The last few months had seen Imp City changed pretty dramatically. Many of the buildings that had been torn down by the Exorcists working in tandem had already been cleared and a lot of them were going back up again, an almost lunatic zeal possessed by the builders because for the first time they didn't need to drag their tools, gear, and materials way the fuck out of town in order to put up a new structure. The last time that construction companies had had a chance to work on this many buildings this deep in the center of Imp City was back in 1981, when some dispshit set off a small nuke in the city for poorly-understood and frequently mocked reasons. This time, they didn't even need to deal with any nuclear fallout, which made things much, much faster than even that sprint of construction.
The Miller Building was just one of many projects that went up during that time period. IMP owned the entire building, so claimed top storey as their own, a penthouse of offices. And because of some sort of weirdo building method that Moxxie had been eager to talk about at hideous and deeply boring length, the building even when it was put up wouldn't be 'done', in that new stories could be injected into the building under the IMP Group's floor as though the top story were lifted off and the new level slotted in its place. It was an imposing construction of concrete and steel and glass. It had Blitz's family-name in big, fuck-off letters near its roof.
It was a dream come true.
The elevator specially made to race from the ground floor to this one opened with a ding, and Blitz took in the newly reconstructed offices of the entire Immediate Murder Professionals Conglomerate. Though they weren't finished painting, there were already clearly places for Blitz-Krieg Magical Solutions over yonder, and along the end of the hall was the smaller office of Rough Research and Analytics, which was a thing that Moxx had started up during the four months (which was a fair bit faster than they thought this would take) it required to put this building up on the shattered lot.
"Well ho-lee-shit will you look at our new digs," Blitz said, beaming with pride as he stepped out of the elevator with his hands jauntily laid atop his hip-bones. "You'd almost think we were important or some shit."
"We own the building, sir," Moxxie said, rubbing at his eye because it was obvious that he'd woken up mere minutes before the meeting that presaged this move. Blitz wasn't about to poo-poo somebody getting as much sack-time as they possibly could, but don't let it get in the way of business, y'idjit!
"Yeah, this place is going to be great," Loona said, eyes off of her phone in a rare spectacle as she moved to the Last Chance office which took up a section of the floor only somewhat larger than Moxxie's little project. Even as she said that, there was another ding, and as section of the wall opened up, revealing the utility elevator and having a bunch of Hellhounds grunt and swear as they shifted a ginormous crate of some kinda bullshit through the as-yet uninstalled doors to Last Chance's offices. "Careful with that! If it breaks it'll cast me a quarter mill to replace it!"
"We'll be careful, Loon!" one of the Hounds shouted back, and then he growled. "No, straighten it out you dumb bastards; I measured it and it will fit if you go in straight!"
Krieg and Uller skirted around him, bypassing the working Hellhounds and heading directly for their own office. Just inside the door, Krieg paused, taking a moment to collect herself, then swung her arm in a circle the way that Moxx did. There was a fritz sound in the air, and the teenager growled.
"Casparastikov knot, not Gordaspian," Moxxie said, without looking up. Krieg glanced back at him, then repeated her motion. This time a portal much like Moxxie's opened to her command. She gave a grin, and then began to drag a bunch of shit into her new place. Yeah, keep on spewing your moon-language, Moxxie. At least one of the people up here can actually understand it.
"This place is gonna be nice when it's all decorated," Millie said, holding her kid at her hip. Beatrice had about half of her fist in her mouth, and was looking at everything around her with undisguised imp-spawn interest. She was shooting up fast. Considering her mama, no great surprise there. Blitz, though, took the opportunity to move to the doors to his new office, an office he owned, in a business he owned, in a building he owned, and threw them open.
Though the old furniture from the old building had been demolished, he'd been able to find almost perfect replications of them, so that when he stepped into the first chamber of the sprawling offices of Immediate Murder Professionals, Interplanar Division (because apparently 'futureproofing' was a word and Moxxie wanted to be sure that when they had a whole gaggle of yahoos killing just the targets in Hell, there would be a different group dedicated to using that fancy fuckin' book to do the rest of their job without interruption), it was to a scene that could have belonged in a building three neighborhoods and a shittonne of rubble away. True, the size of the reception area was different, but it had the same rug, the same desks, the same posters – though they weren't yet hanging on the walls – and the same tank filled with admittedly new eels. It was just that there was another door where the old office didn't have one before, leading to an entire other section which he didn't know how he was going to use.
He'd figure it out. IMP had already killed the unkillable twice, in Hell alone.
"Home sweet home," he said. Moxxie and Millie pressed past him, and they took in the scene before them with at least some of his wistful nostalgia. He moved to the door, exactly where he remembered it being and demanded it be replicated, and threw it open. The office that was his was bigger than it had been, and none of the décor was up. Some of it had to be put back together by Moxxie, because there was literally no replacing them for any amount of money; those things were irreplacable by the markets of Hell. And when Moxxie fixed them, he did more than restore them to the state that they were in when the building fell on them. They restored them to before Blitz, in a spate of depression, tried to scratch himself out of them.
There was a time where, despite everything, Blitz hated looking at himself. Hated seeing his own picture. Like he fundamentally didn't deserve to have even that fractional sort of immortality. Now? Now it didn't bother him.
Blitz was smiling to himself as he slashed open the box that had been left on the desk, and quickly splashed its contents onto the wooden top. A bunch of horse figurines, a much-cracked-and-often-repaired #1 Bitch mug, a somewhat more intact Boss Bitch mug. His now accidentally-restored flintlock pistol that had been mashed to shit during the fight against Birch. That poster with him and Barb from back in the shitty-old-day. A rolodex which was as old as he was, even with time-travel bullshit, that had survived intact from the old spot. A land-line phone, of the same provenance. A blender.
And upending the box, he had a bunch of business cards fall out. Some of them were old and dog-eared, people he'd never gotten around to calling and likely never would. Cards from Jakob Maccabee, or Glassy-ass or whatever the fuck that Goetia's name was. A faded red card from the Goat of the Apocalypse – wasn't sure why he had that one. And then there was one more, this one almost glowingly white with ballistically black text, saying 'Gadreel, Death's Chosen'.
There was no number.
"Hey Moxx?" Blitz asked, as he rounded his desk, threw himself into his chair, and kicked his boots up onto the desk.
"What is it, sir?" Moxxie asked from the reception area.
"What's the Big Guy's standing bounty for any fuckin' Angel up to, now?" Blitz asked.
"It's still at two million Souls for a broken halo or a fresh-right-wing, sir," Moxxie said. He then let out a groan, and leaned around the door-frame. "You're not thinking of actually taking that human's offer to kill that Angel, IN HEAVEN, are you?" the smaller imp demanded.
"Well we missed our fuckin' chance to kill him when he was down here, so I don't see much other choice in how to keep our pride as killers than to go up there and shake him the fuck loose!" Blitz said. Birch had been a very clear lesson to Blitz, to never do for free what you could get paid to do. And more than that, it taught him another, equally valid lesson for somebody whose livelihood was as mercenary as assassins' were; never get paid once for a job when you can get paid for it twice.
While it was true that the weirdo with his incomplete halo had only offered a quarter mill, that was just a spurring to do the job for the full payday. And it sat well in Blitz's petty little heart that there were denizens of Heaven just as sick of the Angels' bullshit as Blitz was.
"So how the fuck am I supposed to contact this bitch if she doesn't give me her number?" Blitz asked, turning the white card around in his fingers a few times.
There was a sound like somebody unleashed a fuckload of panicked pigeons in Blitz's office, and when he glanced up, he was surprised to find an actual angel in the office with him. He sat back in his chair.
"Heya, bitch; what the fuck is your phone-number?" he asked.
"I sensed that somebody was calling for me. What is… where are we?" Gadreel asked, looking around. He wasn't afraid of this one, because she'd pretty conclusively burned her bridges Up Top. And more than that, he'd killed beside this chick. She was good people. He had that feeling.
"My new office," he said, stretching his arms and lacing his fingers behind his head in leisure.
"I… see," she said.
"Look, you gotta get a Hellphone if you wanna keep up with me. This magic voodoo-card shit ain't gonna cut it. How'd that thing with the Big Hoss go?"
"He was furious, but I managed not to have him be furious at me, so I consider it a qualified success," the Angel said. She shrugged. "Officially, I'm now the Ars Goetia of Endings. Unofficially he wasn't impressed so he gave me no resources to live off of or establish myself. Such is life."
"So I'm not hearing 'no, I don't want to work for an imp'," Blitz said, a grin on his face. The Angel turned a deeply unamused look at him.
"That card wouldn't have activated unless you had something needing my skills. Why have you called me?"
"Want a job?" he asked.
"You're offering an Angel a job amongst killers in Hell," Gadreel asked.
"Yup!" Blitz said brightly.
"Why?"
"To say I got the first one!" Blitz said. Gadreel stared at him. "Also 'cause you know your way 'round Heaven and I wanna kill somebody up there."
"Are we back to Atheed?" she asked.
"You know me too well," Blitz said with a laugh.
"I warn you now, it will be bloody. He's a tremendously dangerous Firstborn in good standing. And I… well, am only one of those things."
"Great. We can work out the deets later," Blitz said. He hopped up from his desk and leaned out the doorframe, to see Moxxie and Millie cooing over their admittedly adorable kid. "Hey, M&M, meet our newest hire."
"Hire? I didn't sense anybody WHAT THE FUCK!" Moxxie began and recoiled bodily when Gadreel stepped out of his office.
"Um… Hello. I am Gadreel," the Angel said, suddenly and obviously having no idea what to do.
"No kidding," Moxxie said flatly.
"I… apparently… work here now," she said.
"And we're gonna go kill some fuckhead named Atheeb!" Blitz said with his arms hoisted to the sky in perhaps premature victory.
"Atheed," all of Moxxie, Millie, and Gadreel said, leaving only Beatrice not to shit on his parade.
"Fuck you all," He said in entirely reasonable response.
Chapter 41
Atheed, The Sword of Exorcism
Moxxie was not entirely comfortable with leaving Beatrice behind without Millie to look after her, but given this was their first actual, whole-hearted attempt at killing an Angel, he wasn't about to offer half of an ass's worth of effort that might see failure reaping death for the dealers as opposed to the dealt. Still, he knew that Tilla was a good mother; she'd certainly gotten enough experience raising enough spawn over the decades that she'd have to have been laughably incompetent for her not to by this juncture.
Then again, considering the way Blitz was, and the depths of Barb's former addiction, maybe there was some incompetence there after all.
Moxxie wafted the notion away. Whatever the case of Tilla's former ineptitude, her years and experiences had made her a wise caregiver, the kind of thing that Hell had few of so cherished dearly when one appeared. And having Tilla – and by extension Krieg – looking after the spawn meant that both of Beatrice's parents could come to this damnably tricky ploy.
"This seems dangerously thinly planned," the Angel who now worked for Blitz said. Funny, how Blitz complained to no end about the mere prospect of having to hire a Sinner for any role even so lowly as a toilet-cleaner, but jumped on the opportunity to get a traitorous Angel who was outside of Lucifer's good books on his payroll. Gadreel had been reticent about why she, despite her Godborn provenance and the fact that she very effectively betrayed heaven by warning Hell about the Harrying, was now working for lowly imps instead of getting drunk and fucking with wild abandon in her own personal palace out in the hinterlands. Moxxie had theories, but considering that Gadreel also had an awkward streak five times broader than her wingspan, it would be a while before she opened up enough for him to do better than speculate. Whatever her reasons for blowing it with Lucifer and having to work for Blitz, she would reveal them in time.
"If there were a simpler way of doing it, I'd love to hear it," Moxxie said, as he ran his fingers along the line in the Grimoire Ultima Mundi, the Knowledge of the World's Ending. It had always bothered him to no end that the book would erase the spell from the mind of a caster the moment after one cast it. It was a protection feature which kept this sort of 'dangerous' information in a select few hands, most notably those aligned with Lucifer. Apparently, Gadreel had no personal need of such a thing; with both her halo and wings intact, she could 'Transit' to any plane of being with little more than a thought and some willpower. That piece of trivia had finally explained the who and the why of the Grimoire Ultima Mundi; as one of the fallen Angels who followed Lucifer, the Grimoire was somebody obsessed with regaining the ability to Transit, to the extent of even sacrificing their own body so that they could hold the power once more, albeit in the form of a ridiculously powerful tome of magic.
"Unfortunately, I don't have such a thing," Gadreel said. There was a blaring, as Blitz laid on the horn to somebody who was in their way. The Van was only just big enough for the five of them, as Maelstrom had his head out the passenger's window, trying to get a look at the scene of some-small-chaos that they were approaching. Gadreel, thus, had been relegated to the back bench seat, while Moxxie and Millie, as was their custom, rode in the middle row. "There are barricades up between the Clouds of Heaven that prevent Transit by unknown travelers. While I could perhaps get through them, if I were to try to Transit with you, you'd likely end up vaporized or worse."
"How can somethin' be worse than vaporized?" Millie asked.
Gadreel glanced to her, then gave an uncomfortable shrug. "In Heaven, they find a way," was her answer.
Seriously, fuck this magic of forgetfulness. If there was only one reason why Moxxie now fully and without compunction considered the Codex Cruac in Alabaster to be the superior text between it in its crumbled, ruined state and this in its completeness, it was that the Codex Cruac didn't try to steal its knowledge back once you learned it. It was, in every way that books were supposed to be, a vessel for transporting the past into the future. If only there were a way to bypass this fucking thing…
"Actually…" Moxxie said, as he tilted his head toward Millie so he could look at something beautiful for the next few cognitive hours while he thought about the Forgetful Mind Hex, the books that had it inscribed into them, and the information they gatekept. And the information that this tome offered, similar to many of the Goetic Grimoires both in the hands of the Goetia themselves and those who the Devil Himself deems worth enough of a damn to give one over to (such as his own daughter, whose book looked like she only opened it once a decade). The notion of Transiting without a gate, of interplanar travel without the usual frailties, it gave him ideas.
Sure, the gate was slow, static, and bound up with magic that made you forget how to cast it again once you put the effort in, but there was one major reason why the Goetic Grimoires extolled the virtues of 'gate travel'. Gates, for all their other failings, were incredibly safe. Once a Gate was intact, be it Thaumaturgical, Goetic, Gnostic, or Relativistic, there was essentially nothing left that could fuck up and make it dangerous. The gate would either take you to where you want to go, or would fail to open in the first place, safeguarding you from any disastrous side-effects.
But Transiting was a different beast. There was much more room for error, many more things that could go wrong. He posited within his own mind that Angels likely invented an entire form of time-travel out of of the mistakes they made with their chosen method of teleportation, unaware that he was both perfectly correct in that assumption and that the Angels had formalized the process and called them 'Jaunts' now. A fortunate mistake was exactly what Moxxie was looking for.
He spent an amount of time that most people would have been dragged into boredom for, literally recalling everything he ever read from the Codex Cruac, and all of the Grimoire Ultima Mundi that the book saw fit to allow him to remember, and he realized that their initial plan was not only desperate and foolhardy, but silly besides. There was a much simpler and safer way to do this. And as the mental hours ticked by while his eyes continued staring at his beautiful wife – a state that he had done a few times of late, since it hurt nobody, and helped him unwind – he ran down all of the various bits of mystical trivia and miscellany that he had access to. But there was a stymying point; he recognized the horizon of his own knowledge regarding Angelic teleportation methods. He'd need to break the fugue and talk to somebody to continue.
He remained staring at Millie, beautiful, dangerous, glorious Millie, for just a little longer, before he let his mind slow and the seconds out there in the real world start ticking again. "You might be right," Moxxie admitted, glancing now to where Gadreel was fiddling with the seatbelt that only she and Moxxie bothered to wear. He had admonished Millie before about failing to wear one. But then again he also watched a Devourer bite with full force onto her head and manage to break his own teeth – a feat thought to be impossible – before she crawled further down his gullet and cut his larynx out from the inside. If the van crashed, the van would suffer far more damage than Millie would. "But I need to know a bit more about Transiting, especially the theory of it. I think we might be able to trap him somewhere he can't have help."
"Trap him? Where?" Gadreel asked, followed by a very long blare of the van's horn preventing Moxxie's follow-up.
"I DON'T CARE IF YOUR AXLE'S NOT ATTACHED ANYMORE GET OUTTA MY FUCKIN' WAY!" Blitz roared out his window a the truck broken down ahead of them preventing their entry into The Fortress of Iron, which was the gateway to Fort Abandon in Heaven. He pulled his head back in, having to stop and tilt his head just so after he snagged his horns on the window the first time, then drove around, into oncoming traffic, and darting around the truck before somebody could pancake them. Three years ago, that little stunt would have pulled shrieks of fear and alarm out of Moxxie, and had him hyperventilating. Now, he was just annoyed. Not even at Blitz; he was annoyed at the idiot truck-driver who didn't pull over when his drive-axle snapped, and made it Moxxie's problem.
"Does he always drive like this?" Gadreel asked, clutching the back of Moxxie's seat so tightly that the leather creaked ominously and her dark knuckles were practically grey with lack of blood.
"Only when people annoy him," Millie said gamely.
"So most of the time," Moxxie added the clarification. "And to answer your question, when we get to Heaven, I'm going to need you to do something for me."
"What?" she asked, suspicion plain on her face.
"I'll need you to do your Teleportation to a nice, empty spot in the Human World. Do it as slow as you can, but if worst comes I'll figure it out," Moxxie said.
"You want me, in Heaven, to abandon you and go to Earth?" Gadreel asked.
"You're gonna come back," Moxxie said with growing impatience. Sooner or later this Angel was going to have to accept that not all imps were idiots, even if Blitz was their flag-bearer in that regard "I need to see how you do it, so I can develop a trap."
"A trap using teleportation," Gadreel stared at him for a moment. "To isolate him from his comrades?"
"Exactly," Moxxie said.
"Such a spell doesn't exist," Gadreel said.
"Not yet, it doesn't," Moxxie coached.
"No, you fail to understand; Angelic magic can't just be… invented. You're no Sahaquiel," Gadreel said.
Moxxie stared at her, pity edging into his expression. "...according to who?" Moxxie asked.
"Excuse me?" the Angel asked.
"New forms of Angel magic cannot be created, according to who?" Moxxie asked. "Who decided that what you've got now is all you'll ever have? Who decided that only one of you, this 'Sahaquiel' Angel or whoever he's supposed to be, is the only one permitted to come up with something new or novel? Who decided that, Gadreel?"
The Angel didn't look angry at being questioned by an imp, which was just as well; as much as the idea of killing an Angel was foreboding to him, he even less liked the idea of the first one he bloodied his hands with being the one in the back seat of this van. She just looked mildly aghast. As though without him, that would have never occurred to her. Natural followers indeed, Angels were.
Again, it was shocking to realize that he could make those sorts of internal claims not out of arrogance and folly, but simply because Moxxie knew what he was now. If only Saffron could be more proud of him.
He gave his head a shake, both putting a capstone on the question he'd given the angel, and to clear his own thoughts. "Angels are static because they're told they're static. They're sterile because they're told they're sterile. How many Angels up in Heaven are sexually active with their fellow Angels?"
"A few, though it is frowned upon," Gadreel said, eyes narrowing as she didn't see where he was going with this. "They see it as 'a waste of effort and time'."
"And yet Goetia, fallen Angels to a one of them, are coming up with new magic, including the most powerful magic of them all in creating children," Moxxie said.
"You keep talkin' bout Stolas' kid like that he might even start to like you, Moxx," Blitz said. "Fuckin' finally! Lemme through! I'm the Voice of Lucifer and I've got some fuckin' work to do up there!"
The peep of alarm from the gate-guard and the fact that the van started driving immediately, and was not interrupted again, told the tale that Blitz had thrown his weight perfectly.
"The compliment was incidental," Moxxie admitted. "Angels in Hell, if you'll forgive my vulgarity, tend to fuck like their plane is going down. And now they're having kids because of it. So accept that maybe what you've been told about Heaven is mostly just propaganda to keep your kind in line."
Gadreel looked at him for a moment, then down at her own hands, fingers laced on her lap, before looking up at him. "Possibly," she admitted. Which was a lot less hard-headed than Moxxie had feared she'd be. She then tilted her head at him. "But even if there is some novel magic that can be invented, how could you use it? You have neither halo nor Songblood."
"Oh that's the easy part," Moxxie said. "When I invent it, you're gonna do it."
"I am going to use an untested, hitherto non-existent magic, in battle, against a fully resisting enemy," Gadreel said.
"And it's going to work," Moxxie said. Then he turned his gaze down to the page in front of him. He took a few mental hours to recall everything he knew about portal travel, and the specifics of the Forgetful Mind Hex, that most frustrating of structural magics that people used on things.
And just as he had coached defiance against the status quo of a stagnant heaven, he quickly found himself starting to penetrate layers of obscura and enigma which were layered around every individual instance of the Hex, unraveling it using hundreds, if not thousands of mental models and testing each of them to extinction.
How fantastic it was, for Moxxie, that he could do this with his mental processes; accelerate them to nearly light-speed to undertake month's worth of work in a matter of a minute, and reap the results of endeavors that would have taken up an imp's entire lifespan over the course of an afternoon and evening. So when he finally realized the 'trick' to the Forgetful Mind Hex, the built-in-flaw that all things that exploited it had baked into their very being, he'd done so just as the van was being violently swung into a parking space. Thankful as he was for wearing his seat-belt, he wasn't overly mussed, as he singlehandedly broke all of Hell's monopoly on 'dangerous information'. Time sped up for a moment as he flipped back to the page about making interplanar portals, and this time, with a glance, he memorized it such that it could never be taken away from him again.
Moxxie Rough could now open portals to the Human World without a Grimoire, any time he wanted to.
Neat.
He snapped the book shut, and blinked as he saw Maelstrom's legs flailing in the passenger window; the swerve that Blitz had done to drift into the parking spot had rather ignominiously spat the Hellhound most of the way out of the window, and he was lucky he hadn't gotten ejected straight to the sidewalk. Not that it would do more than daze him. True to the Radio Demon's overtures regarding him on the day that Loona died and was brought back, Maelstrom was changing. When Moxxie stared at him and focused, he could hear, just on the very edge of hearing, something weak and tentative, a tune. And it was the same rhythm and tone that Loona Miller embodied with her every act and being.
Maelstrom was now Loona Miller writ small, just as Satan was to the Altar of Worms.
And while that was a fascinating line of consideration he'd have to chase down later, they were currently parked and exiting the van here inside the grounds of the Palace of Iron.
While Stella Goetia was obviously a fan of the finer things in life, and enjoyed the vaulting architecture and decorated pillars popular two millennia ago in the Human World, there was a lot telling that this was not merely a prestige piece, not simply a symbol of her divorce-fueled wealth and freedom to do as she pleased. No, even a less educated glance than Moxxie's would have picked out how the various courtyards and mainways of this place, when they were finished construction, would make this place a killing field in defense. And more impressively, the entire structure appeared to be 'ambidextrous'. A defensive force could dig in, and create a meat-grinder both against threats from outside in the rest of Hell, and against threats that would attempt using the Teleportal at the heart of the structure.
Whoever designed this place deserved a massive reward and endless kudos. Such a feat was new, in Moxxie's experience. But at the moment, that hypothetical killing ground was only that; hypothetical. There were some buildings put up already, most of them blatantly military structures for housing soldiers of the five legions to be stationed on the grounds alone. That meant that when the Palace of Iron was done, it would be bivouacking a hundred thousand soldiers, at least. And the Palace definitely had the space to hold them. For all there were concrete foundations gathering rain in the Pridely Winter, it was clear that she was going to build this to be essentially something like an arcology, with the defensive structures close to the ground, and then layered overtop of them in what he presumed would be spires and pillars a palace above them full of glory and symbols of power.
Moxxie even managed to be more than half right, despite having only a most superficial glance at things to form his opinion.
The walk up to the Teleportal was beset by queues of frustrating length, lines of people waiting for the light to 'go green' and allow people to pass through in one direction. Unlike most Teleportals, which were two-way like a Goetic Gate, this one appeared to be unidirectional, alternating every few minutes between going one way from Hell to Heaven, to going one way from Heaven to Hell. But even just looking at the thing, Moxxie could see the utility of it; whereas many gates that Hell was used to were fragile, dainty things, which an untoward breeze could knock them out of alignment requiring hours of repair, this one had stripped out every possible vanity and convenience in the name of iron-brick resilience and multifunctional redundancy. From the look of that square frame within which an ovular pane of silvery light hung, it could probably take anything short of a nuclear bomb to its structure and keep functioning.
"Can we hurry this the fuck up?" Blitz asked.
"The gate's on Incoming," Moxxie said.
"So?" Blitz asked.
"We've got to wait until it's Outgoing again to use it," he said, not going into depth that he could now form a portal that lead there himself. Safer not to do that until he knew how damaging the creation of such a portal would be to his body. The Thaumeturgical Portal could practically tear his body apart, if he made one extend too far. He wasn't eager to find out the risks of opening one between planes during a fight. He took a step out from the others and turned to face them. "So what's the plan on actually killing Atheed?" Moxxie asked.
"I'm likely the only one who can even approach matching him, strength for strength," Gadreel said, looking uncomfortably at the currently wrong-way teleportal. "Which isn't my ideal. I kill things. I don't fight them. And I especially don't fight them 'fairly'."
"Um, question?" Maelstrom raised a hand.
"What?" she asked, turning to him as more people started to queue up behind the cluster of IMP, like them waiting for the light to turn green.
"How strong is Atheed compared to an Exorcist?" the King of the Pits asked.
"He's stronger than any Exorcist except for the Type 26 and oddly enough the Type 1. But compared to pretty much any other metric, it's closer to being comparable than not," Gadreel answered.
"So I can fight him strength-for-strength," Maelstrom said with a satisfied nod.
"Excuse me?" Gadreel asked.
"Oh really? He's that weak?" Millie added. "I though that he'd be trouble."
"You've got to be joking," Gadreel said.
"What, didn't I tell ya?" Blitz asked, glancing back over his shoulder at them, for he was pretty thoroughly ignoring the conversation happening behind him. "The guys I hire tend to be pretty fuckin' awesome."
"There's no way that an imp would consider Atheed weak," Gadreel said.
"Wanna see?" Millie asked. She grabbed an ammo drum from the rear-most of the group ahead of her, his protestations failing before a glance at – and most shockingly a recognition of – the presence of Blitz Miller, and she propped her elbow atop it, hand extended in challenge of an arm-wrestle. "Come on, ya' got nothin' to lose but yer pride!" glorious Millie teased.
Gadreel muttered under her breath 'How in the name of God did I end up in such trials' before dropping to a kneel and grabbing Millie's hand. She seemed frustrated and annoyed at having to do this, not at all suspicious that an imp would challenge an angel. So when Moxxie gave the 'go' command, she strained with significant force, the muscles at the back of her neck standing out like cords and her forearms seeming to writhe under strain, while Millie held her straight up and down without showing more than token effort.
"What is this?" Gadreel asked.
And then with a wide grin, Millie very deliberately and slowly pressed Gadreel's knuckles to the lid of the ammo drum.
"Millie is the strongest imp to have ever lived," Moxxie said. "And Maelstrom's not much weaker. We kill the unkillable for a living, Miss Gadreel. Do you really think we'd make that claim if we didn't have the bona-fides to back it up?"
"Many things are said about imps. Most of them less than flattering," Gadreel said, flapping her hand. There was already a yellowish bruise forming near her wrist where something had been pulled. But she kneaded it briefly, while humming under her breath, and the wound quickly fled as her flesh corrected itself under the influence of Angelsong. And that was a whole other thing that having Gadreel in the office offered as an unmitigated boon; having easy access to the hardest-to-find form of magic in all of Hell. Only Lucifer could still perform Angelsong before the current decade. The last few years added to that roster exactly one; Penemue, with whom Moxxie had no association. Gadreel would be a Godsend to Moxxie's greater understanding of how reality worked, and not just in the figurative sense. Gadreel narrowed her eyes at Moxxie. "You've got some sort of mental augmentation, don't you?"
"What do you mean?" Moxxie asked.
"You can make your mind spin faster, the likes of which I've only seen in The First of the Second, or Yael, or Sahaquiel," she said.
"Millie's definitely the strongest imp to have ever lived. There's a case to be made for me being the smartest," Moxxie made sure not to make the most arrogant of possible claims. "How did you know?"
"You tend to look at your bride when you spin your mind up. Sahaquiel did so with rainbows, and Yael with his own skeletonized pocket watch, giving their eyes something pleasing to become locked on while their mindscapes crossed untold eternities," she said. She narrowed her eyes at him. "There is something akin to song in you. Something shockingly alike to my kind, but obviously not stemming at all from the same source. What are you?"
Moxxie could have explained the desperate gamble they made in the pursuit of killing Nathan Birch, the dangerous covenants made and kept when they swore the 37 Oaths there on the splinter of Purgatory that still existed in Hell. But he didn't know her well enough, didn't trust her well enough. So he gave a shrug.
"If you want to kill the unkillable, you pay certain prices," Moxxie opted to be enigmatic. Gadreel nodded and glanced away. Wow, she actually bought that? By Satan it was easy to lead Angels around. No wonder Lucifer managed to convert so many of them.
There was a loud tone, followed by two more, and the light went red for a time, as the last people exiting the Teleportal into Hell hustled and cleared the portal. Then there was a brief snapping sound, when the portal cut out completely, followed by an electric snap as lightning arced from one side of the Teleportal Frame to the other. The lightning spread open as though its arc had cut into the flesh of reality, and as the points steadied and the aperture opened, they could see the heavily guarded 'landing pad' of Heaven, a bunker which now had a steadily growing line of people waiting for the portal to switch again. The line ahead of Blitz's merry band of lunatics began to march forward while the portal favored them.
"I've never been to Heaven before. What's it like?" Millie asked of Gadreel, even as she with one hand slung the ammo-drum back to the power-armored soldier who had to hold it in both of his.
"That would depend on where you go," Gadreel said. "The higher Clouds, of Diligence, Humility, or Patience? They are ideals. Places where there is no pain, no hunger, and no want. And notably, no humans."
"I'd heard rumors," Moxxie said. And Gadreel gave her head a nod even as it hung in shame.
"The rumors you heard were likely conservative to the truth," Gadreel said. "I know not why Michael and Gabriel quarantined the humans in Probity, Charity, and Kindness, because they showed none of those three things in doing so. You'll understand as soon as we're out of that bunker. It needs to be seen to be believed."
"Yeah, this ain't a fuckin' vacation, gang," Blitz said. "We're up here for one reason and one reason only; to kill one of those fuckers," Blitz said, flicking a thumb back to where Gadreel was standing. She no longer showed her Halo. So apparently Angels could hide that. Good to know. "So keep your eyes open and your heads on a swivel. I won't accept any of you fuckin' idiots dying on me up here!"
"Yes, sir," Moxxie said with a tone of intense patience.
Finally there was the slight tingle of the Teleportal's event horizon passing, depositing them in the bunker. From the look of it was being awkwardly expanded because the old structure was now not up-to-task at handling the amount of traffic that would be expected at all hours of the day between Fort Abandon and Pride Ring. There were already Spatial Expansion spells at work, keeping the space from being truly claustrophobic, but considering how much more fortification there now was around hell, having this apocalypse-proof bunker here was now only slowing things down, it seemed. Blitz immediately took a turn and departed out of the nearest door he could find, not bothering to walk past the exhausted looking soldiers coming off of their Heaven Side Rotation, and just plunging out and onto the cloud of Heaven.
The sun was still rising here, meaning that the cliff-face that was the so-called 'Rat Towers' which housed all of humanity who hadn't been assholes in life threw long shadows right over the edge of the long fall. The cloud under his feet was soft and luxuriantly comfortable to walk on, white like clean cotton. Unlike the hard and unforgiving scrabble of Hell, this place was intended to be a reward, and was built from the literal ground up striving toward that goal. It was a strange thing, to see such benevolent roots give rise to such a twisted, ugly tree.
"Holy fuck those things are big," Blitz said.
"There are three entire Clouds dominated by them," Gadreel said, staring at them with a sort of sadness that Moxxie had seen before – on the face of Satan. A sadness of a thing having such potential for glory, stunted into a hideous mockery of itself. "There didn't need to be. All they had to do was keep allowing humans to live in Temperence and Chastity…"
"Who the fuck would take them up on that offer? Living forever without fucking? That seems a lot worse than Hell, I'll tell you that for free," Blitz answered her musing.
"The Cloud is named Chastity, after the Throne it is built upon," Gadreel said. Blitz aggressively did not care. She sighed, and moved to interrupt Blitz, and then point a different direction than he had been walking through the concrete maze that Fort Abandon had become. "That way to the Occupied Zone. You'll only find an unremarkable spot of The Edge if you go this way."
"Well if you're so much better at navigating then why don't you do it?" Blitz asked, crossing his arms in annoyance. For Satan's sake, Blitz, don't antagonize the Angel. But contrary to Moxxie's expectations of Gadreel taking entirely reasonable umbrage, she gave a nod, turned crisply on her heel, and motioned ahead of her.
"Very well. I'm aware of a very ill-patrolled section of the Neutral Zone a short while hence. Better we not be seen until we ambush Atheed. And best of all if we can do it and be back out of Heaven quickly. I imagine that many will be the hands that turn to kill me when they seem me returned and in your company."
"Actually, before we go, could you Transit for me?" Moxxie asked. She paused, then turned and nodded. He quickly spun up his brain, watching with picometer precision as she seemed to practically subconsciously summon up magic. While he, as a Thaumaturge, was unable to replicate that magic, being as they came from fundamentally different sources, the eyes that he'd inserted into his skull in replacement of the ones he'd been born with were capable of seeing all magic, no matter its wellspring. He didn't know who 'Birah' was, but having the Eyes of Birah was definitely an upgrade. And those clever eyes picked out the weave, something like a subharmonic being gently slid into the ongoing song that underpinned reality, a layer of a song being introduced in the studio to make rich the tune being played. He watched it all the way to when it reached the critical point, and then collapsed against the song of reality, and there was a fluttering noise, like feathers beating against the air, and a tracer of magic streaked downward, toward the Human World, and Gadreel disappeared.
A few seconds later, a tracer of the same provenance appeared before him again, a fraction of a second before Gadreel resumed her place there, standing on the outskirts of Cloud One.
"I hope I don't need to do that again; while Transiting amidst a plane of being is elementary, it does take some small effort to cross real boundaries," Gadreel said.
"No you won't need to do it again," Moxxie said, then gave some thought to the spell he'd need. As was his custom, he tilted a glance toward Millie, then quickly essentially reinvented Transiting from a personal means of teleportation even across dimensional barriers, into a trap-and-net that would snare those caught in its grasp and dump them, entangled, to wherever the ability demanded. "Okay, I've got it. I'll explain it to you when we're nearer to the front," Moxxie said.
"Don't worry. Bea's gonna be fine," Millie said in hushed tones to him.
"What?" Moxxie asked.
"You keep givin' me those worried looks," Millie said.
Moxxie actually laughed at that, while Gadreel shrugged and turned back to lead them onward. "No, I just needed a moment to think," he said, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze. "And you're my muse."
"Oh yeach, could you please do that some other time; we're fuckin' working right now!" Blitz complained.
"Sorry, sir," Moxxie said. Maelstrom, who was looking around in befuddlement, could only shrug at them and follow after.
Gadreel had walked the lower Clouds of Heaven before. Not as many times as diligent Forfax or inquisitive Birah, but she had. The Grigori were viewed askance there, actually. To walk the clouds of Probity was to sneak close to The Edge, and the long fall which could land a poor soul either in a crater in the human world, or an even deeper crater in Hell. There had been no defections amongst the Grigori before Penemue, though, so that paranoia and derision was merely more First and Secondborn clique-ism.
There would probably be more, soon, Gadreel considered. Penemue, the first out, had blindsided all of them. Nobody was yet sure how she actually managed to leave Heaven, for she clearly didn't Transit, nor had access to the other conventional ways to enter Hell. And she did that with the far-lesser motivation of being a collaborator with the other Grigori who actually had half-angel children. Given what Yeqon lost, and his own… shall we say… paucity of deep thoughts, he would likely be the next, or else die trying. And Lucifer would do well to have the Godstone with him. Yeqon may not be as artful with the blade as Hepsut, nor have the supernatural reaction time of Atheed, but he had in droves what none but the Archangels could match in raw stamina and resilience. It was said that if Yeqon walked into a wall, the wall fell, unless he stopped walking.
Still, even with that consideration in her head, she found that the bottom-most layer in the lasagna of Heaven's suffering was changed from when she had walked it, a decade ago. Just recently when she passed this way in the opposite direction, it had been during a hunt, her perceptions on the task of avoiding detection and approaching the governor of Fort Abandon without alarm, not on all of the other fine points of change. She'd started to pick them out at the end, but in the beginning, all there had been was focus. And now that she was not focused on saving her sanity even at the cost of her life, she could tell that Heaven was changed.
It was soft again.
Much of the intervening terrain, those many, many miles between the frontline and Fort Abandon, she had abandoned by gathering the assassins and Transiting somewhere closer to the frontline. And while the paths between the Rat Towers were still narrow and winding, sometimes having to take awkward detours because the footprint of the massive buildings had not taken into account the thought of easily reaching one place from another during their desperate scrabble first outward, and then upward. Gadreel realized that the closest analogue to these hovels was that of the skin of a dried-out man; deep gullies of cracks running down to the still-living parts, while the dead mounted ever skyward until it reached a point where it could sprout skyward no longer. Those deep paths, those gulleys between the buildings, they had been as hard as the rocky wastelands of Pride Ring that lay to the north of Pentagram City, rough on the feet and uncomfortable. Now, though, they were soft again.
Almost as though the Cloud were healing in some way.
And even as the thought occurred to her, there was more sign of it there; a section of the ground floor of a Rat Tower had had its internal walls knocked out all the way to the 'street', and it was belching out the slightly muffled noise of an ongoing episode of that ridiculous show that Raguel sometimes allowed her to watch his tapes of, despite the fact it was supposed to be banned for viewing by the Heavenly. The watchers looked different. Not just that they weren't skeletally thin and desperate and despairing; no, they were still thin, as though recovering from starvation rather than on death's-door from it, but they had a certain vivacity to them, a certain clinging to life that the had lacked before. A decade past, Gadreel had walked places like this and felt the overwhelming pressure of sheer despair coming from the humans. Now, they were… maybe not hopeful, but at the very least still willful.
"Fuckin'… Is that spoilers?" Blitz said, shielding his eyes so he couldn't see the episode projected onto that building's far wall. The spot they'd portaled to was much closer to the fighting, but still bore the clear signs of the Governor's influence.
"That's season 2 of Series 7. That's when yer sister was still on!" Millie corrected him brightly. Such a cheerful hellspawn, that one.
"Oh fuck, how about that?" Blitz said, dropping his hand and now rubbernecking to try to spot his sister on the screen. Gadreel didn't know of Blitz's sister, other than the rather tense-looking poster that he and she were printed upon that hung in her employer's office. It seemed that she'd just been dumped, rather unceremoniously, in the chaos of their lives, and was now expected to find her pace amidst them. So be it. She had kept pace with other, stranger forces before.
Past the impromptu amphitheater brought the assassins of all races toward parts of the newer sections of the Occupied Zone, those who were still getting their first deliveries of food, those whom the water-pipes were still being extended, thus water was moved in massive tanks carried like a Sherpa's cargo through the convoluted paths of this degraded hell on the backs of volunteering Innocent. Blitz kept his complaining to a minimum, because they were making good time. The Innocent were apprehensive about imps, and outright concerned by the Hellhound, so Gadreel was essentially invisible in their company. Just as well. While she could extend her wings and ignite her Halo to cut a path through them, there was both no need and a desperate danger if she actually did.
Only a foolish predator alerts their prey before the chase has begun.
Here in the newer parts of the Occupied Zone, the clouds stopped being fluffy, white, and clean, and started to resemble boot-stomped wool, saturated with muck, crunchy and uncomfortable even through footwear. It wasn't quite to the miserable extent it had been throughout all of Heaven a decade past, but it was clear to Gadreel at least that there was a change in Heaven. That somehow, against all common sense, Heaven was being restored to its proper vitality, and only by and because of the intervention of Hell. It almost made Gadreel laugh, at the thought that so many of her proud Firstborn cousins would choke themselves into apoplexy at the sheer outrage of the thought that Hell could actually be good for something. And doubly so, when that something was the wellbeing of the realm of Heaven itself.
Then again, she had met the poor Angel saddled with running this place. Octavia was a strange admixture of all of the virtue of a Heaven now lost to time, and all of the relentless willpower of Hell. That child would achieve great things in time. Maybe not good, but definitely great.
The towers here, near the edge of the Occupied Zone that reached toward the middle of Cloud Probity, the heart of the Rat Towers, saw the sunlight drop from 'occasional' due to the interference of encroaching towers, to 'utterly lost' amongst walls of stone, wood, and mud-brick. The section she was leading them to was one of the oldest built-up portions of Cloud Probity, and true enough though the towers raced upward even taller than their contemporaries near the edge, the sight was even more pathetic rather than ambitious. Whole towers leaned, only saved from collapse by other buildings leaning against them and propping them up. If there were a quake of any significant power possible in a realm like Heaven, the entire thing would have come tumbling down. Frankly, if there were winds allowed in Heaven of sufficient force, that might have done the damage just as badly!
But the reason for her coming here, to this nest of desperate habitation which had once been a city hosting a Tramway station giving access to the Gates – before that Tramway station was built over to the point where it stopped functioning – was that the capillaries of ground-level transit stopped here, descending into the teeth of the building. And on its far side, was the Neutral Zone, whereby Heaven and Hell clashed for more territory, a fluctuating front-line that couldn't quite pull back to these buildings, nor break through and claim more of Heaven. The imps were quiet as Gadreel followed her path in reverse, opening that ill-maintained side-door to the building, and immediately entering the wet, dank, and foul-smelling utility pathway that was just large enough for Maelstrom to fit into, lined walls and ceiling with pipes that dripped foul smelling fluid.
"What the fuck is this stink?" Blitz demanded.
"Desperate plumbing, sir," Moxxie answered, tapping a pipe with his tail-spade when he did. The pipe immediately cracked and sprayed a belch of rank, grey water into the spot behind him. Maelstrom darted back so it didn't slather him, glared at the imps in front of him, then held up a chip of wood to the now-breach in the pipe to deflect the spray away from him so he could pass it cleanly.
She deviated from the path she had taken the first time, because there was a section that she knew would be beneath even these imp's dignity, instead navigating toward the flickering and faltering lights until she reached a door that said 'utility access' and tried to open it, only to have it stymie her. Why would they lock it? Moxxie sighed, and began to extract a set of lock-picks, but Maelstrom did him one better, placed his palm of his hand against the door and gave one sharp shove. The door burst through its frame with a crunch, and allowed them all to enter the halls intended for habitation.
The smell was… better… here, though still far from good. There were signs made of salvaged plastic and gathered wood, declaring the presence of styling salons, or restaurants. The restaurants had a second sign hanging under them saying 'Yes, we have food!' and a date from the very early 2000's, both of them so ill-kept that the filth on them was threatening to make them illegible. There were Innocent here, watching them with a sort of thousand-mile stare, too spent to offer complaint or even interest. This building had been in the Neutral Zone when she'd come through before. Now it was only just being swallowed by the Occupied Zone, with all the 'luxuries' that such a thing entailed on being arduously dragged here.
"This place is, just… sad," Millie said.
"If you could have seen it a thousand years ago, it would have brought you to tears to see it now," Gadreel agreed. She then looked up. The actual front-entrance of the building, which faced the Neutral Zone, was currently being used as a bivouac for a squadron of those 'Blasphemer' armors, one of them having his helmet piece taken off being repaired as he looked at a table which had been set up with maps across it. Gadreel almost guided them to another path, before reminding herself that as of a few months ago, these soldiers were her people now.
The Litigator who was sans-helmet in his power-armor turned a look at them. "Hold on, there; this is an active combat zone."
"Yeah, I know, buddy, that's why we're fuckin' here," Blitz said. "Do you chucklefucks know who I am?"
"Should I?" another fully armored figure asked, with a woman's voice.
The Litigator, though, narrowed his eyes, and then leaned to one side, as though getting a look at the scarred side of Blitz's face. "Would you… Yes my luck is that bad," he muttered to himself. He pushed himself to a stand; with the extra height that the Power Armor gave him, his horns nearly reached the ceiling. "It doesn't matter who you represent; this area is dangerous because we've got active mobilized Angels in our AZ, not just Cherubs and Innocent. You're going to have to find a quieter part of the line to get your duty done in."
"How about I don't and you tell me where to find some dick-bag called Atheed?" Blitz asked.
"Who?" the Litigator asked to one of the other armored figures; this one was far shorter, obviously an imp in that mechanical wonder-weapon.
"The Sword of Exorcism," the armored imp said, and it too was a woman, with a drawl quite similar to Millie's. The soldier gestured toward the map. "We've got a couple of the big names nearby. Uziel was spotted at 14:10 yesterday, and joined by Forfax briefly before Forfax departed and was replaced by Azrael. That guy stopped us in our tracks. No survivors."
"You sound like you know shit," Blitz said, crowding up to the table and its maps. Gadreel took the opportunity to join him, looking at the battle on-going. There were tokens on various places to indicate the presence of Cherubs and most of the rank and file of the Angels, but individualized markers to note Archangels, and Angels who were a cut above. According to that map, at the very edge of this conflict zone, Hepsut was pushing back Hell's forces essentially unsupported. He'd either retreat and have little to show for it but a mountain of hellspawn bodies, or overreach and get swarmed for his trouble. "Atheed; where is he?"
"Do you mind?" the imp in armor asked of the Litigator.
"I know better than to stick my nose in where the Voice of Lucifer is involved. And for the record who is that?" he pointed at Gadreel to Blitz.
"An employee," Blitz said.
"Atheed has been spotted up and down the lines," the armored imp said, using a long pointer to indicate the tokens for some of the major Angels, and then reaching into a bin of them and extracting one that looked suspiciously like an Exorcist and placing it onto the line of battle. "But what seems to draw him out is when we try to use suppressive fire to advance and maneuver. Because he can stop our bullets, he can ignore us and crush us as we try to move."
"Then it looks like you've gotta do a little 'maneuver' for me," Blitz said.
"I'll have to send it up the chain," the Litigator said.
"Send it fast, I ain't got all fuckin' day!" Blitz said. The Litigator nodded, and the armored imp handed him a robust looking phone. He stomped away, making the call.
"So the plan is?" Gadreel finally asked.
"You know the sensation of 'lifting' you get while Transiting?" Moxxie asked.
"Yes, why?" she asked. His explanation on the way had been… in depth, but lacking an ending.
"Make it 'suck downward' instead, and focus onto…" he paused, flicking through his Hellphone, until he brought up a map of the Human world, and picked a nice little spot in the North American desert, "this spot. It's in the middle of nowhere, so there'll be no witnesses, and nothing to interfere."
"So we're just going to kidnap him from a battlefield so we may murder him," Gadreel said.
"The best plans are the simplest in concept," Moxxie said with a shrug. "The execution's another story entirely."
"A truth older than Time Itself," Gadreel admitted. She tilted her head. "Was that a pun?"
"I… what?" Moxxie asked.
"Oh I get it!" Millie said, for once leaving Moxxie in the dirt for a second before he realized how his particular turn of phrase could be interpreted.
"Really?" the Litigator asked. "Well fair enough. If a Dux Bellorim says the light's green, it's green," the sharp-featured red demon turned to Blitz and the others. "I won't ask how you know Jones Von Ketterman, but frankly that's not my business. Atheed is currently on the battle line on grid EE76."
Moxxie and Gadreel looked to the map that the soldiers had parted so that Blitz and his cadre were now no longer body-blocked from. The grid-square that he indicated, if Moxxie's understanding of the 'geography' of Heaven was to be considered accurate, was not at all close. "That's a long way through some very iffy territory," Maelstrom said what Moxxie was thinking.
"Then we'd better tie our boots and get moving," Blitz said. Then he clapped his forehead and scoffed. "What am I even thinkin'? Moxx? You got this?"
"I can certainly try," Moxxie said. He hadn't done imp-magic in Heaven before. According to that young imp, Uller, the realm was… taxing, to imps in a way that doing such magicks in Hell was not. So whatever he did, he'd have to be much more surgical so as not to deplete himself. Moxxie took a few steps away from the knots of pneumatically hissing soldiers and swung his arm in an arc, using his impish magic and spinning his arm in a broad arc. And there did a portal form into being by the impish way against the desires of Heaven, but immediately afterwords, as the portal stood open to the exit point somewhere out in the danger zone of Heaven, Moxxie turned away and fell to his knees, clutching his chest, pain radiating outward. He let out a cough, one that was wet and ragged, spraying black blood onto the floor next to him, causing all those nearby, IMP or not, to recoil.
"Moxxie!" Millie cried out, rushing to his side next to the portal.
"I'll be fine," Moxxie said through the confusing pain, willing his body back into functioning shape. It wasn't just his lungs. He could feel his spine recalcifying and his brain firming back up when he pressed his magic into his body to make it whole. It wasn't the distance that was the issue. It was that the Thaumaturgy clashed with the underlying 'song' of the realm, and the realm-song fucked with the thaumaturgy as a result, a hostile response to his daring to use his powers. So it wasn't Heaven that had done this; it was some sort of Angelic interference. Of course Uller hadn't realized that; he wasn't yet able to make portals and test it. And without that canary, Moxxie was prey to the coal-mine's predations.
Ah, well. Now that Moxxie knew what he was dealing with, at least his next portal wouldn't rip him apart, up here. Maybe. Likely, even. He'd need to experiment.
He rose to his full height – which was dwarfed by anybody in the current group he wasn't married to, and dared to be the first through the portal. The far side looked similar enough to where he'd left that one would think he'd only portaled a hundred meters away, instead of a thousand times as far, but for the fact that there was gunfire cracking the air, and the maniac clashing of metal against metal.
"Is it wise to proceed when you… well… did that to yourself?" Gadreel asked.
"Don't think about it," Maelstrom said with an off-hand gesture. "He's remarkably tougher than he looks," Maelstrom said, being the third through the portal, not long after Millie who had crossed it at Moxxie's side. Blitz was next, pulling his Convertible Rifle from his jacket and extracting a whole clip (not magazine) of special, anti-magic bullets and forcing them down into the internal mag of the weapon. Upon flicking the emptied clip away, he darted to a corner and peeked around it. Maelstrom tightened a strap holding his gauntlets on; though they were painted dull black, at the point where metal touched metal and scraped the paint away, they showed the unmistakable gleam of Seraphic Steel. It had taken a long time for Maelstrom to actually invest in personal weaponry. Of course he'd pick something that made his already ludicriously lethal hand-to-hand skills especially deadly.
Millie pulled out Zahm. The instant it was in her hands, Moxxie could swear that the sunlight nearby took on a faintly red tint, making the space around her look like it was washed in human blood.
"I hope this works as you say," Gadreel said, briefly manifesting a twelve inch blade of living fire in her hand, one that had a triangular profile so that its wounds would be nigh-impossible to stopper.
"You and me both," Moxxie admitted under his breath, and then rounded the corner to view the battle line.
The fighting was close-in, here; there were no long sight-lines to establish kill-boxes or shooting galleries. Because of the haphazard growth of the towers, the battlefield horizon was never more than a hundred meters, and given the supernatural strength of both Angels and some demons, that meant that any meeting of the forces of Heaven and Hell inevitably devolved into brawling. So it was that a plate-armored Angel led a squad of Cherubs, arrayed against a squad of Sinners and Consumers with a single heavily armored Devourer seemingly forming the core of their force. Whereas the Sinners and Consumers were barely holding their battle line and only just able to avoid death from the much less intimidating looking Cherubs, the Devourer seemed to relish combat with the Angel, meeting it strength for strength and even managing to make attacks of opportunity against the Cherubs nearby. One of them was spitted out of the air on the head of the Devourer's halberd, causing a cry of dismay from the Angel's line, and now the Devourer swung his pole-arm with a corpse on it like a warhammer at the Angel, attempting to marry injury with insult.
"We don't have time for this," Blitz said, stomping around the corner and bringing the Convertible Rifle to his shoulder. The Angel turned and spotted him, but wasn't able to react because of the pressing threat of the Devourer in front of him. Blitz fired a single shot, a crack which left a line of grey smoke in its passage connecting the imp to the Angel; when it struck Heaven's soldier, there was another explosion of grey smoke; the smoke was the annihilation of magic that the bullet touched. When it touched the Angel's protective spells, those spells ceased to be. Another incoming strike that the Angel didn't quite ward, both because of the smoky blindness and the fact that the subconscious shield he'd had up was no longer there, crashed into him, using a Cherub's body to shatter the Angel's shoulder straight through his armor.
The Angel gave a shout of pain and fear. There was a flutter, and the Angel vanished from the fight. The Devourer laughed. "Not that I needed your help, red vermin! I would have had him!" the towering wall of fat, muscle, and hubris shouted, as he now turned his attention to shattering the line of Cherubs. With the writing on the wall, the small took the lesson of the greater, and fled, the fluttering of their wings lost under the noise of gunfire, leaving Hell locally triumphant. But this was only a very tiny portion of Heaven, and there were many tens of thousands of fights like this left to even reach the center of this Cloud, let alone its far edge.
"Yeah, I'm sure you would. Have you seen a bag of infected cocks called Atheed around?" Blitz asked, striding forward toward the Hellish line which was now pulling back toward him, and getting ready for another angelic push.
"I don't bother learning the names of the vermin I kill," the Devourer laughed.
"He would fight like an Exorcist wrought in flesh, and look alike to one as well," Gadreel said.
"What the fuck is that one s'pposed to be? Did you smuggle a human up here? Can I have her?" the Devourer grinned with its entirely-too-wide mouth, showing its several rows of nigh-unbreakable (Millie being the exception) teeth.
"How about you tell me what I want to know before I fuck you up like I did your mother," Blitz demanded, obviously having no patience with the Gluttony Fiend.
"I'll tell you what; you give me that piece of meat over there, I'll tell you where this 'Atheed' is," the Devourer promised.
There was a blur of movement, as Gadreel crossed the distance, manifesting her triangular-profiled blade, slamming it home right to its hilt against the Fiend's cheekbone. The much-larger fiend immediately went slack, as though all of the lines empowering his prideful stance were cut and he were left boneless. With a flick, Gadreel pulled out her knife, and the Devourer collapsed, dead, to the ground. Which was remarkable, because a Devourer could survive with most of its brain destroyed. How a single stab could destroy one was something to be studied. Gadreel looked at the Sinners and other Fiends that hadn't demanded to literally eat her. "Well?" she asked.
"Boring conversation anyway," Blitz obviously didn't care if she killed a blowhard. "Do any of you know where Atheed is?"
"He's four blocks that way, trying to cut through our kill boxes!" a Sinner immediately said, his hands up to show he was not offering her threat.
"Good," Gadreel said. "I trust nobody has anything to say about that?"
All of them looked down to the Devourer whose piggish eyes were now blank and sightless as he lay in a dead heap on the ground. All of them shook their heads swiftly.
"See? Sometimes offing a motherfucker is exactly the right play," Blitz said, as though imparting great wisdom. And frankly, Hell being Hell, it may have qualified. He turned to his crew. "Get ready. As soon as her bullshit," he gave a jerk of his head toward Gadreel, "goes off, we need to be ready to dogpile a motherfucker.
They pressed on, and none of the people here at the tip of Hell's martial spear bothered to gainsay a one of them. Perhaps that Dux Bellorim had radioed ahead. Perhaps the soldiers here were too wired to see a fellow Hellspawn as anything but a boon. Whatever the case, the only impediment in crossing the four blocks was that they had to avoid the 'rip current' of Hellspawn dragging their wounded back from the front. A few of them, Moxxie knew, would not survive long enough to even leave this operation-zone. It might have been simpler to leave them to expire on the ground in the fight. Simpler, but not kinder. Simpler, but not right.
They were moving toward the gunfire, in a strict contravention of basic common sense that was endemic to battlefields Creation-over. IMP tended to be the source of gunfire, not the moths drawn to its flame. As assassins and not battlefield-mercenaries, it was pretty clearly in their mandate that they kill fast and go home. Holding lines was not in the napkin-length contract that any of them had signed. Still, Moxxie held out his hand, and created a prismatic barrier ahead of Blitz before he rounded a corner, a feat which strangely didn't counter-attack him as the portal had. There was obviously a lot about Thaumaturgy up here that he needed to consult with Uller on.
A spray of random rounds instantly slammed into the barrier as soon as the line of effect was made, and Blitz strode forward through them, confident in Moxxie's ability to keep the stray bullets from killing him without him having to dive and dodge like a lunatic. The barrier felt… brittle. Great, not as draining, but not as tough. Another failure of impish magic to bear in mind. The entire unit here was roughly four fifths comprised of imps, all of them wearing no armor worth having and instead long coats covered in flame-resistant plastics, a gas-mask hanging around each neck. There was a leader who was a Lustling Imp like Blitz calmly beating on a machine-gun to get a bent part back into working shape, before he charged the weapon with a sharp grin that was missing several teeth, then with a great swing planted the machine gun onto some rubble and ducked down while another imp manned the gun. He looked at the approaching Blitz, and his grin curdled a bit in confusion.
"Who the fuck are you?" the squad leader asked.
"Who am I? Who the fuck are you?" Blitz turned it around. For a moment as Moxxie surmounted some crumbled concrete he could see what they were all shooting at; a rank of heavily armored Angels holding plates of battleship armor as shields. They weren't advancing, under the sheer weight of fire. "Fuck it, that don't matter," Blitz gave his head a shake. "We're looking for an Angel that don't act like those dipshits; one who catches bullets instead of deflecting them off his dick."
The Legionary Imp gave a tired laugh. "Oh, that fucker. He'll be back here soon."
Blitz turned and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up to Gadreel, who was squatted to use the same barriers as the imps. She stared at him flatly.
"You aren't reinforcements. But then again, my radio guy's been dead for about an hour now, so you could be anything from an ammo-runner to a Deadly Sin and I wouldn't be aware of shit," the Legionary continued. "I won't ask why you're looking for the shit-heel that killed a bunch of my guys. Just try not to leave your corpse in an inconvenient spot when he gets here and kills you."
"Damn; defeatist, much?" Blitz asked.
"Imps are good at two things, stranger; throwing lead and dying," the Legionary said.
"Then you're gonna be getting an education in one of the two other things we're great at: KILLING," he said with a savage smile. Then he turned a wink down at the Legionary. "And if you're real nice, you might learn about the fourth, too."
"Sir, the barrier," Moxxie began, only to have the barrier shatter from the incoming fire of the Innocent that were using the rank of Angels as a mobile trenchline. Blitz ducked instantly as the bullets began to crack past their horns once more, unimpeded. Moxxie still looked at the gathered soldiers, how they had regained their footing, and were advancing once more. Slowly, but inevitably. It would be ten minutes to cross the eighty meters that separated the two forces, but they would cross it.
Then there was a tiny flare in the sky, and another Angel appeared. The instant the guns turned on this one, who was armored not in the ludicrously thick plating of the rank, but in a military uniform common amongst Sinners two centuries ago, a coat covered in decorative frogging, a frill of loose plates of gleaming Angel Steel at the groin and hips, and cavalryman-pants descending down, all made of Angel Satin dyed in vivid reds, purples, and oceanic blues. A burst of gunfire raced to intercept him, and his left arm became a blur, quickly gathering up the fifteen bullets in the burst by snatching them in files up between his fingers, before that hand blurred forward, and launched the bullets back nearly as fast as they'd been fired. Two of the imps in that retort of lead fell back, black sprays of blood erupting from their punctured bodies, as the other hand of the unarmored Angel ignited with a sword which after a moment transformed into a short-spear, and he began to advance forward, his wings with metal-sheathed feathers swept forward to keep most fire deflecting away from him.
"Is that…" Blitz asked at a shout-whisper, barely audible against the gunfire. The rank behind the new angel started to advance faster, as it was clear that the gunfire was essentially toothless against this newcomer. And as the newcomer approached, Moxxie could see strange discoloration of his pale skin and a lumpiness to his ought-to-be-symmetrical features, as though he still bore bruising.
"That is. Mox-imp, I'll need a barrier against gunfire for at least a moment," Gadreel said. Moxxie nodded. If this worked, then they would be able to fight this on somewhat more hopeful terrain. Another barrier went up, and when Gadreel stood, she ignited her Halo and had her wings manifest and spread as she stood. At the range the approaching Atheed now stood, Moxxie could see the fury and outrage on the Angel's face at seeing his fellow Angel standing on Hell's side of the line and notably not killing them all. Moxxie then felt a sucking sensation in his hooves, as though gravity started to pull extra hard just for him. He turned to Gadreel, and saw her enacting her new Transit, her piece of Archangel Technique they'd stolen unawares, and saw the magic snap into place.
There was a flutter of great wings, beating against a gale, and winning.
Then, there was a snap, as Moxxie felt as though he were falling onto his own hoofprints, and the battlefield of Heaven vanished. Of the armies involved before, now there was only IMP, Gadreel, and the stunned looking Atheed.
They were standing now in a desert, the grasses burnt and brown, parched for years of ill-watering. In the distance there was a city, just coming awake with the sun barely above the horizon. If Moxxie were more of an asshole, he might have lambasted Gadreel for landing them all too close to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the Human World, but the fact was, there was nothing here but rocks, lizards, and a burned-out RV that contained a failed meth-lab.
"You made two grave mistakes, traitor," Atheed said, pointing his spear at her. "First in joining these filthy beasts. And second in taking this fight to where there aren't enough of them to keep me from killing you."
"Mills?" Blitz said. And Millie launched herself in a blur toward the Angel. Atheed actually looked surprised at the speed that Millie had managed, barely managing to ward the crushing blow by Zahm with the haft of his spear and hurling her aside to skid to a halt tearing ruts in the wasteland with her hooves. Maelstrom was next in, not quite as fast as Millie, but able to close the distance rapidly. The Sword of Exorcism swatted Maelstrom's first few blows aside with his own much-faster hand, and tried to spear the Hellhound to death in a blow showing contempt. Maelstrom kicked the spear upward and out of alignment so that when at last Maelstrom drove a kick upward into his now open-side, it landed with bone-creaking force in the Angel's ribs.
Atheed answered that by outright clubbing Maelstrom away with his wings, an impact that caught Maelstrom right in the face and caused a spray of scarlet blood to fly from his nose, landing in a pile a short way away, only to give his head a shake, and push himself to his feet once more.
Next into the fray was Gadreel herself, but though Moxxie had seen her effortlessly end far bigger things than Atheed, she seemed… awkward, in the fight. As though she were struggling to find an opening for the one meaningful blow that she had. As such, she was quickly put onto the defensive and forced back, taking brutal punches to the gut and temple as she retreated. Oh. Oh of course. She was a killer, not a fighter. In a fair fight – in any fair fight – she would be overwhelmed. If there was no One Strike To Victory, then she had no means of holding her own. Again the crippling overspecialization of Angels came to the Angels' detriment, only now it was to Moxxie's as well.
At this point Blitz had interposed into the fight, ducking the sweeping of Atheed's wings and slashing at the backs of Atheed's knees, only to find his knife didn't even part the Angel Satin that the Sword of Exorcism was wearing. The Angel kicked back, catching Blitz in the gut and sending him rolling back before Blitz grabbed a rock, arrested his backward momentum, and used his own body as an elastic to send himself racing forward again, this time jumping onto Atheed's back and trying to stab him in the side of his neck.
Atheed reached to grab Blitz, but the assassin-imp was able to avoid the grab because there was only one vector it could have come from, and Blitz, while a fool, was not incompetent.
There, the instant that Moxxie had been waiting for, as Millie's brutal downswing with Zahm announced her return to the melee; the blade bit into the naturally armored wings of Atheed, and sprayed golden blood as the structures under were crushed and ruptured. The moment of pain and stillness that Millie's assault imparted gave Moxxie a chance to hold his fingers in a triangle before him, and speak a new word of power, one that God had never spake, but that humans had invented despite Him.
"Bakūko-Græzr," Moxxie intoned, and the focused beam of aligned gamma radiation struck out like a laser, of such intensity that the only way that humans could theoretically match it was to create a laser whose power-source was an exploding nuclear-bomb. It didn't burn the way typical lasers did; when it struck Atheed, there was a grenade-like explosion of the spell it impacted giving way, then of the matter beyond exploding. Blitz was sent flying, and Atheed now was sent rolling back.
As Atheed flipped back up to his feet, his derision and dismissal was gone from his expression. He no longer saw Moxxie and the others as mere annoyances in the fight that he would have against Gadreel; now they were peers in the combat, actual threats who could do him harm, whether by brute force, by magic, or by means otherwise. Blitz picked himself off of the ground and pulled his Convertible Rifle off of his back and sent out a spray of bullets. Here, unlike in Heaven, there was no grey tracer following after them like smoke; New Mexico was famous for methamphetamine, not magical potency. Atheed's hand slashed in a blur, sweeping up the rounds fired at him and palming them when Blitz snarled and fed a magazine into the rifle's well. The Sword of Exorcism flicked his hand out at the rapidly approaching Millie, and Moxxie hissed and created a wedge of a barrier ahead of her, one that she would impact into and deflect aside, in the fraction of a second it would take before the bullets Atheed caught raced back with nearly ballistic velocity and perhaps even did her some amount of actual damage. Millie recovered quickly, but Maelstrom, who hadn't needed to deflect, launched himself in a leaping tackle at the Angel they were hunting.
The arm was instantly out to catch him by the throat, but Maelstrom did something rather unexpected; he twisted in the air so that instead of his throat slamming into the palm of the arm, Maelstrom maneuvered so that he landed already locking in an arm-bar and dragging Atheed's spare arm toward the ground. He tucked in his head, and weathered the beating that armored wings gave him, keeping Atheed's shielding hand out of the way.
Perfect opportunity for Moxxie to pull the Blessing Tip from his own jacket, pull it to his shoulder, and in the instant it was seated properly (a fraction of a second, no more) sent a round of IMP's precious Angel Steel racing toward the enemy Angel's increasingly desperate face. Atheed got his other wing in the way, but the bullet nevertheless blew a hole through the plated feathers of his wing with a sound like a torpedo hitting a warship.
Atheed staggered back, Maelstrom still pinning his arm and being dragged along the dirt as Atheed did so; the Angel's face now had a grisly trail cut from the edge of his nose along his cheekbone before tearing off a clip of his ear, burnt and a strange ragged rust-color, with golden blood freely oozing from the whole tract. Atheed held his spear-wielding hand to his face, snarling at how his fingers came away golden and bloody.
Nobody needed orders right now. The goal was obvious and the method even more so; keep up the onslaught. Keep weathering Atheed's defenses. Injure him. Take away his defenses. And then eventually his resistance would collapse entirely. Gadreel raced forward, attempting to use Atheed's moment of distraction to hook her knife through the Sword of Exorcism's temple. Atheed was able to recover enough to push the blade away using his forearm, the deflection throwing sparks as though her burning weapon had grated along steel instead of Angel Satin. With a flick of his freed arm, he smashed Gadreel aside, causing her to crater into the dirt and rebound out of it, landing somewhat unsteadily on her feet with her wings flared a good distance away, golden blood dribbling out of her nose. She immediately advanced into combat again.
Millie, seeing a perfect moment, lashed out in a flurry of blows which Atheed had to use all of his attention to keep from impacting directly into his guard; he'd learned that turtling up was not a viable strategy against somebody with a metaphorical sledgehammer. But Atheed's defense was hampered by the fact that, despite the thrashing he'd gotten by the wing on that side, Maelstrom was still clung to that arm and locking it out of position and lending his whole body-weight to slowing the Angel down. Maelstrom had scarlet blood running down his face from the cuts on his muzzle and skull from the armored wing, but he had nothing but focus and intensity on his face. He would release this arm either when he died, or when Atheed did.
Blitz did about the dumbest thing a normal imp (ie, an imp who wasn't named Mildred Rough) possibly could, in that he closed to knife-fighting range, ducking under a sweep of one wing and a darting around a stab by the short-spear that Atheed held. As Blitz so often loved to do, he clambered up his opponent, using their own body against them as he scaled up the back of Atheed again, this time getting directly between his wings so that neither one could hit him without either dropping the defense against Millie or stopping the offense against Maelstrom. Still, Atheed wasn't going to allow himself to be used as a rope without response; a backflick of his elbow caught Blitz right in the eye, almost dislodging him and causing black blood to run down his face from the split at his eyebrow. Blitz shouted a flurry of incoherent profanity, then he slammed his knife hard into the side of Atheed's face, right into the wound that Moxxie's bullet had cut.
The blade plunged through the ragged wound, but Atheed did something rather impish when that weapon tried to split his face apart; he opened his mouth as it was coming in, and the instant the blade was through the meat of his cheek he bit down incredibly hard on it, before bucking with his whole body and using the laws of lever to hurl Blitz off of him once more, slamming the imp to the ground in front of him. Atheed raised a boot to stomp the imp into the stone, but Moxxie had been waiting for a moment when Atheed didn't have the Thaumaturge of IMP in sight, to set his feet again, and call forth the immense power that the impish race had stolen through their innate connection to the Abyss which separated Creation from the rest of the Multiverse. And again, he spoke the words he had invented, and framed between his triangularly-steepled fingers came a gamma-ray laser which Atheed, focused on Blitz as he was, made no attempt to dodge.
The blast of heat, light, and radiation caused Atheed to abort his stomp, but when his foot hit the ground, there was a twisting that told Moxxie the whole of it; the graser had burned so much of the internals of Atheed's leg away that when he put weight on it, one of the bones of his lower leg outright crumbled, no doubt to agony and at least a moment of lost-balance.
Lost balance that Millie capitalized on beautifully, with a twisting cut that started by sweeping low, then with a massive heave upward, she snuck the head of Zahm, the Axe of Unspeakable Rage, inside the arc of Atheed's wing; she managed to catch Zahm's hungry edge right into the bones that held all of Atheed's armored wing to his body. There was a crunch not just of bone being cleaved by a mighty blow by a sharp cleaver, but also the shrieking of metal being torn out of its place and shape by tremendous force.
With a large spray of golden blood that covered Blitz, Millie, and Maelstrom, Atheed's wing came off, flying through the air to land with a leaden thud onto the dirt a few meters away.
Moxxie was pulling his Blessing Tip around to take another shot, to damage his other wing to free Maelstrom from its pounding, but Gadreel's face lost all expression, and there was a pulse of strange, otherworldly power about her, something not simply ancient but mind-breakingly eternal, something not malevolent but viewing all living things as so small as to be beneath contempt. For just a moment, the oppressive weight of the Horseman Death touched the Human World, a storm of ruin centered around his chosen representative Gadreel.
She vanished into smoke.
And an instant later, she was behind and above Atheed. Her eyes, which had been alike to glowing mercury, now were black beyond blackness, a sort of wailing and hungering nothing that hopefully awaited Ruut Nuckelavee as the price of her many, many sins. Her white wings were now the color of tire-fire smoke. The moment she needed to be, she was where she could kill. Her arm raced forward, empty and open-palmed, racing down through his Halo, before the hand closed. What was inside that hand was not her knife. It was something that hurt to look at, to try to think about. It was a Weapon. A Tool whose purpose was turning beings into memories. But beyond that, it defied quantification. And with that Tool Of Death now in her hand, she slammed her knee into the spur of his remaining wing, braced as hard as her body would allow her, and dragged it backward, plunging into Atheed's face until her fist smashed flat his nose and the Killing Implement formed a cavity inside Atheed's skull that no living thing could survive.
The Halo on her arm began to glow brighter. With almost contemptuous ease, Gadreel released The Tool Of Death and pulled her arm back, grabbing the Halo as it went, and tearing it from it place hovering above Atheed's head. There was a burst of golden blood that raced out, as though her tearing had revealed the hidden mechanism by which Halos hover above their angel hosts, only visible now in destruction. She held the now-stabilized Halo back, blinking a few times; the last time she blinked, her eyes were mercury again. Her wings took a longer time to slowly fade back through greys and to the white they had been before.
Atheed fell to his knees, then flopped straight forward onto the wasteland of Albuquerque, incidentally landing on Blitz when he did. Blitz immediately started to shout at the indignity of it, but Maelstrom, only now extracting himself, beaten and bloody, from the now dead Atheed's arm, rolled Atheed off of Blitz with a kick.
"Hooo-leeeeee-fuck that was fun!" Blitz said with a smile as he got to his feet and ripped his knife out of Atheed's face. "I ain't had a fight like that in months!"
Gadreel, though, rounded the carcass of Atheed and leaned down, staring into the wound she'd opened through his face; that wound was a hideous thing, even more ragged than the tract that the Seraphic Steel had dug, and even less healing. It was like every cell that the Tool had touched died as well, leaving the whole injury utterly devoid of any hope of survival. "You could have said nothing," the Angel of Deathblows said in High Enochian, which Moxxie only knew how to speak because of the madness needed to prepare for the killing of Nathan Birch. "I could have lived without Daniel, knowing he was safe in the care of others. But you had to be 'eager'. Cruelty begets ruin. Promise made, promise kept."
"What the fuck was that?" Blitz asked, having understood none of it.
"Just mocking him now that he's dead," Gadreel said, her tones more heated than usual. Blitz touched at his face, feeling how his eye was already swelling up; it'd darken soon into a mighty shiner. And knowing Blitz's run of pride, he wouldn't ask Moxxie to rewind it. So be it, Moxxie thought. He was running low on magical ethers anyway. "We are done here."
"Noooot quite," Blitz said. He pulled his Hellphone out, only to find it snapped in half. He bitched and shoved both parts of it back into his pocket, and snatched Moxxie's offered spare, quickly turning on its camera and snapping a picture of the extremely dead Atheed, laying in the dirt of New Mexico among bones of lizards, rats, and tweakers. "Now we're done."
"Actually, sir, we need that too," Moxxie said, moving up to the wing that Millie had severed from Atheed before the Angel's end. He tried to pick up up, but found it cripplingly heavy; it wasn't until Millie stowed Zahm that she with seeming effortlessness picked it up and draped it over her shoulder so that the tips of the feathers behind her dragged ruts in the dirt.
"Oh right. The big guy's bounty. I swear to Christ on his magic stick I'd forget my head if it weren't bolted to my body," Blitz said.
"One more thing," Maelstrom said, his words a little slurred, because of all of them, he looked the most thoroughly thrashed, sitting on a nearby rock with his head wavering unsteadily. They all turned to him. "Take his clothes and that spear of his."
"What? Why?" Millie asked.
"Angel Satin and steel," Moxxie said with a groan at having not thought of it. These clothes, even battle damaged, were not just Angel Satin from an Exorcist; they were clothes tailored for a particular Angel, one who had not only inspired the Exorcist, but had personally killed a lot of people in Hell not long ago. There were now likely a fair number of deeply spiteful, very rich people who would pay good money to have Atheed's clothes, if only to wipe their asses with after they shat. And Angel Steel was Angel Steel. It was as good as money in most exchanges, when it wasn't better.
"Man, we're not leaving this douchebag a lot of dignity, are we?" Blitz asked, leaning to one side and spitting out a tooth. Looked like he'd be accepting some of Rough's Method after all. Blitz turned to Gadreel. "Eh, fuck 'im. He seems like some kinda asshole. Wanna kick him in the dick one last time before you go?"
"I think I've had my revenge, thank you," Gadreel said, already starting to contract back into herself, returning to the small, very closed in Angel that she tended to be. Moxxie didn't waste time with giving any respect for the carcass, simply pulling the pants, jacket, and shirt off of him. The shirt underneath the jacket was almost undamaged. It'd sell for a lot.
Moxxie quickly did the sums, and made some educated estimations as to the likely value that he could ask for the booty they'd plundered, in addition to the client-fee and the standing bounty. Conservatively, if they had to sell this as Scrap Satin (which was still a worth a fucking mint), they'd get another hundred thousand for the clothing. But Scrap Satin was the rock-bottom price for this substance, presuming that it was literally a scrap ripped from a larger garment, needing to be reloomed and rebolted. These clothes were mostly intact. Considering that the War Dress of Princess Charlotte was considered by all involved to be just this side of priceless, for it was completely intact and stripped directly from the assassin-machine with no changing hands between to sully it, this would catch anything from hundreds of thousands, to millions of souls. And if there were a spiteful buyer, the price would actually go down, but would be packaged with an appropriate amount of political and business favors to more than make up the difference.
In the end, today gave a savage beating to a Hellhound, a modest beating to one imp, and a corpse of an angel left naked in the dirt, sightless eyes staring up toward the sun that slowly rose into the sky and allowed the crimson of the dawn to flee before unforgiving gold of barren dirt and empty blue skies.
"We should leave. Heaven pays closer attention to the Human world than most places that aren't directly under its nose," Gadreel said.
"Yeah, well, we got what we needed. Let's fuck off back to Hell, shall we?" Blitz asked, helping Maelstrom back to his unsteady feet. Gadreel nodded, and waited for Moxxie to cluster in with Millie, give her a kiss on the golden-blood slathered cheek – angel blood had a strangely alkali taste – and when he turned to the Angel of Deathblows, there was a fluttering of wings, and the four Hellspawn vanished from the human world, appearing in the atrium of their office once more.
One angel remained behind, though. Just briefly. Gadreel looked upon the utterly defeated carcass of the Angel who betrayed her confidence and led to the death of the child she bore. And with a massive heave, she drove a punt-kick directly between the fork of Atheed's legs, hurling his body away into the distance, his unused manhood pulverized under her bare foot's lack of tenderness. With a nod of positively Hellish satisfaction, she Transited herself, and rejoined her new life as a member-in-good-standing of Hell.
"Gadreel ought to have been our warning, rancid whore, that more of our kind were going to be seduced by the lifestyle that you provide them. Pulled down here, into this fetid and disgusting pit where they can revel to their hearts' content free of the strictures that Our Father God had given them. Her grievance was known long before her defection. As the only Angel who had been pregnant at the time of the onset of God's Pogrom against the Nephilim, her child was doomed before it even drew its first breath. And she counted those who followed God's will to be her enemies forevermore.
In some cases of that overarching spite, I can agree with her. I must heed the First Satan… we failed to be kind. And from that lack of kindness, cruelty followed, and even a foul creature such as you knows what happens when cruelty is enshrined in virtue.
I was not being rhetorical, and you therefore disappoint me with your ignorance. As the Saint At The Throne made very clear; to allow cruelty, is to invite ruin. Gabriel was not merely willing to undertake a cruel directive, he was eager to do it. Gabriel is a name that will live, likely for the rest of time, in infamy, as a name attached to the most animal and savage cruelty. And considering that it had to vie against that of Lucifer, your former fetid monarch and the creature who turned Hell into the cess-pit I am required by contract to stand in, it speaks volumes as to what Gabriel did, and in far smaller a time.
Very much, I wish I could call the Grigori traitors and cowards, for fleeing the defense of Heaven in favor of Hell, and be done of them. But I would not just be wrong, but stupid to do so. Azazel never turned his back on Heaven, despite having every bit as much bile as the Fallen Grigori. He is lauded for his fortitude, even though his part in the downfall of Heaven That Once Was is known. He will be remembered fondly, if he ever goes. I doubt he will. For a Secondborn, he has an Archangel-like spirit. Doubly so, when the Word claimed so many.
No, I cannot blame the Grigori for slipping the leash we put on them, out of paranoia and scorn. We treated them as less-than, and they reacted in a manner which made perfect sense. If I were to treat an animal such as you with such disrespect, I should expect no less rebellion than we ought to have known to see in the futures of the Grigori.
If you try to proposition me sexually again, I will end you, Killjoy. Don't test my patience further."
-Forfax, Angel of Predator and Prey
