your family and your children without your presence! You saw them, you saw what they're capable of!! It's too big now! And you're nothing but a germ for them to sneeze out!" Elisa drifted closer, cautiously, with Goliath having stopped with his mate's stirring word's drilling through the impenetrable coda. "New York has better resources to fight this than a pregnant woman with a knife and a gargoyle slowly bleeding to death with a psychotic immortal after him. How much more of yourself can you give before you're dead?" Her eyes pleaded, her posture as well, her hand outstretched towards him signified her desperate want to protect him, from even his own stubbornness. "Please, Goliath, we have to get you somewhere safe...please...before you die."

The gargoyle lurched to a stop when ultimately swayed by his wife's desperate pleas, his breaths strenuous and grunted out in quick, shunted rasps. His shoulders heaved in time with his chest beneath the canvas bandage, and from his wife to the well-lit boulevard just down from the corner his eyes played his choice.

"Please." she echoed the despair clenching her heart. "For your children, your clan...for me. We NEED you."

"...my children..." he whispered, seeing as Elisa caressed a hand over the shirt drenched and tracing the slender curves of her stomach, now lithe, firm, but still to expand with the spark of life. Goliath turned and stared at her, and tenuously, reluctantly, started back towards her. "...our children..."

And though the strident spatter of rain against every surface would distract a sound indistinct and unintended, the alleyway across from them would leak a growl of disgust, a fusion unlike anything ever heard. A faint growl made certain his presence, a predator's bravado allowed unintentionally to filter from the darkness. A scream erupted, a war cry, and a shadow followed the shrill, echoing bay, reminiscent of wolves under a full moon dancing across the forest ceiling. Led by two golden embers flaring in violent rage and streaking the length of the gritty metropolitan corridor, it emerged and charged with deadly intent towards the couple with lightning speed fed by the thrill of the hunt, and the tempting, delicious scent of his adversary's spilled blood.

Goliath turned only to have that shadow completely envelop him, and impact upon his chest with unimaginable force with two arms as if cannons, perhaps even more powerful than his own. Before the chance to grunt in pain or shock or surprise, before the breath was brutally stolen from his lungs in a pained wheeze, and before a stunned Elisa could physically react to the rush of wind bouncing the weighty tress littered about her shoulders, he was lifted from his feet and carried as a conquered prize across the street and into an awaiting brick wall. The wounds he suffered now screamed in searing agony, every nerve damaged by the loss of his wings spreading lucid fire through his back.

Sobek propelled Goliath back first through the wall, using the lavender gargoyle's incredibly resilient structure as a living battering ram, and hoping to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible to the man who had managed to defeat him at every turn. Even as he collapsed the wall of the building, a gaping hole in brick, wood and mortar, Sobek kept his rapid stride constant and relentless, with Goliath entrapped within his arms, ramming the gargoyle through every obstacle and gutting the building in an unbroken path. He burst through the other side with Goliath mewling in pain, Sobek's blood strewn with immortal fay magicks and pumping so furiously as to create a hypnotic, aggressive cadence, a beat irresistible and making the slightly deranged dangerously psychotic. With his maddening journey, he had carried Goliath straight through the brownstone and into a larger, and dangerously crowded street.

Those panicking and taking refuge from their city under attack were now stunned to see a hideously formed creature somehow emerge into their world in a cloud of broken brick and dust. The police officers directing crowd control too halted their task of seeing to the bystanders' safety when the warriors made their private war daringly public, staring as Sobek hauled Goliath towards a van parked directly in front of him. He never slowed, even when piercing Goliath through the vehicle's steel skin, folding the van in two and heaving the metal behemoth from its place. Sobek pulled away from the furrowed, twisted metal, and merely puffed a breath from the exertion. "Thank you for slowing down." he crowed slickly, seeing Goliath fight as tenaciously against unconsciousness as he did the Egyptian. "It made the hunt so much easier."

He noticed the humans having littered the streets and moving to safety from a neighborhood threatened by the supernatural forces he indeed had unleashed, and even a cross of his gaze across their delicate forms pressed them back in fear. He fed upon the terror, he immersed himself in the collective horror they reflected in their wide, glassy eyes like the never before felt breath of sunlight. He licked his bony lips in the choices presented. "Cattle."

"Freeze!!" An urban-bred hero tried his luck against the immortal, as a young cop stepped out beside the van and aimed his weapon. "I don't know what the hell you are, but if you have anything to do with what's going on in this city, you're under arrest!"

"Interesting." Sobek released through the bony facial armor merged into a skull, without even allowing the human an acknowledgement of turning towards him. He slashed quickly at the wetted air, bringing forth a splash of crimson when claws unsheathed into milky flesh, turning tangible skin into pulpy fluid, and serving as a warning to the others having either watched to satiate a perverse curiosity or fled into the cracks of doorways and alleys. The police officer was dead before the pieces of his torn carcass hit the ground. "Millions of years of evolution, and this is the best they have to offer." The other officers opened fire in retribution for their slain colleague, and Sobek merely ingested the bullets tearing into his flesh and torso, mere annoyances with stolen Avalon magic. His blood spilled, and he appeared only as if slightly bothered by the bullets and intrigued by yet another sensation of pain. "How they deem themselves the dominant lifeform is beyond me." He reached in and pulled a dazed Goliath from the folded hulk once a vehicle, and the police ceased firing when the creature held a hostage in their line of fire, though all of them confused by just what this captive was. "As much a mystery as how you can stand to continually impregnate one of their whores."

"...they are...more powerful...than you could imagine..." came the strength on a borrowed tongue, as two lavender hands reached up to grasp Sobek's wrists, the gargoyles leaning against each other. The button pressed, Goliath used his anger and despair to empower a battered body pushing against his enemy. "...this night...shall not be yours just yet..." He crushed Sobek's wrists, pulverizing the bones to render his hands useless, and threw the immortal away using a simple trick of his weight against him. "...it hurts...does it not?..." he teased.

As his fragmented bones quickly glued themselves together, ensuring his hands were made blunt as a weapon for the limited time his body needed to repair the damage, a shadow befell the crouching mutant, and he looked up only to witness his adversary's fitting retribution. Goliath used what dwindling strength he had to thrust a small cherry roadster onto the Egyptian, the metal frame punctured right through by his massive form.

Goliath stepped backwards as Sobek screamed and thrashed wildly, psychotically, to rid himself of the metal folded around him, the gargoyle directing his gaze to the police officers still holding their fire. He silently pointed towards the car, and the exposed fuel tank a target almost calling to them with notched barrels. They nodded, deeming this lavender creature the better of two evils, proven by his allowing them a crucial opening. Precisely aimed bullets warped the air, and if seen in slow motion, trails would form in spiraling eddies targeted against the bulging metal underside where held explosive fuel.

Forced to one knee to conserve himself, Goliath watched a pillar of flame rise from where once lay an antique automobile, the bullets having pierced the gas tank and erupted an explosion reflected against the curtain of mirrored windows. A rush of wind enveloped the gargoyle, saturated with the smell of burning flesh. A blackened figure writhed within the orange ball, lapping flames like an entity vengeful, hungry and consuming all in its path. "Never insult...my wife again."

****************************************

"What did you say about my wife?"

The entrapped gargoyle reiterated, "She is calling you."

Xanatos, so entrusting his care to Owen in the hospital stretcher, had nearly missed the garbled call coming through his suit's intercom. It was Fox, yelling over a worsening static and impeding her voice, transforming a siren song into a near-mangled distortion. "Ah yes."

Infiniti watched from her bindings as the billionaire double-checked the frequency, trying if anything to clear the call. She noticed with intrigue he made no attempt to answer his wife, and instead finished binding a comatose Owen and ensured his weak pulse would remain stable. "Why do you not answer her?" Infiniti mewed, sneering in contempt for a man having duped her and imprisoned her on a trick of good intention. "Ashamed of your deeds?"

He turned and faced against a force of nature he had indeed tamed, and he would be almost proud if this did not set back a redemption carefully calculated. "You presume far too much, guardian." the billionaire seethed coolly. "If in fact I may call you that, you seem a very ineffectual sentinel. Three thousand years imprisonment, and then allowing a lowly human such as I to trap you using the most conventional of means."

This set the cables and conduits that fed her energy to the rest of the building aflame, taxing the technology to its limits with a burst of anger translated into primal fury. "You dare christen my feelings for Owen as trivial?!" she snapped, an animal hiss underlying the warning. She stared at him, her bindings suckling the greatest vengeance she would deliver against him if but allowed. "There is a battle raging above, there is a city under siege by perverted magic, and yet you betray them even as they face destruction."

"Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder." he smoothed out his response, like ice on his tongue and breathing a chilled breath to curl visibly when rolled from thin lips. "I have just instead chosen a different method of protection."

"You would sacrifice hundreds of lives for your own purposes?!" mused spitefully the guardian spirit. "You are as much a monster as the enemy the clan now faces."

Xanatos lunged forwards, menacing in near demonic armor scarlet and ebony. "I didn't release these things into the city!" he growled, his dark eyes flared, the cautiously guarded emotional state he so preserved now breaking, and parading openly an anger unsuited to a frigid exterior. "And where the hell were you when beings like Sobek were set free?! You were supposed to protect us! You were supposed to keep us safe!! You were supposed to keep HER safe..."

Silence fell in the accusation. And in this sterile vault lined with the rarest of treasures and secured from the world in a titanium-alloy womb cradled deep within the Eyrie, no sounds interfered but the low thrumming of the steel ring which imprisoned the guardian, and the heaving, heavy breaths of the combatants. "You are well aware that I cannot interfere directly, or give too much," she revealed sadly, her voice lowered in octave, "and I have many clans around this world to safeguard as well." Her eyes caught a dormant spark, from bottle green to blood crimson her gaze condemned in hellfire the billionaire. "But I am unable to sense Sobek, and the fact I was betrayed and entrapped by you weeks ago made it difficult to warn anyone."

"Never question my commitments or the promises I have made!" Xanatos snarled, edging his form directly beneath the gargoyle suspended four feet above the floor. "As I have done everything in my power to protect the clan and this city, and that debt has been paid in full. But I am far beyond having to baby-sit when I have much more pressing matters to attend to..."

Infiniti knitted a crowned brow regal, sweeping and feminine, and then brushed a breath through fanged, clenched teeth, "Your excuse is lacking of heart, traitor."

Xanatos heatedly stamped a flattened palm to a control panel on the lower half of the ring, and almost instantly, did the power drain on Infiniti's reserves increase exponentially, as did the pain wrought by such merciless extraction. Infiniti winced, and mewled as if a kitten scolded, but gritted her teeth and her resolve. "It hurts, doesn't it?" he challenged a guardian with godlike powers, the upper hand all his and his to exploit. "Having so much of yourself drained away." To see her like this was almost riveting, satisfying in the fact his place as a mere mortal had stepped up a notch when having divinity under his control. "I've just redirected your energies to the external weaponry. I'm sorry I have to extract it from you in such brutal fashion, my dear Infiniti, but at least you can take comfort it is being used for defense of your clan." He left the extraction process to linger and sap the guardian of every last bit of sorcery she could produce, and stepped away, only to hear his intercom crackle to life once more with Fox's desperate pleas. "If you'll excuse me."

He tried to clear the static infecting the once crystal digital frequency, but to no avail, Fox's voice losing a battle against a blaring, erratic white noise gaining strength. "Hmmm, it seems our uninvited guests have somehow found a way to jam the comm frequency." he whispered to none but himself, and he in turned killed the communications channel inexplicably. "Perhaps it's for the best. My apologies, Fox, but it's better you forget about me for a while." An armored fist stroked across the coarse, sable hair of his goatee, concealing a subtle scowl to his own actions. "Be safe, my goddess. Be well."

He approached the Vault doors, towering and impressive, and took one final look towards a faithful majordomo and child of Oberon amusingly turned a friend in days of war and death passed on, but now merely a dangerous impediment to a delicate situation, crucial in its application. "A deal with the devil, my friend." A shudder of sterling, a familiar hydraulic hiss, and the doors unlocked from their sophisticated mechanisms and slid open, and David Xanatos faded into the darkness beyond. "A deal with the devil."

****************************************

"David, where are you?!"

A silence reigned across the intercom, her husband having vanished into thin air at the most inopportune of times. The walls trembled and shook around them, the weaponry sending ripples through even the thickest of barriers lined with heavy gauge steel. "David?!!" Fox nearly screamed into the intercom, forced to search through the castle and building below them for her better half with just her voice with Mother's runtime dedicated wholly to the above outside. "Damnit..." she muttered, resting to the computer desk and running a hand through long strands of silky fire, blinding red as if to burn like its namesake.

"Well, your hubby picked the worst moment to disappear." Nicole muttered, running an inspecting finger across her manicured nails. "Is he going for a dip in his moneybin?"

"Shut up, St. John!" Fox growled, her brow furrowed from the employment of even the slightest of anger, the ache in her head once subtle, now raging. "I am not in the mood!"

The reporter stepped up, placing the children between them both and into a verbal war. "Oh yeah, like I'm really in the mood to die because of these gargoyles!" she snapped, as yet another blast erupted from the Guild forces attacking the castle, as yet another cringe huddled Trinity's wings around her. "Because my search for the truth of what's happening in this city led me to be locked up in a castle under attack!"

"You little self-centered bitch! Don't you care for anyone of the gargoyles fighting for their very lives?!"

"I care for them!!" Nicole pointed to the display screen, where news cameras captured the devastation left by the creatures Sobek released, and where Alexander had stared since entering the chamber, roving hands across skin tingling with a burning sensation for no reason yet apparent. "I care for the hundreds of people probably already dead because of what your little clan attracts like a goddamned magnet!"

Fox's jaw fixed itself into a locked position, as if the fire she so wanted to spew in Nicole's direction was being blocked only by her own gritty determination. "I hate reporters, like cockroaches they scuttle in where they don't belong and do their best to piss off the general public!" Even as her headache increased in intensity, she ignored the pain. "You are a pathetic little woman, and the very reason why our race is the most hated out of every sentient species on the planet!!"

Nicole's brow rose slightly, but not from the barb. "Uh, Fox?"

"What?!" the billionairess nearly screamed back, her body tightly clenched and almost readying for a physical brawl.

"Your nose is bleeding."

Fox dabbed a few fingers to the thick stream of fluid having trickled from her nose without her noticing, for in the heat of the argument, it seemed she had aggravated what plagued her. The blood slicked across her fingers, and she pulled back to inspect just what now curled over her top lip and onto her tongue. A bitter flavor, a metallic aftertaste, and indicative of something far worse and costing than she would imagine. Fox's features drooped, and she lifted wide eyes towards Nicole, the reporter swearing for but an instant, that it was a guise of desperation, and fear. Fox's eyes suddenly rolled up into the back of her head, and in a coiled wave of fire by a tangled tress being thrown into the air as her body crumpled in on itself, she collapsed.

"And now you're unconscious." Nicole whispered, washing her hands across her face and pulling darkened strands of mottled blond from her brow. "Oh this is just perfect."

Alexander immediately approached the side of his mother, her body absolutely still, and the slow but steady rise of a generous chest bound in tight clothing the only suggestion of any life. His expression unlike Trinity's was not of concern, not of dread, but of intrigue, as his hand probed the cold flesh of his unconscious mother perhaps an inch or two from any actual contact. An arc of emerald energy jumped from skin to skin, Alexander's energies searching, wanting for the truth to her illness he knew of long before now. "There's fire in her blood." the child whispered, magic hollowing and making unearthly his young voice, and setting aflame large, emotive eyes. "HE did this."

The lights suddenly dimmed, and Nicole looked around her as systems powered down, and turned off before her eyes, leaving only the most basic of amenities. Power was being shunted to systems desperately needed, as Mother rerouted any and all necessary energy to the defensive weaponry to stave off an invasion. And Nicole noticed clearly, her proximity bracelet had become a dead weight, the blinking light that was her bane now extinguished. She tested the theory by gingerly, discreetly tugging at the confining jewelry away from prying eyes, and with the electronic lock now powerless, she needed only her own strength to unclasp the intruding mechanism. She unsheathed her wrist, her very being, from Mother's all-seeing eye and smiled grandly in her victory.

It crept along the walls, making the seams of ashlar along the walls prominent by the revealing glow of jade. Nicole's small celebration of freedom was short-lived, as Alexander surrounded himself with an aura of magical energy inflamed by his mother's collapse and engulfed the entire room with a radiance almost warm to the touch. The child Xanatos lifted off from the stones and leisurely rotated in mid-air, his eyes roaming past a stunned Nicole and a frightened, though captivated Trinity towards the one monitor left on. He was angry, by the display of immeasurable power obvious, and thinned eyes lost in the power of fay. "I haveta go." the child announced, seeing the gods on screen and experiencing an odd sensation spread through his flesh.

"Hey, wait!" Nicole yelled after him.

"Take care of Trini an' my mom."

A blinding flash followed, like a bolt of lightning contained into a glass belljar, and as Nicole's eyes readjusted to the strain and proceeding darkness, she discovered a wisped plume of smoke rising from scorched stone where the inheritor to billions once stood, or to her witness, floated. Nicole was presented now with a rare chance, and instinct took over when left to her own. She ran to Fox's prone form, and grabbed her by the hand, and being as gentle as possible, dragged the unconsciousness woman towards the scanner imbedded into the wall by the door's side. Placing Fox's hand to the smooth surface, the scanner immediately read the palm and fingerprints and released the door. A sweet smell, that of freedom, carried along the strands of air, and Nicole skipped out into the hall, seeing the elevators far down the main corridor.

But it was a feeling that itched and writhed in the back of her head and made dull her smile when translated into an inducing, whispered voice, and somehow, against her will she found her eyes drawn back towards the computer room, and towards a small winged child sliding from the massive office chair and onto the floor beside the woman charged with her safety. Trinity nudged Fox without success of waking her, and eventually gave up, curling into a ball with her wings jacketing her trembling form.

She looked once more to the elevators so close, and yet so damned far. The voice persuaded the reporter's gut instinct to run for liberation, and she swore under her breath for what she was about to do as her body moved on it's own volition. "Damnit, I can't believe I'm doing this..." she muttered, running back into the room and using the same unorthodox methods to seal the door behind her. She swept Trinity from the floor and slumped into the chair frequented by Goliath, waiting out the sounds of destruction raging all around her. "I really hate having a conscience." she whispered, perhaps to the hybrid pressed against her chest. "It's damaging to the career."

****************************************

The walls even far below the fortress possessed a shiver through them visible to one staring in fear at the barriers painted a barren white and supposed to keep all from harm. Every blast that erupted atop the cornices she could hear, and see the vibrations run through a building more like a fortress, evident by the glass of water rippling, the liquid trembling and perhaps hailing another death with each concentric ring lapping against the sides. Maria Chavez curled deeper into the sterile embrace of clean sheets providing a thin layer of warmth, and past a sullen, anxious Hudson she stared like the rest, Delilah, Iliana, the twins, towards a bloodied gurney centered in the middle of the room.

They tried as best they could to ignore the drama unfolding three floors underneath a warzone, eyes darting and apprehensive to intrude upon a woman dying and a revealed son hovering over her, stunned in his discovered ancestry.

"My...my mother?" Todd echoed Rose's surprising statement, and a dead silence blemished by the dulled sounds of battle now followed the revelation of hidden bloodlines, as Todd swallowed his breath into his chest, and Annika ceased her frantic chore of removing the nun's clothing to stare in shock. Even Dr. Pierce was momentarily bewildered, and a receptive audience skirting the edges of the hospital now drew in closer in sheer curiosity. He but quickly shook off the outlandish pretense when unable to wholly trust a woman so close to death, "Rose, you're delirious."

"...no..." she protested all too quickly, her voice drowning, and rich. "...m-my real name...is...Rose Hawkins...your mother..." Slowly, lethargically, the tears trickled from her eyes, a secret released after so long. She bred a smile even as she hemorrhaged, she gurgled an unfamiliar laughter in releasing a secret held onto for so long, at last able to look upon her son with the proud eyes of a mother. "...your mother..." She was giddy, giggling and crying in chorus in the fact it felt so good to release the burden she kept sealed within her.

Todd pulled back, astonished beyond the capacity for any verbal response. Annika darted wide and anxious, ocean eyes between Rose and her husband, an association between them so deceptively simple, and yet so staggering. "But..." Todd whispered, leaning over her, his voice withering to but a thready wisp. "But my mother died...in the car crash twenty years ago..."

"...that...was me..." she revealed, her voice weakening, her will to survive, forged by a week spent in Sobek's care, now being severely tested by the deadly wound having punctured her midsection. "...we were the...only survivors...your...father...he..." Her words trailed off, engulfed in the blood she coughed up from her lungs and stomach, and Rose started choking on her own life-sustaining fluids. Her chest heaved violently with the need to breathe, and she fought against even her own son for the one consuming instinct to grasp for air.

"Rose?!" Todd screamed in fear, he and Pierce trying to hold her down. "Rose?!!"

Pierce immediately moved into Todd's way, holding her steady with a hand against her neck and chin and forcing almost ruthlessly a transparent tube down her throat. "I have to intubate her, Todd," he answered a question he knew would come from the young man standing behind him, and virtually dressed in a weapon, "or she'll drown in her own blood."

Todd stood restlessly behind him, unable to do a thing to help her. "Will...will she die?"

"Not if I can help it." boasted Pierce, helping Rose to breathe by suckling the fluids from her lungs, and opening a hole in her neck with a scalpel for the breathing apparatus and tubule. Annika's talons stroked gently across her forehead, graceful, consoling motions helping to calm the nun with the foreign devices invading her body. "But since my only nurse took off on me, I need another."

"I'll help." Annika immediately chimed in, though nervous. "At least I'll try..."

"Take her into the surgical bay, Annika," he ordered promptly, his own apprehension salved by his professionalism and duty to heal the wounded. "I'll get scrubbed up. I need to go inside and stitch her guts back together, though I never thought I'd be doing major surgery with explosions all around me...that paycheck can't come soon enough..."

Todd crept up beside his wife, and Rose, though faint and weakened, offered her hand towards him, reaching past Annika to grasp upon a blurring, winged form that she deemed her son. His hand found hers, her blood streaking across the sleek titanium hide, and even through the thick alloy of the Epsilon, the mindlink effectively transferred the sensation of her warm, soft flesh.

"I'll do my best, handsome." Annika whispered into the breadth of her husband's neck, "I promise."

Todd drifted a hand through the wandering strands of gold pouring over Annika's shoulder, and kissed her. "I know, gorgeous." She wheeled the stretcher away, and into the adjoining surgical bay, leaving Todd to stare at the pools of blood having spattered onto the tiles. "I know..." His hand lay heavy with an object he just noticed now, perhaps used to such weight in his palms with the steel suit, and he opened his fist to discover a small silver cross, attached to a chain necklace. He immediately recognized it as Rose's, and now, after so many years of seeing it around her neck, had the chance to examine it more closely. Sterling silver, and as he flipped it over he found a small inscription, stating clearly in carved cursive script My Love Forever, J.H.. "J.H.?" Todd echoed the initials engraved. "Was that...my dad?" His fist unconsciously clenched and he pressed the cross to his lips, brooding, and questioning his entire life, and the expectations of what he had when but a child and imagining his parents thought lost in the fatal car crash. Todd strung the necklace around his neck, letting the cross fall against his chest underneath the armor plating, and steadied his breath.

"Are ye okay, laddie?" asked Hudson, having drawn towards the young human, somewhat intrigued by his response to hidden parentage.

"No," Todd growled back, anger curdling his voice and bringing cold, vengeful fire to a young soul, "I'm not." He clenched the Epsilon's claws, and fluttered his wings formed in angel feather steel, choking on the revelation and the long, lonely years in an orphanage bred simply by deceit. "Someone's gonna die for this..."

****************************************

Thunder and lightning provided a backdrop eerily fitting to chaos erupting out on the battlements, as man versus machine waged an ancient war for dominance. In a turbulent sea of sapphire plasma arcing mischievously from cloud to cloud, the Wyvern weaponry defended the parapets in cannon blaring of sound, and deadly of device, empowered by Infiniti's magic. The Cyber-Biotics drones were picked off one by one, their husks scattered across the stones and falling far below to the streets, though the sheer number appearing from the hangar bay helped to overwhelm the Guild soldiers. Any Steel Clan robot fortunate enough to fly close to the Guild attack helicopters, and even the stodgy cargo carriers, were reduced to pieces fit only for scrap with powerful weaponry slicing through titanium alloys. But with every sacrificed automaton, the energy shields covering these craft lessened.

The cannons traced the Guild members only by movement, their Kevlar suits and shields deflecting the body heat and reducing the infrared sensors to mere useless toys. One Guild member became far too zealous in his barrier and opened himself up, firing with reckless abandon against the mechanical arm of a cannon mere meters away. Mother noticed the shots taken at her weapon, and without an emotion attached to the thought she commanded the massive, double-barreled gun to swivel around and fire upon the soldier. He died like the others littering the field with their corpses when his smaller shield power source expired, and Mother had no choice but to continue in her war, taking lives against the most basic of programming. To conserve. To protect.

If she was capable of weeping for the lost, perhaps she would. If the holographic imaging array and photons recreating her body, making her come alive from just a progeny's lucid memory, would display her burgeoning emotional abilities, they would give to her the gift of tears.

****************************************

"Don't move."

Goliath wavered slightly, when held under the notched barrels of the officers who now trained their weapons on what they regarded as yet another strange creature bringing destruction upon their city. He was in no position to escape when completely surrounded, and since wanting, needing, to conserve his strength, he instead relented and remained motionless as not to startle them into a premature discharge of steel, smoke and fire. "...as...you wish..."

A cultured response cocked more than a few eyebrows, but they held their weapons firm, watching each subtle, tortured movement.

"Lower your weapons!" It was a scream heard from a distance but enough to pierce the thunder's howl and capture the police officers' collective attention. From the wreckage where the beasts had burst from, a woman appeared, Elisa having followed as best she could the rampant destruction somehow forming a trail bleeding into this larger street. She immediately threw herself between the officers and her husband, flashing her badge to ward off the officers far too anxious on their triggers under such taxing circumstance. "Back off, boys." she warned, with defiant eyes and stance, a woman daring against men. "This one isn't the bad guy."

"You know this...thing?" one cop asked in a barely veiled contempt.

"I know enough to treat him as the good guy considering he saved your butts from being eaten." she hissed, having to rein in her tone to keep the appearance of impartiality towards her gargoyle husband.

The younger man could not but help to furrow his brow and swallow the formed lump in his throat in the said fate he could have befallen. "E-Eaten?" he repeated cautiously, as if testing the very word against his fears.

Elisa kneeled beside her lover, inquiring on his condition with but a look frequently practiced between them, knowing to read exactingly the other's expression when so forced. "Are you okay?" He nodded in turn, his eyelids settled over black-rimmed eyes and dangerously drooping from fatigue, Goliath desperately battling against his own exhaustion and the overwhelming desire to sleep from the loss of blood and strained exertion. His delusion had worn off some with the reality of the battle with Sobek, but still remained, the gargoyle drowsy, and slightly hallucinatory, the city backdrop a blur of light and sound. As she peered to the pillar of flames spread outwards with the spilled fuel, Goliath in turn kneaded the sloping precipice of bone jutted from beneath his hairline, a pain erupting not from the injuries sustained in the church, but something deeper, and traveling through his consciousness with a sentient whisper. Elisa noticed the discomfort filtered through onto Goliath's features, a peculiar expression not yet pain, but perhaps an intrusion. "What is it?" she whispered, a question breathed softly and inconspicuously.

Goliath breathed a growl, of hope and assurance. "...help...is coming..."

The flames before them shifted, the shimmering orange and red and gold moving with liberty when the watchers' eyes, that of law enforcement and casual observer, converged below on the form of gargoyle huddled in the middle of the street.

"Help?" Elisa repeated, and Goliath simply nodded, without an answer to just what he sensed. She shook her head to what she thought was another delusion brought on by his injuries, and refocused her goal, to escape her husband from a spotlight much too public for her liking. "We have to get you out of here."

"No." Goliath's eyes widened, when glistened charcoal reflected a fire moving, the firestorm throbbing, pulsing with life and attempting to hold within its belly the consumed. "...I am needed..." he whispered, noticing movement subtle, but a portent of something relentless, devastating, a force unlike any other. "...this battle is...far from over..."

It was a scream of despair and raw anger erupting from the inferno, unbridled by the limiting human conceptions of conscience or humanity, as the flames themselves ambling in a humanoid contour cried out and stole from the tempest above its power. Elisa snapped her eyes upwards from her husband to a dark shape shifting within the gasoline-fed fire, haggard and limp, but almost whole. From the inferno he emerged in languid step, completely on fire, his entire body feeding the flames with flesh continuously regenerating, and his grotesque appearance made worse when entire pieces of his body were missing and charred around the edges. The great rifts of devoured muscle bared openly his internal organs and skeletal structure, and he appeared as a gutted marionette left to stagger on a single string. But the sheer arrogance and psychotic will of a tyrant pushed on a body near to complete collapse. "That was...annoying." he growled, his throat having glued itself back together enough to spew a mangled affront. "Did I tell you how much I hate being burned?"

Goliath snorted a challenge of hot air into the rain-soaked mists, and lifted to an impressive height stunted barely by his aggravation to injuries severe, and fatal to an inferior being. "...I must...keep him occupied...for a while longer..."

"Why?"

He was a blur of motion before Elisa could protest any action, Goliath lunging towards the burning husk of Sobek and ignoring the pain she knew him to be under, his resolve as adamant and unforgiving as his stone form. He met Sobek head on, and delivered crushing blows to the pieces of his body hollowed by the fires, using his dwindling reserves before his opponent could regain his strength. He struck the deep clefts in his form, hoping to shatter and break what force still held this demon together and hold off the amazing regenerative abilities Sobek possessed. For a just a few moments more, he hoped he could tame the demon and play the continuing game by his rules.

Just a few moments more.

The flames died from their ingestion of his tissues by the rain's quenching touch, trails of choking black smoke with the pungent stench of desiccated flesh curling upwards into the skies, and Sobek felt the potency returning through the immense pain, a now shared experience he in fact relished contrastingly to Goliath. In a city under siege, where just blocks away buildings near to them crumbled by the rant of foreign creatures, the humans stared awe-struck from the sidelines as two alien titans wrestled against each other in the middle of the street, one a slab of muscle gleaming wet crimson in the city lights and seemingly held together by a bony, spurred exo-skeleton, the other a more familiar form, but nonetheless strange, and wounded, struggling with each movement pained and tortuous. Sobek gained the proper leverage and drove his fists into Goliath's chest and pushed him away, knowing his balance was indeed impaired and the Egyptian swerved around the clench his talons into a small vehicle lining the street. "Heads up." It became a projectile by his superior strength, launched into the air towards the stunned crowd morbidly mesmerized.

By the purest of instinct, and the great effort a further strain upon himself, he leaped in front of the smaller sedan and thrust it away to protect the remaining group, his balance again having faltered against the weight of the car. His vision was blurring, the bright lights becoming a swirl and the distant screams of terror invading his mind, the delusion of protecting all he could see was stretching his defenses too thin. He was giving too much of himself, even as his entire body radiated with pain unbearable to anyone less than he.

The police still held themselves ready to fire, and perhaps if pushed far enough, would immerse both creatures in a hail of gunfire if only to sate their fears of what was happening all around them, and to secure their city. Elisa surreptitiously edged herself between the police and her husband engaged in a deadly struggle for dominance, but knowing full well he could not last for much longer. She noticed his movements already dulled of their speed slowing even further, with Sobek unallowing of any rest, of any quarter or mercy in his quest.

"Move!! Let us blow this thing away!" a cop screamed.

"No!!" she snarled, trying if anything to hold back officers too easily prepared to render her husband as dead as the eviscerated corpse lying beside them. "You may hit both of them!"

"Considering what's happening in this city, that's not a bad idea!"

"You shoot both of them, you take away our best chance of surviving! Now back off, do your job," she pointed to the stragglers yet to leave towards the blockades nearby, "and get those damned people out of here!"

Sobek backed up against the opposite side of the street, and espied an arsenal of abandoned cars. With the painted sheet metal compressed into his hands and the weight heaved effortlessly, they flew one by one into the air against either Goliath or any human running for their lives as hundreds of tons of steel bounced past them, the wingless gargoyle either dodging or deflecting all he could, forced to run ragged back and forth in order to protect. He in turn grasped the smaller vehicles and tossed them back against the Egyptian in a desperate attempt, but it doused his strength with every car, his shoulders and back screaming in sheer agony, and exhaustion.

"Well played, Goliath!" crowed Sobek, merely slapping away a car thrown by the limping, hurting gargoyle, his body almost completely healed. "You have a will greater than I ever imagined!"

Goliath lurched to a stop, resting, heaving, reduced to a broken man but spurred by a greater sense of purpose to continue. "...for my wife...for my children...I shall fight you to my last breath..."

Sobek's facial plating contorted, as did his voice, "A mongrel brood." Another vehicle sailed into the air, towards any available opening in Goliath's defenses, blunted by fatigue. Goliath yet luckily shirked the projectile, the car scraping across his shoulder, a close call. "The fusion of pure gargoyle blood with that of our very executioners. You may wish to pity your newest spawn, Goliath," a long tongue slithered out from the separation of bone his mouth, and licked across his teeth, "before I remove it from your whore's belly with my bare hand. Then I win."

As he kept his eyes focused on Sobek, Goliath manipulated several talons to his brow, a furtive conversation continuing. "...I cannot keep fighting him...for much longer..." he whispered to the voice projected by sorcery inside of his head, the raw, unpracticed dump of magic serving to cause a slight headache. "...where...are you?..."

****************************************

Several blocks away from the section of Manhattan destroyed rested one of the aforementioned blockades, and one of many forming a perfect ring and cordoning off a two mile square area in the middle of the island containing the gods, stretched across the emptied street and prevented any access into a literal warzone by heavily armed soldiers and an impressive armory of two heavily-entrenched tanks. The men and women guarding this virtually abandoned section were all too anxious, hearing the devastation but unable to see the creatures from the distance, and every second more they were forced to wait merely frayed nerves and made the weaponry they cradled against their chests seem as the only comfort in a relentless, bitter rain.

"Okay people, let's move." They waved through streams of people escaping the carnage and held back others who deemed the danger either worth the sacrifice of saving their belongings or perhaps even thinking this was all just some elaborate publicity stunt, New York always a popular location for such media delirium. But never would these simple soldiers expect the darkened street they guarded to flicker with an emerald glow, startling them into a defensive posture and herding the restless crowd quickly from the road and into the safety of darkness beyond. The buildings surrounding them, standing as silent, wretched creatures when wholly emptied of any presence, were enveloped within a bloom of bottle green, a dazzling sheathe growing steadily stronger as it approached. They turned around to face opposite the sounds of destruction, and found a small spherical ball drifting serenely towards them, skimming across the asphalt and breeding tendrils of animate, twining fire.

"Weapons ready!" shouted the contingent commander, as they prepared themselves for the worst, and being on the outskirts of the danger zone, they knew not what to expect in a city gone mad. The turrets of the tanks slowly rotated, aiming their long barrels towards the orb of magical energy nearing, and making nervous the military force with its leisurely pace.

It seemed so much larger when at a distance, but as it neared it was barely a few meters in diameter and a swirling chartreuse almost blinding to the naked eye, warm and alive and deflecting the downpour from the flaming membrane. They trained their weapons on the ball, passing between them without any compunction of the invented threat it posed and the fear it would sire, and readied to fire lest it attack.

"Hold your fire!" screamed the commander near frantically, slapping down his team's weapons to redirect their aim. "Hold your fire!! There's a goddamned kid inside!!"

Indeed, the form within a maelstrom was small and diminutive and denoting clearly the size of a child. He embraced his womb, and unbeknownst to the watchers created this form of travel and the sheer energy just expunged into the open air as ambient heat with barely a twitch of his eye. Alexander trained his haunted gaze forwards, his focus on one intention alone and as such, completely ignoring the weaponry aimed at him and trailing the path of his journey.

But one soldier would not relent on simply an order given, one would not allow this entity to pass without indeed sating his fears it was not a hostile. "What if it's one of those fucking monsters?!" The most basic of human dread drew his aim towards the child silhouetted within, seemingly unaffected by the energy he controlled, and duty bound him to stop whatever this was at any cost.

"Soldier." He braced his hand to the younger man's weapon. "You want to risk shooting a kid?"

His aim wavered with his choice, the child now across the barriers and continuing on into the restricted area. His eyes closed to his target and he slowly lowered his weapon, allowing the ball of energy to drift from sight.

****************************************

The entire turret took the brunt of the blast, and the structure just barely held against the power of the explosion, dislodging the entire cannon from its tether, leaving a broken hydraulic arm with a charred end, spewing an endless stream of sparks. The Guild were converging, with their reinforcements unloading and replacing the downed and dead faster than Mother could cope with. And with bigger and better weapons, pulse rifles and shrapnel grenades and any other toys they would bring into play, they were beginning to overwhelm and stretch the defenses with so many viable targets, spreading themselves out too far for the Wyvern sentience to fully manage.

From what Mother could determine, they seemed to have one rudimentary but nonetheless effective goal in mind, destroy the external defenses, and breach the castle's secured interior. And they were too close for any sense of comfort. Over fifty men and women had already died at her electronic hands, by gun or automaton, her computer banks able to commit to precise memory each of the deceased, but two hundred and fifty more were spread across the entire courtyard, the grotto, and every level of the castle around to the rear.

And between the rain of fire and energy blasts uprooting stones and cornice structures, Black coordinated the battle. He was a leader, and more importantly a perfect strategist, and he directed the brunt of their heaviest weaponry to converge on a single point, straight through the front doors on the courtyard level. The remaining cannons defending the courtyard were overtaxed, and channeling as much energy as the conduits fed by the main generators, and now fully supplemented by Infiniti's drained magic, would allow. He had watched many die in the fight already, but swayed himself from the pity of their loss. Their mission was all, and they gave their lives to the cause of protecting the whole of humanity.

It was time, he now ventured in thought, to realize their objective. "Gunner!"

****************************************

Another explosion rocked the structure, an ancient, expensive vase saved from obliteration across a remorseless stone floor by nimble talons and an incredibly responsive reflex. Shadow replaced the vase, and turned to Brooklyn. "They are getting bold."

Brooklyn, knowing of the ninja's uneasiness, merely kept his eyes trained on the monitor. "We stay here." It was a distant response, serving to ironically kindle the fires within Shadow's belly with his leader's stubborn resistance to battle.

"I will not wait inside to die!! I'd rather take my chances as did your sister!"

"You'll stay here and like it!!" he snapped. "You chose me as leader, and you'll damned well listen!!"

"Gentlemen?" called Sata softly, noticing a none too subtle change in strategy outside.

Shadow leaned back from Brooklyn's heated statement, piercing his bottom lip outwards and clenching his jaw in order to restrain the animal growl. "Perhaps I was wrong."

"Shadow may have a point," Lexington cut through the argument led by tempers flaring out of control and creatures forced to suppress their most basic instincts, "they're opening holes in Mother's defenses."

"I believe I was an advocate for the original security system." He had joined them in a step swift and quiet, the armor a whisper across the stone with such an audible distraction of a storm and battle just outside.

"Xanatos." Brooklyn immediately turned to the voice he had come to almost loathe in his brief tenure as leader. "Where the hell have you been?!"

As slick as ever, a thinly veiled smile arched Xanatos' mouth in a leader's cold demand. "My apologies. I was just ensuring the security forces throughout the building were secure, and all the loose ends were being tied up."

Brooklyn tramped towards him, pressing his face directly to the billionaire's, so close their breaths would fuse, their eyes becoming a quarrel of stone against steel, charcoal against iron. "Then maybe you can explain why the security shield was disconnected using a code known only to four people," he challenged with a bitter tang to his tone, "including you?"

"I assure you, it must have malfunctioned." he evaded shrewdly. "I warned Goliath not to entrust all of the castle's systems to a singular consciousness. I doubt Mother can cope, especially now. She's already shut down almost all non-essential systems."

"Gentlemen??"

Unimpressed by a tone dripping with ambiguous deceit, Shadow leaned into the armored human, and curled his upper lip to bare gleaming fangs. "You lie well, billionaire. You smell of deception..." His nose wrinkled, an odd scent permeating his acute senses. "...and iron."

Xanatos repressed the urge to shy away from the shinobi's deathly scrutiny, and though standing strong in his convictions and previous actions, he hoped the gargoyle's amazingly precise senses would not hear through the dampening armor his heart beating faster, or detect the light sheen having formed across his tanned, Grecian skin. A falling grin was his reply to the accusation to Shadow's leaning growl.

"GENTLEMEN!!!" the samurai's razor-sharp voice served to swathe through the heavy cloud of testosterone and spittle, and direct the clan's gaze along her pointed finger and towards the monitor. "They've changed tactics."

****************************************

As the others drew the fire away from a computer intelligence distracted if for but a few minutes at most, and with at last an opening presented, Black led a smaller group towards the slab of steel that was the main entrance inside, already slightly concaved and forebodingly scorched by previous blasts taken by several Guild members when having taken the chance. A larger man, freshly unloaded from the last cargo carrier, kneeled and hefted a sleek but substantial rocket launcher onto his broad shoulder, aiming directly for the door hidden behind the security gate of impenetrable steel.

****************************************

"Son of a bitch," Lexington muttered, his wide eyes already wider, the delicate electronics in his bionic implants visible, technology translating clearly the guise of fear, "that's a big gun."

"Mother!" Brooklyn warned the intelligence. "Front gate! Now!!"

****************************************

A cannon rotated towards the front entrance, and fired immediately when the targeting laser had acquisition on the large man. As the pursuing stream appeared on his forehead above the sharpened louver of his mask's brow, it fired as did he, and in seconds his body was swallowed in a hazing of energy eerily exact in aim and pushed back several meters in a lifeless roll. But doomed was the target when falling under the projectile's explosive power. It impacted against the slightly weakened steel security door, which in turn buckled under the immense pressure and burst open, devouring the wall in a beast made of flame and leading a ball of fire into the castle by way of corridor.

The hall funneled the full brunt of kinetic energy towards where the gargoyles had holed up, like a tidal wave unleashed with all the power contained, sending a mist golden brown and thick and searing with the power behind the blast. It enveloped them, toppling the less sturdy and stealing from them the light above to guide their way though a suffocating miasma.

He coughed the gritty powder from his lungs, he thrashed against the forms in his path as if they were enemies. The ninja grew agitated when confined, blind and deafened by the rush of scalding air past his sensitive ears. Shadow hurried to a breathable pocket of air clear of the invasive microscopic debris, steered by the light of his glowing eyes clearing a path for him to follow. "Enough of this..." he hissed, while dashing for the new exit where the churning clouds hailed split-second streams of light. "I will meet death on my feet!"

Brooklyn emerged, coughing spittle into a clenched fist. "Shadow...wait!"

"Let him go." argued Sata, unsheathing her sword, her jade skin dampened in intensity by the dust, transforming the matron in appearance to some threadbare survivor of a war.

"The first impression I want to give of our race sure as hell isn't of a massive killing machine cutting though the Guild ranks."

"The Guild cannot be allowed to infiltrate this castle." she answered hardheartedly.

"We'll expose ourselves..."

"They already know we are here!" she growled towards her mate, cowing the crimson gargoyle with a reality he had been avoiding to protect his clan, and live up to the standards of the position. "They have been watching us all along! And you knew that! It is your own fear and doubt holding you back from you know what we must do! It is time they knew of what they truly faced," with her sword readied for battle, she stalked away, "it is time we stood for our race and avenged the loss of our clansmen. We are gargoyles, it is time we acted as such."

Brooklyn's features crumpled upon seeing his mate disappear into the cloud, then quickly straightened as he instead allowed himself to heed the words of a woman who perhaps knew him better than his own self. The others looked to him expectantly as they would their leader, as they would Goliath. "You heard the lady, people," he announced to the gargoyles shaking themselves from the clearing fog, "let's move. We protect this castle."

****************************************

Shadow picked up speed down the passage, crossing his arms to the holsters bound in leather to his forearms and pulling the tow-linked weapons into a defensive position. At last he was able to test the aroma of battle from the outside, the blood and sweat made ripe by intense heat, the scent of ozone from rain and lightning, it mixed and imbued his restless spirit with the maddening throb of a heart inclined to burst from his chest. He was an instrument now, born and bred for a destiny bloodied and savage.

He was ninja, the greatest of paradox, honorable, and deadly.

Like animals having caught the scent of hunters on their trail, the Guild surrounding the gaping hole froze in their tracks when hearing what they thought to be the storms having gained a conscious voice beyond the mindless growling of thunder, a spine-chilling wail that preceded a shroud of darkness having taken humanoid form. From the thick, ocher cloud of dust left by the explosion he emerged into the fires, hell-bent and ravenous for battle. The one they dubbed the shadow, his eyes beneath a horned brow ablaze in sapphire and a golden blur of unsophisticated weaponry in each taloned hand, took to the air and became as the storms, a blinding fury of motion and primal rage. A few were shocked to actually see the creature in the flesh, and they were dulled in their response to his savage attack, allowing the ninja to land and ferociously sweep away three stunned soldiers with a single strike of his nunchuku. He shrugged off the blasts and bullets of the rest by deed of the adrenaline coursing through his veins, making flesh like black marble and numbing any pain. Blood spattered by his hands, and the shields his adversaries wore completely deflected energy, but not fully the force of impact against their bodies, and thus, his weapons, ancient by today's standards, were almost as lethal and parallel to the Guild's artillery.

Sata, then Brooklyn and the clan followed the crude trail fashioned by Shadow, and spread themselves out into the field as winged sentinels, working in tandem with the remaining cannons to reduce the number of Guild and protect the cavernous opening. The masked humans were overwhelmed at first, when seeing the clan at last revealed in full glory and horror, their duty frighteningly realized and hard-pressed to obey. The Guild seemed infinite, and unending in their number flocking towards the single breach in the castle interior wall, and the arena was complete chaos.

Shadow and Sata were the greatest offensive, better on their own lest they mistake an ally for enemy in a second of blind rage and deadly expertise. Their weapons were the perfect counterpart against the energy shields, if only they could keep their pace to navigate the streams of fired energy and discharged bullets safely. Sata swiped at those who ventured too close, and took out a Guild member that fell into her huntress gaze, the katana sharp enough to penetrate through the near translucent exoderm. Othello, the hunter, unleashed a rarely seen fighting ability, backed by the awesome brute strength of Broadway. Angela and Desdemona weaved around them using their agility as their greatest offense, with Lexington ever watching their flank with his great speed, playing strategist and coordinating with Brooklyn.

And as the last to leave the safety of the castle's interior, a reluctant approach, Xanatos stood at the gaping mouth, his helmet replaced to disguise his features and keep his anonymity intact. He surveyed the damage he knew would cost him, he found his home under siege by his endeavor to protect these creatures who had saved his son's life years ago. He was waiting it seemed, for something, for someone. His eyes were shaded behind the veiled mechanization of his helmet and mask, trailing from the battle as if it bored him, and out to the city beyond. "Come on, you bastard," he whispered, to that something, that someone, "where are you?"

****************************************

As Brooklyn himself engaged the Guild alongside his clan, his dark eyes were searching beyond the soldiers he dispatched, attempting to narrow in on a single man from between the labyrinth of suited humans, between the flaming rubble that was once his home. He wanted him, he wanted the coordinator to this massacre, and amid the scent of blood and discharged gunpowder he hounded the arena with eyes crystal sharp and razor keen. He spotted him suddenly, fortunately, the leader and the one Mother first warned, in the midst of a circle protecting him as they cautiously made their way towards both him and the lesion ripped into the heart of Wyvern. Beyond Sata's fierce and eerily accurate katana thrusts and Othello's swiping claws, Brooklyn fought his way towards him, the lynchpin, hoping to pull him and his influence from the battlefield.

Using his speed and savvy to traverse the rain-soaked field, he broke through the ring they formed around him, and attacked the man head on, his claws wrapping to his arms and holding off the weaponry he brandished. "I've been watching you..." the gargoyle hissed menacingly, without the need to hold any pretense he was a rational, intelligent being against someone who had already condemned him to death.

He struggled against the winged creature's greater strength, the coating of energy preventing the gargoyle from maintaining a sure grip and giving him the power beyond his human frailties. "High praise, beast." came Black's arctic tone through the mask. His fighting skills matched his ability to strategize, subtle, cool, unemotional, and deflective against any grasp Brooklyn made. He was slippery, and strong, owing to the force-field surrounding him and the streams of water pouring from the sky. "I see you finally decided to show yourself."

"Against my better judgment, I assure you."

Black tried if anything to maneuver his guns towards any part of crimson flesh holding to him as if a vice of steel, but could not budge them from their helpless aim towards the sky. He guessed those who once protected him were now busy with the other clan creatures, and thus, leader to leader they fought. "Your concealment wouldn't have mattered anyway," he swaggered, his voice grunted from the exertion Brooklyn pressed against his frame, "I wouldn't have stopped until this entire building was a burning husk and emptied of any bastard creature such as yourself."

Brooklyn's eyes involuntarily flared, as did the growl brought up from his throat, "You expend so much damned effort to kill us, it makes me sick! Why do you want us dead?!"

The mask camouflaged any expression of features, but underneath the molded, composite carbon-plastic, a striking visage aged by past pain and grimaced with disgust. "You're an evolutionary deviation, and you constantly threaten our way of life." he explained, jerking his arms to counter with equal leverage Brooklyn's bouts of strength to disarm him. "Thus, to reclaim our place as dominant species from underneath your foot, you die."

"I've heard it all before." muttered the scarlet gargoyle, unimpressed with such recycled pedantry. "I thought you would at least puke up something new compared to every other would-be xenophobic militia we've come across. And while you're trying your best to kill all of us, Manhattan is under attack!"

Black seemed unaffected by the verve and fire lit from the gargoyle's tongue. "You have a point, beast?"

"You spout protection of your species, and yet your attack prevents any of us from helping!" They danced a dance delicately treacherous, Black's guns almost nearing an aim towards Brooklyn's face, and the gargoyle unable to break the force-field surrounding the human. "Don't you give a damn about the innocent people being killed out there while you try and exterminate us?!"

"Very much. The situation is already being taken care of..."

****************************************

The lightning reflected across the glossy black hides of the attack crafts, menacing shadows supposedly in use for the security of the humans below them, under brutal attack by yet another creature they feared, they hated, they wanted eradicated from their world. Where the U.S. airforce had failed, the entire squadron now resting in burning pieces across the ground, they, in their unlimited conceit, would deem themselves able to succeed. Five helicopters, almost exactingly similar to those attacking Wyvern, struggled against the wind-swept rains pushing against them, their path not an easy one as they navigated through the storm and over the abandoned neighborhoods. They found great rifts and gutted buildings, toppled structures and overturned cars, an ever-widening chasm spread by the massive creatures clearly visible from their altitude.

As he slowly descended, the fresh pilot of the helicopter designated Echo Seven felt his heart lurch within his chest, having skipped a beat upon sighting his targets, supernatural and considerably large. "W-What are they?"

"It's not in our mission profile to ask why or how, son," the veteran gunner answered the young pilot from behind, "just to press the button and make the monsters go away." As the computer achieved target lock and beeped to confirm, and with a touch of his hand to the control panel, he let loose the fury of humanity and their ingenuity to make better weapons to kill in the name of protection. "Let's see if we can do what our so-called military couldn't pull off." Orange fire streaked from the clouds, dazzling and as catching to the eye as lightning, and possessed of a high-pitched squeal as if a lingering mewl of thunder. Leaving behind an umbilical of smoke from beneath the helicopters' armory wings, the missiles sought their prey and sailed towards the winding structure of the snake, Apep, curled within the skeletal remains of a building's ironwork. They impacted across his skin and against the building it curled around, and in a churning of energy disrupted by the missiles, it hissed and shrieked a horrifying wail. With the arsenal's effect quickly shaken off by an almost impenetrable form, it became only angrier.

To feed, to revenge oneself, the most basic of instincts for any creature, and the resurrected sliver of the pretender god Apep followed such single-minded rationale when a glitter above caught his eye and exposed fresh prey that possessed sharp teeth and a bitter, painful sting. The serpent king coiled his body, and pushed the great bulk of energy up into the air, aiming for the fire that had erupted from the skies. His jaws snapped at the lowest helicopter, and in seconds, the energy shield and all the greatest technology in the world proved a futile waste when swallowed into the gaping maw of the snake.

From the perspective of the ingested craft's wingman, it was instantaneous, barely a flash of sapphire and seconds later a few pieces of steel and a severed rotor were left to descend into the city. "Jesus!!" the young pilot screamed, and angled his helicopter away from the creature feasting upon steel and flesh of the downed Guild helicopter.

"Pull around, boy!" yelled the gunner. "Line up for another shot!"

His eyes enlarged underneath the drawn visor to an outlandish tactic promising a death gruesome and unattractive by any means. "What?! Are you crazy?!" he screamed back. "That thing just ATE Echo Five!"

A smirk showing yellowed teeth from a constant nicotine abuse showed through, with an odd fusion of malice and pride. "It's them or us, boy. You joined the Guild to protect humanity from things like these, now's the time to prove you have the danglies to stand up against the monsters you used to be afraid of."

He struggled with issues he thought had been resolved when at last chosen to pilot the Guild attack crafts, having at last cemented his position as a respected member of the touted saviors of humanity, and then suddenly wrenched the control stick, descending, and following the remainder of the Guild aerial force into an attack pattern against the gods. They fired, and littered the neighborhood with explosions and deadly shrapnel, laying waste to an entire section of Manhattan.

The gods under fire then reciprocated, Menhit with her claws, Septu with his spear, and a new war quickly erupted.

****************************************

"It's a simple solution, creature, first we kill you, then we kill them."

Brooklyn ceased the struggle, bringing them both to a standstill in the middle of mayhem. "You're a psychotic, you know that?"

"I prefer protector."

The single word used to describe their genocidal campaign enraged the leader, a contemptible excuse dared to parallel itself against their own proud faith eons old. "You dare call yourself a protector?!!"

"Yes," the shield flared in a shimmer passing across his form, and Black used the sudden surge of strength to push the gargoyle back into awaiting arms, "I do. Agent White?" Shots rang out and clapped the air, and Brooklyn's side bubbled and erupted in torn flesh and sprayed blood. Brooklyn cringed when the bullets tore open his side, a muted growl of pain, and he faltered, back into the arms of several large Guild members. As invisible and inconspicuous as his namesake, agent White emerged from the cloak of inscrutability he often used, a lanky man putting forwards a menacing stance, his shockingly blond hair slicked back, his thin brow arched. Malice personified. His guns were breeding a thin waft of smoke, from barrel to skin, he was the shooter and seemed quite proud of it.

"White..." Brooklyn snarled towards the infamous Guild member, responsible for leading the massacre in the twenty-third precinct. "...bastard..."

Black sighed, and from the slitted vents in his mask secreted a breath into the cold air. "I don't feel the need to explain to demons why they must die. Please kill him," he ordered quickly, "and the rest. I'm going inside to look for any others. It's time to finish this before we lose anyone else."

He nodded to White and a few others, tagging them along with but a look, and ventured through Mother's relentless cannonfire towards the opening, the other gargoyles pulled away by the sheer number they faced and unable to stop the small group of invaders from making their way inside amidst a hail of gunfire.

As Brooklyn clenched against the pain of his side now bleeding profusely, his struggle for freedom against the larger Guild members was a weak, futile effort, his eyes watching as a woman stepped in front and callously aimed her gun towards him.

"Anymore tricks up your sleeve, creature?"

Lightning struck on the tip end of her wicked boast, a flash blanketing the castle in an instant, and what originally thought as an act of nature was instead revealed as a stray beam hitting her point blank in the chest. The woman's shield suddenly crackled with an intruding energy pattern, sending a feedback through the barrier itself and literally boiling her alive as the heat within soared by a factor of ten. She fell, her skin blackened and charred.

Brooklyn recognized the weapon used, and looked above him to see deliverance descending from above on scalloped, cerulean wings. "Yup."

Like a silent cavalry they soared in to help stem any loss of life. Demona swooped in through the battle of Guild helicopter and Wyvern drone, a chancy dash through the streams of gunfire, carrying Macbeth in her arms, the once king continuing to strafe his beam weapons throughout the courtyard. He swiftly rid Brooklyn of those holding him, and gargoyle and human landed directly into the middle of the battle, Demona with a hand-held cannon in one hand and her mace in the other, and Macbeth swathed in the long, dark, duster-styled jacket and Kevlar, showering the cornices with lightning thrown from each hand. The two longest-lived warriors helped to repel the tide without any compunction to their mortality, their fragility. Back to back, they washed their weaponry across the courtyard in a languid, sweeping circle. They fought as if possessed, bringing a thousand years of experience into the protection of the cavernous hole, easily guessing of the desperate strategy. They were the aggressors, unsuited for defense, and using methods honed in the dark ages of knights and Vikings they allowed that particular burden of turning away any more potential invaders to the clan.

"Favor the bold," Brooklyn quoted, his voice strained as he quickly patched a free hand over his wound, "it seems we have a trump card as well." Backing into a corner, he tapped his comm device hooked around his ear and ensured it still functioned. "Hudson," he warned the elder, in charge of the small detachment in the hospital, "they've breached the outer wall, and a small group's gone into the castle. Hopefully, Mother's security doors and weaponry will prevent them from getting too far, but..."

Hudson picked up on the concern, owing to the Guild's success so far. "...We be sure t' be careful, laddie..." a thick Scottish brogue crackled through the commlink, seemingly restless, perhaps even angered he was unable to aid his can in battle. "...Are you sure you dinna need 'r help?..."

"No. You stay and protect the wounded, you're down there for that reason alone." Favoring his bleeding side, Brooklyn left the defense of his home to the others and slipped through into the castle, intent on stopping them. "I'm going to go see if I can head them off before they get that far..."

****************************************

"Aye." Hudson sighed, entrapped within this small infirmary, and delegated to guard duty deep within the bowels. He was a warrior, not an object of pity put out to pasture to guard women and children. The old soldier exhaled heavily, a rasped breath, for he was conflicted with the want for battle, and vengeance, but as his aged eyes roamed the room, he found the greatest reason not to become consumed by that primal want he thought left behind in the age of torchlight and brutality. To Delilah, where the clone would often sneak glances to the adjoining laboratory where her child formed in the most delicate stages of life, to Matt, the detective reduced to a living machine comatose, and pale. Iliana, her bandages still visible underneath her civilian dress, she stroked her holstered magnum underneath the thick leather jacket as if to constantly assure it would provide her safety under uncertain conditions. The twins and Nudnik, wincing with every explosion rattling the walls.

And carefully, surreptitiously, his slinked his gaze near Maria, bedridden still, and staring to the ceiling. His great hearing could discern every breath she took, long, drawn out and in perfect, rhythmic succession, and her scent, glorious, sweet, ripe. She happened to fall her cloudy gaze from the ceiling tiles and caught Hudson staring at her. He snapped away, and moved on.

He found Todd standing outside the door to the surgical bay, hermitically sealed against any intrusion, even the slightest tuft of air or microbe. He was watching through the window Dr. Pierce starting the operation on his newly discovered mother, under examination lights many and painfully crisp, with Annika assisting as best she could, both garbed in dark cloaks and surgical masks. He was helpless, and that scared him, angered him.

Annika looked up from Rose's opened torso, sensing Todd's eyes still upon them both. She nodded her assurance and quickly went back to her work, handing Pierce the proper tools and watching his hands skillfully weave together internal organs severed and split by Egyptian steel.

Hudson approached the young man from behind, mindful of the Epsilon armor's heaving wings, Todd's anxiousness translated through the mindlink software. "Th' Guild has breached th' walls, lad." he whispered, as not to raise any fears within the room. "An' some may be on their way down here."

Todd's scowl grew deep, resentful, and even wanting. "Good. Let them come." he warned, his voice not his own. "Let them die..."

****************************************

MacBeth angrily thrust a clenched, gloved fist into another Guild member's face, the blow felt even through the dwindling energy field, and the ancient king slowly gained back the vengeance he craved for the destruction of his home, but more importantly his recently purchased, and never finished book. He was magnificent in battle, as much as Shadow or Sata or Broadway, his style fluid and practiced and evasive of any weapon fired towards him. With roundhouse kicks doubled with his charged weapons, he was deadly from any angle.

Demona clenched to her mace, striking the steel-headed weapon to the Guild's barriers and firing her large rifle into the sea of black. She eventually butted up against another's back, her sister, Desdemona bloodied but alive, her own skills barely keeping her as such.

"How did you know to come?" she called to her flame-haired sister over the commotion of battle and storm, surprised in her presence.

"MacBeth...had an itch." It seemed a jest, but with MacBeth's unique intuition, it was a very plausible excuse. "Besides, with what has been released into the city, it was not hard to presume something may be wrong here as well. For as much as this clan may presume otherwise, they are a focal point for strange occurrences." She turned and used her beam weapon to fend off an attacker towards her sister, allowing her a reprieve from combat in which she was outclassed. Having noticed throughout the battle a certain absence to the field, Demona then took the opportunity to demand of her tawny-colored kin, "Where is my daughter?!"

"She is here...hopefully..."

Demona found grief in her sister's features, as if she knew what would come next, and asked once more, "And our clever sister?"

Her golden hair pulled from it's binding and matted with blood, Desdemona cringed, and answered solemnly, "Dead."

Demona blinked. And swallowed, the pain welled within her stomach as a knot clenching upon her insides. In an instant, with but a simple declaration, she was stolen of the chance to ever make good on a promise made so many times, and echoed in word and heart it haunted her constantly. Her anger interpreted itself as a tortured scream growing from a growl lodged within her breast, the gargoyle firing her cannon deep into the Guild ranks, enjoying each and every strike against the humans who dared to destroy them, and judge their race by conceit and propaganda and baseless phobias. As they came, she fled into their midst, swinging her mace to destroy as much as she possibly could, and doing so, left her sister to watch her descend into her own personal rage.

****************************************

He lifted the vehicle as if it were not even a strain on muscles with the strength of titanium, and chose his target deliberately, uncaring to whomever may trapped between the two gladiators. Sobek hurled the car towards Goliath, the wingless leader scrambling away as the vehicle impacted just feet away from where he was once standing. The fuel tank burst as the car bounced and rolled more like a toy, and spread a wall of fire and burning metal fragments in a concentric ring, and Goliath fought against the blinding pain to avoid being either scalded by lapping flame or pierced by jagged debris. "I am further impressed, Goliath," tempted Sobek, "you continue to fight with such boundless fortitude even after having your wings taken away."

"...as long...as you exist, psychotic..." Goliath responded, his grunt a curling breath spit into the moist air. "...I will...never surrender..."

"Good." A massive, unhitched semi truck was wrenched from its place upon the ground, and poised precariously in the bare hands of Sobek above his head, threatening great destruction with several tons of steel and fuel. "I was expecting you would say something as pedantic as that. All such heroes do." Sobek's entire frame clenched, the muscles bursting with raw power to hurl the semi towards Goliath. "I hope you have the scrotum to back up such empty words." The truck danced in the air, quickly homing in on the wounded gargoyle, and with no time to dodge, Goliath raised his forearms and braced his talons into the asphalt, taking the entire brunt of the vehicle head on. The sheer weight pushed him back into a storefront, demolishing the front-facing plate glass window and brick structure, and burying the battered gargoyle underneath several hundred pounds of dislodged mortar and building materials.

"Goliath!" Elisa screamed out in unbridled instinct, the remaining officers hearing her desperate cry, turning towards the woman with suspecting glares. They aimed towards the mutated gargoyle now that the other combatant was free and clear, but Elisa instantly jumped in front of them, again impeding their target. "Don't!! You could hit the gastank...and take out half the neighborhood."

"It seems I was wrong." Sobek sidestepped the overturned semi truck and waded through the low-lying cloud of dust standing before the half buried behemoth, Goliath using his one free hand to slowly remove rubble from his beaten form. He looked down on him and they linked gazes. "You are an arrogant man, Goliath." he hissed, an ironic statement considering his frequent boasts in every encounter with the Wyvern clan, but psychosis often bred the delusion of modesty. "Perhaps I should deprive you of your arms," he goaded continually, "that would truly make this game more interesting."

****************************************

The energy stream clipped her leg across the thigh, and she stumbled, but remained on her feet with a wide stance and quick movement. Desdemona ignored the pain the red streak across caramel caused, one of many, her tunic reduced to a tattered, drenched sheathe over a form athletic and feminine and questionably abominable towards any man who would somehow not appreciate her awesome, matronly beauty. Hand to hand combat was not her preeminent talent, but her intelligence served her well, her swiftness to elude and use the Guild members themselves as weapons, and lure them into the path of Mother's cannons.

But she was tiring, and Othello knew it. They all were, their battle having raged on for near to an hour. "Stay close to me, my love." His voice was deep, his tone demanding, but she knew him to be everlastingly protecting, and ensuring she would survive this night.

"Freak!" a man yelled, attacking her savagely, butting the end of his gun barrel across her temple when the chance arose. He received in turn received a clenched fist to the face by a spouse angered if anything by the insult more than the blow, the force-field preventing the entire collapse of his skull with such untamed ferocity behind the power of the strike.

Desdemona stumbled into the arms of her mate, Othello turning his back towards the Guild raking their energy beams across her exposed flesh and the membranes of his wings. He grunted in pain, inhaling deeply his own burning skin, but persevered until Desdemona could get back to her feet. "How long can we last?!" she screamed out of frustration, her vision marred by the stream of blood intruding into her eyes.

"As long as possible."

****************************************

As the others suffered numerous wounds and feared for their very lives in this desperate struggle, he instead reveled. Within the scent of blood and the scorched air made wet by rain and hot by lightning, he was truly centered, and infinitely focused. He found himself able to unleash almost everything he had, comfortable with even killing blows, but still controlled that darker side gone unseen since Japan. Even here he was hesitant to use it, to lose that control.

His eyes glowing sapphire, Shadow thrust the palm of his fist into a Guild, his head snapped back in such ferocity to nearly sever the spinal cord. His spurred elbow speared another, and Shadow spun around and cracked the gold-tipped end of his nunchuku up against another Guild member who dared come too close, a killing blow to the man if not the shield protecting him. He struck his nunchuku across a few more, the weapons a never-ending blur, and swept his legs underneath, falling them and moving on to the next wave by using his wings to lift himself over them in a perfect flip, unbidden by gravity's hold. He dodged a spray of bullets with a simple crick of his neck, and evaded like lightning the energy blasts coming his way. He was untouchable, a shadow well named, even with their forces encircling him.

It seemed he had gained a reputation among them, as they surrounded him relentlessly, the greatest warrior and threat to their entire plan. They attempted to suffocate him, to limit his mobility, but instead it only enraged him, and tried his patience. "Get...OFF!!!" he bellowed, sending a few flying across the entire length of the courtyard. Another received a crushing blow to the stomach, throwing up from the force of the impact, his vomit spilling into the inside of his energy shield without any place to exit. He staggered off, frantically powering off the field to breathe through his own regurgitation. Shadow fished three shuriken from his armband and unleashed them against the man's unguarded flesh, impacting in perfect succession against his chest, neck and forehead, killing him instantly, eyes open and seeing the sky fall as did he. The ninja was unaffected by yet another killing blow, one of many tonight, deeming these invaders unworthy of any honorable death.

****************************************

She ducked from the hail of gunfire and bounded from a corner bartizan to come down upon her adversary with fists clenched, and knocked him away. Through the battle, she had heard the screams brimming of retaliation rising up from the crowd. Familiar, frightening, heard only a few times when circumstances were desperate, when she knew her sire would follow her baser instincts. "Mother?!" Angela screamed towards the red-haired demon come into sight, entrenched within the middle of the Guild ranks, crazed and feral, angry beyond any words would allow. Her mother had quickly deteriorated into a rage-fueled engine of vengeance, her sable eyes unbelieved of her ferocity. "Mother?!!"

The voice the only lure from her battle, Demona turned and found through the confusion a face welcoming, calming, and she smiled in the younger gargoyle's distant presence, hoping above all she would still be alive in this madness. "Angela..."

****************************************

In an offering of chance, he found the lavender female distracted, a deadly mistake when not a clansmen around to dutifully watch her back, and he fired when the path was sufficiently opened up between his brethren.

****************************************

"Angela!" Lexington warned from across the courtyard when seeing the shooter aim for her back, his voice but drowned in the wake of another clap of thunder.

****************************************

The bullets hailed an unearthly scream as they filled the air with a lightning flash of shaped copper and a stream of oily smoke curling within the wake, a crossfire of steel which ensnared an innocent in their web drawn across the courtyard. She was graceful in her movements to avoid such a fate until now, and even the best of agility awarded by a form superior to man could not escape an inevitability akin to this. The bullets tore through her back, just below and left of her chest, and pierced her lung and shredded the ventricle, venting a strong, triple-pulsing spray of blood into her body. Angela staggered when the pain at last registered long after the bullets had passed through her and continued on to impact in some distant bulwark. Her breaths became gasping, and metallic with the taste of blood flooding into her lung, and stole from her the strength to stand, the strength to wage a winning battle versus the overpowering embrace of darkness. In front of Broadway's wide, haunted eyes, she collapsed.

Demona watched powerlessly from afar only to see her daughter fall in a congested heap, an eerie similarity to another battle fought once before, but this time, no human detective had been there to come to her aid. Nor had she, to spare her the chance to live beyond a war such as this. The reality took several seconds to register wholly. "Angela?"

"Angela!!" Broadway cried, his voice torn, disposing quickly and brutally of three Guild soldiers in his haste to reach his fallen beloved. "ANGELAAAAA!!!!" His howl having risen to the heavens, Broadway became more of a battering ram through the full ranks of Guild members that came between him and his mate. In the midst of the continuing battle, Broadway rushed to her side and kneeled down by Angela, comatose within a growing slick, reflecting in a seeping crimson the threaded strands of lightning crossing through the sea of cloud. He raised her gently in his lap, pressing a large palm to her flowing wound as her lips moved to form words lost in stolen breaths, the promise of her undying faith kissed upon the sheeting rain, and echoed by her eyes. "Come on, stay with me," he pleaded, as the world fell way around them, the gunfire, the thunder, the animalistic war cries exploding from winged warriors now but a whisper, "come on, love, fight! Fight damnit!!"

The fight he screamed to her was no longer her concern, only the static warmth of death enveloping her mortal, fragile form. She only wished she had the power to tell him by word, by diction, just how much she loved him, but her breath was fluid now, muddy red and suffocating. She hoped he would at least see the devotion she reflected in her eyes, and prayed silently he would live on if only to carry her entire lifetime in his memories. Angela mouthed the words I love you before her eyes closed, her heart stopped, and she died in the cradled pillow of her lover's arms.

"Angie?" he called, refusing to believe she was dead, and stubbornly preventing her demise to register even with the lack of pulse from her chest, and the warmth leaching from her battered frame. "Angela?!!" He sobbed into her chest, and tasted her blood on his lips and tongue, the essence of death itself fused with the pouring rain. She was lost. "I love you..."

"My daughter!!" Demona screamed, rending her bare talons across the exposed neck of a Guild woman when her shield collapsed from the stress of battle, killing her instantly without care of the human life that lay beneath the mask, that which condemned the victim to a larger component, and sacrificed her distinctiveness among a force not unlike the stormfront raging above. She ran to Angela's side, and when seeing firsthand her daughter's fate, she crumpled upon her and wept near uncontrollably.

From a far corner, Xanatos peered from inside of his exosuit to the dead gargoyle, and tried his best to ignore the death of one of the clan he partly betrayed. He had a much larger predicament to concern himself with. "I'm sorry." he whispered, the sorrow lost within the cavern of his helmet.

As Demona huddled over Angela's limp corpse, howling in sheer grief and clutching the younger gargoyle's body in her hands, Broadway staggered back, and benevolent charcoal kindled with the flames of rage upon a final declaration, and a blinding white spewed from underneath a crested brow. Tears flowed, anger simmered and ultimately met its breaking point, and Broadway became more than the sum of body, mind and spirit. Abandoning his dead mate, he rose into the storms, his brawny structure heaving and hunched and bursting with adrenaline provoked by his lover's scent, and he searched through the literal myriad of aroma for the gunman. He found only a sea of black, of masks mocking him in their expressionless features, and Broadway screamed, that which would certainly hinder the spirit of any who faced him. Blinded by red, and mindless, he entered back into the fray, and his strength was more than impressive, it was awe-inspiring. All that he faced were toppled beneath him, as Broadway forged a path through the Guild members with his bare fists, bruising skin and breaking bone even through their Kevlar and energy shields.

They attacked in response. And when they hit him, he was not aware. When they shot him, he did not feel. One Guild member got too close, and when having depleted his ammunition into Broadway's body, the once gentle giant merely snapped his neck through even the shield and pushed the body aside to fall upon the stones glossed with rain, without any compunction for the life he just took with his bare hands. The scent of both Angela's blood and his own compelled his form even with the injuries sustained, and drew long-buried instincts to the surface. That to hunt, that to kill.

He was a warrior true and forged by the purest of blood now, and with one last passing glance towards his dead mate, he swerved away and back into the fight. To hopefully save more of his clan from his lover's fate.

As she wept alone in the middle of chaos, Demona damned herself for not having any ability to reverse the inescapability of death, and cried for the fact it should have been her to fall instead of her offspring. And years of demanding, grueling redemption laughed at her, berated her in the fact this salvation was paid for by the dearest of blood. A gun barrel cocked above her, and she raised blurred, scarlet eyes to a Guild member having stopped to take advantage of the mourning matron. She hissed as an animal would when wounded, perhaps even giving credence to the Guild's conception gargoyles were mere beasts. "Shoot me, human," Demona urged, pleaded, to a younger Guild, his hand visibly shaking when facing against the demon or rumor and hearsay spread amongst the Guild ranks, "if you dare..."

"Sure." he answered rebelliously, and before he even had the time to pull the trigger, a splash of crimson and the swipe of steel would be the last sight he would see as Sata lunged her sword clean and severe through his force-field and chest. He fell, dead, the energetic graviton field coated across his body possessed of an Achilles heel, unable to stop the razor sharp blade from piercing between the electrons of the layers of polarized energy, with the might behind the thrust beyond human range.

The samurai was beaten, bloody, torn but alive and fighting still, and wiped the Guild blood from her blade against her kimono sleeve. She simply nodded a passing of her condolences towards Demona, her thoughts drifting fleetingly to her own children as she leapt back into battle, leaving a mother to grieve once more.

"My beautiful daughter..." she whispered, clenching her talons into the blood-soaked tunic of Angela's dress, warm blood caked on cold, unresponsive flesh. "You were...you were destined to be the best of all of us." She straightened Angela's body, her wings draping the corpse out of respect, and babbling out of a sanity being threatened by the one anchor of deliverance. First her sister, and now her daughter, gone. It was too much, too soon, out of the millennium of watching those mortal wither and die around her, she had not faced any death such as this. "The daughter of a leader, of a princess and guardian...an angel birthed from a demon, you were not meant to die by human wretchedness..."

In a thousand years she had not felt pain as she did now, centered in her breast and aching for release. Her hands though shaking traced her own features mirrored in lavender beauty. She stood up and looked around her, her eyes both wide and frenzied, her hands stained with her daughter's blood. Stained, entrenched, soaked in her daughter's blood, the sheer scent and volume unhinging a stable demeanor among the chaos of war.

Something snapped.

"Demona!" screamed Desdemona, coming to her aid and falling to Angela's side, attempting to give anything to help, but far too futile, far too late to save either of them from a conspired fate. Her tearing eyes shot up towards a stricken Demon, her sister's brow clenched, and her claws dragging down a contorted, anguished expression. "My sister?"

"I...I killed her..."

She shook her head, seeing the self-blame evident and the crumbling of a woman, a singular force, once resistant to any emotional injury. "It was not you!"

"Because of me...they are all dead...my clan, my sister...my daughter..." She shed tears, an acrid taste when curling over her lip. "I...I will not allow it..." she pledged in a growl, her words bubbling on a shaken laugh as she timidly backed away. "I will not allow them to die..."

With her recovered mace firmly in hand, Demona dashed towards the nearest cornice edge, striking fatal blows to any who deemed themselves either brave or foolish enough to cross her wild path. The clouds charged with primal energy incongruously welcomed her, as if allowing passage within their depths in pity, and almost willfully granted her an updraft to soar higher and faster into the swells forced against her. In grief and near insanity she flew through an aerial battle the same way she came, but this time without the grace of caution to protect her mortal form. "I will save them...if not in this universe then another..." Racing betwixt the Steel Clan and drones set against the energy-shielded Guild attack craft, they narrowly missed charring her skin against the play of gunfire crossing through the dark streams of cloud and pouring rain. "My sister, and my daughter will live." she whispered to herself, aiming for Destine Manor. "Even if I have to erase from existence the last one thousand years..."

****************************************

It seemed empty, gutted and destroyed by some fictional war, the street torn up and almost half of the buildings lining the streets completely devastated, as if some great force had ripped them open with its bare hands. And indeed it did.

To save what remained of their homes, their businesses and belongings, a few stragglers had dared take the risk to stay behind even against implicit orders by the military forces called in to evacuate the surrounding neighborhoods. And within a ruined district, some found themselves standing upon the edge of a chasm, their curiosity having led them towards a great crater in front of the DeMoro building left in the assault by unknown to them, a resurrected deity. Assured of their safety with the creatures having destroyed their homes now several blocks away, they inspected the buildings torn apart and the abyss perfectly spherical hollowed into the street several feet deep, nearly having broken through the pavement into the labyrinth of subway tunnels and pipes below.

"I think someone's down there..." an older man muttered, adjusting his glasses to better see through the mud and debris a shape vaguely human.

A younger woman, her clothes soiled and stained and drenched from the rain, chose to think otherwise, having witnessed from her home a massive creature destroy all in its path. "No way," she whispered cynically, shaking her head in pity to the dead, she being lucky to survive, "no one could have survived that."

A hand broke through the chunks of cement collected into the bottom of the pit in a filthy puddle, scaring the observers and forcing them back in thinking the creatures of devastation had returned. The figure rose from the mire collected in the crevasse, the constant deluge from above helping to clean off an eerily glowing skin. She stood, alive, and her flesh reflected broken light from broken lanterns and open buildings, appearing as an entity fashioned from liquid fire.

The clever sister.

The gaping crater had been the result of her collision against the asphalt, a descent from thirty stories and the moment of impact more like an explosion leaving several long wounds ripped across her backside and arms and tearing her clothes from her now golden steel skin. Gashes marred the gleaming beauty of the metallic gold, seeping a strange gilded fluid that was her blood. Of any emotion she could feel from nearly dying in the midst of an eruption of magical energy and a fatal drop from atop a skyscraper, she seemed merely annoyed, wearing a peculiar expression. She held a hand to her eyes to better see her new transformation, and marveled at her wounds slowly closing with a powerful immune system. "Defensive measures," a cold, mechanical voice, promising the threat of reprisal when trailing the path left by Set, "active."

****************************************

They fell before her, the stragglers, those who ran as best they could from a spirit of a goddess raised from beyond human comprehension. Sakmet prowled the rain-slicked city merely a few blocks from the DeMoro building, her feline-featured body now near a human's size to better survey her territory and make certain the intruders would pay their penance. The goddess of plague and pestilence only had to come within several meters before the humans around her grew sick, emaciated, their skin hanging loose from jutting bones and crumpling to the street unable to support their own weight.

Her feral instincts were not the driving force like the others, merely her distaste for humanity would lead her to infect the remaining populace. Any guise she wore in the mythology the ancient Egyptians built around her would serve to mask her true intent. Though her genuine fay self still existed somewhere else in this world, this remnant, a shard broken from the past, was just as deadly. As she sauntered alluringly down the urban path paved with fallen corpses and streaming with water, her catlike eyes narrowed to focus her gaze down the street, towards where an energy surge rippled fiercely the worldly energies of sorcery and magic spread across every tangible structure and earthen mount. The gods and fay and even some supernaturally-inclined humans and gargoyles had access to this globe-spanning haze, or field, and it made a presence known to Sakmet like a gentle tug on a spider's web. A green ball floated into view from the street running perpendicular, and slowed, having noticed the so-called god sculpted of sapphire energy.

Alexander stalled his journey and studied at the catwoman far from him. He frowned like any child would when sensing the sheer malevolence by mere stance and body language, and even the perfect replica of the true Sakmet's untamed grin.

Though unpossessed of any intelligent mind, she knew great power beheld this human child, her fur bristling upon her back and prehensile tail. "...boy..." she struggled to speak, to go beyond her limitations of the magical orbs which gave birth to her. Her energies focused, and the disease and plague she carried swept towards the hybrid.

He held firm. "You're not real." Alexander seethed, raising a single hand with fingers splayed. "You're a stupid fake." The street shook, the buildings quivered, and Alexander increased the sum of the energy within him into the one extremity aimed for the malicious feline slowly building what powers lay within her temporary form. From his flesh came the emerald fire passed down through an astonishing ancestry, what had been building since but a child and faintly tempered through tedious lessons with the trickster. The entire street was engulfed in a single beam of energy, shot from Alexander's hand towards the stunned Sakmet and pulling any loose debris into the beam with a sudden vacuum. Her reaction was but a scream, as her physical presence was scraped away by the blast channeled down the entire street, energy diluted with energy and tearing into oblivion synthetic, energy-made flesh. She completely dissipated, only a lingering howl left to bleed into the heavens.

The blast left a trail of fire and seared asphalt down the entire street, its end point a building hollowed by the blast. Alexander's hand shook and eventually fell to his side, the young boy surprised at his own strength, as he did not mean to unleash such power. But satisfied, he moved on, towards the one who needed him the most.

****************************************

Impatient, Sobek decided to aid the gargoyle from his tomb and reached in, gripping his bony claws around Goliath's neck and wrenching him from the brick wall laying atop him as if a broken blanket. His greater strength held Goliath aloft if but a toy compared to his mutated stature, and he eyed carefully the gargoyle clutching his hands to Sobek's single claw stealing the sweet taste of fresh oxygen. "I am so disappointed." he seethed, his anger radiating clearly. "We are the predators living among prey counting in the billions and steadily rising, and you choose to dawdle amongst mere livestock. We are the inheritors of this planet, we evolved first, and so shall we prevail against the infestation of humanity."

"...and...I thought...I was...hallucinatory..." Goliath spit out with great effort, bidding his time, and placing his very life in danger if only to hold out for a few minutes more.

"You wish to live among them, to love them, to exchange bodily fluids with them, to continually protect them even when they want you dead." Sobek's talons drew blood from a muscular neck. "No matter how much you plead to them or pledge your undying guard, they will betray you. You are the delusional one here, Goliath, not me."

"...you...will not...succeed..."

"When I ascend to a throne made of the skin of six billion human corpses, we shall see."

Nearly choking on his own tongue, Goliath managed to slip on a whisper of forced air his rebuttal. "...you believe...yourself king...but you are nothing...you are the...collective excrement...of those six billion humans..." He released a muffled laughter, unheard by anyone but himself. "...to be flushed with the rest of their shit..."

In a fit of anger, Sobek's hand clenched and nearly broke Goliath's neck, the gargoyle's stratagem working all too perfectly. "How dare you!!"

****************************************

"Where is it?!! WHERE IS IT?!!!" Demona threw the ancient apothecary table across the length of her basement sanctum, having just arrived the gargoyle desperately foraged through the bowels of her mansion home searching for the medallion forged by technology and magic and great effort on her part. The tears skidded from the edges of her eyes, making dark indigo of mottled cerulean, and blurring her sight. Angela's blood still clung to her in crevices where the rain could not wash it completely away, caked and dried onto her skin and a bitter, pungent remembrance.

She raked her hands across the shelves of her bookcase, emptying the contents onto the floor in her mad quest. Papers and sculptures, glass orbs and jars spilling and shattering and releasing their contents, all was upturned mercilessly. Her hands shook violently, her chest heaved with wracking sobs, she destroyed an immaculately kept space in a matter of seconds only to discover a room of useless trinkets and spells making themselves a pile across the ground. "Where?" she roared, losing sentience to rabid instinct. "Where?!!"

She spun around, and found on the wall behind a painting left crooked the corner edge of a hidden safe. "...the vault..." She tore the painting from its place, an original oil from the 17th century now reduced to tattered scraps when set against her claws, and plunged a hand through the hard steel of the embedded safe. The door was ripped away, and inside the murky concave, a hinged, ornamented box stared back at her. Hungry to have its power resting in her hands, Demona flouted the bother of a key and instead used her adrenaline-induced strength to tear it in half.

The medallion fell and cluttered to the floor, crimson rimmed with gold, and she lay pause to her desperate pursuit to claim it. It would be the ultimate betrayal to try and unravel everything that has come before, to try and best the river of time and change the flow of history thought immutable. She had her own theories of time and its intricate functions, given credence by Brooklyn and Sata's timedancing journeys, of how their experienced future was already different, and near proven with Griff's deliverance into the future, saved from a fated death, and the visitation into this timeline by figures not yet born. So many loopholes to exploit, and she would eradicate all of space-time to bring back those she loved and ultimately betrayed.

Demona suddenly clutched to the medallion ridden with delicate circuitries, and ran from the room, her decision made under manic conditions without taking enough time to heed the devastating consequences. "Voice ident: Destine, activate Valkyrie," she called out, coldly, her own security system hailing its master's voice within this gothic mansion, "recognize new programming..."

****************************************

"Let's go, soldier. We're losing precious time."

"We're almost through, sir." commented the driller, using a device that sucked every last ounce of ambient warmth from the surrounding air to supplement the raw heat it produced to melt through even the thickest, most resilient of steel. The security door closed between two connecting stone corridors, centered about five feet above the floor, transformed into a warm luminance of ruby orange spread from a single point within the wall of dulled, riveted sterling.

Black waited impatiently for his subservient to open a hold through the gate, the small Guild contingent already having dealt with the interior weaponry, smaller cannons similar to what lay siege to their forces outside reduced to melted metallic stumps hanging limply from the corridor walls. Through three security doors already, this was the last to fall before the large energy source they had detected and followed relentlessly. "You're sure about your readings?" he asked another.

His eyes were red, and searching. "We're getting a tremendous power reading from down that corridor, sir." he answered his leader, using an infrared visual scanner integrated into the eye slits of his mask to look through the walls and flooring. "It's regulating the power brought into the entire castle."

"A control room." Black mused, hoping to come across such a discovery as this.

"Yes, sir, but because of the heat generated within the entire chamber, I can't tell if there are any bogies inside." His gaze trailed downwards, as if he was looking through the entire castle, and indeed, with the inventive technology at his command, he was. "The rest of the castle is empty, but I have body heat signatures from several floors below us. In the Eyrie building."

Black nodded. "You three, head to the room on this floor, kill any resistance, and if you can find their computer banks, download everything they have and then destroy it. Weapons systems, computers, everything..." He turned around the agent White and chose the last four from the group to accompany him with prompt and practiced hand signals. "White, we'll head to the elevator shafts. We're going down."

****************************************

His hand clenched, the pressure against Goliath's larynx incredible, choking the gargoyle. Sobek leaned into him with eyes steeled and devoid of mercy, the sound of gurgling echoing through his adversary's throat and gaping jaw sheer pleasure. "How dare you think you could stand up to me!" he blew a breath noxious across Goliath's senses, angered by the gargoyle's defiance and raw impertinence. "You, the man who would condemn our race to dilution, who would sire a race of mongrels! How dare you believe you were my equal! How dare...you..." he trailed off, intrigued by something new, "why are you laughing?"

Goliath's mouth, cut and bleeding, had somehow swelled into a smile, and in his fatigued state he laughed, healthy and rich even with a compressed throat, and unnerving to the Egyptian, never having heard such a sound erupting through Goliath's chest. "...I...am stalling..."

"Stalling?" The immortal cricked his neck to the side, captivated by a new level to the game. He tightened his grip on Goliath's neck, and hoisted him higher. "Now you have my attention. What are you waiting for? It can't be your clan, they are under attack as we speak." Goliath's eyes flashed with the mention of his clan and Sobek's knowledge of their situation. "And I believe your newly resurrected sister was recently incinerated. So why, pray tell, are you stalling?"

Goliath was suddenly released from Sobek's grasp when the immortal was lost within an energy beam, centered directly at his chest, and knocked away. A stroke of luck and good timing, and Elisa took the chance to run towards her husband, as a ball of blinding bottle green fell to the ground and dissolved, releasing of all things a child from its nexus.

He scampered towards the gargoyle trying to hoist himself onto his feet by Elisa's aid, and stood before them both, rubbing his chest, as if in pain. A child having bested an immortal not unlike a force of nature, and he seemed strangely unfazed. "Are you okay?"

"...I am...now, Alexander...thanks to you..." Goliath managed a reply. "I was...waiting for you...your powers are evolving quicker than...any of us thought possible..."

"He hurt my mom." The youth looked back hesitantly towards where Sobek shook off the effects of the blast, for some apparent reason placid in comparison to what had annihilated the Sakmet entity. "But I can't fight 'im..." Alexander explained with wide eyes, awed by the massive seven and a half foot gargoyle even with his haggard appearance. "Not by myself." An idea arose, popping into his mind, and the fact such a stunt would have no tutors to protest gave precedence. "I need t' use your body, G'liath."

"What?" Elisa deadpanned.

Mimicking his wife's stunned statement in expression, the gargoyle quirked his brow in a questioning response, but simply nodded when beyond the capacity to heed the reason behind Alexander's odd request.

"Wait," Elisa cut through, "what is he going to do? Goliath?" Fear was prevalent within her voice, Goliath having lasted longer than she ever thought, but no one, not even the world's greatest warrior could survive the bloodloss and constant battle. "Goliath?!"

"..find...somewhere safe, my Elisa..." Goliath squeezed his wife's hand and gently nudged her away, and simply watched as Alexander walked around him, reached out and timidly pressed his tiny hand to his backside. It was a warmth soothing, addictive, a tingling across every neuron of his body similar to the afterglow of climax with his wife, as Alexander's hand pressed into the thick hide, and continued on inside of his flesh, buried up to the elbow.

Sobek rose from the street and puffed a chest with the bony plating scorched and steaming. "The boy." he growled perceptively, stomping his ways towards Goliath. "This was unexpected. Why do I continually drag these things on?"

The scent of brimstone and fire suddenly filled the air, raw, unfiltered sorcery, of flesh merging from two into one. Alexander reached deep inside Goliath, his warm tawny tint diluting into lavender as his magic fused them into a single being, not entirely human and not entirely gargoyle. Before Elisa's astonished gaze, the child wholly disappeared into the mighty form of Goliath, enveloping them both within the aura of his abilities stretched to their limits to encompass such a feat. This was new territory for the hybrid fay, and he stepped cautiously when entering Goliath's body and consciousness, not wanting to disturb the great labyrinth of emotion, sensation and sentience delicately strung together. Goliath shuddered and strained from the foreign cognizance, and babbled with two distinct minds vying for a single body, "...horseys...Trinity...father betrayer...mother sick...sky deprived...Elisa...baby..." It was an endless string, as two consciousnesses merged, creating anew from the vast sentient wastes provided.

Alexander found comfort though within this powerhouse, feeling the sheer strength flowing through a body crafted through evolution's finest, and the bonds of love for his mate, his family and clan. He reshaped the battered host to suit his needs, their needs, its needs. Where once the bloodied gashes torn down the leader's back served as a grim reminder, now seeped emerald magicks exact to those bulging his arteries and making wild his triple heartbeat. From a glistening green grew new struts made entirely of energy, shredding the canvas bandage and yawning wondrously into wings mirrored to Goliath's own, severed and buried more than a block away under the ruins of a fallen cathedral. Wounds were mended, salved and healed. For now, through the power of a child, he was whole.

Sable hair turned to scarlet, the strands coated from root to tip in the fires of a fairy lineage and perhaps just a cosmetic touch. The created entity shook its wings, a light dusting of energy shaken from the testing of the new jade appendages almost translucent, but wide and emerald and magnificent nonetheless. His feet lifted from the ground in a moment of levitation, magical wings awarding a flight serene and steady without exertion, and turned towards the indignant Egyptian. The creature born of two swept away any intruding brick and steel beams in its path, and effortlessly moved the broken semi truck from his path with a single arm, his eyes burning. "Sobek." It was an amalgamation of a throaty rumble and a gentle soprano making this otherworldly tone. The combination of two completely separate beings, Goliath and Alexander, in both body and mind and consciousness, melded in voice as well. It was a warning the Egyptian heeded quickly as the flames of emerald sorcery licked at his skin, not hot but possessed of an energy he flinched from readily. The child allowed the leader to play the dominant role, but fueled the fires of rage with his own personal vendetta against the immortal. "You hurt our mother." the two voices cautioned gravely, speaking in a sense plural, of two beings. "You hurt our mate, our city, our home. You are a blight on this world. The game...shall continue."

****************************************

The assaulted shields at last gave way and left the helicopter vulnerable to attack. Septu, his energy created form mottled with great rifts left from the barrage of missiles slowly healing themselves, glanced back up towards the Guild craft. He unleashed his spear and cleaved the craft in two, igniting the fuel reserves and hydraulic fluid, engulfing the helicopter and its crew in a burst of light and smoke. The remains fell to the ground under Septu's foot, the forth helicopter to go down in the Guild's attempt to stop these gods. One more remained, a desperate bid to battle and stay alive.

Menhit leapt at one from a taller building and narrowly missed engaging her claws against the energy field surrounding the craft. The young pilot of Echo Seven swerved off. "Damnit, we need back-up!!" he screamed, his sensibilities still unable to grasp such an occurrence from ever happening, his pledge to safeguard humanity through the Guild pushed to the limits of an established reality.

"Pull in, boy!" yelled the gunner. "Another shot! All we need is another shot!!"

"We're getting slaughtered, we need to get out of here and get help!!"

"One more shot!!"

He struggled to keep the helicopter steady in the winds pushing against the craft, and from the corner of his eye, found the sapphire lioness leap to a taller skyscraper and size up her prey. He tried to pull up, but Menhit was too fast. "God save me..." Her claws ripped through the cockpit, obliterating the last line of defense.

****************************************

The helicopter dodged only just the strange humanoid object as it dared to intrude upon the aerial battle above and around Wyvern, attaining a speed blurring and unstoppable and its path straight and uncaring of the behemoths claiming its airspace as their own. It was similar to the Steel Clan robots, but lithe, feminine, a machine molded from the midnight form of the reclusive Nightstone Unlimited CEO.

A Valkyrie, programmed in a moment of madness and despair, curled its arms around a solitary passenger who cared less what weaponry erupted around her. Through the air and skimming the stones, the Valkyrie blazed a suicidal trail through the Guild and towards the opening guarded by the gargoyles, programmed for one such reckless task that would cost it its very existence. The wings curled in around the cargo and the automaton broke through the line, scraping steel skin across stone when it crashed through the hole into the castle interior.

Demona crawled from the wreckage of her robot, dazed but alive, having used the one personal model stationed at her home as chauffer to traverse the distance between the Eyrie and Destine Manor in a matter of minutes. Now safely inside, she traveled the corridors with a single intent alone, to salve the wound of betrayal. The halls were a blur, her memories rich of this palace still and she navigated with great skill, until coming around a corner and skidding across a slick having polished the stone floor in blackened scarlet. Blood. And by the scent, of heavy iron and protein, it was gargoyle. Demona regained her footing and followed the trail towards the being that had spilled it.

Brooklyn huddled against the wall, his hand against his side in a fruitless struggle to keep inside of him his own blood, pouring from the wound suffered outside. An injury far worse than originally thought had taken its toll, and the new leader of Wyvern resisted the claim of unconsciousness.

Demona slowed her passage and peered down to him, a strange fusion of emotions played across her features.

Brooklyn thought his eyes played the cruelest of tricks in his injure, when he raised his eyes upwards to see Demona clenching to a medallion though slightly differing in color, it was that which condemned him to forty years of nomadic torment. It was a plot too simple to deduce, but he wondered what would drive this woman to try such a stunt. "Demona...don't..." he pleaded, grasping towards the gate. "You can't change the past...you'll only cause chaos within the timestream. Is stopping this battle worth it?"

She flinched and backed away a step, clutching the gate to her chest as if to lose it would deny her everything. "I will shatter all of eternity, if only to give just a single universe, a single timeline, back the beauty that is my daughter."

"Angela?" His eyes widened. "She's...?"

"Dead."

Brooklyn forced down the lump in his throat, weighing a possible chance for success against forty years of memory. "You're delusional, Demona...y-you're not thinking clearly."

"I am thinking clearly for the first time in a long time, Brooklyn. One decision on my part bled a million strands of possibility throughout an infinite number of realities. And there is one defining factor in the equation to be eliminated in order to set things right." She leaned in, her eyes slick, determined, deranged. "Me."

His brow knitted to her obscura, but the one clear truth of her plan screamed to him. "I'll stop you..." he assured.

"I think not." Demona swiftly kicked him across the face, knocking him out cold, his body slumping to the ground. "You have done enough this night. And I will not allow my daughter to pass into oblivion because of my deeds." Her journey resumed.

****************************************

"Hurry up, man!" he yelled towards his smaller, suited comrade, the technician, his hands delving through the labyrinth of wiring behind the handprint scanner of the main computer room. The others had tried their weapons to gain access, their technology, but to no avail, this door particularly resilient to any such damage they could inflict compared to the rest relatively unproblematic. He stood anxiously behind the tinkerer, he and the other guard exposed in the hall, far too much for their liking. "Come on, come on!!"

"I'm going as fast as I can!" he snapped back, unawares of the blur of motion behind him, and a struggle for two men and their lives in the space between seconds. "I think I got it." he announced, just before a muffled snarl brushed the air behind him, in perfect sync with the gale of wind teased against his neck. The tiny hairs bristled, and a spatter of blood sprayed across the door he kneeled in front of, ending the motion he had sensed. His breath held, he whispered, "Harrison?"

"Harrison is dead."

The betraying shadow behind him spread its wings, cloaking him within the darkness of membranous leather, a breath blown hot across his flesh. On instinct, he powered the force-field, disengaged to allow for the fine touch with his fingertips inside the wiring harness of the door panel. He turned around only to have a clawed hand scrape across his face, fortunately protected by a coating of energy lest it cleanly remove the skin. "Shit!" he screamed in fear, Demona unsuccessful in her first attempt to kill him as she did the others. "You can't hurt me, demon!" he goaded, edged up against the door with this strange, ugly, erotic creature studying him with great intrigue. "I'm safe from your claws."

"Perhaps." Demona grabbed his neck, and slammed his head against the stone arch housing the door, repeatedly. Time after time, blow after blow, she pulverized the stone with the Guild member's head, the shield holding barely but acting two-fold, the impact jarring considerably against the man's skull. Even as blood poured from his nose, she continued, merciless, unfeeling, until, sated only just, she released his body to slump onto the floor, the blood seeping through his broken skull and matted hair and pooling within the shield. "I hate humans."

She turned her attentions to the door, a barrier strong, and enough to keep even the Guild and their technology outside. The trail of human stink led her senses to believe there were occupants inside, and she pounded upon the door battered by previous attempts to dislodge it. It opened, Demona's presence verified with the camera above, and the gargoyle found herself directly face to face with Nicole.

"Oh thank god you're here..." she breathed a sigh of relief, entrapped within for hours, Nicole perhaps unawares of the incredible irony of finding salvation and assistance in the species she endeavored to expose.

Demona silently gripped a hand to Nicole's face and pushed her aside. "Move, human." she snarled, ridding herself of the obstruction in her path to what she sought, the reporter bounced off the computer desk and onto the floor. Stepping over Fox's prone form, unconscious still, Demona charged towards the main power feeds, feeding a grin in her ventured prize. She grabbed a cable snaked through the roof, and ripped it free from it's moorings. Without care for her safety, she tore the end from it's coupling, and bred a fire of electrical seepage breathing sparks across the ground, and angled the medallion from her loincloth belt.

The mythical creature gleamed in gold, ancient sorcery melded with advanced science, and Demona held her prize gingerly, her reflection mirrored in the surface of crimson. "For you, daughter." It craved power, and the charge port on the back found the energy needed to rouse this monstrosity to life, fed directly from the main generators, and, unwittingly, from the guardian spirit herself. Her energies directed outside, Infiniti's granted magic now escaped into a vessel forged from incompatible sorcery. The blood of Gaia and Avalon and human merged conflictingly as would oil and water, churning and becoming a storm within an unassuming medallion.

****************************************

The drain increased, and she grimaced, contorting majestic features. Even the most powerful gargoyle on the planet now bared immeasurable pain as her cells screamed in agony having so much torn away from her by the invasive technology. Infiniti bit her lip to prevent from leaking a scream, as the demands on her massive power reserves turned suddenly fierce, and the herringbone seams crossing their way through the steel ring holding her flared a bright sapphire with magical energy.

She was feeding the fluids of sorcery to another source in pure chaos, her energies directed at such an incredible rate as to make bulge her arteries above velvety cream skin and widen her eyes to the steel lined ceiling above. "There is...something wrong..." she gasped, her emerald, spitfire eyes becoming bloodshot. "There is...a disturbance..."

Infiniti screamed.

****************************************

"...enough death, enough destruction..." Demona whispered, watching as the Phoenix gate shed its dulled coloring for a brilliant glow, successfully powering the fusion batteries. "An entire millennium spurred from one single mistake shall be swept away."

"Auntie 'Mona?"

Demona turned to see Trinity approaching with due caution, from the corner of the room, of anything, this child a most bitter reminder of what lay dead on the stones outside. The hybrid sought comfort in the arms of a caretaker, unable to see beyond a trembling sheathe of azure skin her rage and despair having fused and swirling into a tumult. "Get away from me, child!!" she instead roared, scaring the child back into the arms of a recuperating Nicole. "I do not have any compunction to comfort a mewling babe of a woman at times I cannot readily stand!"

With Trinity cowed, and huddled into the shoulders of a stunned Nicole, Demona seemed as if to regret words spoken with wild abandon and unthinking of the consequence to a child thinking the world of her, but she was far too lost in her own guilt to care.

"Kiss your mother with that mouth?" Nicole hissed, unimpressed with any child, no matter what species, being treated in this manner.

"I killed my mother." Demona retorted, watching with dimmed eyes the gate vibrate, soaking in foreign energy like a sponge within any signs of slowing or reaching a breaking point. "I killed all of them, young and old alike, because of one small, simple choice I made, I created all of this," Demona waved her hands around to show off a creation deemed entirely hers, the sounds of destruction a grievous melody played far too long, "and condemned the survivors to a slow death." Demona peered over her shoulder, blue skin rimmed red in anger and malice. "And the only reason I have not killed YOU, human, is the fact it seems you are the only one left to care for the child in your arms at the moment. Consider yourself fortunate."

Nicole suddenly clenched tighter to Trinity's frame in the threat she knew to be real.

The gate chimed inconspicuously, tearing Demona's gaze away from the reporter and onto her weapon. It trembled, and hummed against the palms of her hands as she released it from the power cable, an entity alive and prepared to perform its master's most intimate wishes. Demona grinned, a shaken, desolate smile. "It is time to unravel this redundant thread."

****************************************

"They be here." Hudson warned, the situation monitor in the infirmary showing five distinct heat signatures in the elevator shaft.

"They must have gone through all the security doors." Delilah muttered, her talons unconsciously clenching into the side of the wall.

"Mr. Hawkins." Hudson called towards Todd, the armored youth staring through the surgical bay window and ignoring any voices. "Todd." A more persuasive tone forced the young man's eyes towards the gargoyle elder, and Hudson found a spark he did not readily like. "Ye be our best defense in those metal shorts of yuirs..."

The Epsilon helmet resealed with a snap, the sharpened brow of the featureless mask dropping over mechanical eyes. The wings unfolded, the steel flechettes attached like feathers trembling as the titanium pinions outstretched and tested the air, the weaponry roused to life and priming for use. "Stay here."

****************************************

A rush of air pushed out the sterling elevator doors, followed by a drum of fire engulfing the entire shaft and erupting though the doors with such force as to catapult them down the length of the corridor. The point man emerged from the hole created when using the grenade to puncture through the locked security bulkhead bracing the doors, and swathed his rifle through the dark, sterile hall, searching with infrared eyes and a laser sight for any sign of life. He motioned silently for the others to follow, and Black emerged, followed by White and the two having taken up the rear. They had managed so far against the castle defense systems, owing to their equalizer of technology subtle and devious.

"I'm getting a clearer infrared sight," the point man pointed towards the infirmary, the thick smoke like some entity crawling across the unsoiled tiling and walls, "there's nine distinct heat signatures inside the far room."

"Let's move." Black ordered, drawing his weapons. "They've no doubt heard our entrance." They moved quickly but cautiously within the darkness choked by the taste and sensation of explosive, the hospital room windows bathing the opposite wall in a faint light near the end of the hall, and guiding them towards their destination. The point man lead the way, his infrared sensors seeing the smoke-filled hallway in a hue of deep indigo, azure and green without a single separating line giving distinctive contour to any shape.

And unfortunately, did the titanium and carbon-plastics hide any heat signature within the cloud. A form emerged from the clearing smoke, black from black. "My home is getting torn apart." a mechanical voice boomed from the darkness. "My newly discovered and dying mother has gone into surgery." The Guild detachment stopped and aimed into the heavy cloud, the figure clearing with the glint of steel and the blurred outline of a demon. "I'm having a very, VERY bad day." The Epsilon emerged into full view, Todd impervious to the fact every Guild weapon was pointed directly towards his mask, the scarlet beams touching to cold titanium. His blades unsheathed from his arms, as did the lasers and the gatlings stowed behind his shoulders awaken, he was a walking arsenal, and a young man fueled by a shocking truth and the light stain of Rose's blood washed across his armored hide, the mindlink feeling, smelling, immersing itself in the fluid. Pride made him steel, anguish made him fearless, and anger would threaten to make him reckless. "So, which one of you wants to die first?"

****************************************

She climbed through the gaping hole and back into the storms, into the ensuing battle that left corpses to litter the ground within its brutal course. She would boast her power now, to the humans who waged war upon her clan and stole from her a beloved daughter. She would see them before she perhaps fortunately erased the whole of their organization from history, she would see the reminder of Angela's body lying alone on a distant floor to better ingrain her hatred and blame. Demona entered in the proper commands in the medallion's keypad embedded on the back, and roused the gate made unstable by a rush of energy incompatible with Infiniti's very lifeforce having infected the whole of Wyvern's power systems. The very power of Gaia herself had not fully melded with the technology and human-bred sorcery used to create this duplicate, but in Demona's fractured emotional state, she was far from caring. "It is...so warm..." she whispered, cradling the ability to twist the threads of time to her will.

It shook fiercely, aggressively within her grasp, as if fighting against her hands clutching upon it. Charged with an energy far beyond her knowledge or understanding and as ancient as the stars, the gate spewed flames, that somehow only tickled across Demona's skin, she being the user. She smiled. It was a pleasant sensation, warmth within the coldness of death. So much death.

The flames vomited through the unassuming medallion and spiraled outwards, raining flickers down on wet stone, spurred by magic and technology and the volatile fusion of energy forcing the sorcery-imbued circuitry to its limits. The winds grew, heated by the supernatural fire, and a tempest all it's own swelled in a spherical wall, expanding around the hourglass figure that was Demona. And through at all, her spine-chilling laughter told well of this machine's power, and a mental balance made dangerously unhinged by Angela's death. Spellbound, both the Guild members and clan watched as the resurrected Phoenix gate displayed its awesome might, and Sata winced at the living flames she had feared in her very dreams of stone.

"Damnit, Demona!!" Xanatos suddenly yelled, entrapped within the arms of Guild members struggling to force him down. "What the hell are you doing?!!"

"Mending what has come," she whispered, protected by Guild weaponry by the magical flames yawning outwards and grasping tendrils across the courtyard floor, "making right what once passed. Defying nature itself."

"You know you can't change the past!"

A theory about to be put to the ultimate test, as a portal opened to her side made real by the gate, a picture into another land different, yet disturbingly familiar. "You wish to see true power?" came the affirmation to any Guild who would hear, breeding malice from soft, furrowed lips. "You wish to see just how insignificant you truly are? You would all do well to remember this life," she tested the portal, feeling with her hands a rush of wind tasting of ocean salt form the other side, "for it may not come to be..."

It was a declaration absolute, and all too evident of her purpose. "Oh damn..." Xanatos tried his best to muscle his way from the grasp of masked men, if only to reach Demona before she entered the gate's threshold. This would indeed ruin the carefully laid plans he had sacrificed his very bid for emancipation for. He yelled through the storms to any clan members close enough to the flames curling and fanned by the winds, "Someone, anyone, STOP HER!!!"

Sata nodded mechanically in the order of the billionaire, uncaring of who sent such a demand, only concerned on the actual result. She dashed towards the portal, seeing another of her clan close enough to assist. "Broadway, help me!"

He raised his head from the brunt of battle, and duty won out over personal vengeance, much to his chagrin. Following behind the samurai, they disposed of those in their path and made their way towards where Demona slipped away into oblivion, and with it the gate, and with it the power to hold this doorway open. The portal contracted and readied to seal as the two warriors neared, and Sata slipped through with Broadway behind her, the gargoyle's skin licked by flames as the doorway folded in on itself and vanished.

With the momentary distraction gone, darkness and pouring rain settled back unto the courtyard, and the battle continued.

****************************************

"Damn..." he muttered, having fallen when mercilessly thrown to the ground, his skin still seared and tinged a light faded wine from the magical flames. His hands crawled across not stone, but fresh soil seeded with intermittent grasses, olive green and lush and an aroma delicious to his senses and matching to his deepest memories. Broadway rubbed a hand across his bruised brow ridge, finding it difficult to rise when awarded peace, quiet, and a time to grieve for his loss without a war to fight.

"Broadway."

He blinked his eyes to the voice and form deeply feminine, though demanding of his presence. He sighed, as a hand curled underneath his shoulder to help him to his feet, and he cleared his eyes to that of Sata's worried expression. "Where are we?" he growled bitterly, blinking back the tears in an emotional overload brought on by the lack of stimuli.

"Your home." she answered all too cryptically for his liking.

Broadway dragged weary eyes from the samurai towards drifting hills that rose on a slight incline and abruptly fell from sight by a cliff, and into an ocean black and reflecting a backdrop celestial and placid. A clear night so drastically changed from the besieged Manhattan skyline, with winds drifting across his lips unmarred by pollutants and mottled with the taste of sea and stardust. One structure stood out against the orchid-hued heavens, a sky infinitely filled by the brightest of stars and he widened his gaze to familiar alternating merlon running across the battlements and rising spires with the distinctive crowns. "Oh shit," he gasped, peering upon Wyvern sitting peacefully atop its ancestral cliff, before war and age would claim it, and before a single man would salvage its withering beauty and lift it above the clouds, "Scotland. Oh shit...Demona..."

Sata's brow rose, indeed evolving alongside Broadway a particular idea why Demona would travel here and now of all places. "She would not dare..."

"Yes," he maintained, starting for the castle, "she would."

****************************************

She was untouched by a thousand years of solitude and pain as she skipped across the crenellation rounding Wyvern castle's highest turret, flaming hair basking a healthy ruby crimson in moonlight golden and whole, and looked out upon the sea's glassy surface calmed by lack of wind across the Atlantic. With recent events involving her mate and the attack on the castle, she pondered words left by his future self, a distant echo of memory left that fateful night long ago. To attend the petty jealousies and angers that preyed upon her heart, to fortify herself with love and trust. She deemed such a task easier said than done.

She was Goliath's angel of the night, yet to become Demona after the downfall of Wyvern by aid of her own hands, and she was now brooding upon her future with the latest Viking raid less than a night past, and the shattered remains of her brethren shown to her by her own self twenty years ago had surfaced with a vengeance, a singular image she could readily not erase from her foremost thoughts. It plagued her, as did the treatment of her species at the humans' hands yet to change in almost two entire decades. If anything, it had become worse with the ascension of Katherine to her father's throne, and her revulsion of the gargoyle race indeed had severe repercussions only waiting to erupt. And thus, her decision, like the captain of the guard, would be made in two nights. To safeguard her clan at any cost.

The winds shifted suddenly, the scent of ocean saline replaced with something incredibly familiar, polished gold, perfume, and a musk she knew to be a female of her clan. A wail caressed against every curved battlement, like the banshee from myth, it was deafening and served to completely disorient the cerulean-skinned gargess and the direction of her attacker. The angel of the night turned around when hearing talons scrape across stone, and stared up into a shape almost flawlessly mirrored to her own, with ancient eyes burning scarlet. "You..."

Demona swooped upon her past self, laying clenched fists to thick skin and toppling the younger gargoyle. Landing, she stalked leisurely the fallen victim who shuffled backwards and tried to regain her senses from the powerful blows to the face.

Coming up against the parapet, the younger gargoyle lurched to a stop, and found a silhouette standing over her, wings flared in a posture of anger and her eyes dispelling any favor for mercy. "You are indeed a restless spirit, reflection!" she snarled against the creature towering over her, her own self having come back to haunt her, and sensing the heat of hostility blown on every snorted breath. "I am going to prevent what you showed me twenty years ago! What do you want from me this time?!"

"I want to kill you."


To be concluded...