The weight of ages pulled at Satan, a gentle lethargy that demanded that he stop, that he cease, that he relent and that he rest. But Satan knew that, as the saying goes, if he began to surrender to such impulses, he likely would never be able to start again. It was a terrible thing, to have lived so unspeakably long. To have watched empires rise and fall like the fluttering of a riffled book's pages. To see beasts of every description arise, come to prominence, fall into decline, and then go extinct, time after time as they caught his eye. What of the Chthonic Pea-fowl? Twenty million years dead. The Gyrraptor? Dead for a hundred million. The Salamander Vole, charming little rodent that it was, such that he kept them as pets for so many millenia? They went extinct only twenty thousand years ago, as his breeding of pets could only keep a species going for so long before they became unviable, long after their wild counterparts were consigned to history. Only the Hellhound remained. And that was because the Hellhound had a very powerful force keeping them from slipping into oblivion; a lot of them were sapient now.

There were three of those before Satan now, sitting at their schooldesks trying not to be intimidated by Satan's presence. He could tell that the only ones amongst all of them who were not utterly terrified by him were those who dwelt within his Killgrave Home nearby, they who knew that for all Satan was a terrifying figure, he was not a terrible one. His body ached, feeling feverish, as he compacted his titanic form down to a degree such that he could stand in this paltry classroom without his head, torso, and hips bursting through the ceiling. It was desperately uncomfortable. But Satan had been uncomfortable before. Some things were worth such discomfort.

"Alright children, hush up now I..." the one he had been waiting for said as she pushed past the door and into the room. She immediately trailed off and fell still. A Sinner, this one was, but though Satan held little regard for Sinners as an aggregate, individuals amongst their number could sometimes surprise and delight him. Such it was with Edith Mayberry. "Oh... this isn't good."

"Thou may be surprised," Satan said, and one of the windows shattered when he did. He again had to coach himself to be more careful with his voice. There were costs associated with being connected in the way that he was to the Altar of Worms and the powers that flowed through it. One of them was that his words held a weight that could be ruinous to Hell around him. So he cleared his throat, lowering his voice to a barest whisper, and tried again. "Thou art the teacher Edith Mayberry, of this edifice of learning, correct?"

"I... am..." she said, her hair fluttering as though aflame. She was a fire elemental Sinner, one of the more dangerous clades of their wretched ilk, and had a second Aspect of Fury. Fitting, considering her damnation was a result of murdering her husband in a blind rage. He also knew that she was responsible for the Platt family's deaths, but that was posthumous in her case, having to hire a group of hellish assassins to finish off the one that her mortal husband had been caught being maritally indiscreet with.

"And thou art responsible for the teaching of this cadre of students, correct?" he continued, tucking his thumbs into the belt that held his robes cinched to his hips.

"I am. Why are you here?" she finally asked, and it was clear on her face that she was gathering courage. He continued standing at the head of the class as she finally passed whatever tipping point that audacity required, and she moved to stand before him, staring up at his momentarily diminished form and trying to block bodily his access to the rest of her class.

It was for such things as this that Satan had to come here.

"I know not if thou be aware, but of the schools offered to the denizens of Hell, Killgrave House bankrolls many," Satan said, trying for a conversational tone with his whispers.

"And what do you have to do with Killgrave?" she demanded.

"I am Killgrave," he said. He gestured over her head to the class. "Most teachers I find, they hold little love for the profession of learning. It is a means of pay, not a calling. Such is why I cherish dearly those who come to this place not as responsibility but as privilege. For this reason, I, Satan, in my role as Director Of Operations of Killgrave; I, Satan, King of Wrath; I, Satan, Deadly Sin, offer commendations for the exemplary work that you have done."

"...You're here to thank me?" she asked.

"Indeed," Satan said. "Thine students show greater literacy, greater numeracy, rate higher in comprehension and critical thinking, and host a lower rate of drug use and unprovoked violent crime than thine compatriots even within this same school. The improvement thou wreak compared to those hacks under the yolk of Lucifer are so vast as to seem cartoonish and of parody. And it is clear, Sinner, that thou do this thing for the good of others above thyself. For this, upon my word, you should be praised."

"...thank you, Satan," she said, and seemed a bit baffled at the thought of those words coming out of her mouth.

"Of course, there are more material benefits to holding mine esteem than mere kudos. For kudos cannot fill a stomach, nor heat a room; I instead..." Satan began, about to go into the part that even Sinners would appreciate, but he felt something approaching. Something that shouldn't be here.

The window beside the one Satan'd shattered exploded inward, cutting the students and covering the desks and floor with glass. Satan reached out with one arm, allowing it to return to proper size and caught the interloper in his fist, intent to squash it in his palm. But he found he could not. And when he looked upon what had interceded in his award of merit, he found only confusion.

This shouldn't be down here yet.

"A moment, please," Satan asked, causing the Mayberry's desk to break under the force of it. She could only give a numb nod, and Satan turned to the broken window, and stepped through it, releasing all of his restrictions of his form and resuming his full, towering stature. Out here, he could still still look into that classroom, despite it being on the second floor of the school. And when he opened one finger away from his fist, looked upon the Exorcist in his grasp. "Collegiate Override, zero zero zero one. Open connection to ECC loudspeaker. Execute."

EXECUTING, read the automaton's digital face. After a few seconds, there was the telltale electric creak of a speaker system coming online.

"Whosoever it is that launched this device be it known that thou hast done this fifteen days early. I wish to speak with thine commander," Satan declared.

There was a crackle, and the device pried itself out of Satan's fist. Satan gave it an askance glance at that, because those devices ordinarily lacked the brute strength to perform such a feat. "Hello, fiend. It's been quite a while, hasn't it?" Gabriel's voice came through the automaton.

"Gabriel? What business hast thee with Sahaquiel's little tin Reapers? I seek not you, but he," Satan demanded.

"Sahaquiel is out of the office, so to speak," the Exorcist said with Gabriel's voice, stretching languidly as though exalting from the feel of the motion. "For the time being, I've taken it upon myself to oversee the transition of the bureau to something of a more active footing."

"What dost thou mean in this?" Satan asked, his brow drawing down. He could see schoolchildren with their faces flat against the glass, watching as Wrath Incarnate stared down one of Heaven's Executioners.

"I mean that you should be glad I'm even offering you the dignity of a response. Your realm is at war with mine. The fact that Father treated you with kid-gloves does not mean that I will do likewise," the Exorcist chided, waggling a finger in a most infuriating fashion.

"If thou disregard the Pact between Lucifer the Fetid and Michael the Taxiarch, thou release a great many other treaties," Satan pointed out. "And thy interests are more protected by mine own reservation than they are hampered. Evict this thing to Heaven. Return as the year turns, and reap your demonic harvest."

"How about I don't do that? How about I don't follow the orders of an enemy ruler, and instead ensure that the enemy-nation is so thoroughly burnt to the ground that it loses all capacity to fight against Heaven for ten thousand eons?" the Exorcist asked around a laugh. "Do you really think I'm afraid of the agreements that my weakling brother made with your pustule of a king? Do you really think I hold the first moment of hesitation against the things that you claim you are holding back? Don't try to make me laugh, Cripple-King; I have heard the comedy of the Elder Devils and you're living proof that it's no laughing matter."

"Do you declare this day a state of Total War against all of my homeland? Think carefully before you act rashly," Satan coached, his anger searing but his tones formal. "For if thou speak these words, I will respond without restraint in any measure."

"Do your worst. I have nothing to fear from the likes of you, pit-fiend," the Exorcist scoffed.

"So be it. Total War it is," Satan said. And then he grabbed the Exorcist faster than it could move away, and with a wrenching of his hands, tore it apart. He threw the two halves away, the top half melting down and the legs landing in a tangled pile near some playground equipment. The situation in Heaven must have shifted, if Gabriel were feeling so brazen as to countermand the wishes and will of the Taxiarch. Something had changed while he wasn't paying attention to it. Satan snapped his fingers, and called up the power of the Altar of Worms, and through it scried his mind into the highest cloud of Heaven, viewing for the presence of the Ingenuity of God. And he could not sense that Archangel there. But what he did sense was that Archangel's blood amidst the cracks of the Taxiopolis.

Gabriel had butchered Sahaquiel and usurped the command of the Exorcists.

"Edith Mayberry. Thou be Elemental of nature, and of thy students several be Sinners," Satan said, turning and leaning down slightly to look into the second-story window he'd walked through minutes before.

"Yes, why?" she asked.

"This place be in grave danger from a madman's whims," Satan said. "Come; I give you Specific Permission to enter the Ring of Wrath, in defiance of the strictures of Lucifer."

"Wait... you can do that?" she asked.

"I can do much that he knoweth not," Satan said. She then gave her head a shake. "What is this?"

"There are other students in danger. I'm not leaving until they're safe."

Satan felt a warm chuckle in his throat, even as he could feel the portals opening and more Exorcists begin to pour down from Heaven and into Hell. This sort of rare, un-Sinner-like thinking was exactly the kind of thing that he so wished he could encourage in their debased kind. "Then I preach the value of haste. Move as quickly as thou must, and save whomever thou can. I shall keep the worst of them at bay."

She didn't say a single additional word. She simply pointed out the Sinners amongst her class that needed transport, and with a wave of Satan's claw, he pulled them around the Pride Wall, and deposited them in the Cathedral of Worms. And then, held aloft by his own unflinching will, Satan tilted his head back, and faced the descending storm of Angel Steel and wrath. They would find bone and Wrath to greet them.

Chapter 12

Contempt To The Contemptible

Stella was annoyed.

She ought to be relieved, that she'd managed to do what was blatantly impossible and actually gained a foothold in the realm of Heaven. She should have been euphoric to finally have a chance to stand in her homeland again. Instead she was annoyed, because fucking Stolas had to come in and do those things that he always did nowadays. Get in her way, slow things down, and be too involved with magic for his own good, were she to make a list of them. But the fact was, he now stood staring into the distance with his back against the wall built from the rubble of the fallen walls of Heaven. He was out of the way. And whatever nonsense he was spouting about 'supposing to have died' were going to be between him and the mortar.

"Explain why I shouldn't have you executed for dereliction of duty," Stella said, her anger erasing her earlier desire to see these people lauded, as she confronted the heavily armored Man Of Iron who had split from her force in the first minute of conflict.

He just motioned around him.

"Giancarlo is the reason this structure is here, Ma'am," Puller said. "It's the reason I armored him and not Samovar to come here."

"I didn't ask you."

"You asked to have it explained, Ma'am. I'm explaining," Puller said.

"You're too eager by a half, little human," she said.

"I guess I am, Ma'am," Puller said. "Benny? Let's get back to Hell."

"Aye, sir," the one she was trying to confront said, snapping him a salute and not her. Then, without another word audible to her ears, the two of them turned and walked through the portal back into Hell. She wanted to just rip in half for the lack of respect that they'd shown her. But even she had to rein in her fury and view things reasonably. These were only Her Men Of Iron for the duration of this operation in Hell. She had expected them to depart the moment that she was swarmed and killed, but in the absence of that eventuality, they departed as soon as she was out of harm's easy way, and returned to her husband's service.

He should enact more discipline in his units, she thought. If only to curb the flagrant lack of decorum that they'd shown in every moment that they'd spent up here. But that was an argument that right now she didn't have the energy for. If he wanted upstart and uncouth soldiers lipping off to him every time he showed face in front of them, then he was welcome to it, as long and insofar as it did not reflect poorly on her own armies, her own reputation, and her own ability to be the Duchess of Iron. She had sacrificed nothing in marriage to the Prince of Flowers. She had responsibilities, too.

With her outrage for the most part petered out, she puffed out a purging breath, and looked to the portal, which bowed outward, pushing away those who were about to walk through it as a new Source connected to it, briefly showing a different part of Hell as a group of other soldiers marched into the bunker, before that second venue vanished and the streaming-out continued. Stella considered just leaving Stolas up here until whatever madness had overtaken him was shaken. But he was in a tizzy, and Octavia deserved to have a proper meal with her whole family tonight. So she waded through the tide of fighters, grabbing Stolas and dragging him behind her as she passed through the portal.

In most circumstances, the feel of a place not changing was something to be expected. Not to be remarked upon, and ignored completely. But when Stella walked through the portal, and she still felt the unmistakable proximity of Angel Steel, the barely audible Song of the angels, and the dross miasma of Heaven's self-righteousness here in Lucifer's own Ring of Pride, she immediately knew that something was very, very, very wrong.

Stolas, too, seemed to grasp it. Walking through the portal he'd been staring into infinity. But upon the soil of Hell he stopped, focus returning to his features as whatever fugue he'd worked himself into suddenly fell away. She could see his eyes flitting, picking out things that she was blind to, as his mind quickly spun up to speed like a flywheel attached to a generator.

"No. No it's too soon. We're still a fortnight away!" Stolas said.

"What is this feeling?" Stella demanded of him.

"The Purge. Somebody's started the Purge today," Stolas said. He grabbed Stella by both arms, which she tried to shrug free from, but the look on his face arrested her in a way that he hadn't been able to in decades. There was such focus on his face. Such seriousness. Such drive. To look into those eyes was to see, just for a moment, The Prince Of Flowers in rebellion against God an eon ago. "You must go back to our home and protect Octavia."

"What are you... why don't you?"

"You can still Transit, I cannot; and without my Grimoire..." he trailed off, letting the implication linger.

"You know what it costs," she said, quietly.

"For Octavia," Stolas said. And Stella nodded.

"For Octavia," she agreed.

She slammed the control holding her into the machine, and it disgorged her in short order, leaving her standing in very little clothing amongst the rapidly portalling armies. And there, did all in sight witness something that had never been seen for thousands of years. Stella flexed her back, pressing through the agony of twisting and burning muscles, and she manifested her wings.

The price of following Lucifer in rebellion against God was that those followers would have their wings ripped from their backs, and to be cast down into The Pit with Lucifer. And almost all of the Ars Goetia had met that fate. All but five. Stella, who had thrown in with Lucifer before almost anybody, felt no guilt even now, for Lucifer allowed her to be what she really was. And the price of that, was one of agony.

With cracking and snapping, shattered bones ground against each other, as the ragged, twisted wings bloomed out of nothing, her halo burning into being above her head. It was not the blazing cold light that once it had been. Now, it was banded with black, so that the light had a strange off-grey color to it. And with every flex of her body, every pulse of anguish, of utter and undiluted pain, she opened the pinched-shut veins and allowed the thick and degraded blood trapped in those wings to tumble through her veins, causing her entire body to burn, to cry out in agony, worse and worse until it hit her heart and that organ nearly lurched itself to a stop, before pounding one additional time, and forcing that extra, golden blood through her body.

And then, only then, as she was near-blinded by the pain of it, she willed herself home.

There was a sound of fluttering wings, of black feathers falling from wounded wings.

And then when she stumbled, it was not upon rocky wasteland of the Pride Wilds, but the carefully manicured lawn of her estate. She fell to a knee, here where none could see her, and she painstakingly folded her shattered wings away, until she could demanifest them and let their agony fade to the otherwise neverending dull ache.

The doors were thrown open by throbbing, vein-damaged limbs as she managed not to stagger into her own fucking house. Not willing to wait for decorum, she outright punched the service bell that hung near the grand double doors, shattering it as her blows would tend to. Within seconds several maids and valets appeared as though crawling up from between the cracks in the tiled floor. "Where is my daughter?" she demanded, ignoring the headache that having blood the consistency of half-set concrete in her arteries was giving her.

"She is in the Master's study, ma'am," a valet said. He flicked a glance up at her. "Pardon my impropriety, but are you well, ma'am?"

She ignored him. It was probably clear to any who could see that something was wrong with her. All of the veins on her visible body were bulged as though somebody inflated her circulatory system with a tire-pump. But she made no attempt to answer, and simply strode past the little minions toward her debatable husband's ward of the palace, her eyes locked on each corner and path that she would have to take.

"Is there any assistance I can offer, my lady?" Ambrosius asked, actually managing to surprise her due to her tunnel-vision and distinct lack of peripheral. He looked her up and down, and even briefly at her back. "Is there a calamity coming?"

"There is," she said.

"How may I prepare?" he asked. There was a reason she so valued him. He didn't ever waste her time.

"Keep up," she said.

She finally crossed the unspoken line between the common section of the palace that led into Stolas' own little fief. The study wasn't far from the divide, a reminder of when Stolas had been a more reasonable and practical man. And within it, the door thrown open with little care that she accidentally broke it, she beheld Octavia, spinning to hide something behind her back. For a moment, Stella had a moment's concern, but when she came to a halt, it was clear what she was hiding was a book of ledgers.

"Are you stealing from your father?" Stella asked.

"No! No, I'm..."

"Because it's about time you started getting some value out of him," Stella said, then gave her head a shake, and turned to Ambrosius. "Fortify this palace. Heaven is attacking in force."

"The Host?" he asked.

"The Exorcists," she said. Ambrosius seemed to blanch for a moment, then turned to Octavia for a second one.

"They have never attacked the Palace District before. Why would they...?" he began, but there was a blast that shattered the window and sent the shards of glass launching across the room in the gap where fatefully nobody was standing, embedding those foot-long shards into the wall opposite their intended place. And when Stella looked outside, she could see her gardens burning, and there was thick black smoke coming from the nearby palace of Bathin. Golden portals opened in the distance, and white streaks shot down through them, landing somewhere beyond the horizon of hedges and walls. But each streak was a bit closer.

"There is no time," Stella said. "We defend our home."

"Yes, my lady. Come, Domina. I have something to show you," he said, turning crisply to Stella's daughter. Octavia turned a confused look to him, then to her mother, before nodding, putting the ledger of accounts down, and following as Ambrosius began to briskly jog away. With nobody to look upon her, she dropped herself into a chair.

And then she let out a long, hissing breath. One that mounted up and up until it was a muffled scream of pain, finally acknowledging what her body screamed and her pride denied. It was almost a minute of screaming until she'd gotten the worst out of herself. It'd have to do. After that, she got back up, and prepared to fight for her new home in truth, rather than by proxy.

"Alright. I'll admit it," Charlie said, as Rachel emerged from the back of the hotel.

"Admit what?" Rachel asked, adjusting her sweater.

"You were right about how to treat Fiona," she said. She wasn't her father, and thus not completely blinded by her pride, but she hated to think that all of the work she'd done for the last two years, up until Rachel's arrival, had been at best ineffective and at worst wasteful. She'd put a lot of effort into getting this Hotel up and running. She'd put a lot of sweat and tears – and a few drops of blood as well – into its creation and upkeep. And to have somebody with a fraction of her life-experience come along and just usurp her dream, not only taking it from her but doing it better than her... it rankled. She hated that it rankled, but it did indeed rankle.

"That was never in doubt," Rachel said. She then frowned at Charlie. "You look like you've just bitten into a cherry pit. I presume there's something else on your mind."

"It's just... you're so much better at this than I am. I had Angel Dust in here for a year and didn't see any improvement. You were here for only three weeks and you brought a catatonic Sinner back to wakefulness and made meaningful headway to solving the illness of her mind. It just makes me feel... incompetent," she said.

"How long do Sinners usually have to wait at Our Lady Of Unreasonable Violence hospital to get an MRI scan?" Rachel asked, which caught Charlie somewhat off her balance.

"Wh... I don't know. A while, I guess," she said.

"Six to eight weeks, from time of appointment, during low traffic. Those six to eight weeks would become six to eight months, because the time-period passes through The Purge," Rachel said. "Without your influence and pull, nothing that I have done with Miss O'Daire could have happened, because I would not have been able to convince the imp wizard to restore her sanity if I could not show the other imp wizard the exact parameters of the tumor he had to undo."

"Yes, but, anybody could have..." Charlie began.

"And without you putting a roof over my head, I probably would have found myself in much more unkind hands," Rachel continued, bull-rushing Charlie verbally. "I have had talks with Husk about what the Damned would do with somebody of my attributes. None of them are pleasant. No, you may not be single-handedly shepherding all of Hell's downtrodden into a brighter future, but who in this inferno of suffering is even expecting you to? I'm guessing the only person who expects that kind of exceptionalism out of you, is you. Now, instead of moping for the rest of the day, can we please talk about the elephant in the room?"

"The elephant?" she asked. And Rachel gestured toward where Cain was sitting on the Recovery Sofa, consuming vast quantities of food as though he'd near starved to death. And it did indeed look like he'd near starved to death, so there was probably a point to it. "Oh. Right."

"What just happened here? I don't as a rule go into up to the penthouse, because that's where the Radio Demon lives, but I heard a lot of noise and the building shook a few times," Rachel pointed out.

"That was..." Charlie tried to find a way to sugar coat this, but any attempt at attenuating what had happened here an hour ago was doomed to failure. "Somebody snuck in," she finally said.

"Then I have nothing but pity for the fool who snuck into that spider's web. And Cain?"

"I can answer for myself," Cain said, pausing in his consumption for a moment. He was thoroughly dishevelled, his fine dress tattered and his body clearly having just Regenerated from grisly wounds. There was still blood visible at the edge of his beard where it could not be easily scraped away, as he'd had no chance to bathe. "I came for an object of sentimental worth that had been taken from me two centuries ago. Thank you, Miss Vialpando," he broke off, accepting another plate with a grateful nod as Vaggie emerged from the dining area with more food, this the rather dull fare that Vaggie herself had cooked. Still, plates of eggs and bacon were hard to screw up... unless you were Razzle or Dazzle. "You may find, young lady, that you cannot find your harpoon. That is because it was always my harpoon."

"Hey. I needed that!" Vaggie said, cocking her fist on her hip with a stern look in her eye.

"I can give you something just as nice to replace it," Charlie placated.

"I can also recommend a replacement," Cain said, pulling from his back pocket a silver case, and extracting from it one of several business cards. Charlie, having by this point moved to Vaggie's side, could see that this was one of the old business cards for Carmine Crafting, back when it was still run by 'Abraxas Carmine' in the 1700's, before King Zagan stopped bothering with a pseudonym. "Have him call my number, and I will vouch for you. You should be able to jump the waiting list by a fair amount."

"Why would this 'Carmine' even care?" Vaggie asked.

"I am why 'Carmine Alloy' even exists," Cain said, with a sly wink. He then turned to Charlie. "I apologize for not recognizing the fraud which had been going on under your roof. This 'Glimpse' is a creature unlike any I had seen in my many, many years. It was a very strange thing, and I am not convinced that Lucifer will not approach me at some point to demand it killed."

"Dad hasn't bothered with demanding that for as long as I've been around," Charlie said.

"The Glimpse ain't that old," Husk said, as he entered the lobby from the door at the back of the bar.

"You're up early," Rachel said, breaking her quiet and reminding Charlie that she was in fact still there. She was very good at avoiding attention when she wanted to be.

"Yeah, well, when the whole fuckin' building is shakin', it's hard to catch my winks," Husk groused.

"What exactly is the Glimpse, Husk?" Rachel asked.

"Fuck if I know. Only that it don't often wear the same face for two meetings in a row," he said, then lit a half-spent cigar. "'S I hear it, it's From Outside, and can physically become anything it wants to be. With a couple exceptions, or so it's said."

"So? Anybody with magic can appear as anything else in Creation," Cain pointed out.

"Naw, that ain't it, bub. I didn't say it 'looks like' anything. I said it 'becomes' anything it wants to. If wanted to, it could become you, and nobody in all 'a Hell would be able to figure it out even if they checked the both 'a ya's, cell-by-cell. An' it gets enough 'a yer memories to be really good at blending in, too. Whatever the Glimpse is, it ain't anything that's s'posed to exist in Creation. And it's been workin' as Proxy For Asmodeus for the last sixty years," Husk said.

"And why did it do... that... to Vaggie? Charlie asked.

"Must'a wanted something here," Husk shrugged.

"It believed Alastor was something he was not," Cain said. "And it departed as soon as the ambiguity was undone."

"After ruining my lobby door, melting part of my car, and setting fire to the building across the street," Charlie said flatly.

"That seems in line for anything else the Radio Demon touches," Rachel pointed out.

"I don't like that you're right about that," Charlie groused.

"Now may I ask what I had intended to speak with you about?" Cain asked.

"Go ahead," she said.

"I have looked into the state of my finances and they are... rather far flung of late. It will be several weeks of legal wrangling before what wealth of mine that has not been pilfered can be returned to me, and even then, I find myself very much reduced. I would like to know if there is some service I can offer equal to the hospitality of the house of the Princess of All Hell?"

"You want to live here? Does that mean you're trying for Redemption?" Charlie asked, brightening at the thought.

Cain, though, shook his head and held up a hand. "There can be no Redemption for me, your grace. As I said before: God has specifically forbidden it. I am merely asking a price that I can later repay for a place to rest my head."

"This is a hotel. There's no reason you can't," Rachel began.

"Who are you running from?" Vaggie demanded over top of Rachel.

"Running from? I have never run from a challenger in my eon in Hell," Cain seemed genuinely insulted by the implication. But he schooled himself. "There are no pursuers I seek to use you as a shield against, I swear upon my honor, my name, and upon Naked Law – which I hold to be one of the few good decisions your father made since attaining the Low Throne."

Charlie gave it some thought, and turned to Vaggie. Vaggie had that 'be careful with this' look on her face. And that gave Charlie even more pause. The Glimpse had been in this building for two weeks. Charlie and The Glimpse had slept in the same bed for all that time, and Charlie hadn't had the first clue! So how was she supposed to be able to trust her instincts now, when they'd so flagrantly and blatantly failed her in the past?

"This is a hotel, Charlie," Rachel said, with an easy shrug as the elevators shut and she ascended into the hotel. And with that, Charlie made a decision. If she couldn't trust her own instincts on something, she'd have to trust somebody else's. And the woman who'd shown better instincts than anybody else here – with Husk's possible exception – was Rachel. And Rachel obviously thought this at least was kosher. Still, she gave it thought. She gave it a lot of thought.

Sooner or later, lousy instincts or no, she was going to have to make a call. And considering how uncomfortable her lengthy silence was making those standing in attendance, she could only endeavor to be kind.

"You will be welcome here," she said, but before he could thank her or say anything, she raised a forestalling finger, "on a provisional basis. And if you bring any harm to this hotel or to my works, I will evict you and you will lose any chance of ever having friendship with me ever again. Are you willing to make an enemy of me?" she asked, feeling none of the badass such a sentence required.

"No, I would not. I accept your provisions," Cain said. "Now where is..." he then trailed off. A frown came to his face. "Apologies, but this is the 16th day of the month you call December, is it not?"

"Yes, why?" Charlie said, as Vaggie was clearly doing math in her head, having to reset her mental calendars.

"...Something is wrong," he said, getting to his feet from the Recovery Sofa more steadily by far than he had teetered his way to it. And the proof to Cain's claims came when there was a streak down from the sky, that Charlie could see only in the split second that it hit the pavement. From its back unfurled synthetic wings, horns curling back on its head and above them burning a white-hot halo. Its face fritzed for just a moment, before displaying the cruelly grinning visage of the Exorcist, Heaven's weapon of massacre. And they weren't supposed to be here today.

"Is that an Exorcist?" Vaggie asked, taking a step back from the door. The device spotted somebody on the darkened street and streaked away, a moment later the scream of terror, pain, ruin and death following as the Exorcist did its butcher's work. And before Charlie could even think that 'maybe that was a fluke'. Because this year alone, she'd had to kill one of those things in this very lobby half a year from when they were due, and apparently Sam took over another one that the V Triarchy were using as a showpiece.

Hell of course was not so kind.

Even as gunfire started at the periphery of the Happy Hotel, her soldiers now aware of the presence of an Exorcist in their midst, there was another calamitous crash that rebounded its way into the lobby, and the gunfire started on that side of the hotel as well.

There was a loudspeaker noise that sounded in the lobby, as the old system was turned on for the first time since... well... likely since it was installed in the 1940's. "Action stations this is not a drill! Condition White, I repeat Condition White!" Colonel Roth's voice sounded here, and likely therefore throughout the hotel. Charlie turned a look to Vaggie.

"Condition White... Exorcists arriving outside of the Purge," she with a mildly baffled look. "I thought that was just a war-game!"

"Look'it you, actually payin' attention," Husk said, as he reached under the bar and pulled a switch. She had always thought that was to open the liquor cabinet, but no, as it turned out, Husk had been entirely honest when he told her that there was nothing she could do to stop him from hiding weapons throughout the Hotel. So when the bar opened up and an autocannon emplacement rose up from the basement to take its place, Charlie could only nod numbly. Of course he'd smuggled 25mm autocannon into the Hotel. He'd even warned her that he was going to.

She had little time to stand there like a head-struck goon, before there was a fresh crash, and another Exorcist appeared on the other side of the doors, having cratered into the sidewalk to do it. Husk didn't even hesitate. He fired a calamitous burst from that cannon, the wind of it pulling at the people he was firing though the middle of and the roar of the gun counterpointed by the snap of the rounds through the air as ten of them slammed into the newly landed Exorcist in the moment that it entered the realm of Hell. Its reflexes were good, mechanical as they were, that it brought a wing up to guard the stream, but the armor-piercing shells that slammed into the Heavenly automaton were empowered by something every bit as mighty as magic; raw velocity.

The wing had a hole blown through it, the next few shells hit the Exorcist, and it was sent rolling out of sight by the impact of it.

"I presume that is the much feared 'Exorcist'?" Cain asked.

"It is," Vaggie said, looking like she wanted to hide, which was smart.

"Then today will be a very delightful day, where I have tested myself to destruction against both Monster From Outside and the terrifying industry of Heaven," Cain said with a mildly lunatic wistfulness to his voice.

"You're out of your mind," Vaggie pointed out.

"Boredom is best cured by insanity, young mistress. If you'd lived and been dead as long as I, you would understand that," Cain said, with a roll of his shoulders, a crack of his knuckles, and a grin on his face.

The plan had been a simple one, as far as assassinations go. Scare the target to flee a given area. Make it so that their flight had a pre-determined plan – which Moxxie absolutely did. And then take out the vehicle. Ordinarily, the obvious question would be 'why not just kill him at the first location'? Well the answer to that was that this assassination was IMP's first actual contract against a high-status denizen of Hell, and Yoritomo-no-Oni was protected from just about everything short of a Seraphic Steel bullet via demonic magic. But there was one thing that Moxxie's research had revealed he hadn't warded himself against, because he couldn't: drowning.

That was the trick of protective wards. To have some necessarily precluded having others, unless you had special circumstances like a Remit from a Power. And even then, the Remits of the Deadly Sins tended to be straightforward, overpowering basic problems of violence and damage, but that still didn't solve the underlying problem. Yoritomo-no-Oni was a Devourer, a demon of Gluttony. He would want to eat. He would want to drink. And he would need to breathe. If you tried to ward against attacks against the latter, you by definition prevented the enjoyment of the former.

So when Moxxie let the trigger pull finish, aimed as precisely as his body would allow, the bullet from the high caliber anti-materiel rifle cut off across the distance to impact – and shear – the so-called 'Jesus-nut' of the helicopter carrying Yoritomo-no-Oni. As soon as the recoil subsided, Moxxie fired again, this time destroying the tail-rotor of that same helicopter, so that there was no possible piloting shenanigans that could take the now plummeting craft off of the assigned course. In the extreme distance, he watched with satisfaction as the aircraft dropped like a thrown brick, directly into the waste-water treatment plant below. Specifically, into its water vats, aerated and effluent-filled so that the Devourer demon would die, choking on shit-water that he could not possibly swim in, and would return to the element which in Moxxie's opinion best represented that entire race of fiends.

"Holy shit you actually got it," Maelstrom said, from where he was serving as Moxxie's spotter.

"He's going in?" Moxxie asked.

"Just a couple meters off center so he didn't hit the catwalks," Maelstrom confirmed. He gave his head a shake and stood. "Is it always this easy?"

"No, usually issues come up which complicate things," Moxxie said, watching as the helicopter vanished from view, and not a single foul beast that had been within it emerged even up to two slow minutes later. They were likely trying, as hard as they could, but aerated water was essentially robbed of all buoyancy. Good riddance.

After the slow count of five minutes – exactly as twice as long as any Devourer had ever ever been verified to be able to hold its breath, Moxxie gave his own nod and packed the rifle away. Another job done, another payday. Considering the degree to which they were underpaying for their habitation comparable to the earnings in the latter half of this year, if things kept up like this they would be a pair of wealthy misers before too long. But Millie at least wasn't going to let that happen; she was a child of open space and large clans. Moxxie'd had little experience with either, but what she wanted, by definition he wanted also.

"What the hell is that doing here?" Maelstrom said, binoculars to his eyes again. Moxxie turned a look to him, then narrowed his vision, his senses practically telescoping. And when they did, he almost fell on his back. As though a bamboo-shoot boring into the fabric of Hell came emergence signatures of such powerful Heavenly Magic that they were uncomfortable for impish-Moxxie to look upon. He'd seen their like before. But not today, not on this day of the year. And what he saw come through that gave him a moment's pause.

That was a Type Four.

Type Fours were two dozen iterations of Exorcist out of date, almost pathetically obsolete comparable to their new counterparts. He quickly ran through the reasons why such old product would be sent to Hell, today, weeks before it ought, and the only answer which made any sense to his hypercharged mind was that Heaven was throwing literally everything they had at Hell, without regard to schedule or the covenants that had once held between the Thrones Low and High.

Before Moxxie even started speaking, he swept his arm in a broad arc, and cut a path back to the office as a portal burned into being. "We need the good weapons," Moxxie didn't bother to offer his thought processes, or any of the other things which rambled through his head. He just trusted that the new hire and his darling wife trusted him enough to listen when he spoke. And they did.

He forced the portal closed behind him, because something was approaching their position on that hilltop when they fled. And when they returned, there was a giant of a succubus still there, waiting in a fine black dress, sitting on Maelstrom's desk because there were no chairs of suitable size to her. Most people would simply call her a random Giant Woman and consider that odd enough. Moxxie, though, had known from his Satanic upbringing who she actually was. Sinope. The succubus that Satan had accidentally made immortal many eons ago.

"Well?" she asked.

"Did... you wait here?" Moxxie had to ask.

"You are the Immediate Murder Professionals. I trust you put stock into the 'Immediate' part of your name," she asked. She had an accent like a less pronounced version of Satan's own. Considering that she she was one of the oldest living beings outside of Heaven, no great surprise there.

"He's dead, drowned in a wastewater lagoon," Moxxie said. "Sir? Sir! We've got a problem!"

"With my target?" Sinope asked.

"No, he's dead and gone, you're fine," Moxxie said, and immediately turned his attention to the back room. "There are Exorcists in Hell!"

"Excuse me, what?" Sinope asked.

"Yeah, I got told a minute ago," Blitz said as he emerged from the armory with a few higher-caliber instances of IMP's asset-list. "Think you're up to killin' an Exorcist, guys?"

"I wanna try!" Millie declared, a wide grin on her face. Moxxie wanted to tell her not to, but frankly, he was curious if she was up to the task as much as he was. Since the incident in the Gates to Purgatory, she had only come upon one being who could test her to destruction, and that was a Most Ancient Dragon. What other targets could even compare? Did the machines of Angels count?

"Thatta girl, Mills," Blitz said, and reached under the desk between Sinope's legs and hit the button there. Sinope, who had been momentarily annoyed at his apparent audacity, didn't try to stop him. And when the button was pressed, one of the walls flipped and showed all of Millie's favorite axes, swords, and combat chainsaws. "Ain't no way we're gonna let some fuckin' wind-up Angels ruin my GODDAMNED OFFICE! Now grab your shit and get ready to fight!"

"What about me?" Maelstrom asked, looking around at the sudden tumult of activity which went on without him.

"You work here too, fucko. Get your shit together and punch an Angel in the face with us," Blitz said as he picked up the Carmine Ballistics .50 'Leviathan' Autorifle and slid it into his coat where he usually kept a shotgun, while Moxxie himself got the old 'Blessing Tip' marksman rifle and slung it onto his back. He knew that these weapons were supposed to be physically painful for imps, Demons, and anything less than an Ars Goetia to wield. And yet they had never so much as stung his flesh. Even before he was transformed, these weapons... just kinda agreed with him.

"I... ah..."

"Don't be hesitant, little puppy," Sinope said, in her oddly out-of-date way. "Haven't you got some aggression to get out?"

Those chiding words seemed to put some backbone into the skittish Hound, and he gave a nod, before reaching over Blitz's head and getting two sets of Angel Steel knuckle-dusters. One of them had been taken from a target, the other one bought because, in Moxxie's employer's words, 'it just won't do to not have the set'.

"Now let's go show those winged shits who's the boss down here!" Blitz declared, while Millie grinned, Moxxie nodded, and Maelstrom shook his head like the poor fool who had to drive a bunch of drunks home after a long night.

Mum was in pain. Octavia wished she hadn't heard the scream that Mum had put out after she and Ambrosius had departed, but her hearing was indeed good enough and she was too driven at the moment to go back and find out why Mum was letting out a shout like that.

"This better be good, Master Agrippa. Mother..." Octavia said.

"It is, upon my honor," Agrippa said, as she noticed he had moved to a harsh jog so that her long stride wasn't having to be shortened that he keep up with her. The palace moved by in a blur, until they passed down a servant's passage – which Octavia had to duck to enter – and then through the guts of the palace until they were spat out in the area near the swimming pool. The sounds of violence were in the air, and every few seconds, Octavia could perceive through a method she could not name that more rents from Heaven to Hell were opening, and vomiting forth their mechanical soldiers. And that wave of them was drifting in this direction with the laziness of a storm-cloud of steel, plastic, and mayhem.

She was about to ask him to give her the short version of whatever this was, because that exit from the building had been shockingly fast compared to how long it took via the ordinary paths to reach that particular section of the palace, but her question was forestalled when Ambrosius pulled the blade from his belt. It was the shape of a gladius, but longer, something he called a 'spatha'. With a flick of his hand, he swiped with it, and an edge of solid force raced from his edge to cut the roof from the foundations of the pool's storage hut. He then turned, manifesting a richly decorated scutum shield, and with a mighty rap, slammed his blade against its center boss; doing so projected a blast of near-solid noise which blew the hut away completely.

Revealing that within it was another suit of that powered armor, alike to Mum's, but much more boxy and inelegant.

"What is...?" she began.

"I swore to both of your parents that I would see you protected to the best of my abilities. And I have been in service to your mother and father for nearly a millennium. I abide to few costly delights, and have a significant amount of back-pay unspent. So I reached out to Glowtown, and made a purchase."

"I can't..." she began, as this was unexpected, and entirely too much for the man who should be serving her, not arming her.

"You shall," Ambrosius said, as he reached into the device and activated the opening protocol, causing it to reveal the gap that she would inhabit. "Octavia Goetia shall be the Angel Of New Warfare. It befits you, my Domina, that you have panoply equal to such a name."

"I barely know how to fight. This is wasted on me..." she began.

"Lies and slander. I have taught you. And I did not waste my time," Ambrosius retorted. "That you compare yourself against your mother does disservice to your abilities. Now get in, and fight for your home."

"...You know, if you said that to my Mum, she'd have you flogged for it," Octavia said as she approached the machine.

"You are not your mother. Do not try to be," Ambrosius said. Then, there was the loud, metal clunk as the device sealed her inside. It felt so strange, so out-of-place and time that she was wearing experimental powered battle armor, with a knit beanie on her head and a tee-shirt for a moderately good band on her body. Days like this shouldn't happen. People like her shouldn't be involved in them.

Yet here she was.

The machine came alive, and began to show all of the things around her. When she raised a hand, almost without effort the machine did likewise. Ambrosius nodded, and then with a wave of his hand summoned forth his own armor and helm. He didn't say a word as he began to run back toward the palace. And when Octavia turned her gaze to the building she could see why; one of the Exorcists had just streaked straight down from Heaven and before her electronic eyes shattered the grand glass dome that lay at the heart of her family's home. This she would not abide. So she turned. There was a time to doubt herself, to believe that she was too young and too untrained to do this. But these fuckers were attacking her house.

This thing moved fast. Faster than she believed possible. So fast indeed that she could have kept pace with a van on the street, and when the armor reached the wall she simply kept running, allowing tonnes of boxy metal to carry her straight through it, through the warren of servant's passages, and eventually through the wall of one of her mother's trophy-rooms.

The sensors only picked now to turn on, having been spooling up the entire time thus far, and they instantly picked out the Exorcist which had plunged into her home. Because of that, she kept running, smashing through the door-frame of the room because she didn't have the patience to slow and turn sideways to avoid it, the dragging a clawed arm on the floor to rapidly change her direction as she continued to charge. The nearly-complete skeleton of one of the last living Leviathans was smashed to bits by her passage, tumbling down into its display as she single-mindedly raced toward her mother, and toward the Angelic motherfucker that was trying to kill her.

Another rut-cutting corner taken, and she had a straight shot toward where Mum and the Exorcist were exchanging swipes and blows, each of them bearing a curved saber of Seraphic Steel. And while Mum was very, very good at fighting with an edge, even Octavia could tell that she wasn't fighting at her best. Her body seemed strangely bloated, her movements slightly hitched and dragging. As though she had come into this fight injured. But she was able to keep up with the Exorcist just long enough for Octavia to cause her legs to practically burn with exertion, and the distance fall away, until she was able to tackle and slam the Exorcist into the floor.

With a movement a living body wouldn't be capable of, the Exorcist reversed all of its joints and spun its head in a familiar owl-like motion so that her grasp of its back was effectively nullified. And with a thrust that was almost instantaneous, it slammed the point of that saber into the armor of her head. Her head deflected under the blow, the armor scraping away under the impact, before Octavia used the leverage tanking that hit gave her to drive her fist hard at the electronic face of the slaughter-angel. The Exorcist jerked its head out of the way, and her armored fist shattered marble in its place. Then, the Exorcist hooked its wings into the space between their bodies, and with a mighty flex heaved, throwing her over itself, and holding on so that when her near seven-tonnes of prototype armor came to a halt, the Exorcist was astride and atop her, pulling back to drive that saber down into the damaged section of her armor to drive it even deeper.

Octavia, though, had done her homework on that vanity piece that GLW had produced for her mother, to a degree which she frankly doubted her Mum had even bothered to explore.

This thing had a rudimentary flight system.

A flex of both of Octavia's thumbs hit the thrusters, which burned directly into the solid marble of the floor and sent her and the Exorcist atop her flying straight up and into the ceiling. And the Exorcist, having taken no effort to stop them, found itself for a moment embedded into the painted ceiling. It was a shame to deface such artwork, but this was war. Octavia let herself drop down, releasing the thrusters and letting the armor's internal gyro drag her feet back under her, landing with a stone-breaking crunch.

"Excellent, Ambrosius. I would have expected that sort of forethought from you," Mum said, having only had a few seconds during all of that hubbub to collect and center herself.

"Ambrosius is still coming," Octavia said. Instantly, Mum tensed.

"Octavia! Go into the panic room this instant! This is not safe," she thrust her saber down the hallway that Octavia had come from.

"NOWHERE IS SAFE, Mum! I'm not going to huddle in fear as these things kill me!" Octavia countered.

The argument didn't have a chance to go any further, because at that point, the Exorcist finally wormed its way free of the ceiling and dropped delicately to the floor between them, its wings flared and its grinning visage burning as it swung between two tempting targets. But then there was a flicker. The face stopped grinning, and instead looked unaccountably smug.

"Well," the voice that came from the Exorcist was aristocratic and haughty, "if it isn't the first of the defiant. How has hell been treating you, Stella?"

"Better than Heaven has has you, Strigoi," Mum said.

"And this would be what? Your favored soldier? I thought you were enamored with that fop the Prince of Flowers," this 'Strigoi' woman chided. "I never did like you, you know."

"You're just embarrassed that I earned the freedom with blood and agony that you get to enjoy for free," Mum said with scorn. "And doesn't your pride burn when you look at me, and see that if you'd have been less of a craven, you could have instead been the hero instead of the slinking coward?"

"I came here to kill you for what you've done in Heaven today, Stella. You're just making it more satisfying when I do," Strigoi said.

"You couldn't kill me during the Great Heresiarchy. I've only gotten better with age," Mum said, her face pulling into a most unkind smile. "Would you care to teach this intruder some manners?"

"I would love to," Octavia said. She'd heard of this person for ten seconds and already loathed her. This would be deeply satisfying.

Rachel ducked subconsciously as the sound of smashing wood and stone sounded nearby. And she wasn't the only one to do so; Fiona, who was seated across a small gap of open floor, did likewise. It seemed panic response was something that both shared in common in the modern day. Of course, Rachel had never been a physical scrapper. Between her own diminutive stature and the fact that as a woman she had an innate though not insurmountable deficit in brawn, she had long dedicated her efforts into ensuring that she was never directly party to physical violence. And from the sound of it, her long investment into danger-avoidance was starting to catch up to her in unkind fashion.

"What is that sound?" Rachel asked.

"That's an Exorcist," Fiona said, trying to get up from her chair but being unable to. She fell back into the wheelchair with a look of deep-tissue pain on her face, and pulled the blanket she was using as a robe closer around herself. "And they're not supposed to be here!"

"Explain?" Rachel asked.

"The Purge is New Years Eve. That's the way it works," Fiona said, and started to wheel herself toward the door. She flattened her ear against the wood, and then wheeled back. Rachel could hear something tromping down the hallway, which was a mildly terrifying feat considering they were near half-a-hundred storeys into the air. The electronic grind of a dial-up modem sounded, followed by a harsh noise which seemed to indicate a failure of some kind, followed by a different, higher sort of grinding noise. Like a Geiger counter noise being played using a harp-string.

And Rachel's instincts sang at her.

"Get away from the do–," Rachel began at a shout, only to have the door explode from its place, and the Exorcist rampage into the room with them. It slammed into Fiona, hefting her up and out of her chair, the two of them barreling into Rachel with such force as its impact sent her spinning away like the first time she got hit by a car, when she was still young. Like that first time, the impact of their passage spun her wildly, one of her shoes flying off of her foot as she was hurled into the upper corner of the room, before gravity regained its authority and pulled her down to the carpet.

She agonized for a moment, trying to pull breath into her lungs; she was fairly certain that some of her ribs were cracked, and the pain for the moment blinded her. But she wasn't going to panic. Not after all life and afterlife had thrown at her was she going to throw away her mind at the first sign of danger. She focused, she narrowed her will, and then she overrode her malfunctioning body and sucked in air until the muscles locking her body down untensed and she could breathe again.

She gave her head a shake, and turned to the scrap which had already exploded an armoire and nearly cratered through into the next room over. Fiona, though, had spread her arms wide and caught enough studs that the Exorcist was unable to drive her into the wall as a Damned nail. She then seemed to swell slightly, her body gaining more muscle definition, her eyes distorting from circular pupils like Rachel's into the vertical slits of a reptile, as she hooked her armless hand under the neck of the Exorcist and heaved; she was able to lift the Exorcist off of its footing, and with her other arm, she hurled hard, casting the Angel-Machine through a writing desk nearby with such violence that the breakfast that Rachel had set upon it was cast throughout the room.

There was a harsh electric buzz as the knuckles of that machine burned to life with the same harsh light as its halo, that hovered over its smooth glass head. The whole device seemed... out of date, somehow. Rachel had seen the Exorcists that were used as auxiliary guards of the Unhallow, the one place that they were allowed to walk in Heaven. Word was that once, a century and a half ago, one of the Exorcists lost its operator and, on its original programming, started massacring Innocent, so they were not a common sight in heaven. Those ones were much more elegant, their joints more supple and articulated with finer and more intricately connected pieces. This was clunky, a rough draft that would through dozens of refinements become what she was familiar with. When the Exorcist launched its fist at Fiona, she was quick to grab the silver dome of the serving platter and hold it before her like a buckler, so that when the fist struck, it drove the silver into her and sent her rolling to the floor on her back.

Rachel stood, and gave a glance to the room service phone. Charlie would have to be told. But before she even had a chance to consider making that call, her eyes were pulled through the windows to the outside of Low Central.

A zipping form of another Exorcist streaked down from Heaven in the distance.

Then another one.

This was not an isolated incident. This was a surge.

Fiona scrabbled as quickly as she could without moving her legs, eventually reaching an end table that though clean had never been used for anything. When she tipped it down, it was just in time to swing her legs out of the way of a downward haymaker from the Exorcist, then to get it into the way of the blazing hook that it followed its first miss with.

The table seemed to explode, and O'Daire was sent sliding along the floor. But it became clear that she'd picked this table for a reason; there was a steel plate in it, and straps. She reefed the straps tight on her handless right-arm, and used it to first deflect another blazing punch, then thrust a shield-bash at its glass face.

The bash didn't go as she would have hoped. With a move so fast that it seemed to blur in motion, the Exorcist intercepted the improvised (?) shield with one hand in a vice-grip. And the other burned hot as it reached back to punch past and into the Dragon of Connacht.

But Rachel found herself doing something unexpected. She grabbed that back-cast arm and held fast, so when the Exorcist tried to punch O'Daire, Fiona was able to grab the more awkward blow with her left hand. The Exorcist tried to push that fist into Fiona's flesh, but was unable to, struggling against the meagre but sufficient impediment that Rachel was offering. Finally, Fiona let out a roar and heaved, pulling the Exorcist's fist toward and then past her, cratering it into the floor, and using the shift in balance to get out from under the Exorcist and mount it, even if it did leave Rachel trapped between the Exorcist and the floor.

So it went that when Fiona pulled her buckler from the grasp of the Exorcist and sent its edge down in a brutal blow, much of that ruinous power passed through the machine body of the Exorcist and into the tender meats of Rachel.

Being punched by a terrified Dragon, even by proxy, damned near split Rachel in half, but she'd been through more painful things before. Hell, she'd been through more painful things this month. The increased pain-tolerance afforded by decades of starvation capstoned by three days of torture made it so that while she knew that there was some probable massive damage to her body, she was still able to hold onto the arm and shoulder of the Exorcist as it flapped downward with its wings, launching O'Daire off of itself and sending her to rebound off of the ceiling and shatter a chair on her way down.

The Exorcist flipped its limbs back around, head spinning a hundred eighty degrees, grinning visage now staring directly at Rachel as its pulse of the wings bore it upright. It stared at Rachel for a moment, then all of its limbs switched back to their normal arrangement as though ignoring her.

Ignoring the fact that she could barely breathe through shattered ribs, Rachel grabbed a metal rod that had been part of the dinner cart, thrusting it between the wing-spars of the Exorcist, so that when they tried to beat again, they caught on it. They bent the pole with little effort, but that little was enough to unbalance it and cause it to land on its feet on the floor. The dial-up noise repeated itself, this time going through. For an instant, the Exorcist went rigid. Fiona used that instant well, her claws digging into the floor and using them as a launching point to hurl herself at the Exorcist that had come to assail her.

Rachel tried to let go, to let the dragon tackle the automaton and let their fight not hit her, which for this instance would be a first. But even as she un-grappled from it, the device's left arm twisted and caught her by the throat. Then in the bare fraction of a second it had left, its other arm hyper-rotated to do likewise with Fiona.

The dragon was spun with tremendous force, and hurled through the wall into the next room. The sheer impact of it caused the window in that room to burst as this one had, only its glass went out instead of in. With Fiona for a moment out of sight and mind, the Exorcist turned to her again, and this time the grin on the thin glass of its head was not one of cruelty, but one of smugness.

'You've been naughty, haven't you?' were the words that appeared in the place of that smug grin.

Then, with a mighty twist of its body, it slammed downward, cratering through the floor of Fiona's room and sending them into the next storey down, breaking both of Rachel's shoulders as it did. Her arms, now hanging useless and floppy at her sides, could do nothing as the plates on its knuckles began to burn with cold white light.

'Shouldn't have pissed off my boss, idiot', the face displayed for a moment.

Then, the fist smashed into Rachel's face. With that, she knew her mind was starting to malfunction, because she actually felt dry and fuzzy all over, as her pulped brain started to misfire. One of her eyes was out of its place if not outright destroyed, blinding her on that side. Her other eye did have a moment to look up, as the Exorcist reeled back with its fist. 'Wow. That didn't kill you? I guess these old things really are useless', the face displayed. And from somewhere above her, Rachel could hear a loud, moist crack, like breaking open a crab.

The device pulled its arm back, the visage of the Exorcist grinning without mirth or mercy down at her. And for just a moment, before that fist came down, Rachel could see Fiona grab the edge of that hole and prepare to throw herself down. But whatever Fiona intended to do, it was not for Rachel to see.

With another crunch, more visceral than audible, the Exorcist drove its Purgator Array straight through the bones of Rachel's face, through the back of her skull, and then through the floorboards.

Whoever Strigoi was, she was insufferable.

Octavia had often heard both her Mum and her Dad go on lengthy screeds as to the iniquitous nature of their Angelic brothers and sisters, of the multitude of failures that they hid behind golden shells and the moral turpitude they lived utterly unwilling to entertain in, the blatant hypocrisy and insufferable self-righteousness that they exuded the same way plants did for air or imps did for failure. Octavia had always thought her parents being hyperbolic. Now, with Strigoi in front of her, she recontextualized everything that her parents had ever ranted about.

They were being conservative with how much of a bunch of raging cunts the Angels up in Heaven were.

The Exorcist that Strigoi fought in was one of the most up-to-date models, its horns gleaming white, the garb of its body all clean lines of subtle shades of white and pale gray. It wasn't like Mum's old dress, being more genderless, but every bit as elegant; it seemed a parade military uniform, from the ornate scabbard that its saber had been borne in. It would be such a shame to destroy it when Octavia ripped this thing apart.

Of course, that was lending a bit more martial credence to Octavia's skills as a fighter than she was currently showing. Mum, even in her current agonized state, was able to match Strigoi blow for blow, parry for thrust, and make it look an intricate dance. Octavia just managed to blunder into things as a raging oaf and disrupt both of them as she tried to get grips on Strigoi, set her armored claws into its 'flesh', and tear it part like a pair of pneumatic shears. She just hoped she was disrupting Strigoi more than she was Mum. And she doubted it.

"Really, Stella? You've had all this time to train up your soldiers and you can't even get them to know the dance-steps of the simplest melody? You've truly let yourself slip into iniquity, haven't you?" Strigoi chided.

"Go fuck yourself with a hot poker, Strigoi. I earned the hole you can stick it in!" Mum clapped back, which was disgusting in its own right. Again, it was one thing to know that Octavia's mother had been created a man. It was another to have it thrown in her face. Stella weaved under an adventurous thrust and slash with the saber, racing first low then high in a dervish of Angel Steel. The steel was warded with steel, the clash of metal sounding throughout Octavia's home as the lesser warrior was matched by the crippled one. So Octavia upended the status-quo between them, slamming her fist into the wall and grabbing the live electrical cables that ran through the palace, tearing out a massive length of them and with a hurl of her hand sending them at Strigoi.

Strigoi cut with her blade, severing a foot off of the rope of copper that Octavia wielded as the lights went dead for a moment, before being replaced by sanguine red emergency lighting. The battle now took on the aspect of a massacre at sunset, the tableaus of her childhood memories washed in unfamiliar shades and making all seem alien. Octavia swung again, in that moment when Strigoi was busy warding a lightning double-strike from Stella, but this time, she didn't aim the copper cord at Strigoi, but instead past her.

Strigoi tried to parry a meteor-hammer blow to her head, but her blade met nothing because that wasn't were the attack was directed. With less training than raw unbridled instinct, Octavia gave the rope of metal she now wielded a flick, and the length of it bucked and twisted, snapping around Strigoi's neck and arm. And because of that, because of that minute but significant impediment to its motion, the next time Mum assaulted her way into Strigoi's web of steel, Octavia was able to jerk the Exorcist off of its balance. Just enough that one of Strigoi's parries didn't work properly, and Mum was able to thrust past the blade's protective warden, cutting the clavicle of the Angel Satin uniform and dragging her own blade up. There was an electric snapping sound as the display of the face shorted for a moment, then a line of dead pixels described a scar reaching up through the grin and through the eye of the Exorcist, the blade even dragging a wound into the horns that lay between head and halo.

"Alright, that's enough out of you," Strigoi muttered, dragging her fouled arm into the cord that Octavia had used, and then yanking hard. The several tonnes of war machine that Octavia rode offered little resistance as she was heaved from her footing and went racing toward Strigoi, the point of her saber levelled at Octavia's eye. This was how she was going to die, wasn't it?

Well, it turned out not, because when six tonnes and change of metal, layered with really, really good armor, impacted an immobile sword held by an Angel's automaton, the inclination was for the harshly angled planes of her armor to deflect. The armor shouted that there were layers of armor failure, but the end result was not a dead Goetia impaled through the head, but instead a Goetia who activated the launch thrusters and plowed hard into the Exorcist, crashing them into one of the great marble pillars that held up the ceiling.

At a blind guess, Octavia thrust her arm out, blocking the path of that saber coming in to try to exploit the damaged section of her armored head. Her guess was good, because though that blade scraped along her arm, Strigoi now lacked the leverage or angle to even get her weapon to the weakened point. The Exorcist stared with its one remaining projected eye at Octavia, then laughed.

"So this is the best of Hell? I'm honestly surprised you disgusting mud-people have managed to get so far. You're going to love what comes next," Strigoi promised.

And true to her word, there was a shattering of the ceiling, as another Exorcist streaked down, flaring its wings to come to a delicate stop, settling onto the floor with burning spear in hands. The armor shouted warnings at Octavia, that the Spellweave in the suit was detecting and ablating hexes and curses that were assailing her. She didn't know what that meant, really, but she tried to get Strigoi off of the field before the numbers turned back into the Hell-Butchers' favor. The problem was, when she tried to drive her armor-plated boot through the Exorcist, there was a bend in reality, and Strigoi wasn't there anymore.

Even as Octavia turned, she could see Seraphic Steel singing out, Strigoi appearing at Mum's back and striking at her. But Mum was damned good at fighting. Her instincts must have reacted faster than even Octavia's note of panic, because without looking back she was able to loop her saber back and deflect the blow which ought to have decapitated her. She turned and darted back, barely avoiding the follow up, retreating toward where Octavia rose to her full, augmented height.

Even as the new Exorcist readied its spear and prepared to join in the violence, a door was kicked open and a javelin was launched at tremendous speeds at the rear Exorcist. That one did not look either, twirling its spear in a great deflective shield that battered the javelin off course and left it to embed directly above the head of an imp in Goetic livery who was cowering responsibly on the floor.

"Apologies, Imperatrix," Ambrosius said as he entered the fight. "I was somewhat delayed in my approach. I trust it is not finished?"

"Great. Now I have to deal with disgusting Sinners as well as abject failures," Strigoi bemoaned.

"Rich coming from you. Isn't there a Secondborn in Heaven that's better at magic than you, these days? By the name of Birah?" Mum asked with a grin of abject cruelty. The damaged face of Strigoi's Exorcist flickered to a look of rage for a moment before returning to its ill-omened grin.

"I'll show you the true master of magic in Heaven!" she declared. And then nothing happened.

"Yeah, that's the thing," Octavia said, as one of the few things she did know about Exorcists bubbled to the surface. "Those things you're hiding inside of? They're great at keeping you from being meaningfully harmed... but not so great at being a focus for your magic."

With a rich chuckle, Ambrosius took the two vaulting strides he needed to cross distance, then hurled himself spear first at the pair of Exorcists, in a move more mad than brave, for Octavia knew that there was no story of people being able to 2v2 Exorcists; she knew her own capabilities by this point well enough that she didn't count herself as a meaningful combatant. At best, Octavia was environmental distraction. Still, when the yet-silent Exorcist tried to counter-stab the incoming Sinner, he found his blade deflecting off the curved surface of Ambrosius' purple scutum, only to have to dodge back as the spear that Agrippa wielded came dangerously close to piercing the automaton's chest. Strigoi tried to strike Agrippa's head from his shoulders with a looping cut, only to have it as well warded, and the moment of vulnerability was all that Mum needed to launch herself into attack once more.

It was illuminating, an epiphany to Octavia, watching these two ancient masters fight against the worst that Heaven had to offer. The gulf between them looked so utterly beyond bridging that in other circumstances Octavia would have slipped into despair, knowing that she would forever be the lagging and trailing tail of a beast of great might and renown. Now, though, she didn't have time to feel sorry for herself or truly comprehend that in ten thousand years Stella had not progressed in her own skill a single whit, while Octavia had gone from hopeless to nearly competent in less than half a decade. So with the shield of ignorance guarding her heart, and six-ish tonnes of metal guarding her flesh, she waded into the fray once more.

She was quickly getting some facility with her armor's thrusters, using them to launch herself not into the air – as the ceiling would have rendered that useless in a hell of a hurry – but instead to throw herself with ruinous pace and freight-train inertia forward. She held an arm up before her head, and thus when the second Exorcist tried to lance her face with his spear it instead tore at the armor for that arm, and she was free to barge through him and send him out of his clash with Agrippa. She hoped that he was going to do the smart thing, to focus his attentions on the one in front of Mum. Alone she could hold it at stalemate. Together they might be able to kill it.

The second Exorcist tried to batter and beat its way out of Octavia's augmented grasp, its clawed feet tearing up the tiles of the floor for the entire way that her bull-rushing took them. But eventually the automaton – or more correctly whomever was piloting it – decided on a different tack. The Exorcist hurled his spear toward Mum, which Octavia tracked for the moment she had, and saw that it fell well short of the now fighting trio. That distraction must have been the Exorcist's purpose, though; while her eye was following the feed of the spear embedding itself into marble, the Exorcist shifted its grip on her, and then with a mighty heave dragged her in a great arc.

Empowered in her movement by the thrusters as she was, she then embedded herself with enormous violence into the floor, cratering the marble and causing her to lose sight, just for a moment, as her stunned brain tried to catch up to the fact that the automaton had just suplexed her into the floor at nearly Mach 1.

When her vision cleared, the Exorcist wasn't next to her anymore. Now, it was closing on Mum and Ambrosius. With a growl she didn't know she had in her, she pulled herself to a stand, and started first to hobble, and then to run back into the fray.

She was not even aware that as she did, a spark of silver light had appeared above the armor's crown.

This was no place for Vaggie. She knew that. She knew it in her bones that the moment that violence started to fly, the best thing – the smartest thing – she could do was hide. That didn't stop her from stabbing a bitch as the circumstances required. But she had a feeling that wasn't going to work this time. She'd already been on the receiving end of a brutal face-rearranging by an Exorcist only a couple of months ago. She wasn't eager to repeat that scenario.

The others in the lobby, though? One of them was revelling it it. Cain was everything that Charlie's stories had ever said about him. Dashing, daring, and daft in equal measure; for all he looked decrepit near to the point of collapse, he laughed and taunted the machine that fought against the tide of Husk's incoming fire, against the attempts of the fiends of Splitwater to snare and immobilize it, and against Charlie herself obviously getting mad.

She didn't know what had happened to her. Only that it was apparently weeks later than she had remembered it being, and that somebody had taken her place for reasons that the scarlet fucker hadn't bothered to elucidate. She ducked as the Exorcist spun hard on the spot, hurling a Splitwater soldier toward her; she was just barely able to get under his flight-path before he slammed her into a wall. There was one thing that Vaggie could do in this fight, though. She could keep Niffty out of it. If her experiences with the last time an Exorcist had come calling to the Happy Hotel were accurate to the current one, then Niffty was endangered by her own lack of adherence to reality. The poor, doomed little creature didn't grasp the danger that Exorcists posed, and treated them like any other surly guest. Surly guests who had the ability and deep desire to kill the likes of Niffty.

Even as Vaggie tried to make for the doors into the inner Hotel, where Niffty slept and spent much of her time, the fight was going on behind her. Where even was Angel Dust?

The line of questioning didn't have long to live. Before she even formulated the next consideration, that he might be out there either whoring, getting drugs, or buying yeast, flour, and olive-oil, there came a crackling sound of glass impacting concrete from outside, audible only for its distinctiveness against the sound of shouting voices and general bedlam. That rain of glass was followed shortly thereafter by the crash of something very heavy slamming into the Mageweave awning that had been put over the entrance to the Hotel. A moment later, the nearly-naked form of Fiona fell to the street, grappled onto a very-out-of-date Exorcist much akin the one that Sam had released from the bunker in the middle of this Hotel.

She looked different, a distracted portion of Vaggie thought.

But even as Vaggie reached the doors and slammed the locks closed to the inner Hotel, she felt an instinct to throw herself to one side. She chose the side to be the one toward where Husk was manning the autocannon that he'd somehow fucking hidden inside the bar! She'd thought that old machine-gun he'd used last time was bad enough, but no; he had to go and get the cannon off of a fucking Bradley and use that instead! And because of her dodge, the razor feathers that the Exorcist had launched at her general direction didn't impale her.

Thankfully both for the integrity of the Hotel and the sanity of Vaggie, he wasn't firing it often, now that the Exorcist was inside the Hotel proper. That thing had been useful in the first few minutes, smashing down Exorcists who crossed in the now-gaping front-doors of the Hotel and driving them to find softer targets. Now, though... honestly it might be a liability.

Fiona shifted from her place on the pavement, even as the Exorcist which had come down with her flapped its bakelite wings and resumed its footing. It tried to launch down with a ground-pound on the Dragon, only for O'Daire to back-roll out of its path. That still should have put Purgator to her tail... but she didn't seem to have one. Had it already nailed her once? Considering her legs were now slathered with crimson blood, it wouldn't be that surprising.

"Charlie you have to get it outside!" Vaggie shouted.

Charlie, though, was busy. She had abandoned her more polite visage, her body swollen and brutal, an extra two feet of stature ripping her clothing and cord-like muscles straining beneath her skin. While Cain and the soldiers of Splitwater were doing their best to slow the Exorcist in the Hotel lobby down, it was Charlie who was doing the heavy lifting. The Exorcist was focused mainly on her, seeing a mighty demon with crimson horns jutting through long golden hair and making the obvious estimation that she was likely the biggest threat.

O'Daire didn't even have a chance to crawl away before the Exorcist that had fallen down with her grabbed her by the neck and hurled her into the lobby, directly into the path of Husk's incoming fire. And though O'Daire's hide was mighty, and proof against small arms, it was not immune to the tender ministrations of a gun usually used to shoot down aircraft. Great chunks of her flesh were blown away, coating the Exorcist that Charlie fought with blood, gore, and bone, and for even a moment sheltering it from Husk's attempts at withering fire. It ripped with one arm, dragging the snaring line that the soldiers tried to use to hobble it, catching the unfortunate Fiend who grappled with it by her head, which it then crushed under its fingers like a grape, before there was a flash of cold white light, burning away the scarlet on its clothing, and it tried to lash forward with a buck-knife of Seraphic Steel at Charlie.

Charlie slapped the blade away, the arm being thrown wide even as the slowly Regenerating carcass of Fiona O'Daire came to a rolling stop on the floor. Charlie, finally grasping what the other Exorcist had done, seemed to lose what little temper she had left in her. With a look that crossed from lunatic fury, into something utterly inhuman, she moved with a speed that the Exorcist could not contend with, stripping the blade from its hand and launching it into a pillar across the lobby. The same pillar that she'd launched Vaggie's harpoon into during the last time there'd been an Exorcist in here, as it turned out. And the column, not repaired from the last time, crumbled as the weapon shattered it; the ceiling overhead bowed down slightly as its support was lost.

That seemed to ignite even more rage in Charlie, as she began to belch out light that was white and cold, her hands becoming shining white claws, with texture somewhere between ice and ivory. She didn't opt for any sort of elegance or cleverness; she simply ripped and tore, wrenching the Exorcist's limbs from their sockets and hurling them away, tearing apart the once-more pristine white Angel Satin of its dress in a frantic and almost animalistic desire to tear out the thing's heart. When at last she reached the innards of the machine, she tore them out even as they burned super-hot and tried to melt through her. With a snap of beyond-arctic cold, she froze them in her grasp and spiked the device into the floor. The other Exorcist, which had been approaching, hesitated.

'What the fuck?' was written on the thin glass of its face.

Charlie didn't even grant that question the dignity of response. She was in one moment standing over one Exorcist, and in the next she was standing before the other, her clawed hands thrust through its chest. And with a tremendous rip, she managed to tear the older Exorcist into three parts before it even had a chance to register that it had died.

There was a moment of quiet, announced only by the exhausted panting of Cain, the confused and fearful muttering of the soldiers, and the wrathful rasp of Charlie. Then there came a hiss alike to steam escaping a vessel, and Charlie began to contract on herself, losing her added stature and mass. "Is that all of them?" she asked.

"I would hope that it was. That was exhausting," Cain said.

"Are you alright? It's not smart to fight those things as a Sinner!" Charlie said, instantly moving to a more caring mode, which left the soldiers mildly baffled.

"I would agree, but it pulled its punches. Almost as though it feared to cause me real harm," Cain said. He shrugged. "I must think on this."

"Charlie, are you alright?" Vaggie asked, as she moved to her lover's side.

"I'm fine, Vaggie. Those things are push-overs."

"Well thank fuck there's at least one person here who can say that," the colonel of the fighters muttered. Roth snapped Vaggie a salute. "We're going to barricade the entrance. Corporal, if you could take over the cannon?"

"Aye sir!" another Fury said, moving to take Husk's place behind the guns.

"Oh, no... O'Daire..." Charlie said, pulling Vaggie's attention to the brutalized form of Fiona.

Who then pulled in a desperate breath, her shattered body bucking against the floor as she returned to consciousness. Charlie quickly dragged Fiona to the Recovery Sofa and draped a blanket over her.

"What happened up there?" Charlie asked, as Fiona pulled in a few more breaths, and tensed her face as though fighting down pain. "Are there other Exorcists in my hotel?"

"They got Rachel," Fiona said.

"What?" Charlie asked.

"It got her. Purgator right to the face. Punched her head inside out... I couldn't stop it," Fiona seemed so deeply ashamed by that. And at that, Charlie's face fell. Her lips quivered. Vaggie knew that tears were welling, that the constant self-talk of failure and inadequacy was mounting up in her mind, and all Vaggie could do was pull Charlie into her arms and hold her close. "I fought so hard... and I couldn't stop it..."

"It's okay, Charlie."

"No it's not," Charlie said. "I can't even keep this building safe..."

And with that, Charlie pulled into Vaggie's desperate embrace and began to weep in earnest.

There were few challenges that Ambrosius considered himself lesser to. Leading a Legion, or many Legions, against the forces of Heaven? That was par for his course. Dueling to the death against the champions of the Aristocratic Families? Child's play. But to array his strength, his skill, and his guile against the Exorcist, a device designed from its synthetic toenails to the top of its halo specifically to kill him, that was a very hard ask.

Once, centuries ago, Ambrosius had engaged in a 'friendly' bout against the First of the Damned. It had been a bracing encounter, one that Ambrosius was not ashamed to admit he lost, but that came mostly to the fact that despite the 'friendliness' of the bout, it didn't stop Cain from cheating as though his life depended on it. And that was an illuminating source of humility for Ambrosius when he desperately needed it; just because he was an honorable duelist, it gave no reason for his opponent to be likewise. And as bad of a blatant cheater in their fight that Cain had been, these Exorcists were even worse.

His hands moved with their nature, deflecting blows and parrying them aside, trying to lash forward with thrust and slash with his own spear, to break the skin of the Exorcist and try to lance something important within. But he was at innate disadvantage. The Exorcist was stronger than he was. It was faster than he was. And it had access to Angelic powers to which Ambrosius had no response.

There was a snap as a portion of his scutum shattered, the blow or force which caused it unseen by his eagle-eyes. This was a fight that was strictly beyond his capacities, but he had a duty to Imperator Stella, to Domina Octavia, and deeper than that to his own oaths. He had sworn that he would allow no harm to befall the Goetia within their manse. And thus far, he had as yet still upheld it.

Instinct sang, and Ambrosius danced, bashing the boss of his scutum straight into a jab, deflecting the blow awkwardly so that the old Triarius could slam his own speartip into the thigh of the automaton. Ordinarily, such a blow would split the vessels of blood through the leg, and kill a man in a matter of seconds. But this device had no such veins, so all he managed to do was tear Angel Satin, rupture high impact plastic, and maybe damage some trifling internal mechanism that drove this thing's leg. He would have wished were he a more inane man that he could have crippled the thing at such a blow. Reality did not oblige.

A flick of a glance was all he could offer to where his mistress and his ward were embattled against the one calling itself Strigoi. Two Ars Goetia against one Exorcist was potentially a winning match for their side. And Ambrosius would have to fight hard to ensure that the numbers favored them for as long as he could manage. He was not the only Sinner in Hell who could have fought a piloted Exorcist to a standstill... but he was in a rare fraternity. And even then, amongst that rare fraternity, there were none amongst them, Ambrosius included, who could finish one of these thrice damned things.

The impact of a spear's haft against his helmet rattled him, but he kept his focus as much as his will was able. It was trying to weather him down now, levying an insistent rain of blows against his defense and dexterity, slowly eroding his footing and his foundation until the mighty stone of his being crumbled for it. He knew also that the rate at which that rain fell, at which his stone eroded, would be vastly swifter than it would against any other opponent. Again, this was a device designed to kill him. It had every edge. And when there came another crunch of shattered wood and ping of broken metal as a section of his scutum that neither combatant touched was blown away, he knew that it was using that edge to its fullest.

His scutum was losing integrity. When it failed, he would be shieldless against this monster. The first time he tried fighting against a monster without his shield, it ended with him gored to death by an elephant's tusk on his native Italian soil. This would be less merciful even than that. A song of metal through the air, a whistle unlike most any other thing, and Ambrosius had to pull his neck in a most unnatural way so that the Exorcist's own spear cut off the ends of feathers instead of splitting his head like a log. And when Ambrosius took the wide-open strike that such a gambit naturally opened, he found it stymied by the spear getting in its way even as it was still past his ear, as though the Exorcist had manifested a second to defend itself even as it attacked most recklessly.

There was another smash, and Ambrosius staggered back a step, his left arm creaking under the clawed boot that slammed into the scutum and drove it against him. He was starting to lose, his endurance nearly spent. And he dare not even glance to see if there was anything approaching victory behind him.

So he decided to die as a man, attempting the impossible. He had not been born a god. So by Jupiter he would die fighting like one. He barged forward, through the net of Angel Steel that the Exorcist wove in an ever-mobile web before it, using what little remained of his shield to keep that point from lancing him until it was too late. Until he was in the right place. Until his hand thrust with the might of two thousand years of war and service, slamming into the chest of the Exorcist.

And then there was a brilliant pain as Ambrosius was forced back despite himself. He tried to stab again, but found the strength leaving his arms. He looked down, and could see the haft of the Exorcist's spear disappearing into his own chest, an almost mirror of the blow that Ambrosius had dealt. And Ambrosius could see the edges of his own chest-wound begin to turn grey, and to crumble.

"No!" Octavia's voice shouted, her armored arm reached toward him, as he accepted his second death. Then there was a blast of cadmium green flame that raced from the tube in her armmra reh in ebute eht morf dacer taht emalf neerg muimdac fo tsalb a saw ereht nehT .htead dnoces sih detpecca eh sa ,mih drawot dehcaer mra deromra reh ,detuosh eciov Octavia's "Ņ̶̝̹͖̙̠͂̋͊͗̓͜͠O̷̩̙̣̓͆̑̽͑͗̈́̆̚.̶̣̆̓̉̈́̈́͝"

.elbmurc ot dna ,yerg nrut ot nigeb dnuow-tsehc nwo sih fo segde eht ees dlouc Ambrosius dnA . taiW .ereht dnouw on was dna ,nwod dekool Ambrosius ?gnineppah saw tahW .ekirts rorrim thiw deilper ton dah tsicroxE eht , deniamer reaps nwo sih hgouht taht was dna ,pu dekool eH. The Exorcist before him was awash with strange green fire, horrifying to his senses as it tried to strangle his nostrils and choke his throat, and he watched as the thing before him crumbled away, not even burned so much as retroactively erased. Had those Sinner fools been so brazen as to actually do it?

Since Ambrosius didn't seem to be dying anymore – which was a bizarre thing, to both remember being stabbed through the heart by Seraphic Steel, and now not – he did what he always did when confounded in such circumstance; he did his fucking duty. With a great heave, he tore his now burning hastae from the body of the dissolving Exorcist, and with full body hurled it into the grapple between Mistress Stella and the other Exorcist which was pulled back as though in mild horror. Strigoi offered no actual resistance as the spear shattered into her electric face, and the splatter of the foul, terrifying Infernal Talc which had coated his weapon now burnt the electrical innards of the device.

There was a final crash as the device, now defunct, was thrown hard into the wall by Stella, then a strange silence, puncutated only by the cries of pain and gasping for breath by the people wounded as incidental victims of the great melee between the three masters of this house against the foul intruders. Ambrosius turned to Octavia, to ensure that the madness which had saved him did not do her harm. Infernal Talc was a monstrously, suicidally dangerous substance to carry about. And if those Sinners had done as they'd claimed and packed any amount of it inside of that panoply... well, if they had, it had just saved his life.

Whatever notions he might have had to bring rebuke and harsh words upon the Sinners of GLW Heavy Metal were strangled in his throat. And at his side, so too were the words in Stella's. The prototype armor which Octavia wore was damaged, rather badly in some spots, but there was a shocking new appearance on it. Hovering above Octavia's brow as a ring that radiated clean, frigidly cold, sanitary-feeling silver light. He blinked at it, in confusion.

"How are you doing that, Octavia?" Stella asked.

"The Exorcists are gone? And I can't see any others coming," she said, her armored head panning left and right, that silver ring following it as it moved.

"Octavia... what is that?" Stella asked, more clearly. Octavia tried to bend and look above her, but she saw nothing, because the ring aped her movements perfectly. It wasn't until there was a loud hiss and the machine pulled itself open that the ancient Sinner and the fallen angel saw it for what it really was.

When Octavia Goetia emerged from the prototype, she brought a silver halo with her. It hovered over her own head, quivering with might that even Agrippa could sense. He turned a look to Stella, and found himself doubly shocked, because tears were coming to Stella's eyes. Tears that she didn't even try to deny, to ignore, and to push back into her eyes.

"You're alright," she said. "You're one of us."

"Uh... thanks?" Octavia asked, looking every bit as 'weirded-out' as one of her age in such circumstances could be expected to. And when Stella pulled her daughter into an embrace, Octavia gave only a token resistance before allowing the mountain-strong arms of her mother to hold her close. In the distance, a teetering portion of the ceiling finally lost its battle against the laws of structural integrity, snapping free and falling to a massive crash in the hall of stone breaking against stone.

"We should make ready our defenses, in case others come," Ambrosius was loath to end such a heartening scene, but reality seldom cared for the desires of its inhabitants.

"Right. Of course. Get in your armor, my brilliant daughter. Our home will not fall today," Stella said, pride beaming on her face. Octavia gave a chuckle, seemingly self-conscious, and nodded, before getting back into the prototype and starting to stomp the halls of her Palace.

Wrath was hotter than Mayberry expected. She'd spent a couple of years down here in Hell, and was used to Pride's weather. And she had spent her days expecting whole-heartedly that she would face her annihilation without ever seeing any distant shores ever again. Gerald had always promised to take her to Europe. Gerald was big on promises. And just like the ones he made not to fuck a blonde whore in Mayberry's bed on his birthday while she was at work, he had failed on most of them. So this was a new situation for Mayberry.

She didn't know how long they'd been down here. When they had moved from Pride to Wrath – a notion she still had to cement in her mind as 'actually possible' – the hour had moved from the break of the morning to some point in the afternoon. And the other Sinners of Killgrave School now waited here, in a cathedral that showed scenes of Hell's ancient history.

If one were to look straight up, you could see scenes of God's creation of Hell, hovering eternal over the pits of the Abyss. Traveling down from the dome at the cathedral's heart, came scenes of the Elder Devils contending for mastery, of the division of rulership amongst them to the First Kings of Hell. How Satan himself overtook the First King and became Wrath Incarnate. How the Fiends arose, and of scenes of battle against The Leviathans. Scenes of the decline of the Elder Devils and the responding rise of the Fiends, of the names and faces of the Old Kings of Hell, from before Lucifer broke the old way in favor of his own.

The art was beautiful, but held a certain bittersweetness. And it apparently had all been made – every single stroke – by Satan himself. Like he was trying to tell a history in paint and image so he would no longer have to put breath to words that had become too painful to speak. It was a work of exulansis, tethered with responsibility. Mayberry was a bit uncomfortable looking at something so obviously personal to the King of Wrath, but... it was what it was.

There was a strange tearing, a flare of uncolor as a portal was opened into the cathedral hall, and Satan stepped through. His robes were slightly mussed, as though somebody had ruffled him to some trifling degree. By the time Satan had smoothed them, only a few minute rips and the fact that an Exorcist's Harpoon was pinned through the voluminous sleeve like a lethal cuff-link gave any indication that he'd just come from a fight.

"I apologize for the inconvenience. I will return thee to thine homes in short time," Satan promised. He twisted his hand, and the strange, brick-like... thing... which was the Altar of Worms rotated to his unspoken command, twisting and shifting and teeming and surging and draining away as it moved through alien geometries until it presented itself as a tall table, with a massive rotary telephone atop it. Satan picked up the receiver, and dialed the number '4'.

Then there was a long silence.

"Good evening. Your brother has broken the old covenant. I will respond in kind," Satan said with great restraint. "I care not. Whether he had authority or not is thine business, not mine. And the consequences be upon thee also. Good evening."

Then he set the thing down, quietly, delicately. And Mayberry knew that she, a schoolteacher who was here only because of one measly rampage motivated by rage-blinded revenge, knew that she was witnessing the transition from an old age, and into a new, and far more perilous one.

"I warn thee now, Edith Mayberry; the threat though stemmed has not ended. By perfidious Gabriel's command, Exorcists shall now harrow and bear ruin to the ring of Pride. And mine protections extend only thus far," he gestured toward the door that no Sinner child under Mayberry's care had dared to cross. "I may send thee home... but it will be into danger. Canst thou accept this?"

"This is Hell. We're always in danger," she said.

Satan nodded, a sad look on his terrifying visage. "Would that you could have seen Hell in the days before. Farewell, Edith Mayberry. Thou hath earned now two boons from the Final Satan. When thou needeth them, ask, and much can be given."

With that, Satan twisted his hand as though turning a knob, and the uncolor swept over Mayberry and her students, dumping them in the hallway outside of the school's gymnasium. She quickly did a head-count, finding all that had gone to Wrath had returned with her. And within seconds, a number of Hellphones began to go off, as Sinner parents or guardians of these Sinner children frantically called looking for them.

Mayberry looked up through a hole punched the whole height of the building nearby, to the sky that lay beyond it. It was only just about noon, snow falling in Pride making for brilliant prismatic shine. It was beautiful in the way a sharp edge was beautiful. Sad, in the way that a forsaken bowl was sad. Still, Mayberry didn't bother trying to deal with her emotions about what had happened today at this very moment. She was still a teacher. And these were still her students.

"Alright now gather 'round my children. I'm gonna get you all back home fast as a blink. Who lives closest?" she asked. She was in Hell, and Hell had given her the element of fire. It would take a lot to stop her in her duty, now.

It was strange how the knowledge that Satan himself saw her work as worthy made her feel so cherished. Strange, but good.

Things were off.

Mister Alastor had asked for her help for a while last night, which was a bit rude waking her up from her beauty sleep. Still, she had a job to do, and cleaning things up made everything less poisonous. She simply could not abide things out of place. Dust was blasphemy. Broken bits were sacrilege. And an unmade bed was to spit in the face of God.

She moved as quickly as her little body would take her, practically running in the genteel way that her mother had showed her. She had always been the smallest of the family, so small that even fully grown she still wore the same clothes that she had in her early youth. Some called her a little doll. She could have been their little doll, if they'd wanted her. But no. They looked at her, they saw a child, and the idea of doing naughty things with a child sickened them.

She'd tried to convince a few of them otherwise. They had rejected her anyway.

She didn't take that happily.

But that was before she got shot four times and ended up down here. Now, Mister Alastor made sure that she had things that kept her mind occupied, her hands occupied, and allowed her to do with the rest of her body as she pleased. And down here, people didn't seem to care about her stature. Hell was fun.

Still, having Mister Alastor as a patron had gotten old by the time he introduced her to Miss Charlie. He kept forgetting about her. Ignoring her. She didn't like being ignored. She hated it. But even thinking of the hate she'd felt toward that made her angry all over again, so she quickly focused on the door which was stuck closed. It shouldn't have been. Niffty had cleaned it just last evening and the door swung like it was newly made.

With a frustrated scowl on her face, and lacking the raw strength to barge the door down under any facility of her own, she immediately thought of another way to get into that room. And the most obvious one was to go out through a window and crawl along the facade! Of course that would work!

With that plan in mind and having given absolutely no thought to the downsides of it, Niffty moved to the next door down the hall and opened it, striding spritely through the bedroom that had yet to see a guest until she'd crossed its length and reached the window, which she threw open with nary a moment's consideration of height, danger, or more immediately, weather.

Snow immediately stung her one great eye, which she had to squint as she with great and solid obliviousness kipped out onto to the decorative ledge. It was not built, as it turned out, to carry the weight of a Sinner. But Niffty didn't weigh as much as most Sinners. So she was able to pull herself along the stretch of wall, that overlooked the whole of this part of Pentagram City in the snow. The sun was sporadic, now, occasionally cutting through clouds which disgorged more snow, but gave her enough light to pick her toe-holds long the edges until she reached the next window. And since the latch was on the other side, she got frustrated and punched the glass out.

Well, that was uncouth. She'd made herself a mess. With a discomfited grumble, she pulled the window open and slipped into the next room, immediately dedicating herself to the task of cleaning up first the shards of glass on the floor, and then the blood that her arm was leaking. When had that happened? Oh, right, when she punched the glass! Only once those messes were squared away did she turn, and see man-like figures of beyond black in the room with her, who had been standing there the entire time.

"Oh. My name's Niffty! Who are you?" she asked of the three utterly still figures.

They remained rudely silent.

"It's impolite not to introduce yourself to a lady, sirs!" Niffty demanded, stomping her little heel.

They remained rudely silent.

"Well just for that, I'm not going to talk to you! Good day sir!" she said with a fit of pique and went to the door and moved the chair which had been put against its knob at some point, allowing her egress. It would be hours before she even thought to tell anybody about what she saw in the room. And hours more before she actually did something about it.

"There were put into place a set of agreements, some of the oldest put to chisel and stone. You have to understand the world in which these agreements took place, to understand why they were so monumental in that they fell; the Provision of Scourging was enacted between God and the Old Kings of Hell long before Lucifer had even been Sung into being. That if ever there was a threat TO Hell arising from the denizens OF Hell, Heaven could intervene with the Old Kings' permission to ensure that Hell remained stable and intact.

Those same provisions are why the Leviathans are now extinct. When they were expelled from Heaven, they came here, breeding with the Fiends of Envy. And the rest of Hell quickly saw them for what they were. With the weapons of Angels in their hands, the Old Kings drove them into oblivion. And there the provision remained, alive but hibernating, until The Silence of God, the Entry Shift, and the overpopulation of Hell due to Heaven's mistakes. By then, Hell was Lucifer's. He tried to argue that the provision was unnecessary, that he could deal with the population problem on his own. It should be obvious that argument was less than successful.

But to break it the way that Gabriel did? That was to throw millions of years of peace and good relations onto the pyre for nothing but one man's bloodlust. It was to make a mockery of everything that the Old Peace stood for. It was the Archangel of Might deciding that he knew better than God, and that Hell was best disposed by having nobody left alive on it. He believed, as many of his ilk did, that nothing good could ever come from hell. And he believed it wrongly.

He was so very wrong about that.

...

That's not a question I can answer, Killjoy. He's almost fifty now. You can ask him yourself."

-Magister Purson, Ars Goetia and Hexbreaker General