"He's goin' up, I'm tellin' you!" Angel said.
"Based on what? Intu-fuckin'-ition?" Arackniss countered.
"Floor four's where he keeps his first panic room; it's where he's got a Demon Killer gun!" Angel said, then motioned at the door to the stairwell. Arackniss rolled his eyes, but with a basic straight kick sent the heavily locked bulkhead off of its hinges and sent it clanging and crunching its way into the basement. "Thanks, bro."
"The things I do fer family," Arackniss bemoaned.
"Shut the fuck up, bro, yer havin' a blast and you know it," Angel Dust snipped as he reloaded his Tommy. He'd only had four drum mags in total, and he'd dropped those 200 bullets into mooks really fucking fast. Now he was going through his array of 20's and 30's which hang down over his jacket like medieval fucking armor plating. Considering Angel Dust was wearing at least 50 pounds of ammunition around his person, he'd have those for a while. These stairs oddly enough were unfamiliar to him. He'd always taken the elevator. But stairs were stairs. This wasn't some fuckin' loony's bin. Things made a certain kind 'a sense here. When he emerged onto floor four, it was to screams and panic. Which was appropriate, considering the shit that Sam had proved himself capable of doing.
Arackniss darted in front of him, his head tilted toward the wall they were moving past. He got a focused expression, then, with a full body swing, he drove his fist into that wall, driving it through solid, reinforced concrete like a nail through a sheet of paper. He then ripped back, with a crunch of a neck breaking as a Sinner was thrown into the hallway and a hole was created into the wall. Arackniss darted out of the way as a flurry of gunfire came through that hole. With his many hands he started counting bullets, then, when the number seemed right, he dove in, getting shot in the process but not seeming to care. Angel Dust was right on his heels. Angel Dust caught exactly one bullet in his armor of ammo, and then everybody who had been firing was out of bullets and had to reload.
Angel Dust didn't go deep, he simply fired bursts into the people closest to reloading, puncturing brains and damned-near-surgically separating spines, dropping Sinners to the floor unable to fight back. Arackniss mechanically disassembled the rest of them, ripping off limbs and heads, or turning torsos into donuts with super-sonic punches. It took about ten seconds to put down twenty Dolls and Mooks.
"Hey, bro! Focus! We ain't here to paint the walls!"
"They was gonna come up behind us and you know it!" Arackniss said, squeezing a bullet out of his shoulder with two fingers. "Unlike you, I don't want nobody comin' up behind me unannounced."
"Fuck you!" Angel said, but around a laugh.
"Fuck you too, bro!" Arackniss countered, but with a small smile on his face. The brothers, united again after decades estranged, stormed through the building, with the gun-toting spider demon following in the juggernaut's wake while he took a direct-line, walls be damned.
Finally, they spotted the glare of white light around a corner, before it was sent pretty much into their laps, launched back and exploding into an inchoate blaze, before its limbs returned and it stood, glaring with hate down the hall that it had been cast from.
"I got a fuckin' million a' those, shithead!" Valentino said around a laugh. Sam took a step forward, only to be smashed in the chest by a streak of crackling black, one that drove him into the wall again. Out of sheer reflex, Angel grabbed his brother and dragged him to a halt. When Arackniss glanced back, the expression on Angel's face must have answered the unspoken question of 'what the fuck, bro?'.
"You come in here, smash up my place, and think you can just throw me around? Do you know HOW! FUCKING! MANY! People I've broken?" Valentino shouted.
"What's he doin'?" Arackniss asked at a whisper, flattening himself against the corner to glance around it.
"Pain elementals," Angel Dust said, the horror that should have turned him into a quivering puddle instead rising up as acrid bile.
Valentino wasn't the kind to get his hands dirty in fights. He had Velvet for that. He also wasn't the kind to ruin people's lives. He had Vox for that. What Valentino did was much more intimate, much more personal. And Angel knew first hand that it came from him learning secrets that Pride had thought buried. Angel didn't know that Pain-Theft was considered a 'kind' Thaumaturgy, stealing the sting of those in agony. All he knew was that the tidal-wave of pain that Valentino produced in this place was converted on an almost industrial scale into spectral ammunition. Most people said that only Imps could use Thaumaturgy. As it turned out, Sinners could too. And Valentino had gained a terrifying aptitude at the impossible art of Miraclemaking long before he coopted Angel Dust's web.
"And just what the fuck is a pai–" Arackniss hissed to him, then was cut off when another crackling black streak impacted Sam and smashed him into the back wall.
"That," Angel answered him. Sam stood, and though he had no face to show it the volcanic scale of his fury wafted off of him in sheets.
"You holdin' up alright Val?" Velvet's voice joined the fracas out of sight.
"Yeah. I'm just showin' our glowing pal how things work around here," Valentino said happily.
"Well stop playin' with you fuckin' food and kill 'im already!" Velvet demanded.
"You take all the fun out of this, Veevee, you really do," Valentino said with a sigh. But Angel Dust rounded that corner with his variable-speed gun in hand. At the far end of the hall, the moth demon was manipulating the smoke from his cigarette into a form which swelled and pulsed with ruinous darkness, the pain of somebody's life being torn apart reshaped into a weapon. To Angel's left, he could almost swear the faceless visage of Sam smiled maliciously. "Angel Cakes!" Valentino said.
And Angel shot him. The gun went off and Valentino was sent back a few steps, but no blood stained his attire, because the afterlife was just unfair like that.
"Now now now, Angel Cakes. Let's not do something you're going to regret," Valentino said. He then launched the pain elemental at Sam. And Angel found himself doing something rather unexpected. He stepped into the way.
The pain elemental that should have hit Sam exploded his skin, set fire to every nerve ending. It rubbed salt in his flayed body, put out cigarettes onto his eyeballs, ran a belt sander along his dick, and made him realize that he should have said sorry to Molly the last time he saw her. But despite the agony in all parts of him, Angel Dust snarled and raised a gun that he couldn't see with a hand he wasn't sure he still had, and pulled a trigger he couldn't feel at a target he wasn't sure hadn't moved.
Instant by instant, the anguish receded. Fucking hell, how in the fuck did Sam take three of these motherfuckers to the guts and stay standing? When the fuzz cleared and his vision returned, Angel Dust was on the floor, being supported by Arackniss, as Sam wove away from the Seraphic Steel of Velvet's shears, trying to close distance on Valentino.
"You out of your fuckin' nut, bro?" Arackniss shouted at him.
"I might be," Angel said at a croak. But with a shake of his head, he forced himself to his feet. If Sam could take a pain elemental to the gut, then so could Angel Dust. "We gotta either get Velvet outta here or shut down Val, we can't fight both!"
"Who says we can't?" Arackniss said with a grin.
"Hey! Don't think that Sam made you inta' God!" Angel gave him a shake. "He made you strong, he made you tough, but you just fuckin' saw what Val can do! And we die just as easy as Sam to Velvet's shank!"
And then, because Hell was unfair in that exact manner, the floor between the brothers and Sam exploded upward, showering them with concrete, granite, and rebar. Crawling up through the hole was the gore-coated Exorcist, its wings belching sparks as they ground against the hole. Oh fuck this with a cactus. Arackniss let go of Angel Dust and hurled himself at the demon-killing machine, only for the automaton to strike him with a driving punch that Angel would have been able to dodge, one that smashed in the bones of Arackniss' face and launched him lifeless into the crater that Sam had pioneered in this hall. Angel turned back to him, his stomach falling. No. Don't. Don't let… Fucking yes, he was still moving. Across the room, Angel Dust could see Sam punting Velvet into Valentino, and embedding both into the far wall, before turning back.
Arackniss began to twitch and growl around a concave face, but the Exorcist was now bearing down on Angel Dust. And he didn't get to back away far when the Exorcist was stopped. It continued trying to stride forward, to get grips on Angel Dust, its arms stretched and grasping. But it couldn't move. Because Sam had it by the wings.
Wait.
Why wasn't it turning around?
Angel Dust's question grew more acute when Sam pulled himself round the thing, letting another pain elemental break over the angel machine. Now that Sam's blazing self was in front of it, it should have doubly turned its full attention to killing him. But it ignored him as though he weren't there at all. It strained, as though trying to reach the brothers, utterly ignoring the Elemental that was in front of it.
Then Sam's claws slammed onto the halo, heaving until he brought the gap to a close. Then, there was a flare as intense white fire bathed the ring that was now intact above the horns of the Exorcist. Sam's body became translucent, the black plastic and gunmetal of the Exorcist visible through him, and a great torrential blast sound came, as though he had opened the maw of a flame-thrower as big as a man-hole, but nothing was obviously happening.
Strike that, something definitely was. Even as Velvet and Valentino tried to pry themselves out of the wall, Sam started to vanish, from his feet up. His torso followed, until all that Sam was was a pair of arms connected to a neck and head, which was glaring into the electronic eyes of the Exorcist. The face went blank. Then, it started to display lines of text.
Signal Jammer Detected, Carrier Error
Direct Override
Verified User Detected; User 0000000006
Error
Verified User Detected; User 0000000002
Error
Attempting to Connect to SEFIROT
Connection failed.
Verified User Detected; User NaN
Then there came a snap, as the Exorcist fell to its knees, and Sam disappeared as though being sucked into the Exorcist's now blazing white halo. The face went blank for a moment, the body twitching and spasming until it fell still. Then, there was a fresh pulse of light, and the chains that shackled its wings were shattered as the ruined machinery pulled itself back together, not in perfect condition but a fuck-load better than it had been before. And the face displayed a new message.
Debug Mode: Y
Login Successful
With that, the face snapped on. And it wasn't the wickedly grinning visage of every Exorcist that Angel Dust had ever seen in his decades in Hell. No, this face was a deeply furious scowl, its asymmetrical eyes either glaring, or emitting a litany of other 'error notice's and 'connection failed's. It turned, and faced the Overlords.
"Did it eva' look like that before?" Velvet asked.
"No. No it didn't," Valentino said. With a grunt, he cast another pain elemental at the Exorcist, but the gaseous manifestation of torment burst over its artificial skin, breaking down into motes of smoke. "Well," the moth said. "Shit."
Chapter 24
Stay Out Of Overlords' Business
Part 2
If Vox had wanted to slog through the killing fields of Vietnam, he would have gone to fucking Vietnam! But no. Hell had decided to gift him with a personal visitation of that hellish mire on his way back to his fucking job, and for what reason? By what hand? He knew where the explosives came from. There was one other would-be-Overlord who specialized in the manifestation of such things. But this – all of this – it showed a sophistication that she utterly lacked. Blowing the street? That was her speed, if a bit grandiose and requiring more patience than she was renowned for. But this fucking rat's-nest of traps, counter-traps, and counter-counter-traps?
He didn't have a chance to complain when another explosion rocked the street behind him. And he looked back in time to see a fuel-truck slam into the building that made half of the alleyway entrance; the cabin of that truck was merrily aflame, its Sinner driver crumbling away to ash from where he hung out of his own window.
"Tick tock, motherfucker!" Cherri Bomb's voice came with a cruel laugh, putting surety to presumption. Did she just seriously launch a fuel truck at him? With explosives? And not destroy the truck? God above and Satan below, she had some finesse.
"Boss... I don't think we can get past that," one of the eight of his men who still were able to move after this short stint in fucking misery said.
"Then our only way out is forward," Vox said. He'd thought that crossing the first alleyway would see him to clearer trails. The opposite was true; the next entire street as far as the eye could track was an utter ruins, a lot of it on fire from broken gas mains or sparking from power lines being washed with filth. And that meant the only intact way to Porn Studios was through more of these incredibly lethal alleyways. He was only three blocks away, now. Only three. That should have taken ninety seconds. And he'd been here for... he didn't even know how long. "Well? Don't just stand there! Find us a way out!" he demanded. And at that, he managed to shock his underlings back into action.
The survivors of Vox's motorcade had become in the space of the short time they'd been walking these alleyways the exact kind of people paranoid enough to survive that kind of duty. They trusted nothing. If it wasn't naked asphalt or concrete, they threw garbage at it until it either exploded, or made it impossible to walk on that spot anyway. And they even learned which garbage they could pick up and which garbage would explode in their hands. Two of his lackeys were out of it, having to regrow hands and arms, but they still had feet, which meant they weren't yet useless.
After only one more trip-wire, located by firing sprays of shaving-cream ahead of them, they emerged onto the street level, to the scene of devastation stretching down the road in either direction. And when Vox looked up, he finally understood the brains behind the brawn of this operation.
"Well, if it isn't the Swindler Incarnate himself?" Vox said, straightening his back and staring up on the rooftop across the street at the cat-bird demon who sat in a small balcony with a bottle of unlabelled liquor standing on the railing next to him and a cigar between his fingers.
"Might wanna hurry, bub," Husk said. "That tanker ain't gonna last much longer. Wouldn't want to get exploded."
"This isn't like you, Husk. You aren't the kind to frequent Cherri Bomb's circle. So what did she pay you to kill me?"
"Kill you?" Husk asked, taking a deep pull from his cigar. "I don't give a fuck about you. I was just paid to put bespoke traps in particular alleyways. Your fault for walkin' along those alleys, not mine."
"You won't be able to hide from my revenge for this, you understand?" Vox pointed out.
"Law of Proxy," he said around his cigar. Vox glared at him.
"Even with that loophole, there are things I can do to ruin you. You won't be able to escape that, no matter what Luciferean law says," Vox said.
"I might surprise you," Husk answered, then kicked his feet up on the rail, drinking deep from the bottle.
"Wait a second... what if he really isn't trying to kill us, boss?" Bartholomew asked. He turned to the bug-like Sinner who had so far only lost a foot out of the four that he had. "What if this is just to waste our time? To delay us?"
"From what?" Vox asked.
"Why are our Hellphones down?" Bartholomew stressed. Vox stared at him, then rarified his senses to the electromagnetic spectrum. And he could see a staggering amount of interference being blasted across all wavelengths, stifling Hellphones and no doubt ruining a lot of people's wi-fi.
"Porn Studios is under attack," Vox reached the conclusion that his underling had been prodding him toward. "Haste! Come on! We'll deal with old debts later!"
Velvet took the first step toward the scowling Exorcist which had turned against its masters – which they'd paid a fuckload of money to prevent from ever happening! – and was arrested by Valentino's hand on her shoulder.
"We should take a second on this one," Val said.
"Boss! I got it!" came a shout from one of Val's guys.
"Then bring it you sack of shit!" Valentino shouted at the distant voice. The tattered wings of the Exorcist they'd bought and kept in the basement flared, a deeply uncomfortable light belching from its halo, which was now fucking intact. She saw its balance shift in that minute way that only people ever did, before they began to explode into motion; this thing wasn't on autopilot anymore. She grabbed Valentino and launched the two of them to the side, going through a weakened wall and landing in a boardroom that was peopled with incinerated Sinners. This room had been hexwarded, but they left the door open. The nuclear blast then did what nuclear blasts do. When the Exorcist tried to hurl itself through the hole that she'd punched, it was rebuffed by a shimmering, prismatic field. It tilted its head, in confusion, pressing hard against the barrier.
"Nice try, but my toys only go where I let 'em," Valentino said, scintillating light sparking above his hand.
"You had this planned out since back when? Ain't you a stinker?" she said, patting Valentino on the cheek as she did.
"I didn't get to where I am by being an eediot," Valentino said. The Exorcist drove wall-shattering blows into the barrier, but it didn't so much as quiver against the might of Angelic fists. Valentino stood, brushing the dust from his suit and began to make to speak, but another section of the wall burst inward. And landing amongst the rubble, in the room with them, was the smaller of the two spider demons now stomping over her lovelies.
He pushed himself to his feet, not bothering with the dust, a sinister smile on his face. "Yer runnin' out of places to hide, dipshit," the somehow superpowered spider said. She put on her winningest smile, smoothing her slightly singed skirt.
"Who says we's hidin'?" She answered him. And then with a lacerating laugh, she threw herself at the small spider with more strength then he'd ought have. She lashed out, darting in and slashing with her sheers, flicking them 'round her fingers and thrusting with them. And every attack she made was ducked, dodged, or deflected. The blows he sent in her direction stung with every impact, blunted though they were by the treated Angel Satin of her dress, even as wet crunches hit the air as her bones slid past each other, as her muscles ripped, as her limbs lengthened and hardened to stone in her Warform. He was being as annoying to squash as the last mosquito in your bedroom when you were trying to sleep. She just couldn't swat him.
So she changed tactics. Instead of attempting to end him with a single deadly blow, she stomped the floor so hard that the section under her foot declined by almost a foot, raising up the portion under the grey spider by that same foot and taking him off of his balance. She lashed forward with a stiletto-heeled kick that impacted as hard as a bullet in his abdomen and sent him rolling back. She didn't relent, lightning fast kicks lashing at him every time she was within a range he couldn't dodge from. Her bespoke shoes slammed into fuzzy flesh again and again. From time to time, she felt a bone snap under her toes or at the base of her heel, but he frustratingly didn't respond appropriately to that.
Honestly, this was starting to get fun again. Then she heard a bang behind her, and her head snapped forward, a bullet caught in the lace of her coif so that it couldn't penetrate her skull. She turned a glare at Val's little pink and white toy who stood, proud as a peacock who didn't know the tiger was right behind him. "Shouldn't 'a done that, mista," she promised, then delivered a brutal kick that ought to have staved in the grey spider's skull. Instead, it merely stunned him, and when she took a step, it was off of balance, because from a glance she could now tell that she'd destroyed her heel. Oh, she'd kill that grey fucker extra hard for that!
Angel Dust didn't answer her charge, though. He pulled a long magazine from the overcoat he'd made of them and slotted it into place in his Thompson. Now that was a look she'd have to investigate. Ammunition as fashion. How very avante garde. But he was now trying to point a gun at her, and though she had promised Val she wasn't going to kill his toy on him, she wasn't about to stand around like dumb bitch and get shot. So she kicked her busted shoe off of her foot at such velocity that it struck Angel Dust in the face and stumbled him back out of the hole in the wall. She was able to kick the other one off and set her bare feet onto ruined, fairly overheated stone by the time he returned. And on the other end of the room, the door burst open, one of Valentino's bunch came in, holding a gun by its barrel.
The gun was a mottled grey-green, only occasional inklings of its once golden and alabaster construction still intact. Val gloated once that this thing had been made by the Grigori Azazel, armorer of heaven, and now it would serve only him. He calmly as you please accepted the box of bullets that was handed to him next. The rounds that peeked from the box were practically luminous. Seraphic Steel, rendered down into 15 grams of bullet, arrayed four by six.
The grey spider tried to stand, to get out of the reach of this demon-killing gun. Velvet put him back on the floor by kicking hard into his throat and pinning him against the wall with one of her legs now remaining almost parallel to floor. He tried to throw her off. He was strong, admittedly. But Velvet? Velvet was pissed.
Valentino didn't even gloat, quietly loading the bullets into magazines, a magazine into the gun, and priming the slide. He then casually pointed it in the grey spider's direction.
And then the other spider demon threw himself into his path. Valentino flinched, a snarl coming to his face as he lost the opportunity to kill one of his attackers and now having the entire objective of this passion-play in his crosshairs instead of kneeling at his feet.
Out of the corner of her eye, she also saw that white flame was leaking out of the Exorcist.
"Get outta the way, Angel Cakes. I wouldn't wanna muss that pretty face of yours up," Valentino warned.
"You ain't got the balls to fire that gun. You never did," Angel Dust said, still holding his Thompson but pointed at Val instead of Velvet. "And that's gonna be why you die."
"I've survived more than two centuries down here, Angel Cakes," Valentino said smugly. "I'm the last demon alive who knows the secrets of Clan Cruac. You? You were just a passing amusement. And frankly, Angel Cakes... I think I'm gettin' bored of you."
"Val what is..." Velvet began, as the fire leaking from the Exorcist snapped into crisp, clear runes that surrounded it.
Her question was cut off by the sound like a massive metal cable snapping. A sound she knew well enough from the times Asmodeus would visit for his tailoring sessions. It was the sound of True Teleportation.
The Exorcist was in the room with them.
Valentino immediately switched targets from the grey spider demon to the Exorcist, firing a pair of shots in understandable haste. The Exorcist's hands moved in a blur, stopping directly in front of its face. Then, almost mockingly, it lowered its hands as though in offering. Sitting in the center of each palm was the Seraphic Steel bullet that Valentino had fired.
At that, the grey fella... what was his name again? Right, Arackniss! He pulled something from his vest and plunged it into the side of Velvet's calf. She let out an unamused 'ow', then tried to flatten his throat under her delicate arch. But she couldn't.
With a glare of hate almost matching the Exorcist, Arackniss forced her foot off of his neck, then heaved, letting her strength carry her through the thin wall into the next room. She rolled to a halt amongst incinerated Sinner cadavers, trying to kip to her feet only to fail and land in a pile. She rolled to a sit, and stared at her calf. It was oozing something grey-green and viscous. She tapped it to her tongue and immediately spat it out. Stygium-infused mercury? Arackniss you beautiful fucking lunatic. She would have kissed him for giving her the idea for this poison if she wasn't already busy trying to murder him.
Squeezing the muscles of her leg hurt like nothing else, but some of that guck started to bubble out of her wound. After a second or so, she was able to get some strength back into her limb and push herself to an admittedly painful stand. "You help my brudda. I got this one to myself," Angel Dust's voice came from the next room over. Well, if Angel Dust wanted to die on his own so badly, she wasn't about to stop him. Arackniss burst through the wall, creating a new hole beside the one she had entered the break room. By the time he was setting eyes on her, she'd already hurled the fridge at him, which he caught with one hand and threw back with every bit as much ease as she did.
When she tried to return-to-sender his return-to-sender, the impact rippled up her arms and made her shoulders ache. Her heels cut ruts into the burnt carpeting as the force of it ground her three yards back before the momentum was expended. She just tossed the thing aside at that point, to find Arackniss hurtling at her. A grin came to her face as she spun almost bonelessly, ducking his lunge, catching his foot as he passed her, and then slamming him spine-first into the refrigerator. She swept her unintoxinated leg into a brutal axe-kick, which drove down at the spider-demon's neck with the insistence of a jackhammer. And he caught it, stopping her heel fractions of an inch away from his throat, before kicking hard into her supporting leg. The pain was tremendous, but it was the limb's weakness that caused it to fail her, not the pain.
He pulled himself over her, raining down blows to pummel her into a pulp. Or at least he tried to, because she'd picked up a few tricks avoid getting punched on by fella's. So when he overextended a punch, cratering the floor, she was able to sweep her leg up and into his snarl of limbs, and with a deeply unfeminine grunt of effort, she reversed their positions for a moment, before completing her motion and suplexing him into a supporting pillar. With a flash of her hands, she pulled her shears and slammed them through the center of Arackniss' lower left hand, nailing him into place. "Sorry, pal. I ain't inta the rough and tumble."
"Funny, you struck me as exactly the type," he answered her.
"I'm gonna enjoy poppin' your head off, little man," she promised him, pressing him even harder against the wall.
"Yeah well, what goes around... comes around," Arackniss bit at her.
"Don't think it will, sugar," she said, pulling out a second set of scissors, these ones less obviously intended to end lives but still made of Seraphic Steel. She lashed toward his face with them. With a grunt of his own, he tore his hand off of the Seraphic Steel, the edges of the wound dissolving into grey powder as he used that already injured hand to intercept her new attack. This time it punctured the lower, flapping half of his hand and broke the entire ruined portion into fat blobs of Demon Salt. Arackniss growled as the sacrifice of half of his hand didn't stop her from driving the point of those shears into the flesh of his shoulder, however shallowly. But the rictus of his face slowly changed to a smile. And he laughed. "What's so funny?"
"I win," Arackniss said.
"Accordin' to who?" she demanded, as she pushed a little harder on her shears, sinking another millimeter into his flesh. There was a pop sound in the air directly behind her.
"Accordin' to him," Arackniss said. And Velvet felt a pair of plastic and Seraphic Steel hands clamp around her neck. She turned as much as she was able to, to rip those shears out of the wound and drive them through their pet Exorcist's face, but even as she did, there came the rising, gutteral blast as she felt her entire body grow hotter and hotter, until there came a flamethrower howl, and every part of her from the neck down was subjected to unspeakable agony... and then numbness.
Valentino was running. Valentino, the Overlord, the Lord of Pain, pillar of the V Triarchy, was running away from Angel Dust the coked-head faggot. There was a deep satisfaction in Angel Dust's heart as he followed the flowing of the flesh-peddler's coat as it trailed him around corners. He was running, and he wouldn't get away. Angel had already heard the telltale noise of Sam reducing an idiot to cinders, and considering the people involved in that scene, even the worst case scenario was that he was turning Valentino's minions into powder.
Again as Angel Dust rounded the corner, he slid low on his feet, and the gunshot that he had expected whistled over his head, not even mussing his hairdo. Every time Valentino took one of those pot-shots was another Seraphic Steel bullet he couldn't use in the future. And there were only a handful of those things that he had in the entire building. Angel Dust knew that for a fact. He even knew where they all were.
The Tommy in Angel's lower hands fired from the hips, while the Variable Speed was held in two of his higher ones. The rat-tat-tat-tat of the .45 bullets might not have done as much as they ought against a guy wearing velour, silk, and velvet, but they didn't need to. Every time his suit stopped one of those bullets, the impact still hit him, like getting punched in the chest. And though he was recoiling from the impact of 30 rounds in short order, it was the Variable Speed that really started putting cracks through his armor. Each hit made Valentino reel, white fluff separating from his collar, cloth tearing at his arms, buttons popping off of their strings.
And then there was a crisp crack sound, as another gun went off and hit Angel Dust in the chest.
Angel Dust fell backward, the impact stunning him more than his counters did to Valentino only because unlike the Triarch, Angel Dust's clothing was as mundane as they came. He landed on his back with his wind knocked from his lungs, pain radiating across his chest. Valentino actually shot him.
But there was something to remember about Seraphic Steel. While it could cause grisly injuries that could not Regenerate... it was still steel. And steel wasn't the most effective metal for bullets. Lead edged it out easily by being twice as dense. Bismuth even had fancy colors you could get it in. And while steel plus velocity equalled some degree of penetration, steel lost a lot of power when it tried to punch through the steel magazines that hung as plating over his body. To the point that when Angel Dust pushed his fingers between the mags, he found no blood. He fished the deepest of his three overlapped layers of .45 out from its hook, and saw the Seraphic Steel bullet with its tail sticking out of one side of the mag, and its nose just barely poking out the other.
Lead trumps angel steel, fuckhead.
Angel rose, a growl on his lips, as Valentino's jacket split and broad wings emerged from his back, his teeth growing jagged and his eyes becoming multifaceted. The last and only time that Angel Dust had seen Valentino in his Warform, it had been terrifying. This time, there was no fear in Angel Dust's heart. Only unimpeachable rage.
"You're supposed to stay down when I shoot you, Angel Cakes," Valentino mocked. He pulled the trigger again. Click.
"It only holds seven, dipshit," Angel snapped back. Valentino's most monstrous face twisted into fury as he realized that Angel was right.
"What does it matter? You ain't even got a Warform anymore. You can't beat me. You couldn't then, and you can't now," he pointed out.
"One problem wit' that," Angel Dust pointed out. And then he shot him. With six arms, he could consistently fire five guns. Physics was a bitch, as it turned out. Even Valentino's Warform didn't afford him much protection against naked velocity empowering a blob of lead. He didn't recoil as noticeably as he had while in his civilian form, but the fact that as Angel Stormed forward Valentino didn't actually do anything told that the onslaught was checking him hard. Valentino was right. Angel Dust hadn't gone into his Warform in almost thirty years. He didn't even remember how to do it. And he wasn't sure that there'd even be anything left for him to go into at this point. But he didn't care. If his demonic power wouldn't rise up and empower him in this fight, then he'd do it with exactly what he had when he was rippin' shit up in New York. He'd do it with lead, guts, and hate in his heart.
Breaking through a 'respite' where only two of Angel Dust's guns were firing, Valentino flicked with a finger. A black streak leapt out, catching Angel Dust in the chest. In an instant his entire existence was pain. He should have fallen to the floor, curled fetal, waiting for the pain elemental to fade. Instead, he went to a knee, his vision narrowing, tunnelling instead of going blank. He was never going to bow down to this motherfucker again. He would never submit to him. Angel Dust was damned, but goddamn it, it was his damnation. And he would be a slave no longer. With a feral snarl he forced himself to stomp forward.
Another flick, and another pain elemental. Landing on the tail of the last one, it sent Angel Dust careening into a wall, instantly upchucking his breakfast. It sprayed over his shoes, as he snapped his head toward where Valentino was standing so unimaginably smug. And again, the pain demanded that Angel Dust relent, submit. Surrender.
He refused.
He reached into the depths of the Seven and Eight, and pulled out what he'd hidden there for months. It was a stupid thing, a bit of pageantry he'd snapped up not long after getting into the hotel. A flintlock pistol, marked with symbols that he didn't understand, but somebody who did would identify it instantly as a sidearm of the Clan Cruac. Packed within was a Stygium Lead bullet. In his most morbid of moments, he considered it his out. If Valentino ever came for him, a pull of the trigger with the metal in his mouth and he'd never need to worry about it – or anything – ever again. Today he had a different target in mind.
The bang sounded so different than his other guns, emitting a big cloud of grey smoke, and the slug went through Valentino's bicep, causing the limb to explode away in Intoxinated chunks of grey and red. Valentino's insufferable laughter turned to a growl of confusion, pain, and finally alarm. He lashed out with his wings, causing a blizzard of grey dust to sweep toward Angel Dust. Angel knew exactly what was about to happen so he spun so that his back was to the torrent and pressed his eyes as closed as he could get them, slamming a hand over his nostrils and mouth. When he stopped feeling the pressure of that false wind against the back of his head, he turned again and glared. Valentino was clutching his unhealing stump, while the rest of the arm was lying at his feet, the demon killer still loosely in its hand.
Angel Dust ignored the burning sensation he felt on the back of his head. There was nothing he could do about the dust that was slowly eating its way into him at the moment, and he had only seconds to turn this around. He launched himself forward in a baseball slide, pulling the demon killer from the dismembered arm. And then he felt a massive hand close around his neck from behind and hurl him hard into a wall. The impact drove stars into his vision. Valentino dominated Angel Dust's line of sight, much the same as he ever did while demeaning and diminishing Angel Dust in the past. But this time, when he shouted, Angel Dust just ignored him. He ignored him, and made sneaky with one of his hands.
When it became obvious that Angel Dust was ignoring whatever diatribe that Valentino was launching at him – likely calling him a used up sex hole, or something along those lines – he then fell still. There was a very distinct click sound. Valentino's eyes fell, to where the magazine of his demon killer gun fell to the floor. A second click, as the new mag that Angel Dust pickpocketed from the Triarch was slid into place. Then a sli-chak as the slide was primed.
Blam, and Valentino staggered back, a grey, Purified wound punching straight through his spell-woven clothing and flesh with equal ease. Angel Dust slid down the wall until his feet hit the incinerated carpet, and he fired again, this time right into Valentino's other wrist, blowing his other hand off.
Angel Dust had once memorized an entire cocky speech that he'd deliver if he ever found himself in this position, with him standing in power over Valentino. But in the moment, he had nothing. There were no pithy witticisms, no jibes, no insults. There was just a wordless roar of released pain as he aimed central and low, and sent the third bullet into Valentino's dick and made a eunuch of him.
Valentino's body warped and twisted as it involuntarily left the Warform, reverting down into his more recognizable visage. He made it one more step before Angel Dust blew off one of his legs at the knee. He toppled to the floor. "Wait," he shouted. "Angel Cakes, we can..."
And again Angel Dust screamed. For just a moment, it shook the walls, his flesh shaking and his bones sliding as though he was beginning to slip into his own Warform for just a moment, before he fired three more shots into Valentino's chest. Lung, lung and heart. With a scream that drove tears from Angel Dust's eyes he pointed between Valentino's eyes and pulled the trigger again. Click.
So he jumped onto the already dying body of Valentino, without words in his mouth and nothing but pain and hate in his heart, and just smashed Valentino's face with the pistol again and again until one of the moth's eye sockets gave way and the eyeball flopped out onto his cheek. His ragged breathing grew weaker as Angel Dust broke his jaw. And then with a final scream, Angel Dust rose, made it two steps away and then fell to his knees. Behind him, Valentino was silent and still.
And Angel Dust wept. He should have felt triumphant, free. But here he was, blubbering like a baby and he couldn't stop.
The sound of fighting faded, and with it the ragged, sobbing breathing that Angel Dust had been reduced to. He saw his brother round the corner, a cocky smile on his face. Then the smile faded, and his more usual melancholy took over. Without a word, he picked a spot on the wall near where Angel Dust was kneeling and squatted down with his back against the burnt concrete.
"It's done?" Arackniss asked. Angel Dust nodded, wiping his nose with the back of a hand. Fucking hell he was dribbling like a school-kid with a sinus infection. "Take your time."
"I figured you'd give me shit over this," Angel said, his voice quavering.
"When Marco Genovese came to Hell, I made a promise that I'd kill him, for what he did to me, Pa, and Molly. It took me a year to dig him out. Remember Frankie?" Angel Dust nodded. Frankie was two decades Purged. One of the old crew. "He pitched Marco into the Abyss. And when he did... well... I made like you. It ain't easy livin' with that kind of rage in you for so long, and having it all pop like a boiler that ran too hot. Valentino must'a heated your boiler a fuckload more than Marco did mine."
"Thanks, bro," Angel Dust said.
"I still think you're a dope-head and an embarrassment," Arackniss offered.
"And I still think you wouldn't know fun if it fucked you," Angel countered. There was a crunching sound around the corner as the grim faced Exorcist rounded the corner. In one hand, it held by the hair Velvet's decapitated head. It stared at the two of them for a moment, then the face went blank for a moment, before displaying 'Fail-safe initiated'. The body began to quiver and shake, then the halo began to descend, melting the entire thing away into a puddle of high impact plastic, molten silicon, and Seraphic Steel. There was a strange flame that remained, hovering where it had stood, one that looked like a bunch of blood vessels that continued up and into an arm that now held Velvet's head.
There was a burning snap, and bones quickly formed, appearing out of the flame. Muscles followed, holding them together, sinews binding and making joints. Last to form was skin, growing out of the muscle, until what remained was a Sinner with a horns swept backward making his hair like a sconce. He was naked. And he was bleeding profusely from a wound in his side, a second trickle coming down from his shoulder.
"We should leave," Sam said.
"Like that?" Angel Dust asked. Sam looked down, then sighed.
"Right. Arackniss? Still got those pants?" Sam asked. Arackniss rolled some of his eyes and untied the grey sweatpants that were still forming a girdle around him. Sam pulled them on quickly, depriving Angel Dust of the peep show. He offered a hand, with the other one pressed to his side trying to stem some of the blood that dribbled from his old injury. "We should get moving before Vox takes this personally."
In the end, Vox was alone. It had taken every one of the bodies of his underlings to find a path to Porn Studios. Even Bartholomew was laying a hundred yards back, slowly regenerating a missing skull. But Vox was here. And as he exited the alleyway and crossed the scree of broken pavement and half-buried cars, he found that there were people standing in his way.
Vox took a moment to straighten his bow tie, and focused on his body, ignoring the glancing impacts, partial scrapes and single shrapnel hole he'd accrued, and forced his body to shift into a more monstrous form. No taller, but far broader, a new set of electric arms sprouting from his shoulders, he began to tap into the energy that surrounded him, converting light into packets of xrays and gamma rays so that when that pyromaniac whore in front of him and the likely inebriated Swindler Incarnate tried their luck against the Triarch, they would find a rude awakening awaiting them.
"You should have stayed up on that balcony drinking, Husk," Vox said. "You would have been spared what's about to happen to you."
"Maybe. Or maybe I think I'm right where I need to be," Husk said, taking a final drink from a bottle and throwing it away to shatter on the broken sidewalk. He lowered his stance, his wings spreading out to hurl him in whatever direction he needed to go and a strange black cutlass leveled at the Electric Overlord. The pyromaniac hand-juggled a trio of handgrenades as she stared at him, her usually grinning face utterly devoid of glee.
Before either side decided to tip their hand and throw the first punch, the doors were kicked open. And flying out onto the sidewalk was Valentino's corpse. Vox was given pause by that. There were numerous Purified injuries on him, large holes in his chest and groin, both arms and a leg missing. And notably, his head was not attached to him. Vox's cruel grin grew brittle as two spider demons emerged. From the small one's hand dangled the head of Velvet. From the taller one, the head of Valentino.
Well. Shit. Vox tried to connect to the building's network, only to find the entire thing... missing. Not down, not jammed... missing. As though it had been burned out root and stem. He sighed, hanging his monitor head for a moment, feeling his body shift as his Warform receded. With the databases gone, so was all of his power base. With Val and Vee-vee gone, so was his enforcement. "Alright," Vox said. "Looks like I'm the one who's lost this one."
"Get outta the way, Vox," Husk said as the spider demons were joined by a bleeding, Elemental Sinner wearing only sweatpants, and all moved away from the building. Vox didn't recognize the last one, even though by rights he should have. "You don't have to join 'em in Double Hell."
"I might as well," Vox muttered. But he stood aside. The entire group shot heated glares at him, as most of them moved across the ruined street, and picked a different alley that Vox hadn't traversed. Angel Dust glared at him, though, as he picked a pair of pieces of rebar, having his brother spike them into the ground, and then mount his comrade's heads on them in a gruesome display. He sighed, moving to the side of Valentino's cadaver. He got down on a knee, placing a hand on him.
It was a strange sensation. Vox had been here for seventy years. He didn't make friends in Hell, but in Val and Vee-vee, he'd had comrades. And now he was alone. "I'm sorry, Val. I guess I'm on my own again."
And with that, and nothing holding him here anymore, and nothing to rebuild, Vox slipped back into the night as the first crack of thunder reached the city, promising a mighty storm, a mighty rain, and an end to the heatwave.
Charlie was in a sulk, as the news choppers closed in around Porn Studios, taking crisp, clear footage of Angel Dust, Sam, Husk, and their criminal friends sauntered away from the doors which even now emitted thin, grey smoke. At the news desk, Katie Killjoy had passed out and was drooling onto her cards, while Tom Trench gamely tried to continue offering commentary as information came out. They'd identified Angel Dust and Arackniss Veloce, who had taken a bit of time to pull some bits of rebar from the ruin of the street, and then mount the heads of Velvet and Valentino on them in front of the doors to their own business before Vox slinked away into the shadows and the ruins. Nobody even mentioned Sam a single time.
"I'm a failure," Charlie muttered.
"You're not responsible for this," Vaggie said.
Charlie didn't answer her, which was rather sad in its own right. Wendy, though, just continued to sit in the chair nearby, eating popcorn. She knew that she'd missed out on the actually impressive fight that must have taken place inside the building, away from the prying eyes of the fourth estate. Still, it was a fascinating display of cat-and-mouse that the choppers had been privy to, watching the sick, sad reality show of Vox and his group trying to navigate the most booby-trapped section of Pentagram City this side of last Halloween.
Alastor, standing nearby, shared her tub of popcorn, a wistful grin on his face as he'd watched Vox's lackeys get blasted to ribbons by Husk's exquisite placement of Cherri Bomb's explosives, and the traps of his own device. Truth was, there were a couple of minutes of footage that actually had the Radio Demon there, watching in person, but he'd retreated to the Hotel when 'the drizzle became distracting'.
"Well that's the end of today's entertainment apropos the now defunct Triarchy," Alastor announced. He turned an unkind grin to Wendy. "Did you ever have occasion to work with them, my dear?"
"No, thank Christ," Wendy said, rolling her eye. "I might have had a bad couple of decades, but I'd take that again over an afternoon with Velvet."
"Well, you can pick any afternoon of your choosing now," Alastor motioned to the news-feed that showed a camera man jumping out of the low-hovering chopper and get close up pictures of the paired heads of the dead Triarchs.
"I'll start clearing out Angel Dust's things," Vaggie said unhappily.
"Why?" Wendy asked.
Vaggie turned a look at Wendy, then motioned to the screen. "That was the only reason he even came here! There's no way he'll be coming back now that Valentino is dead!"
"He's coming back," Wendy said, eating some exploded corn.
"And where are you getting your faith in his good nature from?" Vaggie demanded, fist canted against her hip.
"I know Sam," she said. She then had her Hellphone start to ring. Wendy had to shift to get off of the thing and pull it from its pocket. "And this is probably him. Y'ello?"
"Hey Wendy. Could you do me a favor and grab a change of clothes from my closet? And some bandages," he said.
"Oh, I'm aware of the figure you've cut walking out of those doors. I imagine there's a few demons who are interested in you now," Wendy teased.
"Ugh, pass," Sam muttered. There was a pause, the words muffled but vaguely sounding like Angel Dust talking. "Really?" he asked.
"Oh yeah," Angel Dust's response was clear, but what followed it wasn't.
"Alrighty then," Sam said. "In my fridge's butter bin there's a key to Angel Dust's room. Don't ask, I've got everybody's keys, it's an old habit. He wants you to grab the sluttiest thing in his closet for him."
"Really?" she asked, flatly.
"Yup. Something tight and laced," he said. "And... hey, it's your ass that'll be out there. The really small shorts."
"The ones which are basically just a belt?" she asked just as flatly as before.
"Probably. Despite Angel Dust's best efforts I haven't seen all of his slutwear," he said.
"Is that Sam?" Charlie asked.
"Hey is that Charlie?" he asked.
"Yes," Wendy answered both.
"Is he coming back?" she asked, looking very desperately for one answer.
"Of course he is. And Angel Dust is coming back with him. He's just got something he needs to do first," Wendy put words that she was sure were accurate into Sam's mouth.
The next news story that came on the next morning, was that Cherri Bomb and Angel Dust had singlehandedly demolished Club 666.
"It's cute that you think I need your help in this, it really is, but that's not your fucking business, Angel Cakes. You stay in front of the camera and do what you do. I'll stay behind the camera and do what I do. Everybody's got a part to play in this. You'd better play yours. Stay outta my business, stick to yours. You know what? For your pretty face's sake, just stay out Overlord's business in general. You'll last longer and stay prettier."
-Overlord Valentino