Fic: Ravages Of Hell (28/?)
"Might I ask why you're still here?"
Ethan turned from his window over-looking the Slayers training, such delightful fillies, to the man stood in the doorway. Why Ripper, he thought with a delicious thrill of fear, you know just how to deliver a threat within a velvet glove, all polite words, but an underlying tone that just promised danger and pain.
Face held carefully neutral, he shrugged. "Why, Ripper what do you mean?"
"The Witchguard are an irrelevance at this moment in time, if they're brave enough to stick their heads over the parapets, they'd only have someone chop them of. That said, shouldn't you be off gleefully buggering someone's life up?"
Well if that didn't hurt, nothing would. "Perhaps I like it here," he suggested.
A glint entered Ripper's eyes that reminded him of the rough-housing thug his friend had once been. "I'll make it plain then," Ethan backed off as the man advanced. " Willow's off-limits, I won't have you using her power in one of your games. The same with Faith, she's had her problems, but she's a fine young woman, I won't have you tainting her. Xander, Dawn, I won't stand for you trying to corrupt them. And if you've any thoughts of thoughts of sabotaging our efforts here, lose them."
On balance Ethan was heartily relieved that his bladder didn't loosen on the spot. "Sabotaging your efforts?" Ethan forced a laugh. "I'm an anarchist not a bloody end-of-worlder! I'm staying to help in what way I can." Ripper stared disbelievingly at him. "Look at it this way old bean," he continued, "if the world ends, there won't exactly be much chance for mischief for me, will there?"
"Between you helping me with Whydham-Pryce and now staying," Giles shook his head, "I'll never understand you!"
Ethan watched as his fellow countryman left the room. It wasn't hard to understand at all. It was simply because the man he'd secretly loved for thirty years was here. He could no more leave Ripper in his direst hour than he could walk on water.
Giles took a breath as he reached the entrance to The Deeper Well. It looked for all the world like an ordinary albeit very large oak tree, but there was aura of power surrounding the tree that threatened to bring one to his knees. He turned at a chuckle to his left. "Ethan?"
The chaos mage smirked. "I was just thinking I pity the lumberjack who tries to cut this tree down."
Giles shook his head, a wry smile tugging unwillingly at his lips. Vintage irreverent Ethan.
"How are we going to do this, Giles?"
Giles glanced to an all-business looking Xander. "You, Faith, and Angel are the important ones here-."
"Speak for your bloody self."
He ignored Ethan's mutter to continue. "The rest of us are going to do our very best to buy you the time you need." He looked around the group, thankful for the clearing around the tree. "You know your positions, take them. Willow, get on with whatever spell you're planning, I hope it's a good one."
"Oh," Willow nodded. "It is."
He looked towards Xander, Faith, and Angel. "Go with god."
"You know," Xander chuckled darkly, "if I'm who the fate of the world rests on, kinda thinking god's sitting this one out."
"Optimistic blighter aren't you?" Ethan snarked.
Angel bit back a groan at the thudding footsteps following him down the steps and into The Deeper Well. Faith was stealthy enough, but Xander had all the elegant grace of a drunken hippo.
No, that was unfair, although Angel wasn't entirely sure if it was unfair to Harris or the hippo. The Californian had been forced into this position by powers far beyond any of their comprehension much less control, but had stayed when plenty of men popularly considered heroes would have turned and run. Not that the youth wasn't feeling the pressure, Angel could hear the youth's drumming heart and smell the sweat forming under the youth's clothes. But he was here, and trying his best, that was the important thing, and Angel could cut him some slack for that.
"Whoa." The whispered exclamation came not from Xander but from Faith, the sultry beauty staring wide-eyed around the entrance hall, a circular room standing before a narrow bridge over an unsettlingly deep chasm. The bridge was itself completely encircled by a sweeping wall containing a seemingly countless number of stone tombs enclosed in open-ended enclosures. "This is not of the good."
"If we do our job we won't have to worry about them," Angel encouraged. "And the only way to do our job is to get these tridents into position, the quicker the better."
"Damn," Faith shot him a disgusted look, "you must be hell on Connor with his chores."
Every minute stationed outside the tree took an eternity to pass, and yet at the same time passed all too quickly. "Oh bloody hell," Ethan groaned from his position to Giles' left.
Giles looked left and right, the inky darkness surrounding them feeling somehow different. "You felt that too?"
And then suddenly they were there. The Nightbreed Legions, The Glorious Fallen, and all the other too foul to be spoken names that basically meant Satan's forces and mankind's doom.
Fellhounds, huge snarling dogs with curved horns jutting out of their foreheads and the size of ponies, a single bite from the fang-filled mouth meaning death. Orcs, their piggish eyes burning with hatred and their thickly muscled limbs gripping a variety of melee weapons. Hellboars, red-maned boar-like beasts with jagged spikes protruding from their backs and curved tusks erupting from their wide mouths. Shadow-Stalkers, winged vampires who could drain a human with either their teeth or their claws, and could only be killed by decapitation. Malarks, ten foot giants made of living stone. Six-Steppers, spiders the size of small dogs, a cut from their pincers killing anyone before they'd taken six steps. Hornaks, seven foot tall humanoid creatures with green-scales covering their thickly-muscled physiques and lizard-heads. Ethereal Warlocks, black clouds that could whisper horrors to quail the bravest heart. Beastmen, their cloven hoofs stamping on the ground as their gnarled knuckles likewise scraped the grass, their bestial faces staring hungrily at their prey.
Demons stretching as far as the eye could see. And this wouldn't be even a hundredth of the forces Satan could call upon.
"Giles?" He heard Riley's shaky voice in his ear-piece. "Should I?"
"Do it!" Giles snapped.
The ground shook and the black sky briefly illuminated as Riley triggered the explosions he'd spent the first few hours since they'd arrived setting up. Dismembered demons flew up into the air before crashing back down, the air filling with the stench of death and a blood-red mist as hundreds of them died.
But just as soon as they fell, others moved seamlessly into their place.
Angel glared at first Faith and then a chuckling Xander. Kids, he shook his head, he was trying to save the world with kids. "Just get a move on."
"Say pops," Faith bumped a hip into his hip, "will you spank my ass if I don't?"
"Scary mental image," Xander scoffed as he joined them walking across the uncomfortably narrow bridge.
"My ass ain't scary," Faith protested. "Sinful, hot, pert, curvy, sexy, but it ain't scary."
"Thought of Angel spanking it is," Xander replied.
Angel stopped, his companions continuing on past him, as he felt something indefinable yet wrong in the air. He looked left and right, eyes narrowing. "Oh hell!" Leaping forward, he shoved his hands into Xander and Faith's backs, knocking the protesting couple to the ground, just as a huge several hundred foot long stone pendulum swung across the chasm with enough force to fling them from the bridge had they been stood in its path.
"Thanks Deadboy," Xander gasped as he started to rise, "only next time, cut down on the drama-."
"Stay down!" Snatching a hold of Xander's ankle, Angel yanked him back down to the ground just as another pendulum swung the length of the bridge and through where the young man had been standing. "When I say go, go!" Faith's affirmative grunt and Xander's pale-faced nod were the only signs that his companions had heard. "GO!"
Snatching a hold of the young man's collar, he yanked his companion to his feet and charged through the far exit and around the corner just as the pendulum swung back, the gust of air that accompanied its passing almost enough to take them off their feet.
"I'd say we're buggered," Ethan muttered.
"We are rather out-numbered," Giles admitted.
"Then it's lucky I brought some reinforcements."
Giles turned, speculating at what spell could create the strain he heard in Willow's voice. Then he saw and promptly wondered if there was time to change his laundry before the battle began.
The forces he'd gathered had parted to make way for the newcomers. And no wonder, for the Slayers in particular their presence must be an uncomfortable reminder of what was to come. All the newcomers were girls, Slayers if he missed his guess, but not live girls, everyone of them – and there were a multitude of cultures and times represented before him to judge from their varying dress, had a terrible wound, a fatal sort of injury. Add to that their deathly pallor, and Giles could come to only one bone-chilling conclusion. Willow had somehow resurrected the slain Slayers.
"Buffy?" he whispered as he looked over them and failed to see her.
Willow shook her head. "The spell," her voice was a whisper, her face taut with tension, "the spell would only work on those who died before the mass Calling, something to do with them being slightly different Slayers." The witch's weary smile carried with it a lifetime of pain. "I had to play the numbers."
"Right," he swallowed again. "How many?"
"There are," his heart almost stopped as a very familiar figure stepped out of the crowd, breaking the unearthly silence that had surrounded them, "three thousand, six hundred and seventy-two of us."
"K…Kendra," he felt tears form in his eyes, "I..I'm sorry you died."
"I'm a Slayer Mr. Giles," the dusky-skinned beauty replied, the ugly scar across her throat testament to the fact, "it's what we do." The Caribbean Slayer looked towards the snarling hordes. "'Tis time we did something about them."