One wasn't happy about the hellspawn that Hare had picked up. He was even less happy that she got a fancier room than the rest of them put together. But far be it for him to point out that the vile little demon was in fact a demon and needed to be dealt with; no all of the dames around here (which potentially included Hare, as One had no idea which side of that fence Hare had been born on) were all utterly smitten with the horned hag.
Though to be fair, it was a bit much to consider her a hag when she was the same age he was.
"I've got some good news, and some bad news," Hare said as she – wait, no, it was a he again – strode into the dining area that was set up across the hall from a line of small rooms that they could all get comfortable in, as opposed to sleeping on cots in the hallways as things had been until recently.
"Oh God, spare me," One muttered.
"There is no god here," Hare said. He plunked down a piece of simplistic jewelry, one set in a brass chain but bearing a large pink gemstone. "The good news is that we are one very big step closer to making a useable gate to reach to Hell. And having access to Hell will be critical in our ongoing mission to keep this universe from unraveling."
Delilah, who had been about to bite a burrito, paused and gave a nod. "I suppose that is good news. How much longer, do you think?"
"Not a goddamned clue!" Hare said with a grin. Lou (she had moved from her supermodel-form into a more unremarkable male form days ago) then furrowed her brow, putting down his own burrito.
"Hare… what's the bad news?" Lou asked.
"The Hag Star were seen on Canaveral," Hare said. "If they're coming on shore and getting recorded on video, that means they're about to do something big and nasty. Which means we have to give them a slap before they can."
"The last time we tried to 'give them a slap', One ended up Unwound and Lou almost vanished from reality," Delilah pointed out the problem with the situation.
"This time we're not fucking around and trying to be subtle," Hare said. "I've already shifted the ole' Hive around, so I'm not going to be able to make you fancy guns on the fly while we're doing this, but I'll be able to stomp those mind-twisting fish-asses along side the rest of you."
"And if they do what they did last time?" Delilah asked.
Hare's good cheer curdled a bit, but he nodded with sincerity. "However it was that they found us last time still eludes me. That they managed to get as close as they did to Desyncing us is on me. But this time they're going to be too busy dying to give you guys nightmares."
"Is there a chance the greasers are involved somehow?" One asked, sitting forward.
"We're not calling them 'greasers', One. It's not a thing. Stop trying to make it a thing," Delilah said.
"Delilah's right, it's not an accurate title. They're inverse-relativity Noumenon; greasiness is at best incidental," Hare said. "Why do you bring them up?"
"I… it's nothing," One said.
"Be candid. There are no dumb theories here," Hare said, as the hatch irised open and the imp joined them, a towel somehow threaded between her horns and otherwise clad in a bathrobe and fuzzy red-and-black slippers.
"Oh on the contrary; there are an infinitude of dumb theories. But by all means add to that infinity if you please; it's not like infinity can get any bigger," Vera said, pulling herself quickly up the desk and sitting on the table-top next to the coffee maker.
"Infinity absolutely can, but that's not the point. One?" Hare said.
"When… that… happened, it was 'cause I was panicking thinkin' that Two sent some of her people down here to find me, and that they'd already gotten what's his name and were closin' the noose on th'all of us," One said.
"They attacked your sanity. Of course they inspired a paranoid delusion," Delilah said.
"Actually, One raises a good point," Hare said. He rubbed at his chin with his knuckles in thought. "The Storm Kings are infamous for getting other synergies of Noumenon to do their bitch-work. But they aren't unique in that regard. And when we first encountered these things, it was only a few of them in what was otherwise top-to-bottom a textbook Cognoscenti hub."
"Wait, really?" One asked.
"We're going to have to go in expecting a third party. Lou? Did you set those new Endeavors you devised?" Hare asked.
"The one that matters is in," she said.
"Which one is that?" One asked. Lou blinked, then looked at the imp.
"Is it true you're fireproof?" Lou asked.
"Yours is harmless to us, without the force of the ambient power of Hell behind it," Vera confirmed. And then a moment later, Lou narrowed his eyes, and Vera burst into flames. Vera did not react as one would expect of somebody who just exploded into fire. She pursed her lips, tilting her head to one side as her clothes began to singe and burn. "That actually stings a little. Bravo."
And just like that, flames died but for the smoldering of the imps' robe and the steam coming off her head-towel.
"I won't be completely useless, like I was in Greece," Lou said.
"Are you engaging in battle, oh-employers-mine?" Vera asked.
"Yup. Wanna kill some fish-people?" Hare offered.
"Oh I delight in killing fish-people," Vera said. She grabbed the entire carafe of coffee and then hopped off of the tabletop. "I will be prepared in a trice. I don't want to miss the fun!"
"I like her moxie," Hare said. "Get your weapons and shit locked in. One, take off that suit and use the one I made for you yesterday; it's got better armor. Vera, remember you can't corrode these things; they evolved to live in sulphuric acid seas and that thaumaturgy you showed me will not work on them!" it was unclear if she heard, or if she was listening. He turned to Lou. "Lou, just stay your beautiful self. And Delilah?"
"Yup?" she asked, as she flexed her arms behind her head to a popping sound in one of her elbows.
"Keep their gribblies off of us and knock 'em dead. Let's not fuck this up twice in a row," Hare declared.
Helldiver VIII
Extermination: Hag Star And Enemy Unknown
The last time ricocheted around inside of One's head the entire drive over. How quickly he'd lost his shit and started gunning people down in a blind panic was not something he was going to allow himself to simply brush past. It was a lesson. A miserable, horrible lesson that had cost something that he couldn't ever completely repay, but one he would take to heart. Just how dangerous his enemies were, and how good they were at turning his own brain against him.
Delilah was all business, driving the lot of them across the bridge that separated Titusville from the island where the US sent all of its shit into outer space. To the south were the more populated regions of Canaveral, which put them directly on a crash-course to the middle of fucking nowhere, well north of the Flight Center and all of the towns that were to south of it.
All that lay before them now were nerves, a flat road hemmed by choking vegetation, and absolutely no traffic whatsoever. The day had dawned grey and dreary, hot but wet as the rain fell in sheets.
There were no words, no big speeches or fortifying words offered by Hare as they moved into what all knew was going to be a no-holds barred fight. They'd already been briefed on what was expected of them. Of what they expected to fight. And what their objectives were. With those covered, all that was left was waiting.
One wasn't a soldier. He hadn't ever signed up, hadn't gone through boot, hadn't gotten a face full of Drill Instructor spittle. He was a spook. A government agent. A government agent for a bureau that no longer existed. And now he was going into a fuckin' war along side of the same kind of hellspawn that had began the slide into oblivion of his friends and comrades.
But that was the bitch of it, wasn't it? Hard times made for strange allies. And if the little demon was willing and able to save his ass, then she was welcome to do it. The rest of them had had his back when he lost his shit. Maybe that was all that there was now, that he'd finally seen what he'd been so keen to spot in his youth. He saw the truth of the world, red in tooth and claw, ravenous and heedless and hungering. And if he wanted to be a man in the face of such a force, he couldn't do it alone.
Time was, he had Two, and that was all he needed. When he had only seen the shadow of the monster, a single person at his back seemed more than enough. But now, he understood the difference between the monster's shadow and the monster itself. And he had a sinking feeling that the monster he had finally seen was but a shadow of something higher, darker, and hungrier.
This was what One had wanted. And now that he had it, he hated it and wanted it dead. Fate was a fickle old bitch, wasn't she?
There was a rumble of thunder that shuddered the battle bus in their transit to the east. "How far?" One finally broke the spell of silence that the trip had installed into them.
"Soon," Hare said, rechecking the spare guns that he had stockpiled. They were all futuristic, but not nearly as fancy or nice as the one that he'd given One and hadn't been able to better since. "A video showed a Hag Star Flesh Farmer coming out of the surf north of the space-center. There are probably more in the south, but we're in the north, so that's where we start."
"There's nothing up here but palm trees and scrub," Delilah said from the driver's seat.
"And rain. They always feel bolder when it's raining," Hare said. "Remember the RoE: If it's not a human or an imp, kill it. No questions, no hesitation. We're driving them out of Florida. We don't need to kill all of them. Just enough to panic them."
"I saw something," Lou said, narrowing his eyes through the sheets of rain. The battle bus slowed, coming to the side of the road (which was a ludicrous notion because there was literally nothing here from the shoulder to the 'treeline'). A few meters ahead of the front bumper was a carcass, specifically one of a dolphin of some sort. There was a crater a bit further ahead, and the corpse was burst open as though it had impacted something with tremendous force, or else been dropped out of the fucking sky.
"They're here. Dolphins hate the Hag Star. The feeling is mutual," Hare said. And then he opened the door and stepped out into the rain while pulling on an older shrapnel warding suit that was popular in the 2000's before plate carriers became a thing. He didn't even take a gun. One sighed and followed him, walking up to the dead dolphin, and recoiling a bit from the wounds. There was a row of punctures, like fingers plunging through muscle all the way to the bone, near the tail, and those tracts were ripped as though pressure had been put on them.
"Did a Hag Star seriously hammer-throw a dolphin all the way from the shore to here?" Delilah asked, joining him over the aquatic mammal.
"...Most of them are strong but not that strong. Might be a mutant. There are enough mutants in Creation already, what's one more? Regardless. Delilah? Keep them off of us," Hare repeated.
Lou didn't say anything, simply following them as they walked toward the shore that was about a klick ahead of them. One had his carbine out, eyes peeled to the close-in horizon of the road, but having to squint against the intrusion of wind-blown rain.
This time, though, he found himself paying a bit less attention to his surroundings than to himself. Every few seconds, he could swear he saw some movement not explained by the wind and the drenching rain, but every single time, it was an illusion cooked up by pareidolia. Trying to see as hostile what was nothing. Which then started to drive doubts into him. Was this fear his own, or was it something that somebody was dive-bombing him with? It had worked last time. Would he end up as the weak link again?
"South treeline," Lou said, and One flicked his gun in that direction; by guessing her vector he spotted dirt-path driveway that lead toward the more built up sections of Canaveral. He hussled a bit, and saw what she had spotted; there was a fence closing off the section beyond from common traffic, but that fence was ripped open and bent out of shape. The sign overhead said CCSC Fire Reservoir.
"That sign isn't genuine," Lou said as the others reached One's place at the foot of the path.
"What?" Hare asked.
"It doesn't use the same font as the sign for Wilson we passed, and the letter-kerning is all off," Lou said. "It's here to keep lookie-loos from walking in.
"But why tear the gate open, then?" Delilah asked.
"They're feelin' bold," One answered for Hare, who gave a nod that One's assessment was accurate. They left the tarmac and began to venture down the mud path. One paused by the fence; it would have taken somebody as strong as Delilah to do this kind of damage to it. And the damage had gone from the inside, out. A glance to Lou told One that she'd come to the same conclusion. The mud path they were on didn't obey the same rules as the road they'd left behind. It didn't lance off in one direction without so much as a twist for miles and miles; this one was deeply meandering, snaking through the tall scrub and causing frequent breaks in line-of sight. All to keep what was ahead of them out of sight by the common folk.
Hare sucked in a hissing breath, causing all to pause and look back at him. He raised a hand to an ear, focus coming to his face. One took a knee, heedless of what doing so would do to his pants, and listened with him. He didn't hear much.
"Clicking," Lou whispered.
One didn't like the sound of that. He crept forward, leaning ever so gently around the hedge line and toward the pit into the dirt that had been dug and flooded by salty water. And at the shores of that pit there were beings that were far more foul than anything ole' Lovecraft ever described. Howard Phillips had been terrified of so many mundane things, from fish, to air conditioning, to black people, and his one great ability was to transliterate that visceral terror he felt onto the page and make other people feel some shade of it. But these were not mere 'fish people'. They were something worse.
One might not have been a student of biology, but even he knew that there existed in nature a louse whose entire life cycle was predicated on invading the mouth of a fish, biting off the fish's tongue, and then using its body to replace it in a parasitic relationship that ended when one of the two of them died. And there was entirely too much of that creepy pale sea-insect in the Hag Star, along with the scales and unblinking eyes of the fish and the stature and posture of a man. To look upon the Hag Star was to look upon Lovecraft's very ideal of What Must Not Be.
And like the terrified old racist, One found himself momentarily transfixed in horror.
Delilah was the one to snap him out of it, leaning around him to see what he was seeing. And she sucked in a breath of alarm. "Christ Almighty," she muttered. "There's got to be a dozen of the things."
"That's just the guards of this outpost," Hare whispered from a couple of paces away. "How many fat ones?"
One blinked, the spell of fear that their mere existence instilled into reality broken by the fact that he was here to do a fucking job. He quickly darted his eyes among the creatures that were gathered here. Of the dozen, most of them looked to be about One's mass, if distorted and malign. Two, though, that stayed near a pile of something banded pink and brown, were much larger, easily the size of a half-grown rhino, and bearing much of the same apparent thickness of hide.
"Oh thank god. Not Bloat Mothers, just Bone-pickers," Hare muttered. "Still. One Bone-picker would be bad enough. We've got two,"
"Share?" Delilah asked, as One withdrew around the shrubbery.
"Bone-pickers are outside of your," Hare pointed at Lou and One, "paygrade. It's going to come down to us to deal with them. You two kill the Flesh Farmers as fast as you can. Shock, awe, and overwhelming violence of action."
"We'll get mobbed," Lou pointed out.
"Unless we draw 'em out," One countered. "What'd'ya think will get 'em to send a couple out to check something?"
"I have an idea for that," Hare said. "Stay here. If they try to kill you when I'm gone, run for your lives to the bus. I'll be on my way to you."
"Wait, what do you…" Delilah began, but there was a shudder in the air, followed by a strange electric snap sound, and Hare became a streak which vanished along the path that they were standing on, quickly disappearing from sight. "God damn it, Hare."
One, though, was looking back whence they came, his attentions having been pulled by the retreat of Hare. He pointed at a bend in the path that they had come. "Over there, all of yous. We gotta string 'em out so that they can't reach us before they wanna kill us, and that means we gotta give 'em a bit of distance."
"Fair enough," Delilah said.
"Lou, you only got that one thing you can do, right?"
"Why is everybody ignoring me?" the imp asked from One's immediate left hand. One flinched and nearly shouted, but managed to contain himself. She of all of them had the good sense to have an umbrella keeping the rain from lashing her. She wore a dress now as she had before, but there was something more… substantial… to this dress compared to what she'd shown up in days before. As though it were more than what it appeared.
"Didn't think about you, frankly. What can you do?" One asked, as they moved toward the turn in the road.
"More than you can think, overgrown ape," Vera said. "Those things back there, I have actually heard stories of their existence."
"What? How?" Delilah asked.
"They leak into the Bleeding Pits of Pride Ring from time to time. The Old Mothers speak of the Fearbenders, that they by blackness of their blood can perform a few thaumaturgies, though not the array we imps can," Vera said.
"Great, magical monsters," Delilah muttered.
"We are all magical monsters, human. The only difference is how magical, and of which stripe of monster," Vera said with a grin showing her razor-sharp teeth.
"Any advice on how to kill them?" One pressured before either Vera got more distracted or Delilah led them astray.
"The ones in the Pits can fight, if blindly, without a head, which means they have no brain there," Vera recounted.
"Alright, center of mass only. Delilah?" One said.
"Blind them and work the body, I hear you. Lou?"
"Are they flammable?" Lou asked.
"Most things which are not imps tend to be, yes," Vera said. Then through the rain, they started hearing a loud diesel engine, which confused One because the Battle Bus was electric. But he didn't put it past Hare to simply belt out diesel-truck engine noises on the loudspeaker. Whatever worked, brother.
"Pick a spot. Delilah, you're in the elbow, the rest get a sight-line," One said. Delilah quickly darted to the inside of the bend, her skin turning that strange blue shade and the air around her fists quivering with expectant violence and destruction. The imp and Lou pulled back a short distance into the shrub line, while One opted to be right at the edge, half in a shrub, with the barrel of his Carbine sticking out.
The sound of diesel engine quieted for a short time, then snorted back into life, drawing closer as though a truck had almost passed the path, spotted the gate, then reversed course and gone in. And with the noise of approaching machinery, there was only waiting, and hoping that some level of prudence existed in those abyssal nightmares made flesh, some semblance of tactics and positioning. That they would send a few to scout out the threat, rather than move in a unified, furious mass.
In its way it was fortunate that it was pissing down rain. For all One was saturated to his bones, it at least kept him from being covered in flop sweat.
The Bus was visible, now, slowly churning the mud as it swung along the chicane to where the four of them were bunkered. No sign of the fish-men.
But the expectation turned to horror when there was a tremendous crunch, the back of the bus being lifted off of the ground and spun off of the path and into the trees, as though it had been struck by an invisible wrecking-ball, now leaving it blocking the path with its ass in the trees and a whole section of it staved in.
No. One snapped his gaze to the path ahead of him. Was that movement? He closed his eyes for a second, ignoring the alarmed words that were passing over his back, ignoring how Lou had to hiss something loudly at Delilah to keep her in position, ignoring the rustling of plant matter near him until his fear caught up with him and he turned, to see the imp approach and squat, eyes no longer yellow with red irises, but instead black from eyelid to pupil.
"The fact you are not shooting it means you cannot see it," Vera muttered. She wiped an eye with a finger, then slapped One in the face with her hand. He instantly felt something slimy crawling across the surface of his left eye, which made him flinch and recoil, but within a moment, as though bubble of reality were popping appeared there one of the fish-isopod freaks. And he could only see it with his left eye; according to his right eye, there was nothing there at all.
"They're invisible! Engage!" One shouted, firing a burst at the Hag Star that was standing in the midst of the road. The impacts didn't burst the Hag Star like a blood sausage, instead turning it and tearing chunks of scaly flesh off as though being pelted by sand-paper baseballs. The thing leaned back, its head pointing toward the sky, and let out a thunderous clicking noise, as though emulating a modem. It then caught on fire, flame erupting from its body without source or apparent fuel, and the clicking took on a panicked shrieking quality, followed by a dull thud of deafening silence, and a moment of darkened blindness, as Vera spoke a word that shuddered against the skin of the world, and a beam of anti-lightning slammed into the Hag Star, lifting it from its feet and hurling it down the muddy path. And after a few seconds, it slowly, with seeming pain, started to pick itself back up again.
Fucking hell, these things were way tougher than the Deus Vox.
A tree crashed down into the path as one of the big ones, the 'Bone-pickers', charged forward, a purple froth bubbling out of what One guessed was its face. And for some weird ass reason, his brain told him that it meant 'territory anger'. He didn't spare much effort tracking passing thoughts during a firefight. He stood, flicked the S-46 to full-auto, and then laid into the brute.
The thing didn't even slow, as great chunks of its hide exploded away and pockets of strange pale green goo leaked out from under them. One grit his teeth, halting one burst to recenter his aim into the existing wound and then fire again. The next cluster dug deeper, inches into the thing's hide, but every impact caused not sprays of what was described by the imp as black blood but instead pale green goo and shards of hide with suspiciously sharp edges.
And at that, One twigged what was happening. That thing's skin – and possibly all the others as well – was a natural ablative armor, shattering to deflect incoming force before it could penetrate into something valuable. The big one was even worse, having one 'a them non-Newtonian fluids packed into cells between each layer.
Then, as the realization hit One, the Bone-picker paused in its forward charge toward where the Battle Bus had been wedged, locked its black, blank eyes on One, and then began to charge. Oh fuck.
It didn't get very far before Delilah streaked out of her spot in the trees, intercepting it and preventing it from getting any closer. Behind it, the first, formerly invisible one caught fire again, flames refusing to go out even in the pissing rain. It didn't last long before it fell to its face again, burned into uselessness. The brute on route didn't seem to be too happy about Delilah's interference. It lashed out with a strange, claw-like hand, sweeping her off of the spot she was trying to tackle it down and then lifting her by her torso and slamming her into the mud, before hurling her behind it. Delilah dug a rut in the mud as she was sent skimming toward the treeline at the bend over yonder.
One didn't have time to fear. He'd just finished reloading, and the Bone-picker was starting to pick up speed again. One had the instinct to aim between its eyes, but remembered the imp's warning. No brain in the head. But before he dipped his aim down to the heavily plated center mass, he remembered the other thing that Vera had said. That without a head, it would fight blindly. He grit his teeth and then opened fire directly onto its eyes. A few of his slugs outright missed, but those that hit didn't suffer the same useless end that his first had; first the left eye, then the right were pulped to gore and deflated. But now the thing was charging. Even blind, it knew that One was somewhere ahead of it. And it was going to hit like a train.
Vera answered that by throwing up her hands with a different word that rattled One's teeth, and the rain began to deflect away off of a colorful barrier that bloomed into being between the Hag Star and the pair of them. The Hag Star crashed into the barrier, and the barrier showed nearly-transparent cracks all through it, bowing inward as though it had held, but only just barely. Vera recoiled as though she had physically absorbed some fraction of the impact, and a thick dribble of black blood leaked from the corner of one eye, which she quickly wisked away.
One didn't waste any time. His carbine was out and the Hag Star was going to continue forward in a second, the barrier being as broken as it was. He awkwardly grabbed for the nearest part of Vera that he could get his hand on – her tail – with the hand that otherwise had his gun in it and ran out of their little spot of cover. The Hag Star blew out a thick foam onto its chest, this one mustard color. Die for the clutch, it meant. How One discerned that from a spray of brown-yellow shit, he couldn't tell you.
"Unhand me human!" Vera snapped as One finished dumping one magazine for another. As she did, the Hag Star turned; it was no longer able to see them, but it apparently could still hear them.
One tried to find a better target than straight into the heavily armored thorax of the Bone-Picker, but he couldn't find one. So he switched back to single, and tried drilling repeated single shots into the same spot, to not waste metal and time spreading damage out but to penetrate past the armor belt and into the vital organs of this thing. He didn't get far before Vera cast her hand out with a declaration of Un, and a streak lashed out from her. It slammed into the area that One had been firing, and the instant it did the ragged edges of the Bone-picker's ablative hide began to sag and drip, an acrid stench in the air as tissue bubbled and seethed… but the dart then slipped off and out, as though it couldn't stick to the thing's tissue. It instead began to eat its way through the mud instead.
One couldn't even see any of the others right now. Lou was still somewhere in the trees, setting things on fire with her mind, and Delilah… well. One hadn't seen her since she got yote. And As for Hare? The only thing One could say was that the guy wasn't visibly in the Battle Bus anymore.
All One could do was keep firing. So he kept up what he had one before. And as before, chips and shards of chitinous flesh breaking away and pale-green viscous fluid spilling out. But then there was a threshold, obvious from the crunching noise. The next shot blew out chunks as though he were shooting at one of those guys in Bangor, though whatever voodoo bullshit Vera did failed to soften it up at all. Finally, on the last three shots this mag had, the result of firing wasn't shattering and green, but a spray of foul black blood.
Of course, the entire time the two of them had been trying to kill this, it had been advancing on them. It didn't charge as it had the first time, but because of its sheer mass and the fact that it was moving forward whereas One and Vera were moving backward, it overtook them. Vera once again spoke the word that raised up a Prismatic Barrier, but the Hag Star was having none of it this time. Its body twisted forcefully, driving a tree-trunk arm capped with a three-tonged pincer-claw. Vera was able to duck, but One, dedicated to getting the last shots in, lacked that luxury.
The impact crunched through the Barrier, barely slowing down before it impacted One's arm, shattering every bone in his right arm and dislocating it from its socket in the same movement, sending him corkscrewing through the air with his vision narrowed to a thin cone from pain and the insane violence of the impact. There was a moment where he was airborne and helpless, lashed by rain and wracked by pain, that he wondered if he should have just ignored The Angel of the Seven-Eleven all those years ago.
He had no time to complete that thought when his pelvis smashed into a palm tree. The tree had a bit of give to it, so it didn't shatter his groin region, though it hurt like an absolute fucker, before he fell eight feet to the ground. And he just laid there for a second, trying to get his vision to open up again. He couldn't so much as twitch a finger on his right arm. He didn't need to look at it to know how fucked up it was. He could feel it. And he was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to bend in those particular directions.
"Get up, human! I refuse to die on the FUCKING HUMAN WORLD!" the imp roared at him, but he didn't look at her.
He didn't speak, but his lips did move. 'Just gimme a minute. Just gimme a minute to get my second wind'.
A second wind which simply would not come.
This was bad.
Delilah knew even as she got up that she was desperately out of position, and since she was in sight of eight of those fuckers, they'd be concentrating her down. One of them pointed its fine pincer claw at her, and she instantly felt as though there was hot, wet breath on the back of her neck. She didn't respond to it. She knew that these things fucked with your head. And her sanity was pretty much the one great advantage she had right now. She turned a glance to the trees, and she saw another of the smaller ones moving toward where one was getting beset by the bigger asshole.
Well, she had her orders; keep the Hag Star off of the squishy ones. So she pushed herself first to a kneel then to an awkward, mud-flinging sprint, one that dove into the brush after the one she'd barely noticed. She couldn't see it, but she knew it was here. After all, one of them had appeared out of thin air when One shot it. So Delilah just trusted that rummaging of the trees was the spot the Hag Star was. And for once, her instincts were proved out; her tackle felt as though it wrapped around something that weighed a fair bit more than she did, a something she continued charging with until she found a palm-tree in her path and drove the something into it. The impact popped whatever bullshit it was using to hide from her vision, revealing the horrible fish-insect-man thing that was entirely too close to her personal space.
It released a set of clicks and rattles which Delilah's brain somehow decoded into 'die for the clutch'. Well, fuck that noise. Delilah wasn't about to die for anybody else, let alone a bug-monster. She grabbed one of its arms, planting a boot against its thorax, and with a monumental heave that she felt her muscles burning and searing in strain she ripped and tore, disarticulating the right arm of the monster and hurling it away, causing it to spray spurts of black blood onto the wet foliage.
The Hag Star didn't just take that lying down, though. It still had its other arm, and that arm swung down in a sledgehammer blow that managed to catch Delilah at the corner of the skull right above her eye. While her head did deflect away, it still stunned her, and made her stumble a few paces back to collect herself. By the time she'd shook the stars out of her vision, the barnacle encrusted skin of the Hag Star warped and spasmed, falling off and swelling up as it hit the ground to become a large-dog sized beast of barnacles, dead coral, broken shells and other seaborne detritus. In the moment of its birth it was already hurling itself at Delilah, who was able to dodge the lunge which it had very optimistically launched for her throat, and even deliver a powerful jab into its flank. With the power of her 'Elohim Array', the impact which would have otherwise simply bruised muscle and flesh instead sent the creature streaking away through the brush.
That left her and the freak in front of her. It lashed out at her, and by the way the world rippled around its claws as it did so, she could tell she couldn't even let this thing touch her. She skirted back, not merely ducking the swipe as pugilistic-best-practices told her to. And the next swipe as well whistled toward her, trying to hit any part of her, that she immediately stepped back from. Her footing wasn't great, being as she was on plant-matter saturated into mud, but it gave her enough traction that she was able to keep backing away as the swipes came in, and rising clicking which her brain told her meant 'aggravation desperation'. Finally, there was a swing that didn't have the same grim weight to it, one that was just a foul undersea abomination trying to thwack her. That one she ducked under and felt that same explosion of force rising up from her pelvis, through the coils of her core and then exploding down her arm and into the 'face' of this monstrosity.
The scales and chitin of the Hag Star were ripped, tearing from their foundation, and she felt bone crumple under her blow. But before she had a chance to follow it with the even mightier followup that her body was even now moving to throw, she heard a crash in the trees near to her left. She had to abort the punch, and felt something slam into her, lifting her up and carrying her away from the Hag Star that she'd belted. She couldn't see the one carrying her at speed, not with her clearest vision at least. When she glanced behind her, to see a tree that it was trying to slam her into as it continued (which she of course braced for and took like a champion), she found upon glancing back that for a moment she could see the thing which grabbed her, but only as she was swinging her vision back toward it.
It could only be seen in her peripheral vision.
Well fuck that voodoo, Delilah thought. She didn't need to see to know that it's head was mashed up against her breasts as it drove her out of the forest and back into the muddy path. She could blindly drive an uppercut by her elbow into where either its face or the back of its head would be. And the impact there was much reduced compared to a full-body haymaker, but it was enough to cause the thing to fall from its charge, the bubble of imperceptibility failing around it and allowing her to spot it in plain sight.
Delilah rolled back and free of its grasp, only to immediately get something hit her in the side of the head. She glanced over there, and yet a third Hag Star had gotten involved. This one had a large head, bloated and seemingly soft like a bladder, with eyes drooping down like an ancient porn-star's breasts. It didn't have the pincer-like hands that most of the others did; this one had more human hands, albeit with only four fingers to each limb. It cast its hand out again, in a clutching motion, and a ripple ran through the falling rain. Only by the deluge did Delilah see the otherwise invisible blow coming, and because of that she was able to lean back and roll with the blow that might have otherwise knocked her the fuck out.
She landed on her back again, stars likely circling her head like an old cartoon, as she tried to get her bearing. She could hear the massive thuds of the Bonepicker going after One and the imp. But she knew that somewhere in the trees over to her left was Lou, and Lou only had one trick he could use in this fight, a trick which grew much less useful when the enemy got close to him. It wasn't a wise man who set someone on fire while that someone was hugging you. With a growl and a 'goddamn it, Hare' to the universe, Delilah got to her feet and immediately ducked aside as another shudder through the rain came; the distance was such that her reaction time allowed her to get out of its way entirely, then with a mighty drive, use the dodge she'd done to launch into a superman punch at the one who'd tackled her into the mud to begin with.
It clicked wildly, words that her brain refused to translate, waving with its clawed arms, until there was a terrible weight upon reality; as her fist connected with the thing's skull for a second and fatal time, it was a split second after the air seemed to become invisible knives which flensed her arm, right from its blue skin to the red muscle underneath in numerous places.
Though the Hag Star went down and stayed down, Delilah had to dart back and duck again, cradling her degloved strong-hand with her body. This was the very definition of not good. As far as she knew, that blue skin thing that this Array gave her wouldn't protect her if it wasn't there (obviously). So she forced her precious little Numen to rebuild her skin so that she wouldn't lose an arm over this.
It turned out the panic she felt was only slightly overblown, because before the floppy-headed one could send out another telekinetic blow, it burst into flames. And unlike the others who were unmoved by being ignited, when afflicted with that state, it reacted as a reasonable person would; by flailing about and rolling onto the ground to try to stem the flames. It gave Delilah enough time to replace her skin, but her arm still hurt and she could tell the limb was bleeding internally as opposed to simply externally. She'd have to deal with it later, if later ever came.
The flames suddenly stopped and Delilah heard a shout of alarm and fear from the trees. Something managed to get close to Lou. Delilah wasn't about to let that fly. She charged at the slowly rising floppy one, only offering a moment to clothes-line the first Hag Star she'd successfully attacked today, the one that had tried to throw a flotsam-dog at her. She felt its head buckle under her treatment, and it barely slowed her down. She continued charging, ignoring the fact that there was another big one, another 'Bone-picker', that was coming up the road toward her. It was a future problem for Future Delilah. Present Delilah had to make sure that Future Delilah had a chance to exist.
She launched herself into a full-body haymaker, physically leaping and coming down in a streak, her somewhat weaker left fist first. The bleary eyes of the floppy Hag Star snapped into concentration, one uncanny hand reaching out and extending a palm toward her, and all of Delilah's advancement came to an ignominious end as she slammed into a wall of naked force that refused to budge. It caught her in mid air, and she could feel it begin to wrap around her, perhaps to crush her.
Fuck that noise.
She pumped Numen into her fists' coils again, and this time drove them against the unseen barrier separating her and the floppy Hag Star. The first was like punching titanium. The second, with her lacerated and internally bleeding strong hand, felt like it was punching wood. And the third felt like it was punching leather. While the creature in front of her didn't have any sort of human facial features for Delilah to get a read from, even she could read from its body language and the fact that it was clenching its fist extra tight and trying to back away that it was afraid.
Her fourth blow, with her strong hand, caused a thunderclap on the ground and caused the rain to fly away, blown by tremendous force being undone by greater force. And the blow carried forward into a completely ridiculous sweeping, twirling blow that saw her pirouette upon her feet finally reaching the mud, giving even more centrifugal force to her fist, until she finally managed to get it to make contact with the front of the Hag Star's face. When the coils discharged again, there was a tremendous, wet rupturing noise, as the floppy head of the Hag Star inflated like a balloon, before bursting away from her, hurling away not brains but a thin stream of black blood and a strange insect thing that was the size of Smudge.
With that thing removed from the Hag Star's head, the thing fell to the mud, seemingly insensate. It didn't respond as Delilah put a hand on each side of its ragged skull and then with monumental tension of her back-muscles, clapped her hands together, heedless of the Hag-Star head between them.
She looked up just in time to see three-clawed pincer swinging toward her, and though she deked back for all she was worth, that thing was massive, and so was it's arm; there was no getting out of its reach in time. The impact was a lot lighter than it could have been, but still lifted her from the ground and threw her hard into a tree as though she were a doll a toddler had decided it no longer liked.
She wasn't stunned like she had been by the now decapitated Hag Star. And contrary to what the Imp said, it was quite appropriately staying dead now that its head was missing. Still, the second Bone-picker was closing on her. Delilah could hear flames erupt near her, see the light and the heat of them flashing through the greenery, but it was all too much to keep track of. Hopefully it was Lou having a merry old fish-fry. She doubted it, though.
Delilah snarled, pushing herself to her feet with sufficient time in this case to juke aside of a sledge-hammer blow by the Bone-picker's massive claw, and then hurl a mighty left cross into the thing's thorax while the limb was for at least a moment mired in mud. The impact of Delilah's blow was tremendous, sending chunks of shattered chitin and strange crystals of pale green rocketing out of the injury tract, but none of the black blood that the others showed leaked, which meant that she had given it only the most superficial of injuries.
Instead of trying to cross itself with its other arm to hit her, now that she was standing on the side of its mired shoulder, it tore up, sending a spray of mud up in an arc as the limb caught her in the side, and tried to hurl her away again. This time, unlike those earlier impacts, she had been prepared for, so instead of being hurled like a disgraced toy, she held onto the limb as it swung her with wild abandon. It was a rough trip, but she still had her bearing, and when she released herself from the limb she was standing behind the hulking monster.
A shudder of sound-eating silence sounded, and the air grew momentarily darker, as the imp used some of its own magic to try to fight whatever she had been put up against, over there on the other side of the chicane of trees and brush. Delilah was not in a position to help. And frankly, as a glance over her shoulder told her, she wasn't in much of a good position to survive if she stayed here, as there were three more of those roughly man-sized Hag Star advancing on her.
Delilah jumped aside as one of them leaned back and hurled a loogie of foul green ooze, which hit the Bone-picker but didn't seem to do anything. The ooze slid off of the Bone-picker and splatted to the mud, which began to smoke and catch fire. So she was glad it didn't hit her, but that still put her in a rough spot. The big dumbass spun, trying to throw its armor-plated elbows into her; as she was behind it, it had to do so blindly, and his flailing eventually let her round the thing so that it faced its fellows and provided her a wall of meat against more spit-balls of what she presumed was concentrated acid. And since she still had its back, she reached into the disgusting fronds that waved like anemone tendrils along its side, clamping her fist down on a few of them, and then ripping up.
The Bone-picker finally released a noise, something like an elephant blowing as hard as it could into a fog-horn, and the thing hurled its arms back in wild swings, now uncaring whether its savage attacks clipped one of its 'allies'. The others retreated, leaving just Delilah and the big bug-fish. Her right arm hurt like a bastard, and was swollen visibly compared to her left. Probably full of pooling blood. But she would deal with that later if she had a chance to. It still had her muscles and those muscles still had her strength. And like all good fighters, she had been watching the way this thing moved as it tried to fight her.
Like massively bulked-up steroid users, the Bone-picker had a spot on its upper back that no contortion of its overpowered limbs could actually reach, a strip about half a Delilah in size that the claws never crushed, pincered, or struck. It wasn't a great solution to her giant monster problem. But it was a lot better than no solution.
She launched herself up with a mighty bound and while airborne infused another swig of her quickly depleting Numen supply into her fist, so that when she lashed out with her bloated but stronger right, it did as her first blow did, blowing out a crater of chitin and hide. And with her other hand, she dug into that chitin, locking her fingers into the nooks and crannies between the layers of this things biological armor, so that when it swung its body to strike at her again, she was carried with it. She felt the power shift lower, and the same power which hypercharged her punches was directed downward, lancing forward out of her boot, which dug another fresh divot into the hide, which now had her rooted against the back of the thing, no longer flailing about like a nearly tattered flag.
Delilah allowed herself a moment of triumph when she saw that a desperate swing to dislodge her had caught one of the other Hag Star who had grown too bold, bending its form into a C shape and depositing it, lifeless, onto the mud. There were others, though. And she was much more liable to survive if the Bone-picker went down than if she simply clung to it. So she used its momentum against her as it began to charge into the trees, launching a brutal haymaker blow into the same wound that she'd blown into its body before. Again, chunks of chitin and pale green-crystal pelted her face as back-blast from the blow. The crystals softened almost immediately into a stinky goo, though, so Delilah was at last thankful for the pissing rain. A third blow as aborted as the brute spun without losing its momentum, and now hurled itself backwards (which was to say, Delilah-first) into the largest tree it could find.
She wasn't going to get pancaked like that. She pushed out of her foot hold, letting her fingers slip around the edge of the now deeper and wider crater that she'd started, letting her momentum swing her legs out to one side and her body up and out of the way, so that when the dumb brute slammed spine-first into the tree, the tree abraded her knuckles and came shockingly close to her face, but otherwise missed her entirely. She also now had her legs wrapped 'round the Bone-picker's head. And with a grin more mad than happy she grabbed ahold of the crater that kept her grapped to the Hag Star brute with her other hand, and then tensed her entire lower body in a wave, starting from her navel and sending it down and through her thighs.
Positioned as they were, her thighs pincered the massive, blank eyes of the Bonepicker, squeezing them tighter and tighter until one of them popped like a leathery watermelon. She was mildly disappointed she didn't crush its head, but considering this thing was probably immune to light anti-aircraft fire, she would have to settle for the victories she got. She saw it reaching up for her ankle, though, so she had to abandon popping its other eye and scramble back onto what essentially the nape of its non-existent neck. She looked into the crater; its back wall looked… different… And when it pulsed with the things massive inhale, she knew why.
That was the thing's actual skin. The stuff she was smashing until now was just a shell over it.
Delilah had to cling hard as it tried to swing her off with a remarkably adroit pirouette, but by the time it stumbled to a halt, she pulled her body into the right postion. Then, she narrowed her hand into a blade, one that she sent a pulse of force up her body and drove into the actual flesh of the brute, having it part from her fingernails as though they were claws, digging easily up to her elbow. She then switched side as a bass bellow hit the air, something so wordless and pained that her brain-thing couldn't translate it as anything. Next, another hand-blade, slamming deep into the flesh of the Bone-picker, until she was both-elbows-deep in the thing's flesh. There was something hard in there she felt near one hand, and much squishy she felt around her other. So she grabbed the hard thing, fishing through the squishy until she got a grip on it with both hands. The thing was rampaging now, crashing directly toward the emergency reservoir, heedless of what other Hag Star it flattened as it ran.
Delilah didn't care. Even as there was a tremendous splash as the thing dove toward the deepest part of the waters, she rooted her feet, and began to heave as though attempting a nigh-impossible dead-lift. The first pull was aborted by the approach of the water to her face. She sucked in a desperate breath, then she was submerged. She rooted herself a second time, and then heaved again, feeling her empowered muscles begin to burn and sear at the bones of her spine and hips, but though she could feel movement from where her hands were embedded, the brute continued to thrash and flail. The black blood from its wounds quickly floated up, murking the water until she was blinded from it.
Since she was already holding her breath and had nothing to do but keep ripping, she knew she had only one more heave before she'd need to pull her arms out of the wound and make for the surface. Killing this thing didn't help anybody if she drowned. So she felt the bubbles of her desperate breath leaking from her mouth as she put herself into as best a power-lifting form the unstable, hostile surface and the angle of her under the water would allow. And then, with all of the power that her body could manage, she pulled.
There was a tremendous crunch, bass and meaty in the blackened water, as the hard thing under her hands finally snapped and broke, and within half a second, her pull tore it up out of the hole in its shell; held in both hands was a thoroughly mangled pair of vertibral bones, with a dangling tail of nerve tissue leaking from one end. Delilah then pushed off of the Bone-picker, and surged upward, making it to the surface a fraction of a second before she would have started to start inhaling even though she had the notable problem of being submerged. The air was sweeter than daiquiris.
The Bone-picker she had ripped the spine out of did not emerge from the water. It simply, silently, turned the water black with its blood.
She pulled herself up the steep escarpment that plunged into the water, breathing heavy and feeling light-headed. Her right arm was now almost twice the thickness of her left, and any movement of it surged agony through her. Though the limb was currently blue-black, she knew that if she were to let her Elohim Array go back into neutral, it'd show that her limb was currently puffed up with trapped blood, and entirely too much of it at that.
She focused inward for a moment, just a blink in the swirl of the fight, to get a gauge of how much Numen she had left in her metaphysical tank. The answer was 'not enough'. Well. Shit.
And as she looked up, the air rippled in a way that was foreign to these Hag Star shits. It bulged and boiled at its edges, dripping down until it finally ruptured and even prolapsed, the air somehow made into gaseous flesh, which deposited a clean-shaven and balding man wearing wraparound shades and a black suit, adorned with a silver D pin at his lapel.
That wasn't a Hag Star.
It turned to her, and a grin that split the skin at the corners of its mouth opened. "Ah, so that's what I felt up here. I was wondering when your kind would show up," it said, entirely too enthusiastic, as it quickly became saturated by the pissing rain.
No rest for the righteous, it seemed. Even in pain, body damaged and calling for rest, Delilah stood, and got ready to kill another crime against reality.
This was not Vera's finest hour.
While she was by all accounts an entirely competent Thaumaturge, and knew all of the Wyrds and spells that her Station-of-Blood would allow her to cast, she was not a fighter by nature. That didn't stop Aydra from using her as one, if only because she'd already produced her seven shitlings and the Second Family Of Cruac could not be seen to have less Thaumaturges to pursue their enterprises than Nuckelavee did. That simply wouldn't do. So she, magical instructor and researcher that she was, was hurled into conflict against Drevisté's enemies.
And though she had some paltry experience fighting Hellhounds, these Hag Star were certainly no Hellhounds. She had tried to use the Dart of Un against them, and it had proved utterly useless, its corrosive power thwarted instantly by the thing's impossible physiology. And since Darts of Un were the easiest spell she had in her repertoire, that distinctly left her in a rough situation. As though she'd been handed a machine gun and a crate of ammunition, all of which didn't work, and then told to hold a bunker.
So she had to use more draining abilities, and ones she had less faith in. There wasn't enough ambient agony in this part of the Human World to summon or launch a Pain Elemental, and though the human One was now a viable source of it, he was too busy trying not to die and limping from dodge to dodge. So too went Vera, barely staying out of the way of the 'Bone-picker's ponderous swings, either by her own natural but not exemplary dexterity or by the panicked inclusion of a Prismatic Barrier to deflect a blow that would have broken her like a twig.
All considered, this fight shouldn't have been this bad. The thing was already lashing out blind. But those tendrils and whatnot that peeked from the uncomfortable crannies of its body might well be sense organs allowing it to fight without sight. If the legendary swords-imp Zalban Zalban could kill twelve Consumers while blind as a rock, then perhaps so too could this thing.
It kept advancing, not giving the human nor the imp any room to breath, to think, or to prepare. It had to be sensing some other aspect of them, something other than light or noise. Vera had been being very careful to be less noisy than the human, and still every third swipe was leveled at her. Of the remaining two thirds, one third lashed at One, and the last third missed both of them handily. She narrowed her eyes, and saw so little magic on this thing as to beggar the mind, and at that she finally understood. Not because of its lack of magic, but because she could perceive said lack of magic; it was using similar to her Magesight, perhaps attuned to body heat.
She was furious that she had not learned the Carcass Mien when she had the chance. It had always seemed so useless to her, a spell of monumentally narrow utility, that made one's outer body behave as though it were dead while preventing it from rotting. If she could become cold as a corpse, she would be invisible to a creature that viewed based on heat.
Another swing, and this one she had no recourse but to put up a Barrier and pray. And her prayer was not answered, as they seldom were for imps, as the impact shattered the barrier having only slowed the back-handed blow a trifle before it smashed into both Vera's chest and her jaw at the same time, launching her up and into the air.
She was pretty sure that she should have lost consciousness from that, but reality was not so kind. She was aware of her entire parabolic flight, launched from a spot near the human man to somewhere approaching the wheels of their 'Battle Bus'. She was conscious, but she didn't have control of her wind, let alone her muscles, which meant that she landed limp into the mud. It hurt a lot less to land than she had feared. And with a growl that she pulled from sixteen years of sexual slavery under Aydra's foolishness, she pushed herself up enough that she could point an arm and call her black blood into place, and utter the word of power.
The grey was replaced by black, silence swallowing the noises of the battle, followed by the snake of Darkning slashing at the Bone-picker that was closed in on One, about to slam down both fists to crush the brutalized human. Huge tracts of the thing's hide exploded away from its body under the Darkning, subject to a torrent that ordinarily was a snap of force and ruin, but now she forced even more of her magical reserves into, so that it lingered and bored ever deeper. One thick finger of the Darkning quested higher, finding the socket of the Bone-picker's arm now benuded of its shell plating. And greedy for violence it ripped into the joint, boiling and detonating flesh.
A tri-pincer arm was thrown free of its seat. The beast turned from One, no longer considering the beaten Human a significant threat. But that left it pointed nearly directly at Vera. And she needed a few seconds to center herself before she could call another bolt. It'd be on top of her by the time she got it off. She tried to crawl backward, to buy whatever little space she could manage, because what few spines (or millimeters to those using human measurements) she could muster might be the difference between injury and ignominious demise.
It was rendered somewhat moot when she felt something close on her horn and lift. She almost lashed out, but saw that it was Hare who was ungently lifting her to her feet, as the Bonepicker in front of her began its flailing, blind charge. And Hare said nothing, just raising one hand to its extension and making a C-shape with his fingers. Vera saw it with her magical vision a fraction of a second before it happened, that the air was suddenly saturated in magic, and that magic was slamming in to form a tube that raced out from just in front of Hare and then through the Hag Star monster that was charging them.
An instant later, the Magic was given form, and there was a blast in the air as a horizontal column of space became fire. No, it didn't become fire, because fire was cold compared to this; it became heat.
The Bonepicker was stunned, its charge sliding to a halt. It tried to swing its one remaining arm again, but since nobody was near it, nobody was at threat. Hare simply turned from it, offering it an off-hand snap of his fingers as he did. A bowl of heat exploded into being, charring the nearly-dead Bone-picker to the point where 'nearly' no longer applied.
"How did you do that?" she demanded. "What spell was that?"
"One second," Hare said, reaching out with his other hand, and then tightening it into a fist. She felt the magic shift again, this time not into a tube but forming a cone centered before Hare and reaching into the chicane of trees. As soon as his fist was clenched, the trees were washed away as though they had been made of salt and the rain only now recognized that. Revealed in what once had been concealed by the brush was Lou, the mad reality-mage in his new face. He was clutching one hand to his face over a grisly wound, trying to stay back from a Hag Star. Lou's other arm was grossly bloated and distended, lumpy and misformed as though she had been afflicted in an instant by a decade's worth of miserable cancers. "Lou! Bootstraps!"
Lou immediately flopped to the slurry that had once been brush and treeline, and Hare once more made the C with his fingers, and another explosion of heat raced over the top of Lou and lanced not only the Hag Star, but the Hag Star behind that one. When the blinding white light died, both of them were just legs left upright only by chance and momentum.
"Could you always do that, wizard?" Vera asked.
"Where's Delilah?" Hare demanded as he began to storm forward. A Hag Star stepped out of the far trees, magic surrounding it like the first of them in a spell that Vera gathered made them impossible for humans to see. Hare nevertheless spotted it before Vera even had a chance to point it out, snapping his fingers at it and having it explode when the bowl of heat split it into parts. So Hare had been hiding his true power all this time? If so, why pay so much to hire the likes of Vera?
Why have anybody else at all, if he could exterminate the Hag Star with a snap of his fingers, as he did again, to another blast of light, heat and death?
Hare didn't bother explaining himself, simply striding toward where One was slumped, likely struggling to breath with half of his torso shattered. He stooped for a moment, laying a hand on One's disjointed form and scowled, before another swelling of magic emerged from him, and there came a wet pop as One's arm resumed its proper orientation and location, and he drew a deep breath. Vera blinked in confusion. He had compressed an entire day of Thaumaturgical Surgery into a matter of seconds. "Where's your gun?" Hare asked of One.
"I… I don't know," he said, looking at where he'd been fighting before.
"Balls. Get your machete and follow me," Hare said, turning and storming past where Lou was only now coming to rendezvous with them. Vera looked at One, who was moving tentatively, and with surprise on his face, as though shocked to find little to no pain in the movements. With his surprise aired, he allowed Lou to pull him up to his feet, and pulled a machete from inside his jacket. As he seated it into his palm, the blade began to blur and become indistinct, as though it couldn't decide where its edges were. Vera needed no spoken warning to know not to touch that thing.
"Here I am, Hag Star! All the skin you could ever want! Come and claim it!" Hare bellowed, as a pair of the 'flesh farmers' entered his line of sight. They clicked and pointed at him, but Hare snarled and snapped his fingers aggressively. A blast sounded in the gap between them, which blew them both to smithereens. "Don't tell me that we've wiped you out this quickly! I swear I felt DOZENS OF YOU! COME ON! DINNER BELL IS RINGING!"
"He's fuckin' nuts," One said.
"I was going to say, but thought it uncouth," Vera agreed.
"Yup," Lou still held his own wounded head as Hare advanced.
But both Lou and Vera were arrested from following Hare. Lou by a hand on his shoulder. Vera by a snag of her tail. She was going to have to be more careful where she put it around that human. He had a predilection to grabbing it. And that was only sometimes pleasant.
She was about to ask him what got him acting so grabby, as there were no more immediate threats to their person that Vera could see. But a moment later, she saw it. Almost invisible in the poor light of the driving rain and the shadow of the far treeline. A human in a black suit.
No, several humans in black suits.
Vera looked back at One, and saw that he was pale as Virgin Angel Satin, his complexion making it seem that there was no blood whatsoever anywhere but his torso. She then looked at the humans in black suits again, and flinched viscerally when she saw one walk.
It didn't walk the way humans – or imps, or in fact anything that Vera had ever heard of – moved. It seemed to glide heedless of the realities of its body, as though its bones didn't connect and its sinews were mere suggestions. It was so grisly and wrong that Vera wondered if this was what it was like to look upon a Despair Imp, a member of a clade so long extinct that nobody even knew what their quirk of evolution was, or what they looked like.
There was a crash, and one of the humans in suits, a thick-set, short human wearing the same wraparound shades as the others but also adorned with a bent silver pin in the shape of a Kijg rune (or a 'D', if one were to use a human tradition, which Vera absolutely did not) came rolling into sight, his head flattened as though it had been hit by a pneumatic hammer. As he got to his feet, though, the black-suited human's head unflattened, popping back to roundness. "Well that's not what I expected out of you. I thought you'd be half dead by now, woman."
One stepped past Vera and Lou, one hand not holding a machete extended, reaching out toward the human? "Eddie?" One asked, horror dawned onto his face.
Hare intruded on One's moment by raising up his fingers in a C and pointing them at this 'Eddie' human. But when the magic shifted and the tube of unspeakable heat was born, there was a shudder in the air and 'Eddie' was now just outside of the tube's path. Eddie snapped his fingers and pointed at Hare, and the other humans began to race toward him, ignoring the three of them clustered over here. The four that appeared quickly spread out, so that when Hare clenched his fist again, only two of them were caught inside the cone of ruination that tore down another whole section of the forest – this time revealing Delilah looking haggard and barely able to stand. She looked around, confused, especially at the black-suited human who was currently melting in front of her. She drove a very awkward jab at the human, and he burst apart not into red gore as humans were wont to do, but instead a strange, unsettling pink slurry.
The other humans tackled Hare, and Hare tried to throw one off by the other scooped low, starting to lift him off of his feet. Hare snarled and snapped his fingers aggressively, before he and both of the humans were engulfed in heat and light. When the light died, Hare's clothes were burning if not melted, and his skin was raised up in blisters, but the black suited men were still clinging tight. More than that, they no longer looked like men in black suits. No… they looked like they were merging into one being, inchoate, seething, and protean.
One finally broke from his trance and started to run at Eddie, machete in hand, with a roar in his throat. Lou, though, pointed at Hare. "We've got to get them off of Hare!"
"He surely can't be in danger from…"
"Hare is NOT immortal, he's just powerful!" Lou said, and then rooted his feet, and glared at one of the things, causing the black clothed meat surrounding Hare to burst into flames. Vera was about to summon a Dart of Un, because they seemed to work on these things, when she saw a new shift in the magic of the area, the sky shifting as though it were fundamentally being rewritten, transformed from naked air to a sort of meat-tube with its mouth near the ground. There was an almost gastro-intestinal pulsation of that tube, and the mouth of the tube opened to disgorge more black suited humans.
Well, they were clustered up, so Vera considered aborting and sending a bolt of Darkning to them, but Hare's magic shifted again, this time a connection snapping into being between him and the centermost of the newcomers. The instant that it was in place, there was a surge of power down it, and then an explosion rocked their invading cluster, flames and force lifting and hurling away the ones surrounding the innermost. That innermost was utterly untouched and unburnt, as though the entire point of that ability was that it couldn't hurt them, just those around them. How bizarre.
Vera decided to finish what she started, as One managed to carve off one of Eddie's arms with a swing of his machete. That at last got the fat human to treat One as a combatant and not a pest to be essentially ignored. The Dart in Vera's hand was a powerful force of naked entropic decay, corrosion incarnate, and with her Station-of-Blood being what it was, she was able to supercharge it, so that it would be all the more ruinous, before casting her hand out; it flew faster than any arrow, impacting the teeming meat that was trying to hurl Hare to the ground and crush him. When it hit, the meat began to dissolve, grey matter at war with pink slurry.
Grey, ruinous matter won.
Hare finally managed to kick his way out of their grasp, to roll free in the mud and cast his hand out. And when he did, the air around him shifted as it did for fire, but differently than before. This time it wasn't prompting heat and light and blast, but instead Vera could detect it as something like a magical on-switch. And when he did, the pair of dislodging unhumans were ripped apart as though she had used a Greatest Dart of Un on them, stripped apart from their outsides in until there was almost nothing left of them, and a shallow crater in the mud.
"Nice try, Spook, but while you've got some moves," Eddie chided, now effortlessly dodging every swing that One tried to level at him, He then reached out with the one hand he had left, grabbing the fist of One's machete arm, "I'm now a part of something bigger. And we're still willing to let you be part of it. Just say the word. The door is open."
"FUCK YOU!" One shouted, trying to pull his arm free. It was locked in place. "You were s'pposed to be outta the office!"
Hare began to raise his arm toward the two of them, but Eddie had the slurry from his arm wound surge out of the body and form a rudimentary limb, which he made a halting gesture. "You're gonna all want to give a rain check on that. Don't know about the red pygmy over there, but I know your cloud of hungry invisible robots are very good at picking friend from foe. And you'll find you can't right now."
Hare was still, and silent, but his face told everything needing saying about his frustration.
Eddie nodded. "That's what I thought."
Then Eddie and One both burst into flames, but only for a moment, before the rain put them both out. One screamed in truly understandable pain. Eddie merely gave his head a shake.
"I warned you, friend," Eddie said. He turned to One. "Your quality of co-workers had declined of late. Are you sure you don't want to come back to the company with us?"
One simply struggled, trying to pull free of Eddie's grasp and split him open again with his blurring machete. Eddie shook his head and sighed.
"Welp," Eddie said. "Looks like there ain't too many of my guys left. Seems like I oughtta skedaddle."
"You're not going anywhere," Hare said, limping forward as his clothes rebuilt themselves, but his burns remained.
"I already got what I wanted outta Florida," Eddie said, grinning not at Hare but at One. "So go nuts, Spook. I leave those fish-men to you. I'll be keeping you on my rolodex."
And with that, Eddie hurled One into Hare, causing both of them to crash to the mud. Eddie retreated, the air ballooning forward to envelop him, and consume him like a nematode consumes plankton. Then, there was quiet, the sounds of violence dead and nothing but the driving rain and the hard breathing of Delilah, who limped closer with a bloated, dangling arm and a dazed look on her face.
"Get offa me gaddammit!" One shouted, finally dislodging Hare from him and getting to his feet. He was brown from head to toe, with the rain only barely starting to cut away the mud from him and send it sluicing down his legs. "What the fuck was that, Hare?"
"I have no idea what that was," Hare got to his feet, and the mud all slid off of him as though he'd just become covered in wax. "That was the entire point of this extermination; to push out the Hag Star and to get some intelligence on their ally. And some is the best we managed to achieve, sadly."
"I was talkin' about how you nuked those bastards with your brain!" One said, casting an arm and flicking mud when he did so. It hit Delilah in the face. She didn't react.
"If you shut down the precision construction functions of the Mobile Nanofactory, it can be turned into a weapon capable of aerosolized crucibles and targeted-tear-down," Hare said. "It's draining, far from exact, and takes up module-capacity that I'd prefer to keep for more broadly useful…"
"If you could do that the whole time, then what the fuck are we even doing here?" One demanded.
"The entire point of this enterprise, One, is to get you to the point where you are as powerful if not more so than I am," Hare did not blink. "I can't do that if I handle all of your problems for you. You have to push yourself to grow. And the best way for me to help you in your growth is to allow you to push yourself to ludicrous levels and prevent you from dying when you do."
"Hare?" Lou said.
"Yeah?" Hare continued staring down One. Delilah took that opportunity to tip forward onto her face in the mud.
"...I think Delilah might bleeding to death," Lou finished.
Vera rolled her eyes. "And where do I fit in this little plan of yours, O Provider Of My Luxuries?"
Hare turned a look at her as he moved to Delilah and lifted her face out of the mud so she wouldn't suffocate even as she bled internally. "The same to them is offered to you. You might not be Integrated, but if my hunch about you is right, you've got a lot stronger you can get."
"If only. I am only of the Middling Bright. I am perhaps as strong as I am like to become," Vera said.
"I presume you believe that because the crones that you hold in disdain have told you that?" Hare turned a flat look at her, then pressed his hand to Delilah's bloated shoulder. "You've got something like Resonance, and I'd say that it's on the same level as Lou and Delilah here. Which means you can get stronger. Frankly, having powerful allies which I can easily keep happy is something to be grateful for."
"You make me sound like a biddable child," Vera crossed her arms before her chest, letting the rain soak her. She wasn't sure where her umbrella had gone.
"The things that you've asked for happen to be things I am both able and willing to give you," Hare said. He then stood, helping a mildly delirious Delilah to her feet. Her arm was no longer a bloated sausage, but instead dangled with loose skin and nearly black bruises even through her metallic skin. "Everybody, you did a good job. Now Lou if you could help me with that one."
He was pointing at the Hag Star with the ruptured balloon of a head, and the still twitching insect thing in the mud.
"Uh… Hare?" One finally said, picking up his firearm. It was mangled to the point of uselessness. "Well fuck, that ain't good."
"A problem for later, One," Hare said. Vera moved to Hare's side, looking down at the insect, and marveling at how innately magical it was. This thing had as much magic in its twitching, useless body as Ruut Nuckelavee herself! "I never thought I'd actually see one of these things. They were pretty much presumed to be a myth where I'm from."
"And the shape of that myth?" Vera asked, now that One was helping Delilah back to the damaged Battle Bus, and Lou was dragging a burst-headed Hag Star in their wake.
"You see this thing? It used to be attached to the brain-cavity of the Flesh Farmer over there," Hare said. "And as you can tell by its manipulators…"
"It interfaced directly with the brain-matter. Likely controlling the host as though a puppeteer," Vera gathered.
"Oh no. Not just that. It wasn't a parasite. It was a symbiote," Hare reached down, picking the thing up and holding it at arm's length away from himself. "This is a… let's call it a gift, from the Cradlemakers – the Cultivators of the Wyrd Synergy. A stunted version of the Cradlemaker itself, perhaps one of its degenerate offspring that didn't pupate correctly. Shove this into the head of a Flesh Farmer, and the two become one entity. All of the physicality and Arrangements of a Hag Star, but with the intelligence, cruelty, and telekinetic capacity of a Cradlemaker."
"I was intending to vivisect this creature simply to learn how it could be so innately magical," Vera noted.
"Then you won't mind if I vivisect it to learn if the stories of the Hag Star Gifted are true, will you?"
"You charming snake. Strike this naive, innocent woman where she is weakest, why don't you?" Vera said with an ingenue's gesture at herself.
"Will you two knock it off! It's pissin' rain and we've got a dozen fuckin' corpses out here!" One shouted from the driver's door of the Battle Bus.
"We mustn't rile the children, my dear," Vera said with a smug smile.
"But how else will they learn?" Hare asked, and started tromping through the mud back to their vehicle.
Not her easiest fight, but a satisfying one. She wondered what insanity she'd be thrown into next. Considering the price he was paying, there was little that she could call 'beneath' her at this point. And secrets were a currency worth more than gold, more than freedom… more than almost anything.
Abyss, The
Alignment: E1, M-1, D5, L-2, I-2, R-5
Synergy: Unique/Manifested, Name Undecided (Working Title: the Seethe)
A singularly horrible Realm Outside known for its astronomically high Alignment towards Dark, and an incredibly strong Inverted Relativity, the Seethe (called by the locals of Creation as The Abyss) was observed very early during Man's experiments with exploring the extra-real spaces beyond the Prime Reality in the 2050s. Presumed to be nothing but dead space, it was promptly ignored in favor of the more obvious problems, such as Pluroma, the Source, and Hyperuranion. Interest was born again in exploration of these locations after the Syncroncity Collapse, the disappearance of the Founders, the discovery of the true agendas of many of the Noumenal invaders, and most notably the localization of The Silence, a realm of absolute Dark Alignment.
Once creatures from the Silence were beginning to filter into the Prime more readily, it behooved the Post Sync scientists to know how to sent attacks back into their homelands, so that the Prime would not be forever reacting to aggression and unable to respond to it. This research eventually resulted in the True Portal of Kashmir, which remains a highly contested site to this day; through the True Portal, even Silence is within reach from the Prime.
Now that denizens of the Prime had the courage to venture into a perfectly-inverted realm, it took little more to get enterprising Integrated to revisit old discoveries to see what could be made of them. A number of enterprises and expeditions were launched into realms of inverted Relativity, some of which came back with tremendous scientific information or resources. But one remained out of reach; the seething black membrane on the edge of measurable reality. Numerous expeditions were sent by the various Foundations trying to breach the Seethe, but none ever returned, their echos vanishing into the Realm as though consumed by it.
Until recently, it was believed that the Seethe was impassable. But then an Echo was found by Satunde Global belonging to somebody who claimed to have seen what lay on the other side of the Seethe; that there exists a smaller-yet-still-infinite sub-Stack on the other side of the Seethe, referred to by its locals as All Creation. Further expeditions were put on hold, until technology to safely reach Creation can be developed, tested, and deployed.
Expeditionary Database 2096-12-14, Preface to Article 1,-1,5,-2,-2,-5
Article 1,-1,5,-2,-2,-5 renamed to The Seethe
Article note: Please use more professional language in the future. This isn't the Pillar of Dawn anymore.
