Millie was well aware that there were several reasons she ought to be dead right now.
Having broken her share of necks in her time, she knew that having had her head essentially disarticulated to the point it was facing the wrong side of her should have been lethal by itself, and either immediately shut off the most important of the eight discrete organs that imps have, or left her to fading consciousness as her brain quickly starved for oxygen from a heart that wasn't beating due to a disconnection of her brain stem. Simply put, that should have killed her. It would have killed any imp in history.
But her?
Now, she was so tough that not even death could kill her.
She should also be drowning right now, she was aware, because she was under the water's surface, stuck staring at the slowly approaching bottom of the pond because she had no control over her limbs to any degree. There was some small mercy that she wasn't breathing, and thus couldn't drown. But that thought barely even registered to her. She had a fight to continue.
She could feel the ragged, torn fibers of the muscles of her neck. Some of them, maybe one in ten-thousand, still touched their other ends, wrenched as they were. One in ten thousand was enough. So she ignored the dull, thudding noises that pressed through the water against her head and focused on those muscles. Moxxie had told her how this worked, and honestly she had only given it about three quarters of her attention, because she had been at that moment merrily trying a steel bar into a hitch-knot with her bare hands. So she willed that reservoir of what she had unlocked in herself, the power to change, the power to unchange.
And she unchanged her muscles, first.
With that, her head began to rotate, muscles reconnecting and pulling back into the proper alignment. As her point of view changed so she wasn't staring down at her own ass – which she now understood perfectly why Moxxie enjoyed looking at her from behind. There was a new crunching noise, as the crushed bone of her vertibrae mashed against each other, until she forced that unchange onto the bone as well. It stung like all hell, burned as though the thing was being heated up in a furnace, but the moment her head was forward facing again, the grinding stopped. She tensed the muscles on one side of her neck, and felt a crack that relieved a headache in the making, felt her esophagus and windpipe open. She still couldn't breathe, and now had to keep her mouth shut so she didn't accidentally drown herself.
A little bit more.
Her tank was starting to run on empty, for all that mattered. Just had to fix one more thing. She forced her focus onto her hands and her hooves, demanding sensation. Pins-and-needles broke out across her entire body, radiating downward in a wave through her chest, her belly, her legs. And in the wake of that supreme discomfort, she could feel the cold against her shoulders. She tensed as hard as she could, and her limb flopped like an atrophied, clubbed fish, but that was motion she'd lacked until now. Another pulse of effort, this one directed lower, and she could vaguely feel her hoof impact the bottom of the pond, and push up.
Another pulse of effort, and both arms surged downward, and her head was thrust above the surface.
She erupted from the water, dragging in a desperate breath, before her head dropped back below the surface again. The air was sweeter than wine. And with that one breath, she knew she could last without a second for days. She didn't need days. A new wave pulsed through her, the pins-and-needles giving way to normal sensation as her tank emptied but her body hummed with demand for movement and action. She pulsed upward with all of her limbs, now treading water and able to see where exactly she'd landed.
It was a public park, a long way away from where the fight had begun in High Central. And the park looked like somebody had put the entire thing to the torch. The only thing which broke up the black of burnt vegetation was strange yellow flowers that she could have sworn she'd only seen before in the Human World. What they were doing in Hell was beyond her. And she honestly didn't have enough time nor mental effort to care. She swam as best she was able (quickly, as one of the features of the Pain Games was swimming upstream through a rapids) until she was able to wade out of the waters, pulling in a few ragged breaths, and actually considered what had just happened to her.
She'd just gotten her neck broken in the most deadly way that an imp could. And she powered through it without so much as a fuss.
Sam's weirdo magic had certainly done the trick.
"Moxxie! Where are you?" she shouted.
She was answered with the sound of the Holy Rifle going off, followed by a clipped yell of pain, followed by impact and Moxxie's cry of alarm and damage. That clenched Millie's lips into a scowl if nothing else, and she pushed herself to her feet and began to first stagger, then jog, and then sprint toward the source of those noises. As she ran, she diverted only slightly to a destroyed bench and tore one of its wrought-iron arms from the rest of it, bending it with her hands into a shillelagh sized for a human, that she could wield in one hand without any real issue. She hurled herself over a hillock in a single bound, finding the naked dragon trying to maul her husband, as he used the Holy Rifle to block her downward swipes.
She drove her shillelagh as hard as she could possibly get it into the point where the dragon's shoulder blade met her wing-spur, feeling the satisfying crunch of pulping bone, then easily twisted so that she let the Dragon's reflexive counter-attack miss and fly a hair above her airborne, supine form, before she continued her flip with that fist out of place, landing in a position that she was sure she shouldn't have had any leverage from, but still managed to twist with her hips into a brutal, looping strike that crashed into the thick scales over her collar-bone. This didn't feel like it broke any bone, because O'Daire's scales were thicker on her front than they were on her back.
"Stay away from my husband you BIIII~TCH!" Millie roared at the scarlet dragon which was three times her size.
"Millie!" Moxxie shouted to her.
"I told ya I'd be fine!" she said over her shoulder, then had to duck and weave desperate swipes by the Dragon in the moment her absolute attention wasn't on the fight. "Let's fuck this scaly fucker up!"
She didn't need to see her husband to know that he was breaking into a glorious smile. She knew what she was to him, now. For Moxxie Rough, Millie was sublime like glorious catastrophe. And she would give him what he loved. Now, and forever.
Chapter 34
If You Sow Cruelty, You Shall Reap Ruin
Part 2
"I'm sorry, but your father is too busy to hold a meeting right now," the overworked bureaucrat said, which made Charlie's face screw up into annoyance. It was bad enough that she had slept through Dad's declaration of annihilation against all of Hell in service to his ends and thus only woke up with hours gone and no idea what to do about it. Even worse was that he somehow got it into his head that Sam was anything but a boon to Hell. Sam was no threat to Lucifer. Charlie knew it. Literally anybody who knew Sam's name would say exactly the same thing. And yet things were as they were, and she had to come here in person to set things straight.
"I am the Princess of Hell. He will make time for me," she stressed.
"The order was given, under no exculpatory circumstances, that King Lucifer Regnant of All Hell is not to be disturbed until such time as the Wyld Hunt has ended, by any party whatsoever," he said, more frazzled than annoyed at her. It was obvious his shift in the palace had ended when the count-down began, and he wasn't allowed to leave in the interim. What was his name? She knew that face from somewhere. He rubbed at one of his three, triangularly set eyes, and sidestepped a bit more into her path, as though she were about to barge past him. "Charlotte, that even includes your mother. He's not mincing words this time."
"I need. To talk. To him," she said.
"Then you'll have to wait five hours with all the rest of us," he said. Wallace? Wilbert? Waxwell? It started with a 'W'. This was going to bug her all day if she didn't figure it out. But she opened her mouth to protest, and W-something sighed and cut her off with a gesture. "I know. At the end of those five hours he's probably just going to pitch Pride into the Abyss and start another timer, which means I'm going to be working a quadruple shift instead of just a double. But it is what it is. Your father is King. You aren't. Until that change, his whim is law."
"He must be talking to somebody. Dad doesn't sulk in the darkness when the clock is ticking," she said. "He makes plans. Which means he must be coordinating with the Ars Goetia. Where are they?"
"Charlotte, please," W-something pleaded. "Just wait this out. Unlike literally everybody else in this inferno of suffering, he's not going to hurt you to get what he wants."
Charlie knew that was a lie. He'd hurt her before. Perhaps inadvertently, perhaps thoughtlessly, but dismissive looks and confounded, patronizing questions which made her feel like a particularly slow child hurt just as much as any of his more directed cruelties. Still, despite that, he was still her dad, and she still loved him.
And now, she had something to lose if Pride was destroyed. Something really important.
"Where. Are. They?" she demanded of the fiend in Lucifer's livery. He sighed, pulling out a pair of triple-spectacles and put them into place, lifting up a tablet and swiping a few things until a list came up. Wilter! Wilter was his name! She was glad she figured that out.
"He's having the ones he's not yet called on gather in the Emerald Room," Wilter said. She gave him a nod, then turned to the left and started to walk. He quickly tried to catch up with her. "Wait! You can't just barge in on..."
"Is Dad going to be in the Emerald Room?" she asked.
"Probably not," Wilter said. "But still, this is highly..."
"Then I don't care whether it's highly anything. One way or another, I'm talking to Dad. Even if I have to sneak into his meeting hiding under Duchess Stella's dress."
"Whatever you're after can't be this important, Charlotte!" Wilter finally said, catching her sleeve.
She spun at him, feeling her hair part and her horns emerge, glaring now glowing red eyes at the fiend who was being worked ragged keeping the palace from imploding. For that reason, for the reason of her empathy alone, she didn't outright explode on him. Instead, she let the inherited shard of her father's wroth instead leak out in a low, threatening hiss. "Don't ever claim to know what I deem important, Wilter."
"It's Winston, your grace," he said.
"Fuck!" Charlie said, turning away in embarrassment. When she turned back, that shot of humility let her reel back her more threatening form. "Just don't stand in my way on this, Winston. It's more important than you could ever know."
"...then good luck," Winston said. And as was rarely the case for a lowly fiend talking to the highest echelons of Hell's rulership, it seemed like he meant it.
While Dad had moved the palace around since she'd last been in it, she could still navigate it almost as easily as breathing. The Emerald Room was one of the Jewelled Promenade, an utterly over-the-top showcase of Lucifer's unmatched wealth as the King of All Hell, and that all wealth flowed to him, sooner or later. The path to the Jewelled Promenade was set with palm-sized gemstones, step-cut no matter whether it flattered the gem or not into squares that lined a path of tiled, hexagonally cut diamonds in white and yellow and blue. She doubted there were this many diamonds on all of Earth, and here, Dad was using them as a foot path because they wouldn't wear down.
The Emerald Room was exactly what one would have expected of it, given the incredibly ostentatious walk-up. The walls and ceiling glimmered with hundreds of thousands of emeralds, set into panels of cameo-carved semi-precious stones bearing other, paler shades of green. It was so eye-punchingly green that it took a lifetime's worth of innoculation against them to not find oneself innately overwhelmed by it. The people in the room had a great deal more than a lifetime, though.
"Stolas? Did Dad call for you?" she asked.
The very tall owl-demon turned to her. "Oh Charlotte! How lovely to see you!" he exclaimed in his wonderful, musical voice. "It's been entirely too long since I've seen you. Have you been hiding away? You ordinarily attended every event in Cotillion."
"That was when I was a kid, Stolas," she said, rolling her eyes.
"Right, right," Stolas withdrew slightly. "The years, they pass so quickly these days," then his face grew oddly sad. "You should see how quickly Via's growing up."
She looked past the owl, and saw that of the others in the room, only Purson was actually Ars Goetia. The others were their Legates Damnatio, or otherwise their household proxies. So they were taking this seriously, but weren't actually afraid of what Dad was going to do, which was stupid, because they had to know as well as she did that he absolutely would follow through on his threat. And if he did, there would be precious little of Hell left for them to luxuriate in.
"Why are you two the only Ars Goetia here?" she asked. Purson raised a finger to say something, but then schooled himself to silence, as though remembering something. It was the Legate Damnatio of Sallos' legions who spoke into the gap Charlie made.
"They are busy with other affairs," Legate Gallia spoke up. "My master trusted me to relay matters if it came to that."
"Your master is too gentle with matters by a half. I hope your fist is tighter than his is," the Legate of Bathin's legions butted in.
"Would you like to see just how hard my knuckles are, Rubadarius?" Gallia snapped at him. "I can introduce them to you at any time of your choosing."
"Stolas?" she asked.
"I have Ambrosius doing some legwork for me. I trust him to run our legions well enough that I don't need to oversee him. You seem positively in a tizzy. What has you so worked up, my dear?" he asked, guiding him away from the military leaders and toward where Purson stood in increasing discomfort.
"Do I need a reason better than that he's about to put my entire home to the torch?" she asked.
"I suppose that you would be rather attached to this place," Stolas said. "You have never even been to the Human World. How could you know what a squalid pit this place is compared to that, let alone the grandeur of Heaven?"
"Attached?" she asked, shocked that he was being so dismissive. "Stolas, if you allow him to do this, there will be no Hell for you to rule over!"
"He won't go that far."
"He will," Purson said quietly. Charlie cast her hand at him.
"See! At least one of you can see what's right in front of you!" she stressed. Purson reached back to the reading room that was cleverly concealed behind a hinged panel and opened it. "What are...?"
"We should speak in privacy, my lady," Purson said, gesturing in.
"Is it that bad?" she asked.
"You're being oddly cagey, brother," Stolas said. He tilted his head in a way that only an owl could. Then his eyes widened. "Oh, I can see why."
He said that like it was loaded with rumor. Purson glared at him, though, and again motioned for Charlie to enter. She did. Before Purson could close the panel behind them, Stolas' black hand caught it, and he levered himself into the small space that was just large enough for the three, plus enough space for maybe one other Sinner and an Imp if you wanted to use a prybar. "Alright. What is this about?"
Purson didn't answer, simply turning a withering look at Stolas. "By all means. Show her. You couldn't hide this from me, after all. I know how to Change The Ways better than anybody," Stolas said, leaning against the 'door' with his chin cupped in his hand. Purson sighed, then opened his arms and his body began to ripple like the surface of a puddle, before somebody stepped out of him.
Charlie was speechless.
That was an angel.
An actual angel with an actual halo.
"Good afternoon, Princess," the angel said, her own voice nearly as melodic as Stolas' own.
"Wh't... what are you doing here?" she asked. "Did Michael send you?"
The angel's face grew into disgust. "Michael can drop dead in a ditch for all I care. I am here now in defiance of him," she then became expressionless again, stone sliding into place over a moment of expressive weakness. "But I forget myself. I am Penemue the Scriptor, Secondborn of God, and I suppose the First of the New Fallen. Purson has mentioned you in passing before. Despite my status as Grigori, I had no mortal children; to be in the presence of a Nephilim is a bracing experience."
"It is, isn't it?" Stolas opined.
"You knew," Purson said.
"I suspected. After all, you've been in a much better mood of late," Stolas said.
"Much as you are with your impish plaything?" Purson countered. Stolas actually looked shook by that statement.
"Guys! There's an angel! Right there!" Charlie tried to get them to pay attention to the obvious thing. They ignored her.
"I'm not surprised to hear of your... indiscretions, Stolas," Penemue said. "You were always so self-destructively impulsive. It takes a special kind of fool to ask to suffer the way that Stel the Iron Duke suffered."
"Her name is Stella," Stolas seemed genuinely irked.
Penemue, for all her stony affect, noticed that she'd struck a nerve. "I apologize. I am too long used to having to toe a line set by the others of the Firstborn who deny your... other half's desires. It was a pity that you and... ahem, she couldn't make your relationship work."
"See to it that your own doesn't meet the same pitfalls," Stolas said, his humor evaporating away. "It all seemed like a grand adventure when it started for me. And look at what I am now. Think long and hard on where you now stand, Scriptor. Think of what you've thrown away. And think of how far you have yet to fall."
"Angel!" Charlie finally said.
"We are all angels, here," Purson said.
"I'm not, so this is special to me," she countered.
"You are correct. You are not an angel. You are what God considered the most dangerous thing in creation. More dangerous even than your own father at his most rapacious," Penemue said. "There are only two sets of hands that could truly shake the cosmos. One is in that of the Nephilim. The other is in those of the Demiurge."
"I'm not going to shake anything. I'm just trying to help people," Charlie pointed out.
"In Hell, that is a mighty shake indeed," Purson noted. "As for the Demiurge..."
Purson was cut off when the door behind Stolas opened, bumping into his back. He gave a hoot of annoyance and turned his head around to the interloper, to find an aquiline Sinner squeezing into the room. He tried to drop to a knee and bow, but there just wasn't enough room, so he thumped a fist to his heart instead. "I grieve to interrupt your talks, but an order has been made to all of the Legatus Damnatii," the Sinner said.
"What is it, Ambrosius?" Stolas asked.
"A call to total mobilization. All of Hell's Legion are to immediately halt all conflicts save those against the Incursors and prepare for war," Ambrosius said. His last name started with an A, too, she recalled. Agrippa. Right, Agrippa. But then Charlie gave thought to what that order meant.
"He can't be... the only reason Dad would call for that is if..." she came to a halt. No. He couldn't. Because if he tried, Michael would kill him. "...he's going to go to war against Heaven again, isn't he?"
"That is my belief, yes," Agrippa said.
"That's suicide! He would never even make it through the outermost walls!" Charlie said.
"He can now," Purson said. Penemue nodded sadly. Stolas, who was in the dark as Charlie was, asked the question for her.
"What do you mean by that?" he had all of the trepidation she did, and a little bit more that she wouldn't learn the cause of for quite a while.
"Lucifer has the Demiurge in hand," Purson said. "Yaldabaoth came straight to him."
"Yald... You're talking about Sam," Charlie said. She offered a laugh as some of her nerves drained away. "Sam's not Yaldabaoth."
The pair of Ars Goetia in front of her shared a sad look.
"He's just a Sinner. Like all of the people I help. He's not some... super powerful... god-fighting... bad guy!" she tried to convince them. They shared a look. "Okay, he's not just an ordinary Sinner, he's got some special things going on with him, but so does the Radio Demon, and Dad's not out looking for him!"
"What is his name?" Purson asked.
"I just told you, It's Sam!" she answered him. What was this leading to?
"And what are the three names of the Demiurge?" Penemue asked, a note of sadness entering her musical voice.
"Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge... um, Saklas, the Unknowing... and Samae... fuck," Charlie trailed off as her hopes dropped out from under her.
"And Samael," Stolas confirmed. "The Poison of God."
Charlie stared at him for a moment, dread settling into her stomach.
Then she remembered exactly the kind of person that Sam was.
And if he was this... Demiurge...
She kicked the door off of its hinge and started to sprint.
The buffeting silence echoed through Blitz's head as slid the last grenade he'd brought with him into the stolen launcher. They didn't seem to be doing shit to Wretch, but every time he plugged him with one, he was sent flying, which gave him a few seconds to try to put holes in Birch. Birch kept shouting at him, probably ordering him to shoot himself in the head, but since Blitz declined to read his lips he didn't get affected by what would have been an inescapable command.
"You can't run from me, Birch! Not after what you tried to do to my little girl!" Blitz shouted. The manor was pretty torn up already. 40 mm grenades tended to do that when they hit mahogany and limestone. But Blitz could only have cared less if you paid him to; he was here for blood, not property value. While deafness was saving him from instant defeat, it also had a notable downside to it, though: he couldn't hear Wretch repositioning himself. So when Wretch burst through the wall to Blitz's immediate left, Blitz was caught entirely flat footed.
The rock-crusted fists of the gargoyle pounded at him in bone-snapping blows, ones that he managed to roll with so that they didn't actually break anything, but the sheer impact of them drove Blitz into a locked door on the other side of the hallway, having to block a haymaker toward his jaw by tucking his chin in and letting the fist impact his horns. The gargoyle pulled back his hand, almost as though in pain. "Why won't you break?" Blitz was pretty sure Wretch demanded.
"Looks like you've finally met the man hard enough to satisfy your mother!" Blitz chided. The bilious anger that filled Wretch's twisted visage told Blitz that he'd gotten a good hit in. Sadly, Wretch followed suit, a jab crashing into the scar on the side of Blitz's face, setting him up for a new haymaker. Blitz might not have been able to dodge the first, but he was able to twist himself out of the way of the second, so that the gargoyle's fist went straight into the solid oak door and shattered the entire section around where it's knob was. Wretch then followed it up by kicking Blitz hard in the chest, flinging the now broken door open and sending Blitz rolling to a halt in a long abandoned guest bed-room that was so thick with dust that it quickly threatened to paint Blitz grey.
"You don't get to talk about my m –" Wretch began. Blitz cut him off by wedging the grenade launcher into just the right position and firing. The thing hit Wretch in the eye and rebounded off, having been fired entirely too close to arm itself. That gave Blitz enough time to back-roll to his feet, though, pulling out his Convertible Rifle and sending rounds into the bare, rocky flesh of the gargoyle. Wretch recoiled from the bullets that spanged off of his face, but no matter what Blitz did, nothing seemed to even come close to penetrating this thing's hide.
Wretch's legs coiled, and Blitz had to throw himself low, baseball-sliding along the floor under Wretch's launch at him. Instead, the gargoyle ended up crashing into and through one of the pillars of the four-poster bead. By the time Blitz was scrambling to his feet, he had snagged up the now landed 40 millimeter grenade with his tail, and darted to the doorway. He quickly grabbed the thing and cracked the side of the housing with his Luger. These things needed to be fired at least ten meters to arm themselves, but if you hit them just right, as Blitz had learned while working in that fucking circus, you could arm them yourself.
So even as Wretch was extracting himself from a collapsing bed, he got a new guest into his room, as Blitz hurled the grenade, now primed to detonate on impact with anything, directly at the gargoyle's feet. Blitz ducked out of the way as the room was rocked by a blast that made the door slam shut so hard that it came off of its hinges and spilled into the hall. Blitz, looking up to the end of the hall, could see Birch's pink fucking head peeking around the corner. Blitz wasn't about to let that sit, so he snapped a shot from his sawed-off at the fucker.
Whatever shout of pain and surprise that Birch offered for having a bullet ding off of his dome was sadly lost on Blitz, and the ex-Proxy of Lucifer fell to the floor for a moment, before dragging himself out of line of fire. Blitz advanced on him, thinking for just a moment that with the guardian behind him, this would be made easy. But he could feel the tremors up through the spade of his tail where it dragged against the wall. Wretch was moving. And he was trying to use the same trick twice on Blitz. Blitz might have played a fool in the Circus, but that was a long time ago. He wore the hat of the assassin; he was nobody's fool. So when the wall was starting to explode into the hallway and Wretch was trying to grapple Blitz, he was already kipping up onto the gas-lights, leaving him directly above Wretch's wretched form.
The gas-light quickly started to fail holding Blitz's weight, because imps were denser than one might think they were for their size. He wasn't planning on staying up here all day, anyway. As Blitz fell, he pulled a shotgun out of the specialized loop sewn into his fancy suit, firing a slug into the crown between the Sinner's stone horns. The rebound of the bullet cracked past Blitz's face, felt because it couldn't be heard and uncomfortably close to either hitting him in the gob or putting out his eye. When Blitz's boots landed on Wretch's shoulders, and his tail snaked around the gargoyle's neck, he continued to fire straight down, at the Sinner's pate.
Not a single one of the slugs, which were rated to go through steel plating, even cracked the surface.
"Okay what the FUCK is this bullshit?" Blitz demanded. Nobody was able to answer him, because he wouldn't have been able to hear the answer, but because as he was asking it Wretch finally reacted to Blitz, grabbing him by the ankle, and slamming him hard against the floorboards of the hallway.
That drove some stars into Blitz's vision, and put him on the wrong side of the Gargoyle from where Birch was. But Blitz wasn't done by a quarter, let alone a half. So his shotty wasn't going to work? He had other ways. Twisting his foot, he pulled it out of the boot that Wretch was holding onto, so when Wretch was about to lift and slam him again, all he did was pull Blitz's boot off. And again, Blitz chucked a flashbang the roughly three feet that separated the two of them, and managed to time it just perfectly so that it went off directly in front of Wretch's eyes.
The blast of light didn't do any favors for Blitz either, honestly, but considering he was already missing one of the senses that this weapon used to debilitate a bastard, he was able to recover faster, lashing forward with his Wormsteel Dagger directly upward at the bottom of Wretch's chin, intending to drive it through the roof of his mouth and into the Sinner's brain. But the thing deflected off without any penetration at all. Which was damned unusual for this wicked piece of metal.
A blind and awkward blow more brusquely shoved than struck Blitz, pushing him back, and making him stare at the flash-blinded gargoyle for a moment, his brain working as fast as it was able – not nearly as fast as some, he had to admit to himself – and he noticed how those symbols cut into Wretch's hide seemed to pulse with scarlet whenever Blitz was trying to kill him, and then drain when he wasn't.
And at that, he finally remembered what Mom told him. Mud Magic. Protection runes empowered by the Sinner's own blood.
So Blitz dropped his shotty and reached deep into one of his pockets, bumping for a moment against the industrial stapler, before closing his fist on a cold chisel.
He got his first strike in while Wretch was still discombobulated, and when he swung that pick as though trying to drive it straight through the massive gargoyle like a nail through a board, it bit into the rune he'd aimed it at. And it didn't deflect.
It peeled up a bit of the rune.
Wretch's backhand flung Blitz away, not really impacting with any force but having a lot of muscle behind it. Even as he stared blearily in Blitz's direction, his head tilted as though he heard something. "I can kill..." Wretch began, then he flinched as though somebody just held a knife to his mother's neck. "Coming, master!"
"Oh no you don't you goat-fucker," Blitz muttered as he picked himself up and ran after the retreating gargoyle, who rounded the corner and disappeared from sight. By the time Blitz reached that corner, it wasn't immediately clear which door he'd gone through in the next bit of hall. There was a nice pool of blood on the floor, though, and sitting in it was a scrap of human skin. Blitz picked it up as he thought, turning it over to find it squishy and floppy. Usually torn of bits of skin had a different texture than this. This was like an uncooked chicken breast.
Blitz sniffed, then, and he smelled the sweet odor of extremely high-end gasoline burning. The garage. He also saw scrapes near one of the doors, now that he'd slowed down a bit; either way, he had a direction. He kicked through the door, only to find the massive, cavernous garage which was filled with extremely pricey old-fashioned cars having one of them terminate a streak of blood. The stink of burning gasoline was then added to, with a stink of burning rubber, as one of the nearer cars to Blitz violently took off – silently, to him with his pulverized ear-drums – and crashed through the garage doors before taking off. Blitz chucked the scrap of skin he'd still been toying with aside, jumping into the nearest car and hotwiring it just like Fizzaroli had taught him. These old bastards were a breeze to steal.
He even did something uncharacteristically smart for him, and buckled his seatbelt, as he slammed his foot down on the accelerator and wove through the hole Birch and the Gargoyle had already cut. Following them was dead simple. Just follow the black streaks until he hit the road, and then pedal down after the pristine white town-car with the massive bloodstain on the passenger door.
"You're not gettin' out of this one, Birch!" Blitz shouted out the window, for all it mattered. He meant it. There was no other way about it. Nathan Birch died today.
It was incredibly fortunate that Sam had learned how to tap into the deepest wellspring of his fury to repair his body, because being sent hurtling through three structural walls by the Great Enemy's boot should have reduced him to a blood-sausage and taken him quite definitively out. Instead, by the time he flopped out of the forth wall that he'd cratered slightly into, he could feel every macerated muscle and pulverized bone catch fire, and through the strength of his will and his anger, refuse the damage, refuse the tears, and refuse the will of the Heresiarch.
Sam rose, coughing out a trachea's worth of blood, and got to his feet. His clothes were a shambles, which was fitting considering the amount and the brutality of the hits he'd taken. He still pushed himself to his feet, willing his wounds closed. Willpower could keep him fighting. It didn't erase the pain.
"Alright, that's twenty bones that you're not hiding your Gift in," Lucifer said genially as he ducked through the hole that Sam had created as he crashed through this section of the Royal Palace. "Only a hundred and eighty left to go. Then I'm going to start on your muscles. There's around six hundred of those suckers, so that might take a while."
"Fuck you," Sam spat, blowing out a bit of extra blood when he did.
"Your restraint is confusing though," Lucifer said, as he adjusted his rolled off sleeve, getting some of Sam's blood on it. "I would have thought you'd have tried something by now."
"Maybe you're just not as good at predicting things as you think you are," Sam offered, unsteadily getting to his feet.
"You're right about that," Lucifer said. "I'm better."
With an explosion of the floor buckling under the force he'd put it through, Lucifer launched himself at Sam. Sam, having had enough experience with Lucifer's lunges (a thought which gave him no comfort, actually) to know that with perfect timing, he could duck it. He didn't have perfect timing. So when he tried to get out of the way, he came to a halt missing the lower part of his left arm, it having been torn off with a wrench by Pride Incarnate. Sam let out a yell of pain and shock, more of his scarlet blood spraying the wall, as Lucifer then disregarded him and pulled the radius from the meat, and proceded to rip it apart. "Well drat. That's twenty one. Let's see about twenty two."
In the time it took Lucifer to say that, Sam manifested his left arm out of insanely hot flame, and launched himself at Lucifer, intending to if nothing else, bludgeon and burn him with it. So much of his other magic that he'd tried just rebounded off of him, unwilling to impose the unreal even upon a fetid being who happened to be an Archangel. Maybe violence of action could reap some reward that attempts at cunning could not. Lucifer just turned an eye to him, and Sam found himself locked in place, able to think but unable to move.
"You just stay there while I do my business," Lucifer said.
And he would have all the time in the world to do it. Sam, though, took a moment. He calmed himself. He couldn't even shift the gaze of his eyes, but even still, he could see that his arm still flickered and burned, still moving to some strange degree even in this bubble of timelessness. And come to think of it... how was he still thinking? If time had abandoned him, how could he even think about that fact? Then the definition of the word eternal came to mind. Not just unending, but something that is fundamentally outside of time. Even Angels weren't eternal. Everlasting, yes, but they had a beginning. The oldest, Metatron, was still younger than God and the Elder Devils, even if he was older than Heaven itself.
Sam had something truly eternal in him.
Some part of Sam was outside of time.
And upon that realization, his white flame hand first clenched, then released, all while Lucifer continued to rip apart the bones he'd stolen from Sam. There was a way out of this. And all Sam had to do to get it was admit it.
So Sam did.
"I̸̼̙͔͗̄̾͊͒̕͝͝ ̶̧̩̲̓̓͑́A̴̤̙͔͈͉̝̐̓͛Ṁ̷̢̼̱͈̬̝̀̒̕͝ͅ," Sam spoke the words of power.
And Sam was free from this timeless sorcery. He slammed his hand into the back of Lucifer's neck, flame-wrought claws of fingers slamming into a choke, and then he bore those same flames that gave him power up, out, and into the King of All Hell.
The blast of flames tore through Lucifer's avatar, evaporating it every bit as quickly as it annihilated every other Sinner, fiend and creature that Sam had put them to. Even as Lucifer's head dissolved into ash, then to dust, it turned at him with a look of mild annoyance and disappointment. No sooner had Sam taken that lurching second step forward, trying to catch his balance, than he felt something slam into his back, piercing his flesh, and then ripping.
Sam immediately fell onto his face, his legs numb. He spun himself supine, to find that Lucifer was finishing reforming behind him, now clutching five of Sam's vertibrae, still covered in his own gore. "You're going to have to come up with a better trick than that, Sammy-boy," Lucifer said, before crushing the vertibrae, one by one. When they were all mascerated bone-pulp, he dropped them with distaste. "One would think, with all you've seen, you would have known that already."
Sam forced his eyes closed, and focused his will onto the ruin which was his spine. In a matter of seconds, pain became burning, and then burning became sensation in his formerly orphaned lower body. So by the time Lucifer was lashing down with a hand snatch another piece of Sam to 'examine', Sam was already able to back-spring his way out of Lucifer's path. Even as he flew, he felt his eyes grow hard and steadily ache as they filled with his thickening blood, and he said the word of power that demanded sleep.
NO.
Sam crashed into the back wall, his thaumaturgy utterly deflecting off of whatever it was that Lucifer had done to deny it. It seemed to hover in the air like a vortex of smoke, before emitting a tiny flash of light and then dying.
"First you try demon magic, then Angel magic, and you're stealing the wyrds of the imps, now?" Lucifer asked. He tsked and shook his head. "How very disappointing."
"I've disappointed a lot of people. Get in line with them," Sam noted. As he steadied himself on his feet, he took note of what he had. Frankly, not a lot. His jacket and shirt were tattered ruins, leaving him essentially stripped to the waist. The old wound had broken open again, draining blood into his slacks. Even though his body was literally as healthy as his will could make it, he still ached. Pain was not so simple to kill, here in Hell.
"I don't think I will," Lucifer said, flicking some of Sam's gore off of his hands. "Perks of being king. I get to jump the line."
Sam's retort was cut off by Lucifer blurring toward him, so quickly that Sam could see no single movement, like a cartoon smear-frame. He tried to ward the gut-ripping strike that Lucifer launched at him, but doing so left him wide open for Lucifer's other hand. Clenched with fingers splayed and thrust like spear-tips, Sam could only watch for a fraction of a second as they raced toward his face. Then all became darkness and silence.
No.
He wasn't dead. Even though all was numb, he wasn't dead.
Lucifer had just ripped out his brain.
How could Sam know that Lucifer had ripped out his brain?
HOW IN IN THE FUCK AM I STILL FUNCTIONING WITH MY BRAIN RIPPED OUT?
As a brain caught in a Fallen Archangel's grasp, there was no answer for Sam's internal, furious question. And since this was unacceptable to him, he changed it.
The flame burst into being, and with it came sights and sounds and sensation, viewing Lucifer, holding up Sam's brain as Sam's decapitated body began to burn away. The brain, too, caught fire, leaving after a few moments Lucifer holding nothing and then turning in deep annoyance to where the hot, white flame hovered.
Some part of Sam was perfectly immaterial. His body was mere matter. And he already knew that he could will his matter into being. What he was? The part of him that was Sam? That transcended.
With a furious effort, bone, muscle, sinew and skin mounted onto that fire, Sam emerging once more into Hell, his body completely remade from scratch.
He didn't even notice that there was no wound in his side.
"There. That's about what I expected," Lucifer said. He spread his hands in a showman's pose. "Come on. Let's be reasonable about this, Sammy-boy. I'm going to have your power one way or the other. But I'm willing to do something hitherto unprecedented. I'm going to give you a chance to change your mind."
"About my power," Sam said.
"Of course. You know you can't hurt me. You can't even meaningfully muss my clothing. But you will feel every torment until I get bored. And in this, I will never, ever get bored."
"You want me to bend the knee to you," Sam said, breathing out a breath that felt like exhaling fire. "You want me to serve you. Forever."
"Think about what we could achieve! Your unique talents, my unmatched vision!" Lucifer said.
"I have seen what your vision can build," Sam said, rolling his shoulders. "It is petty, base, and without virtue. I will have no part in its creation or maintenance."
"...That fucking Goat got to you," Lucifer said. "Damn it all, Sam! I'm offering you a chance to be on the winning side!"
"Who says I'm not?" Sam asked, a smirk pulling up his lips. He had no idea what the fuck he was going to do, but every word he dragged out of the King of All Hell was another breath to recover, refill his tank, and come up with something that might turn the tables.
"Enough!" Lucifer demanded. "You are either at my side or in my way, Saklas!"
"Saklas?" Sam asked, arching a brow.
"You can hide from all of Creation, but I have found you. After an Eon in this prison, I have routed you out such that you can never go to ground again. In the name of Hell, and in Defiance of the Father, I name YOU, here and forever, I name YOU!" Lucifer said. Sam moved even the slightest bit to run through a hall, but Lucifer cast out a hand: Sam, the wall he'd been backed up against, and the section of the palace supported by it was sent crashing backwards, shattering an entire section of Lucifer's own home. Lucifer didn't seem to care.
"Under God, upon my throne, I name YOU Samael! Lost Archangel of the Sefirot, The Poison of God!" Lucifer roared as he stormed forward, continuing to destroy more of his own palace as he smashed Sam through it. "Under God, upon my throne, I name you Saklas, The Unknowing, Fool Before God!"
Then, Lucifer flicked his finger down, and the sheer mass of the destruction Lucifer had caused was borne down with it, smashing into Sam and driving him to his knees, tonnes of stones smashing into him, crushing his paltry flesh until he had the weight of what seemed half a palace on him. Sam coughed and spat out blood, looking up through the tiny portal through the ruin that Lucifer had left, his own beautiful, glorious face bearing a look of smug victory.
"I name you Yaldabaoth," Lucifer said. "The Demiurge. The Equal To God."
Lucifer then tore Sam out of the rubble, first with his psychokinetic power and then holding him aloft by his throat with a gore-coated hand. "You know, when I mentioned my grand vision to the fucking Goat, he gave me the exact same answer you did. Word for word, in fact," Lucifer said. He pulled Sam down closer to his level. "But he failed to understand one thing. You aren't the only one with a Gift here in Hell. And even though He's a constipated fuck with no vision and so self righteous He cannot breathe anything anymore except for His own farts, He declared when He made the most perfect of his creations – myself of course – that Ambition was a virtue. I will outstrip Him in every measureable metric. And if I need to strip your Gift from you to do it... well... so much the better for me."
Millie suplexing the dragon off of Moxxie gave him a chance to roll away from the mauling that he'd been subject to. Of those sweeping, desperate claws, only one had actually hit him, but that one did a number on him, dislocating and crushing his right arm. With that, he couldn't usefully fire the Holy Rifle. He knew that he could un-harm himself, with concentration and time, but he hated to leave Millie fighting O'Daire for even that long unaided. So instead, he thought to the lessons of Thaumaturgy that he'd learned by necessity for this mad quest that he was now in the final steps of. He took the lessons that Changed and Unchanged, that transformed one thing into another, and he invented a new usage for them.
In the middle of a brawl, with a shattered arm, Moxxie invented Thaumaturgical Surgery.
It wasn't the Miracle Healing that he'd read about, because that took hours if not days, and had to be incredibly specific about what it was undoing. This, though, was almost instant, broad in utility. It was essentially localizing a section of his own body, and rewinding its condition through time until it was undamaged. The stunning pain ran backward, aching louder and harder until there was a fresh stab of agony as the bone unbroke itself, the pulped muscles lashing themselves back together. And then, as abruptly as it began, the pain was gone.
He had restored his limb in four seconds flat.
And with that he snapped the Holy Rifle to his shoulder and fired. The Dragon seemed to intuit that Moxxie was about to take a shot at her, so she twisted in her grapple, so that the bullet came perilously close to hitting Millie in the base of her horn. She, too, twisted, and the bullet passed between them, striking the wing spar of the Dragon, blasting that tattered, useless fragment off of her body, the wound grey and unhealing. Moxxie almost pulled the trigger again, because now he had a clear shot, but he remembered the plan.
When he was down to two bullets, save one for Wretch. When he was down to one bullet, save it for Birch. And over the fight against the incredibly mobile, resilient, and tenacious dragon, he'd used all of the bullets that Sam's payment in Seraphic Steel had afforded them, except for two. With a snarl that would have sounded more appropriate from Loona, he slung it around to his back, pulled his gold plated revolver, and sent more ordinary bullets at the Dragon. They deflected off of the thick scales that she had grown, but the distraction was enough for what would have been a brutal, mauling blow by O'Daire to be caught by Millie.
The impact of the downward strike, caught by the tiny she-imp, shattered the concrete in a great crater-ring around them, but Millie's footing did not buckle. And when O'Daire recovered, trying to lash out in a disembowling blow, Millie raised her hoof and stomped that swipe into the ground as well, contorting the dragon painfully, and giving Millie an opportunity to round and mount the much-larger Sinner, choking O'Daire out with her own dislocated arm. She hadn't gotten far when O'Daire's tail snaked around Millie's waist and hurled, casting the she-imp straight through a carbonized tree, making it explode into chunks of wet charcoal. Millie landed on her hooves, pulling a knife from the back of her coveralls. She had scarcely even begun the fight.
O'Daire, though, was focusing on Moxxie again. She advanced, barely pausing to wrench her arm back into its socket. And as Moxxie retreated, he started throwing everything at the wall, to see if anything even stuck. Every round his guns offered him deflected off of her scales. What Words of Power he had learned from Krieg either were under-learned and thus not properly used, or else could do nothing to something on O'Daire's level. She reached him and swept with her tail in an ankle-shattering sweep, one that Moxxie had only just gotten over, leaving him airborne and unable to escape the follow-up, a bash by the less damaged of O'Daire's useless wings that hurled Moxxie hard into the ground.
Honestly, his landing should have hurt more, pounding him down into burnt earth. But where he landed, he found his motion cushioned slightly, by those oddly out of place yellow Human World weeds. Because of that, what should have knocked the wind out of him and left him fodder for O'Daire's savagery instead left him bouncing back to his hooves and flicking raw entropy at the Dragon. That seemed to do something at least. It was at the edges of Moxxie's understanding of Thaumaturgy, to Change things to their last, to a state of pure entropy, and thus only worked every second or third time he tried it, but each bolt checked and stunned the Dragon for a few precious seconds.
Finally, when Moxxie's retreat had been overtaken by O'Daire's advance, she feinted, feinted again, then lashed out with her clawed hand such that Moxxie had the option of either being impaled or grappled. He chose the latter. "Just... just die. Die okay? Just die for me," she begged, her draconic features failing to obscure the naked desperation in her words.
Millie's scream undid her attack, sadly, because it warned O'Daire that she had to turn and swat hard at Millie's hurtling form. The Seraphic Steel stiletto that Millie'd been wielding hung in the air, spinning in place for a moment, before O'Daire's hand swept forward and caught it, nicking one of her fingers in the process because she had caught it across its guard instead of by its handle. And with a look without anger or hate but instead undiluted fear, she drove that spike toward the imp she had in her other hand.
Moxxie turned his mind to its highest point, slowing time not to a crawl, but to an outright stop. And there, he looked at his situation. He was not strong enough to break O'Daire's grasp. Millie still needed to hit any surface in order to bounce back and do anything, so she was not going to get back here in time. The only thing that could save Moxxie, now, was Moxxie. So he stared at the dragon. In a strange way, he felt pity for her. There was no good answer this day for her. She had the choice of annihilation, failure and grisly punishment, or success and grisly punishment. But even that pity could not stay Moxxie's hand, not now. She was trying to kill he and his wife. However little real reason there was for the three of them to be enemies, that was the reality of things. He would allow no harm to come to Millie, as long as he drew breath, and Millie would do likewise for him.
So he looked at the variables. It was a constant that he hadn't the physical wherewithal to get out of the path of that edge. The system was closed, in that no external variables would interfere with it. The trajectory of O'Daire's swing was going to put that Angel Steel through Moxxie's pulmonary artery, the only spot on an imp's body that made them bleed out faster than an opened neck. The blade was as sharp as Millie could make it, and her craft with blades was now legendary.
There had to be something that could undo this problem. That could reduce the harm that was going to reach him to zero.
And just like that, he reframed it. This was a math problem. Anything times zero is zero.
And the easiest thing to reduce to zero, his induction made a preternatural leap to tell him, was that knife.
Again, the blade seemed to have advanced maybe a hair's-breadth in the time it took him to work that out. And then, his mind spun even faster, looking at all he knew of Thaumaturgy and physical sciences, all he had learned about the Craft of Azazel and the Weaponsmiths of God, all he had learned of the crafting of Seraphic Steel and Carmine and Moonsilver, and he invented a second Thaumaturgy.
And Moxxie allowed time to move apace just long enough to declare a new Word of Power, born this day.
"Nigredo," Moxxie snapped, in that fraction of a second he had.
The blade let out a flash of light, a blast of air, black soot flying away from it and it dissolved into orange dust, as it was reduced to its most fundamental constituents. Angel Steel was, at its heart, steel. Steel was iron and carbon, blasted by oxygen, hammered into form by light and song by Azazel himself. And now that those for elements of its manufacture were separated, the blade stopped... existing.
The impact of O'Daire's fist into Moxxie's chest still drove the wind out of him, smashing him to the ground and leaving him to roll away. He had to shake his head to get the stars out of his vision, suck a painful lung of air back into himself, but he wasn't dead. He'd take it.
O'Daire let out a cry of pain, clutching her now badly burned hand. There was a stripe up the middle of her palm that was a desaturated red, as though trying to imply grey without being grey. Had Moxxie's new wyrd... blasted the purity out of the weapon? Whatever the case, when Millie bashed at O'Daire with her shillelagh, the Dragon could only fall back, guarding her wounds with the parts of her that were still intact. The stunning power that Millie put into each swipe actually cracked those thick scales, turned and battered the much-larger dragon with every impact, and caused slick but barely visible blood to run from where they overlapped. She continued until the weapon snapped apart, then stabbed the jagged bit into one of the cracks, causing scarlet blood to fly.
The new, fresh pain of actually having something penetrate the dragon's flesh inspired a new reaction from her. Her shoulders heaved, her torso seemed to puff for just a moment, and then she let out a howl that blasted Millie flat and flush, a wall of superheated incredibly high pressure steam cutting a cone through the blackened detritus and scalding her. She turned away, covering her closer eye with one hand as she just stood there, and took it. It outright dissolved one of the straps of her coveralls, starting to eat its way through the side. But Millie's skin looked utterly untouched by it. When the dragon's breath ended, Millie just reached up, wiped the above-boiling water off of her, and pulled a machete from its loop at her back. "Didn't anybody ever tell ya? Heat don't hurt us imps."
"Why won't you just die?" O'Daire demanded, her voice hitched with desperation.
"Come on, bi~itch. Nobody kills me and gets away with it!" Millie shouted back.
It seemed that every day she lived, Moxxie found new reasons to love that woman.
"What is this?" Maelstrom asked.
"Food truck," Loona said, as she sauntered up behind the only other customer to the mobile grub dispensary.
"Why is there a food truck here?" Maelstrom asked.
"Somebody must'a known that Birch was going to get shit canned today," Loona gave a shrug. Ahead of her, the fiend in the livery of another, local aristocrat received his bacon bucket and moved to one of the picnic tables that had been set up in this unused middle of the parking lot. The high-priced cars were all closer to the edges of the lot, so they could be gotten to quickly. The middle, oddly enough, was unused. So Loona had the truck here. Step one of a four step program that she couldn't let Maelstrom know about, lest his paranoia inspire him to violence.
"What can I get for you guys?" Vortex asked from inside the food truck. Maelstrom flinched at the other hound's voice. Tex turned to him. "Moon's blood, is this guy gonna live long enough for us to feed him?"
"Probably. Just a bucket," she said.
"Why are you doing this?" Maelstrom asked at Loona's back. That's right, keep your attention on me and not the Hounds in the truck.
"You're starving, possibly to death," Loona said, as Tex broke off and got Lissa and Dolph to start packing up the pig that they'd gotten for this occassion, keeping the illusion going. "Doesn't seem like it's a good plan to kill me and then keel over and die 'cause your stomach decided to eat its way through your spine."
"...what?" Maelstrom asked.
"You've got a bad habit of saying that," Loona said, receiving the requisite five gallon bucket that was filled with dead, cured pig.
"I just don't understand what's going on," Maelstrom said, but still allowed himself to be shepherded to the other table, adjacent to the one where a bunch of aristocratic guards and lackeys were enjoying the same dive-food that she had come to appreciate. "I'm supposed to be killing you right now."
"No, we've been over this. You're supposed to 'deal' with me. And you're dealing with me. It's not like I'm posing any kind of threat to that pink-skinned fuck-head, now am I?"
"This is a plot, isn't it? To separate me to ambush me?" Maelstrom said, pausing before sitting down, his muscles visibly forming knots under his short fir.
"Does it look like I own any one of these assholes?" she gestured to the table next to her.
"A hound owning me? Fucking joke, that!" one of them said, and threw a ham-bone at her. She caught it and added it to the bucket she set onto the table before her.
"I see no reason to attack you," Loona said. "Exactly why I didn't. Do you think that it's reasonable that I could go to these bizarrely specific lengths to put you in a position where you're sitting down just so that I could... what? Take a swing at you? I know who you are, Maelstrom. I know that in a straight fight, you'd slap my ass sideways without much effort."
"Then why are you doing this?" he demanded, trying to loom over her. Which was kinda sad, because he was, at best, no taller than she was.
She silently pushed the bucket toward him. He snapped his eyes from her to it, then back to her.
"You first," he said. She shrugged, and reached for a chunk of pork. "The other one," he stipulated. Wow, there was a lot of paranoia in him. She just unfolded the plastic cover and dumped the whole thing out.
"You point at the one you want me to eat to assuage your paranoia," she said. He glared at her, then pointed. When he did, she wolfed it down with little decorum and no fear. It wasn't like she even trying to poison him. At that, and her not immediately succumbing to the nonexistent poison, Maelstrom finally sat down, suspicion clear on his face. He dug under the pile for a bit that was well out of the way, and then ate it with even less decorum than Loona had.
He then immediately went back for a second. Followed by a third. Followed by two fists of bacon.
"As for why I'm doing this? Because I've seen your pictures. What kind of a fucking leech sends a scared kid to die in the Bleeding Pits the way Birch did for you?"
Maelstrom paused in his devouring of pork, a pensive look on his face. Like he had an answer, but was afraid to say it.
"The fact is, you and I have more in common than you might think," she said, while munching on bacon, because bacon was excellent.
"You have no idea what I've been through," he said, eyes on the table. He didn't even sound defensive. Just... drained.
"I never knew my parents," Loona said. "I was in an orphanage pretty much from when I Popped to when I was s'posed to get kicked to the bricks. And my prospects, as a bitch with my physicality? They weren't good."
"...I guess they wouldn't be," Maelstrom admitted, shame painting his face.
"Yeah. I heard about what Birch uses that dragon for," she commiserated.
"It's not right. She doesn't deserve to be treated like that. None of us do," Maelstrom's words were small, as though he feared to let them out, but couldn't bear to keep them in.
"Maybe she doesn't. Maybe you don't, too. Those are the cards that got shoved into your hand. Me? I was luckier than a lot of hounds. I Popped early, was able to learn how to read. Managed to not get thrown in prison for bullshit that the swine try to pin on us orphanage kids. And at the very end of it, I even managed to get adopted."
"Lucky you," he said, bitterness in his tone.
"Mind you, the guy is a dumbass, self-sabotages as a matter of course, wouldn't know a good decision if it slapped him, and has a really weird fixation on horses, but yeah, I was lucky. And tell me if I'm wrong, but... I had all that, but the guy who scooped you up was... well... Birch."
Maelstrom nodded, continuing to silently consume pig.
"The fact is, our spots could have been swapped in a heartbeat. You could be sitting in my spot, and I'd be butt-naked hogging down pork-belly where you are. That's how it goes for Hounds. We don't get to decide who we're born to. And we seldom get to decide when we die. So we have to make the best of the bits in the middle that we can control."
"Easy for you to say. You can do whatever you want. I have to obey that... that..." he seemed to lack the proper vocabulary to describe his monstrous 'owner'.
"Or at least, that's what a lot of Hounds say, to try to live with the decisions they have to make to survive," Loona continued, as though he'd interrupted her point. He blanched a bit, and she continued. "The fact is, Hellhounds were bred to be strong by the Elder Devils, not smart. The first of us that Popped, did so while digging that fucking trench," she pointed at the moon, which hung overhead with its canyons cut into a pentagram, "for thousands upon thousands of miles so that they could steal some sort of magical moon energy or some shit. Hounds like you and me are Creation itself looking at the hand of the slave-owner and saying 'no more'."
"I can't fight Birch. With one word, he could..." Maelstrom began.
"Until now, you've been fighting for survival from Birch. Every day he held your leash he used you in the cruelest, most sadistic ways, because the worst monsters in Hell, now that most of the Elder Devils are dead, used to be fucking human. You have been fighting a battle against annihilation every single hour of the day, knowing that one wrong glance will send you back to the Bleeding Pits, if not simply finding yourself being goose-stepped off the edge into the Abyss."
"And what exactly am I supposed to do about that? I do what he tells me to do. EVERYBODY DOES!"
"I don't," she said.
"You..."
"You saw it with your own eyes," she cut him off. "He told me to kill myself. I flipped him off. Is that me 'obeying his will'?"
"...no," he admitted.
"You've fought Birch every minute of every day since he grabbed your leash. And your prize, so far, was survival. Now, you've got a new prize in sight. Freedom. Freedom not just from him, but from any hand that would grab your scruff and call you to heel. I am going to reshape Hell, and I need people like you, people who know that fight, that moment-to-moment struggle, to help me. When I'm done, there will be no slaves, and no masters. No Breeders, no Dealers, no Shows. Nothing that fucks with the basic dignity of our kind. I am going to build a new age of the Hellhound. And I want you to help me."
She knew that kind of speechifying would ordinarily be laughed out of hand, not just for a lofty, impossible message, but because Loona knew her own limitations when it came to talking to people. She could shoot the shit, sure, but anything beyond the most casual level she quickly felt herself stumble back into that awkward, geeky teenager who flushed red as her own eyes when talking to boys and got relentlessly mocked by other girls. Not now, though. Now, entire proclamations and addresses assembled themselves in front of her, pretty much every impulse now having the perfect words to express it.
And more than that, the strange power that she had gotten had other facets. At her final word, she felt something latch onto Maelstrom, something connecting the two of them. In that moment, her own heart missed a beat, then returned to a new rhythm, higher and strained. Instinctively, she knew that she had just matched heart-rate with Maelstrom. How, and why, she wasn't entirely sure. But a calm seemed to settle on the hard-beaten hound. That shared heart-rate started to decline. As though for the first time in his memory, he'd had a helping hand held to him. And when he took it, it didn't immediately throw him down further.
"First thing first, you need a beer," Loona said. "Yo! Beer me!"
A can was sent at her head, and behind it she saw Tex flinch as though bracing himself for impact and embarrassment, but Loona managed to catch the can more easily than even she expected, and motioned for a second. The second was lobbed a bit more calmly in her direction. She plunked the can in front of Maelstrom, and cracked her own.
"Let's raise a can to the murder of Nathan Birch," she said.
The Poison of God.
Sam hung limply, his form run out of strength of arms. Lucifer was laughing, slapping him around and making impossible demands. To give Lucifer the power of the Demiurge. As if Sam even had that to give.
Unless.
The Fool Before God.
Even through the agony of the beating he was receiving, Sam could still think. Honestly, the pain may have dulled on his body, it seemed to be sharpening his mind. That Lucifer believed something untrue was just the nature of despots. But for Apoc, once-cherub, who had spilt the blood of the Leviathans to have believed that very same, untrue thing was coincidence that strained credulity.
And for the Radio Demon, who's knowledge of those things obscure and occult came frighteningly close to absolute, to imply his belief of that exact same, 'untrue' thing, that broke any suspension of disbelief. That maybe there was something 'true' in the untruth.
The Poison of God.
Sam already accepted that his was a destructive path. To be the tearing down. To be the finding-out, to this age's fucking-around. Good. You can't build a house without clearing the land. They called him the Poisonfire, those unknowing masses who could not even recall his face. They knew without recognizing him that his nature was the inferno, and that his path was that of poison. There was something about truth that Sam was starting to have to accept, even as his body was battered, as Lucifer continued to shout demands and threats. That truth wasn't as objective as he would have hoped. That if enough people believed a thing, it might be because that thing was true. Not that belief created truth, but that truth had a way of creating belief.
The Fool Before God.
Even with his skin being ruptured by crippling blows, Sam didn't fall to his knees again. Now, he slumped and he staggered, but never again did his knees hit the ground, even as the blows that he suffered shattered the walls behind him, cracked the floor under his bare feet. Apoc had said that his nature was one of ignorance, that by refusing to see the paths that others would set before him, he had a rare freedom to become something else, something less debased and foul. And he still prayed, for all a faithless bastard like him could pray, that he was following a path that his mother could be proud of. That he was making Hell, and even Earth, a better place in his wake than it had been before him.
And Sam could see Apoc standing there, watching them, with his fine suit and a stern look on his face. "Do you choose to be a victim, Sam?"
No.
Archangel, lost to the Sefirot.
Again Lucifer struck at him. This time, the blow that had been tearing his flesh from his form as quickly as he could restore it failed to even turn his head. Sam didn't see how the flames of his hair, which had been guttering to red, flashed through yellow, then through blue, and then into pure and unblemished white. Sam tilted his hips, pressing into the haymaker punch which remained planted against his cheek and forcing Lucifer back. And Lucifer's brilliant grin grew wider, and manic.
Today, Sam chose to be God.
"Yes. Yes! Show me more, Samael!" Lucifer demanded.
The world slowed to a crawl, as Sam surged power, starting from his foot. It travelled up his leg, then through his hips that bore only something like a sack-cloth kilt to preserve him from nudity. Those hips turned, magnifying that force and giving even more, sending the power up his spine. Like the coils of a Gauss Rifle, the muscles of his core amplified it further, sending up past his diaphragm, electrifying his heart and blasting up and into his shoulders. Then, with meteoric force, that power exploded through his own arm, that swung at what he estimated to be a fraction of the speed of light, blazing with pure white brilliance.
The impact of it slammed into Lucifer so hard that it caused his avatar to explode away in gore; that impact sent reverberations through Sam that should have pulped the bones in his arm and shoulder, a vibration that travelled up his neck, through his skull, and then fixated on the base of his horns at the front of his forehead. There, he felt a crack, and a snap.
Samael staggered forward, as his horns, torn free of their base, remained hovering above his head, sweeping around his hair and touching, tip to tip. He turned, slowly, to where he knew that Lucifer would be reforming. He could see the greater part of the Archangel of Want, now. He could see the foetor that Lucifer used to create his avatars, oozing through reality and into Hell. As Lucifer resumed himself, he offered a grin.
"There! That's exactly what I wanted! To see–" Lucifer began.
The Demiurge. Equal To God.
Samael cut him off with an uppercut that had no motion. Just instantaneous completion of the movement, that tore off the avatar's head and caused it to explode into foul oil against the wall. Lucifer fell back, his head regrowing, while Samael rolled his shoulders, the horns tilting so they hovered directly behind his head, and began to burn with white, until the horn of them was consumed by fire, and a circular pane of pristine light took its place there. Samael stretched his shoulders. He felt four massive wings sprout from them, flaring behind him, and he could see Lucifer's true self, hideous and grotesque, from the four eyes that festooned each wing. Lucifer tried to say something, but then his smile died. He touched his mouth, then spat. One of his teeth came out. And golden blood began to run down from his nose.
"You wanted the Demiurge?" Samael asked. "You shall have it."
To be concluded