"Behold, the greatest sin that Angels have wrought upon Hell," Cain said with a grand, showman's gesture, toward where the unspeakable scale of the Qliphoth was lost to the immense distance. "To install a new Shard of Ruin into Hell by stealing it out of Heaven. I'm sure that Prince Stolas had his reasons, but nevertheless it takes up half of the realm, now. And it will only ever grow larger. Some day, all of Sloth will be shaded by the Tree of Death."
"That… is a very large tree," Rozarin said. Death suited her, she had come to realize; with her new body and the immense power it held, she could easily command any price of her choosing for doing those tasks she didn't find reprehensible. It might wound Charlie to know that Rozarin was very much moonlighting as a mercenary in the ongoing Turf Wars of Pentagram City, but capitalism was a reality of life-after-death. And she would not beggar herself for another's ideology. So instead, she reaped money in pushing imaginary lines on a notional map, lines which, once she withdrew from them would have a coin-flip of returning to their original spot within a fortnight. There was a reason she didn't contract by the month, but instead by the mission. It meant that there was only a very miniscule amount of The Suck™ that she could be tied to before her own savvy saw her free of it again. And the money was certainly more than enough that she could afford to take a hiking vacation all the way on the far side of Hell.
"A tautalogy if ever there was one said," Cain said, nodding at her assessment. "It pleases me to see that Hell hasn't done something intractably stupid like try to cut it down, as Heaven had. Two centuries of fugue is more than enough time for truly rank idiocy to transpire, after all."
"What is it, though?" Roz asked. "Really?"
"The Tree of Death?" Cain asked, following her as she began to depart from the road and move through waist-high salmon-flesh colored grass, her back to 'civilization' as instantiated by the Hellevator that was the fastest way by far to reach this Ring, and heading toward the places that seemed to not have been corralled and cultivated and domesticated. In a word, she was walking toward the Qliphoth. The cultures of Sloth seemed to be quite eager to grow their civilization as far from it as they could manage, and leave only industry to the tree's shadow. Cain fell into a place cutting his own rut a few paces beside her, even with her and neither leading nor following. "It is That Which Unmakes. If I were to call it something vulgar and reductive, imagine it a disposal area for all that Creation ought-not-have. I did not see the seed of it, for that is a cutting from a plant twenty billion years old and twenty thousand years felled, but I do know that it is of Outsider provenance."
"So why would an Angel plant it here?" she asked. Cain was a valuable companion, and dare say even a friend, but what he seemed to excel in was being a living history book.
"As mentioned, I can't speak for the intentions of Stolas. But I can speculate, and if you will accept mere speculation than I can offer you this: perhaps Stolas saw that a Shard of Ruin was not something to be thrown away so easily or so flippantly as his celestial brothers in Heaven had done with their own," Cain gave a mild shrug. "After all, for all Stolas' proficiency in matters heavenly, both ecclesiastic and astronomical, there is a reason he is called 'The Prince of Flowers', and it is likely due in some small part to his role in bringing that here."
"Do you suspect it had something to do with the False Worlds?" she asked, recalling a tidbit he'd brought up at some point in the previous months. Cain brightened for a moment as he gave it thought.
"It could very well be the case," Cain admitted. "You have to understand; in my first century here, I walked the Rings in my damnation and wandered heedless, but my path did take me to this ring. And notably, to Sloth before the planting of the Qliphoth here. And now that memory stirs in me, yes, there is a notable difference in the False Worlds. Those sad globes of denial and escapism were once only about so wide," he said, holding his arms a bout a meter and a half apart.
"That's significantly smaller," Roz said, recalling the video that Cain had showed her of his 'rescue' of his gear from inside one of those things. It was the size of a room, that thing. "You could only fit one Dream Eater into such a fruit."
"Indeed. And you could often tell which ones contained one, because they were dull where the others were luminous," he said. A hill began to mount up before them, and they began to ascend it, feeling the wind blowing over their shoulders and dragging their hair forward with it as it went. "And as memory serves, they also were found throughout Sloth Ring, rather than only in the Tree Zone."
"So do you think that maybe Stolas planted that tree, at least in part, to help cultivate and maybe even tame the False Worlds?" Roz asked.
"That is a possibility I hadn't considered. And though I can't place intention onto another person's actions, the end results do bear a certain degree of logical sense. Dreammatter is valuable. And having more access to it, either through Ruptures or Escapes, would enrich all of the Ars Goetia, including Stolas," Cain said. He gave a nod, satisfied with the line of thought that she'd presented for him. He turned to her, a smile clear in his green-on-green eyes. "I can't recall I had a pupil who actually provided new hypotheses, rather than having to chew through the ones that I have by the quiverful."
"I have big shoes to fill," Roz said. Charlie had not exactly 'compared' Rozarin to the last person in the Hotel who had been like her, as Charlie wasn't nearly mean-spirited by a half, but by the way that Charlie talked about this 'Samuel Scailes' that had briefly shared her roof, he had been a phenom, a prodigy, a man possessed of monumental talents, and lacking only the willpower to properly use them. Husk said that Samuel had learned as much magic as the Radio Demon (or the Scarlet Fucker, as Husk now unwaveringly called him) was willing to teach him in a matter of days, as opposed to the many months that it was taking Rozarin to gain a meaningful grasp of magic, even with such skillful teachers as Cain, First Of The Damned, to guide her.
"You'll fill them. Unlike the previous poor soul who was saddled with responsibilities well beyond his capacity, you have no time limit, and all of the same advantages, plus perhaps even more," Cain said with a shrug. "You certainly have a knack for understanding Angelsong Hymnals and other Angelic forms of magic."
"Well, yeah, they're pretty simple to understand," Rozarin said. Cain tutted, raising a finger as they crested the hill, and now that they were at its summit, they could see that they were going to descend toward a gradient of pink slowly going grey, as they left behind the perimeter of Sloth Without Qliphoth and approached Sloth With Qliphoth.
"Ah, but there you're blinded by the lenses of talent that have fallen before your eyes," Cain said.
"Please, I've never been talented at anything," she demurred.
"A sentence uttered by somebody whom society has convinced those talents she had were worthless. Foolishness! I'll hear no more of it," Cain said with broad gestures as they began their descent. The wind now blew into their faces as they made their way down the long slope toward a gully where a creek choked with fallen trees and other pink-leafed detritus was winding. "Your capacity with advanced Angelic magic – and make no mistake, Ahmadi, it is advanced – is a talent. One that you are unaware of because it makes the difficult seem simple. I ask you to remember that what often seems quite simple, sometimes is anything but."
"Fine, fine," she said, relenting to his point. "I still wish I could figure out some of the other stuff faster, though."
"Rozarin, you are making monumental progress as a human learning the Arcane Arts. Don't hold yourself to a standard that nobody who is not currently attempting to murder God could match or better," Cain said with a dismissive wave. He paused, hissing through his teeth, and Rozarin fell still for a moment. She looked to where he was staring, but after a long few moments, he shook his head. "It's on the wrong side and will be gone when we reach it," Cain muttered, then turned to Ahmadi again. "You are an extraordinary woman. Have you been doing your physical exercises?"
"As much as I can. I don't find I'm getting much out of the weights," she admitted. It had been a shock to her as well that she could easily lift many tonnes with one hand, and with both she could practically relocate buildings. In fact, it was easier to list the things she couldn't do with her raw physical might than it was to list the things she could. Once, when she had been only a child, she saw a cartoon on the neighborhood television one morning. Popeye. It had seemed a flight of utmost fancy to watch a thick-wristed seaman punch a Roc back into its egg, or knit a steel-beam into an anchor-chain, or smash the artist drawing him to the floor. Now? Now she had questions.
"Perhaps it is a nature of your Gift, that stolen piece of Gabriel, that makes it so," Cain said, easily picking his way down the slope whereas Rozarin was beginning to flag behind him despite the fact that her legs were longer. She wouldn't have picked this body if she had the choice. She had lived as good a life as she could. To have the realm declare her a demon for it was unjust, and in the long tail of history would not stand. "Husk relates that Samuel had the gift of his Angelic Grandfather, Raguel, in that he could look within a person and know that which made them who they are. A gift to discern guilt from innocence, taken to its logical end, smuggled into Hell."
"Everybody says such spectacular things about Samuel," Rozarin said. "I keep wondering how much of that is people holding onto favorable memories, and how much of it was… well… him being what he is."
"And you wonder if you will ever match the example of the one who had been placed in your shoes before you had a chance to wear them," Cain said. He shrugged, pausing and allowing Rozarin to pick carefully her path through a tricky, collapsed section of the down-slope, before he continued walking again. "You shall. I guarantee it."
"Yet the going is still so slow," Rozarin said. "So much magic exists that just slides off of my eyes without ever sinking in."
"And yet you've managed to learn Least Teleportation, out of the Hellish arrangements. If there were one spell a prospective student were to learn so swiftly, it would not be that one. A freakishly difficult cantrip, that one is," Cain said with a chuckle.
"Well, I don't want to get stuck somewhere I don't want to be ever again," she said.
"And you never shall," Cain said. "Now onward. While we technically have all of the time in the world, I would still rather be to our destination and then back to safer climes before the weather grows foul or the Delirium Engine rumbles over a hilltop."
"The what?" Roz asked.
"Trust me when I say with utmost sincerity that it is far better for you not to know," Cain said, with a distinctly uneasy look in his eyes, one that managed to convince Roz not to pursue the point. There were many things which angered or saddened or concerned Cain. But to make him uneasy? That numbered far fewer. "Onward, Rozarin. The sun is up, the Qliphoth is ahead of us, and if we sleep on the ground where we're going it might take us decades to awaken!"
She gave her head a shake, but nevertheless followed in Cain's enthusiasm as their way evened out to a more gentle downward slope. It was still a ways toward the creek, and a long way farther until the grey overtook the pink. There would be time enough for Rozarin Ahmadi. In this. In everything.
Chapter 42
Only As Strong As…
Family business was going bad, fast. He'd watched with eyes more glazed than not as Henroin once again lashed out at the more loyal but less productive members of his organization, lambasting and berating them. Wearing them down. Grinding away their loyalty until nothing but resentment and spite remained.
More faces were missing from the meetings each time one was called. Either because Henroin had them purged on his own, or because he had Arackniss do it for him, or else because more of the members of the Veloce Crime family were starting to read the writing on the wall and knowing that the Don was on metaphorical life-support. Strong-arm tactics wouldn't last him much longer. Eventually, and sooner than Arackniss would have liked to admit, there was going to be an open rebellion against him. And with Pa being Pa, there was exactly zero chance of that rebellion ending without a swimming-pool's worth of blood being spilled.
So Arackniss was taking matters into his own hands. Every time somebody was 'to meet with an accident', he would nod his head, say 'I'll get it done, you'll never see him again,' and then go out into Pentagram City with nothing but his bare hands. Now it was something of a touch-stone of the criminal underworld. Arackniss, forever the bitch-boy of the organization, now had a reputation. That if he came to you with a gun, you would likely spend the next week recovering in the hospital, but if he came to you with empty hands, you would never be seen again. It suited him, to have that particular reputation. Not because it fueled his ego; decades of working under Henroin had pretty much murdered-in-the-crib any arrogance he could have possibly had. It was useful because it made what he was actually doing much, much simpler.
He knocked on the door of the building in the rain-pounded town of Macery, an off-the-highway spot an hour in the direction opposite which lead from PC to Imp City, a highway that lead out to the middle of fucking nowhere Pride Ring that was festooned with abandoned pyramids of potassium, Gas Vents and the industrial infrastructure to capture and transform those toxic fumes into Hadene, something that could be used as, but was not directly related to, gasoline. There had been a time, way back in the mid 1800's that this had been a bustling industrial town, canning energy for the good of Hell. But automation had turned that boom into a ruthlessly corporate affair. Now entire fields could be overseen by two Sinners and their cat, and the processing almost as egregious. They didn't stack up the waste potassium anymore. They just dumped it over The Edge. There was nobody living out here, because there was no reason for them to. Yet the infrastructure remained, even dilapidated as it was.
The door swung open, and the feline, scarred visage of Old Tom greeted him, his twisted, perpetually glowering mouth tilting up slightly into a smirk, before he pulled back within. Tom might have the signifiers of a city tom-cat, but he had more in common in terms of musculature with a Siberian Tiger, or perhaps a polar bear. He dwarfed most Sinners who hadn't lucked into becoming Dragons. "Why you come here now, little spider?" Tom asked, still having that distinct Bratva accent after all this time in Hell. Nobody knew exactly who Old Tom had been in life, but the running odds were that he was a Vory in the Old Country, which made him likely a Georgian.
Arackniss didn't answer, instead dragging the bag which he effortlessly pulled and setting it in front of him. He undid the knot binding it shut here, where no eyes but those he knew were somewhat trustworthy could see, and allowed the sack to fall away.
"If you ever drag me around like a bunch of potatoes again, I'll skin ya!" Marco Scutello snapped, standing up and beating the loose fibers off of his pristine black suit. He picked and plucked at it, as Old Tom gave a bass laugh.
"Tarantula grows tired of Dust King now?" Old Tom asked. "Tarantula is losing mind."
"The old fuck's lost his mind," Scutello countered, wincing and grimacing at finding a weevil on a cuff, and flicking it off of him. He rounded on Arackniss, easily overtopping him in height, as nearly all of made-men of Veloce tended to. He pointed down at him, a haughty look on his face. "But mark my words, little bitch, if you thought you could just drag me here to Old Tom and off me…"
"You might want to look that way for a minute before making that claim," Arackniss pointed to the window in the door that lead into this set of row-houses. He scowled at Arackniss, then leaned and looked. And then he was still, blinking in shock.
"Wait a fuckin' minute. Ain't he s'posed to be dead?"
"So are the people in the next four rooms," Arackniss said. "Congratulations, Scutello; you're the latest member in my collection of guys my Pa ordered me to off despite it bein' a fucking stupid idea. We still got a couple rooms open, but don't get comfy. We might need to ditch in a fuck of a hurry," Arackniss said.
Scutello blinked, then looked to Arackniss. "You're making a move on your old man, aren't you?"
"He ain't left me with much of a choice, now has he?" Arackniss grumbled.
"Well, shit. You know, I might be willing to…" Scutello said, grinning wide, the peacock feathers which stood out all the more when contrasted with the crisp blackness of his suit fanning wide. Arackniss had about none of the patience required to deal with the Dust King being his scummiest right now, though, so Arackniss kicked the back of Scutello's knee and grabbed him by the throat when he fell to the floor.
"I don't care what you're 'willing' to do," Arackniss said. "As of today, you are alive only at my pleasure. It would be a very fuckin' simple thing to rip your head off and yeet that bitch through the Pride Wall. So you're gonna have to convince me why I should take the more pain-in-the-ass option."
Scutello bristled, but the thunderous growling of Old Tom quickly quelled him. Marco's arrogance might be equal to the strongest spider in Hell, but it wasn't up to the task of both that, and also the maybe-Georgian who landed in hell with 'MИP' branded on his right hand. He folded like the off-suit 2/7 that he was. He let the man rise.
"So here's how it's gonna go, Scutello; I know how you've been gouging the Old Man. I know the money you been pulling off that was s'posed to be sent to him, and blaming the gap on Saul the Skink," Arackniss said, standing with his back straight, not caring how he still needed to stare upward at the Sinner before him who had the most disconcerting features of a frigate-bird mixed with the plumage of a peacock. "And that shit ain't gonna fly. Saul's good people. And with you now 'dead', he's gonna be takin' over your routes and your deals. So I hope that yer sweetheart-deals are fungible, because I'm fuckin' funging 'em."
"Do you think I'm just gonna stand here with you making demands?" Scutello demanded, trusting a finger into Arackniss' chest. Arackniss grabbed his arm and twisted down, causing the King of Cocaine in Pentagram City to let out a shocked yelp of pain and be dragged to one knee once more, so that he was more or less looking Arackniss in the eye.
"No, I don't," Arackniss said. "I think you're gonna kneel there while I tell you how shit's gonna go now."
Old Tom gave a chuckle, and Arackniss puffed out a breath.
"Leggo 'a me, half-hand!" Scutello demanded. Arackniss tightened his grip until he felt the slightly hollow bones of Scutello's arm grind against each other. He let out another scream, this one loud enough to cause Imelda Marcello to poke her head out of the room she was sharing with a couple of the other dames whom Pa had lashed out at. Arackniss was old-school. He didn't like hurting women. Pa was old school too, but frankly he held the belief that a woman needed a firm backhand from time to time to 'remember their place'. Imelda was one of the few who could take that backhand and give it back just as hard. If Pa hadn't been in charge, that dame would'a been an enforcer, just like Arackniss.
"You need help out there, Baby?" Imelda asked, that particular New Orleans patois as always pleasing to his ear. She'd been a daughter of the city's Godfather back in the golden age, one who died young and in defiance of her Sicilian roots. Defiance like that was hard to put a price-tag onto. Especially now.
"I'm fine, gorgeous," Arackniss said. Imelda, like Tom, had taken on a fairly feline aspect, so smiled the way cats smile when the prey they're playing with is just about to die.
"Well if you need a partner, I got you babe," she said, then ducked her head back into her room. A few moments later, there was the ringing of feminine laughter as she no doubt made a joke of Scutello's new place rather low on the ladder of what Arackniss was doing.
"So here's how this shit's gonna go," Arackniss said. "You're gonna take this phone," he beckoned back with one of his extra hands and Old Tom placed an old burner flip-phone into it, "and you're gonna call up Saul the Skink. You're gonna tell him all 'a your suppliers, all 'a your middle men, and all 'a your endpoints. Then he's gonna run that shit."
"That's just killin' me with extra steps. Why the fuck would I do that?" Scutello demanded at a pained grumble.
"Because Saul don't want to do that job," Arackniss said firmly. "In fact, he's perfectly happy sellin' Coke by the kilo instead 'a by the tonne, and wants nothin' less than to take up yer vaunted title of the Dust King of Pentagram City. So when this shit goes down, he retires back to his fifty-kilogram lifestyle, and you step back in as the Dust King again. Only this time, you're answerable to me. And remember that unlike Pa, I actually read the fucking ledgers. I know where the money is going. And I know how much I'm owed."
"Fine. Fine!" Scutello said, and Arackniss released his arm. He rose back to a stand, gingerly clutching this forearm where Arackniss had stopped just short of crushing it to pulp. "You want the big chair that bad, well fuck me, it took you long enough."
"Here's the thing, Marco; I really fuckin' don't," Arackniss said, dead honest for a moment. "But I see, and I know you see, that Henroin is flailing and he's losing ground with every step he takes."
"Fuck 'im. Let him fall," Scutello said.
"And what about Babs?" Arackniss asked flatly. A confused look came to Scutello's face. "Or Angie? Or Desiree? Or what about all the other wives of the Old Families that I haven't gotten proof-positive that yer fucking behind their men's backs? If Pa goes down and there's nobody there to catch it, the Old Families go to war and all that trim gets locked away. Capone is already a fucking juggernaut. Do you want him to eat all 'a what we once had, too?"
"No. No I'd say I don't," Scutello said. Arackniss had been lucky to be able to hold onto the 'Alphonse Button' as long as he had. Because Scutello was fairly blithe with the people who hated him, but there was one name in all of Hell whom he could not abide under any circumstances, and that was the former Chicago Mobster Alphonse Capone. And considering how adept that old Al had been at turning his living ruthlessness into demonic power, Arackniss needed as many people in a line to keep him from eating Veloce as he could get.
"Exactly. Veloce is in a ditch right now. It got run in by a dumbass drunk on his own ego. And now we've got the bitch-work of dragging it back out before somebody comes and tows it away on us," Arackniss said. He gave a thrust of his head to one of the doors down the sheltered hallway that was being rattled by the driving rain of the late Hellish winter. "Pick yer room. There's still a few of 'em. But don't accumulate shit. I wasn't joking when I said we may have to move in a hell of a hurry."
"Long live the don," Scutello said sarcastically, then turned and moved through the hallway that had been built, shanty-style, to protect the entrances to the row-houses many years before, when this town still meant something to somebody. Arackniss puffed out a sigh, feeling some part of him deflate as the Dust King moved through the ill-lit path toward a place to hang his hat, and the youngest of the three Spiders Veloce in Hell turned to Old Tom.
"Don't you start with me," Arackniss said, at Old Tom's very smug look.
"I say nothing. You are fragile man," Old Tom countered.
"Fuck you," Arackniss said.
Tom chuckled then turned a retroflective golden eye toward the door that Scutello was entering. "Old Man is losing grip fast. Maybe have to make grip tighter, faster."
"I ain't got a grip on anything. Not yet," Arackniss said. He narrowed his many eyes at Tom. "And, frankly don't take this the wrong way – I appreciate you bein' here for shitheads like him that need their place punted into their heads – but… why are you here?"
Old Tom raised a brow at him.
"Come on. Everybody knows the only reason you worked for Pa was because he paid you as much as he did," Arackniss said. "And that kinda money? I don't have it. So why are you here?"
"I do work for money," Old Tom said with a nod. "I worked for Old Man for many years. Once he was strong. I work for less money. It is good to have good leader."
Arackniss snorted out a laugh, leaning against the doorframe of the first rowhouse, the one claimed by Old Tom himself. "Yeah. And when was even fucking that?" he asked.
"Was not long. A few years," Old Tom shrugged. "But then Old Man become weak. And I demand more money. Soon, he pay me what he pay me, and Old Man become weaker still."
"Which doesn't do anything to explain why you're standing there and not just jumping ship to Capone," Arackniss said.
"Capone is a shit," Old Tom said, leaning to spit on the ground. "I would not work for him if he offer all the treasures of Romanov Family."
"So why me?" Arackniss said.
"Does Old Tom do charity?" Old Tom asked, a smirk curling at his mouth.
"Obviously fuckin' not," Arackniss said.
"So you see, is not charity. Is investment," Old Tom said. "You not have money now. But you will have money. Is good enough for Tom," Old Tom said. He turned a glance toward the door which rattled loudly from the rain hitting it. "Old Man will not have money much longer. Me? Have expensive hobbies, will need new money. You will have money. Tom works for you."
"And I presume you're keepin' a very close tab on what I owes ya?" Arackniss said. Old Tom grinned, showing many sharp, flesh-ripping teeth.
"You understand principle," Old Tom said. He somewhat brusquely swept Arackniss off of the doorframe to his room with a hand that could have palmed Arackniss' entire head, not quite rude but certainly not polite, and opened the door to the dim room lit only by a storm-lantern. The electricity to this place was meager, provided by a store-bought generator, so as not to pull from the Grid of Hell which both would have given away that Macery was being inhabited again (an outside chance that Henroin would check that, but Arackniss was taking no chances), and was prone to failure out here in the sticks and as ill-constructed as it had been most of a century ago. Arackniss let the maybe-Georgian mercenary return to his room and shut the door behind him, leaving Arackniss in the hall, with dark thoughts on his mind.
Things were coming at him hard and fast, and Arackniss was having to dedicate more and more of his already scant free time to keeping as many balls in the air as he could manage. He'd never been a superb juggler. He just had to hope he'd get Pa to move off, one way or another, before those balls began to hit the floor.
Money was increasingly becoming an abstract thing for Angel Dust. Between the sheer amount of it his ass and/or dick could reap in the course of an afternoon, the fact that he spent essentially none of it down the black-hole which was his former addictions, and the fact that he was fixated on a task which had already kicked his ass once with the determination that he wasn't going to let it do so again, it was gathering up steadily with every John and with every movie he filmed.
In fact, it was amazing how little he cared about either prostitution or pornography considering that right now, he just needed the end result of engaging in them. The film crew refused to look him in the eye as he counted up his money, utterly ignoring his 'costar' who was dicked-out to within an inch of his life half-way collapsed off of a bed. The director had a mildly horrified look on his face, and the cleaners were all cursing loudly at the mess they were in the process of cleaning up. Guess what, assholes? Angel Dust ain't just bottoming anymore, motherfuckers!
Did he enjoy the work today? Not really. But frankly, had he ever?
Actually, there had been a brief window when he had. But obsession had a way of closing windows. He would leave it to the pornographic historians (which were a thing in Hell) to be surprised by what would, in the long view of history, turn out to be the final performance of Angel Dust's that was ever put to film.
"Holy hell you practically massacred that guy," Truly said, having offered to be his ride to and from this job. "Are you sure we can still call it porno?"
"He's smilin' and he got off. That's all that matters in the biz," Angel Dust said.
"I guess," Truly said, casting a worried look to the even more worried crew. Angel Dust wasn't paying attention to what his reputation was becoming, because he was, as mentioned, rather obsessed. But Truly clearly had. "Let's get you back to New Purg, shall we?"
"Yeah, whatever," he said.
The building was one of those up-scale Hell Houses that was pretty, scenic, and rented out by the hour for people to film smut in. For aficionados of the pornographic business, you could actually make a calendar, hour by hour and day by day of any given time-period by watching various films in a particular order and noting such things as the position of the sun in the sky, the background noise of traffic, and whether one particular venue was avoided because the glare was shitty at around 3 in the afternoon at this time of year.
Truly seemed to be holding something in as he passed the incoming new crew that would be setting up for the next filming – which told Angel Dust that he'd definitely gone over time in the shoot – not even trying to dodge them. The approaching Sinners, imps and fiends all parted at one glance at the look on his face and let him walk right through the center of their tide without slowing, giving Truly just enough space to be pulled along behind him.
"What's on your mind, tits?" Angel said, pausing just outside the front doors of the building, that particular 3 PM glare reflecting off of a nearby building and making Truly have to squint to look in his direction even as the clouds rolled in and the thunder rumbled. That building over there was a bitch, and that it was still standing when so many of its neighbors were torn down was just another sign to Angel Dust that this was actually Hell.
"I'm worried about you," Truly said.
"Don't be," he said, and turned to start walking again. Truly caught his arm, though, pulling him to a halt. She moved so the glare wasn't flat in her face, and gave her head as low shake.
"I'm serious, Angel Dust. I'm a Succubus. I practically grew up in places like this. That wasn't normal," she said.
"Who gives a fuck? I got paid, and now I'm leavin'," Angel Dust said.
"Angel, what is going on?" she said, trying to keep him from turning away and striding toward her car, parked about a block and a half away. She only managed to slow him down a bit, and she was pulled staggeringly in the direction he was walking. True to her Truly's own admission, she was not the best in terms of upper-body strength. "Is this about that Heaven thing again?"
"What's there to talk about? I need money, and this is how I can get the most of it," Angel Dust said.
"Angel Dust Stop," Truly said with a shockingly authoritative voice, one that even Angel in his current monomania couldn't simply ignore. He paused, turning back toward her. She had a deadly-serious look on her gaunt face, her dark hair having a distinctly blood-red tinge to it. She always looked half-starved, which she was. Now it gave her a particular intensity. She released his arm, staring hard at him as one hand went, as it did by habit, to the grip of her revolver. The only reason he didn't take it as the threat it seemed to be is because that's always where her hand went when she was talking Serious. "You're fishtailing. And if you don't do something to correct your skid, you're going into a ditch, if not a culvert. So how about you tell me exactly what's got you so goddamned obsessed?"
Angel Dust wanted to blow her off. But the way she tilted her head in that 'am I gonna have to ask harshly' way reminded him way too much of Cherri Bomb. Way too much of the friend he got killed because he was hasty, stupid, and unwilling to face reality.
It hit him like blasting a jet of ice-cold water directly up his asshole, a jolt which he could neither ignore nor disbelieve. Angel Dust released a sigh which, upon releasing it, he came to the realization that he'd been holding it in for days if not weeks. There was so much tension and strain in that sigh that when it finally left him, he planted his back against a mostly destroyed bus-stop and slid down until he was sitting on the pavement.
Truly moved to sit next to him.
"It's that bad, huh?" she asked.
"I've got to do it. I've got to get Molls out of that shithole up there," he said. "But… I don't know if I can. I don't know if it's possible. When I went up last time, we got squashed inside a fuckin' hour. And 'cording to the Ring Tops, it can take days to walk around the shitty parts of Heaven, let alone go higher."
Truly nodded, not even offering words because the words, right now, were his to let out.
"Last time, I was stupid, and I got my bestie killed. What happens next time if I do something stupid again?" Angel Dust asked. "What happens when we're even deeper, and one 'a them hole-things that the imp brung won't be enough to get us outta Heaven? 'Cause if Heaven's anything like Hell is, usin' one a them holes up on Cloud 2 would just dump us out in a random spot on 1, and most a' that shit is still hostile territory!"
Truly continued nodding.
"And fucking Christ, the wizards!" Angel Dust continued. "When we had one, everything went to shit the instant that white-armored fuck turned him into a stain. How are we gonna be able to do our shit if our Mage gets geeked like last time? Have more than one? How the fuck am I gonna afford an entire fuckin' wizard's tower of fucking wizards?"
"Isn't a wizard's tower typically just one wizard?" Truly finally broke her supportive silence.
"See? That just goes to show how little I know about fucking wizards!" Angel Dust said. He groaned as the impossibility of what he was doing finally began to set in, digging through his skin like the roots of a tree greedily snaking their way through soil.
"Well, let's go over it from the top," Truly said. "Who are you bringing this time?"
"Well, Cain's got some shit up there he wants to do, and so does the Korean," Angel Dust said.
"So there's two 'wizards'," she said.
"What?" he asked.
"Cain, First of the Damned, one of the few humans who's been down here in Hell longer than Lucifer, and knows forms of magic that are now otherwise extinct," Truly held up one finger on one hand, although did so in the ignorance shared with Angel Dust that technically Lilith was a human and had been in Hell for far longer than Cain had, and then raised a second finger, "and Jun-Ho, an autodidact who learned directly from the angelic source for several hundred years, capable of doing things that most Hellish magic can't match."
"...I didn't think about that," Angel Dust admitted.
Truly then raised a third finger. "And that's not counting that Ahmadi character. That bitch can cube a car with her bare hands, and is constantly practicing her magic shit with Cain. She'll be on his level faster than you'd think."
"Wait, I've got three wizards already?" he asked, as the rain began to patter down and the storm drew in.
"Yeah, but before you get excited and hasty, there's something else that you didn't say you'd lined up. So keep talking about the people involved," Truly prompted.
"Well… there's my bro. He might not look like much, but Sam made him one'a the strongest motherfuckers around. By accident even!" Angel Dust said.
"Strange I've never met him," she said with noncommittal tone. A smarter, more canny Angel Dust would have pursued why she said it like that. The extent Angel Dust was neither, so didn't.
"And then there's Striker, that imp you seen," he said.
"The Betrayal clade imp-supremacist who wants end royalty as an institution," Truly said. Angel Dust turned to her, his brow furrowing down.
"The fuck?" Angel Dust asked.
"Oh, Striker has a reputation and has left a lot of bodies in his wake. Politically, aligning with him is a bad move. But considering he did kill Baron Sundie and Sundie's entire lineage, despite how prestigious and more importantly how well-protected they were, he's the right person for a dive into Heaven," she said. "Does he know any other talents? Or is it just that he's a Gun of Satan that's useful?"
"He's a what?" Angel Dust asked.
"One of Satan's chosen, but not entirely chosen. I don't fuckin' know! I don't pay attention to religion!" she said testily.
"And that makes you one 'a the smart ones," Angel Dust said. "Think he's got magic, too?"
"I know he doesn't," Truly said. "If his reputation is anything to go by, that's the only reasonable way to protect you from him if he wants you dead. And even then, it's an iffy prospect. If he had magic, then that distinction wouldn't get said."
"So do you think Husk is right that we need one 'a them imp mages?"
"I'd rather you had one when you went up than that you didn't," Truly said.
"Ah, you're meltin' my heart, babe!" Angel Dust said.
"Yeah, well, I like to keep my friends alive," she gave him some repeated prods in his chest with a fingertip, "no matter how suicidal the thing he's doing is."
"So if we got all that, the only thing stopping me is… well… me," Angel Dust said.
"I didn't say you had everything you need. I said you had more than you thought. By all means, find an imp mage. I hear murmurs that there's some of them up here in Pride Ring, so…" Truly began.
"Yeah, naw," Angel Dust cut her off. "My bro tried to hire that li'l bitch before our first try."
"So the imp said no?" Truly asked.
"She said FUUUUCK no," Angel Dust laughed.
"Well, maybe she's got a student who's more expendable and less cautious than she is," Truly shrugged. The rain was starting to pick up again, so she shrugged her wings out of her coat and held the worst of the rain from pounding their heads under them. It was so weird how Succubitches could fly with them little-ass wings. Must have been a magic thing.
"If there is, I ain't seen it," Angel Dust said. "So…"
"So without the imp mage, you'll need trackers. You've already got one in Striker; the urban tracker," Truly said, now holding up two fingers and waggling the first one. "He's got a rep for finding people when they've gone to ground and smoking them out. If Heaven is the way that Rachel describes, you'll need that."
"And the other?" Angel Dust asked.
"You'll need a Hellhound," she said.
"Why?" Angel Dust asked, his face screwing in confusion.
"A couple of reasons. Hellhounds have better instincts when things go bad. Hellhounds have a sense of smell that can track a man across a Ring Barrier, if they're good enough. Hellhounds can survive a hit that'll kill most things, and be back up fighting in minutes rather than months," she rattled off. She then shrugged. "And depending on what Hound you get, they might be able to quadruple up on your magic thing."
"I thought them dogs wasn't allowed to use magic," Angel Dust said, getting off of his ass because that ass was starting to get soggy with the rain pooling as it was. Truly joined him, and they made their sedate way toward the car that she'd driven him here in.
"Do you think Hell on the whole can really mandate what every single Hellhound can and can't do?" Truly asked flatly.
"Point taken," Angel Dust said. He let out a sigh, one less aggravated and defeated and more hopeful. "Y'know, you're really good at that."
"At what? Making you feel better?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"I try to be a good friend," she said with a shrug.
"Yeah, well, you're makin' me look bad, so how about you half-ass it a little more so people don't make comparisons no more?" Angel Dust prompted.
Truly just laughed and shook her head, pulling her wings back into her coat and seeing the two of them away from the pornographic studio which was now fucked over because it would have to film indoors, and movies filmed indoors always sold less copies, because indoors movies didn't appeal to the voyeuristic audience. Angel Dust didn't make the rules. He just knew them all by heart.
The shriek of the thing dying was wet and bubbling, leaving Maelstrom covered in foul black blood, so similar to that of imps that it had shocked him the first time an arterial spray hit him in the face. Now, though, he was used to it.
That didn't mean he was happy with it.
"How many of these fucking things are there?" Moxxie shouted, not in fear as he might have in years past by his own admission, but in deep seated frustration – a frustration that Maelstrom understood deeply. The job today was a Hellbound one, down in Greed in one of the palatial mansions that belonged to Hell's upper crust. To stand in this estate was to forget, for a moment, that they were in the most poisoned and ruined of the Rings of Hell; here, as nowhere else in Greed, the grasses were lush and green, the trees stood tall and straight without the gnarled growths of foul nutrients being pulled up withered roots, and flowers showed their actual colors, not sickly or dribbling with their petals more fluid than solid.
It looked like an ideal place to live, to raise a family, to relax.
But just like most things in Hell, the moment you lift the first rug, you find a horrifying amount of shit swept under it.
The estate itself belonged to the Von Brutte family, of whom Maelstrom had done numerous ill-turns. And they hired him anyway, because IMP had gained a reputation for being able to kill things. And the young sole-heir of the Von Brutte family wanted to be sure that whatever 'infestation' had worked its way into his vacation house, that it was well and truly dead to the last cell.
The creatures were big, bloated things, things that looked like some sort of deeply and horrifically infested fish given an ambulatory stature and working hands. But never for a moment would Maelstrom mistake them for a Piscean Consumer or a Selachimorph. These things were wrong. Wrong on a fundamental level. Their biology was wrong. Their anatomy was wrong. And they smelled just as wrong as the Adjacent had in Vladivostok.
Hell was infested with Things From Outside. And now, people were paying IMP to kill them. If Maelstrom could understand, on a provisional level, why Blitz so enjoyed the 'purity' of killing the living on behalf of the dead, he could now understand the intense satisfaction that Moxxie got when solving a problem, or Millie had when she killed something that managed to last more than five seconds against her. This was good work. Even with the stinking black blood on his hands and sprayed on his face, it was clean in a way that soap had nothing to do with.
He was making Hell less foul by nothing more than the strength of his hands and the clarity of his will. It felt good.
Maelstrom threw the carcass away from him, landing it near the other two which he'd already killed to reach this point of the 'room'. Underneath the manor house there were numerous tunnels, ones melted into being by acrid spittle by these strange monsters. And it fell to Moxxie, Maelstrom, Loona and Blitz to clear these rat-holes such that not one of them would survive. Gadreel had vanished ahead of them almost instantly upon entering these tunnels. He hoped she wasn't dead somewhere.
At least Maelstrom and Loona didn't need to hunch to walk these tunnels. They were sized for something quite a bit bigger than these horrible fish miscreations. The walls were all smooth, almost organic in their appearance because of the 'ribbing' that their construction seemed to give them. "What did we learn?" Maelstrom asked. Not as a taunting question, but as a genuine one. "Because I learned that crushing their heads sometimes doesn't always kill them."
"I learned that Darts of Un are useless against them. Fucking Outsiders!" Moxxie said, his humor obviously worn down until it wasn't even a nub anymore. He made a dramatic upward gesture with one hand, then pulled down as though closing a blind. A blanket of black flames descended and coated the fallen Outsiders, beginning to consume them. "Why are these things even here? Don't these aristocrats ever check their own basements? This should have been smothered in the crib years ago!"
"You think they've been here for years?" Maelstrom asked.
"They'd have to be. This is granite, and this gunk," Moxxie lifted up a ropy, viscous strand of purple ooze that leaked out of a wound in the dead fish-thing and was sizzling the blood and offal that it touched. The gloves on his fingers bleached the instant he lifted the thing up, and he quickly had to drop it again, and flap the glove off of his hand. Within seconds the glove's fingers were dissolving toward the knuckle, "can only take about a centimeter every other hour on granite. The limestone path? Yeah, they could have knocked all of that out in an afternoon. But not this."
So these were the old tunnels, then. Maelstrom nodded, catching his breath and looking down the descents into the crust of the Ring of Greed, able to smell foul and polluted water around him. Both forward and back he could smell it. So there was likely a tunnel that went submarine at some point. Maelstrom wasn't looking forward to that.
"So did we just send Blitz, the angel, and Loona down the tunnels where these things are likely to actually be?"
"I don't think so," Moxxie said. He waved his hand and the ball of mystical light that he had crafted on the drive out here (yes, on the drive, he engaged in magical fabrication) followed his implied urging, softly drifting ahead of them and bathing that which they were heading into in clinical white light. At the same time, a softer, red light was trailing them, the kind of light that threw no glare so if something tried to sneak up on them, they'd see the shadows of it, and looking backwards wouldn't blind them. It was a clever thing. Maelstrom would have to get a pair the next time the IMP group went hunting for these kinds of things. "As far as I can tell, these things don't live in Hell very often, or last very long when they do."
"Really? What are they, then?" Maelstrom said, slowing as the path took a sharp turn around a mostly buried and only partially dissolved megalith. Moxxie was reloading his shotgun as he moved.
"The old books call them 'Astar-yag'," Moxxie said. "More mythology than anything tangible. And according to those books, you expect to find infestations of them in Envy, not here in Greed."
"Why?" Maelstrom asked.
"Apparently the waters of Greed don't agree with their bodies," Moxxie said. "They might be immune to acidity, but that doesn't prevent the waters of Greed from killing you a lot of other ways. I'm fairly certain there's an entire current which is about 80% formaldehyde off the coast of Ransom."
"Greed has a city called 'Ransom'?" Maelstrom asked.
"Yeah. Crimson used to take me and Mom there to watch the races," he said, turning a glance back at Maelstrom, which indicated what kind of races they were. "It's where his favorite mistress lived. Before he got bored of her and had her strangled."
"So these… these Hag Star," Maelstrom said, transposing old Impish pidgin into modern language. "They can be poisoned?"
"It might be why these ones were bloated and weak," Moxxie said, and swapped the shotgun which was now fully loaded with slugs for the other one which dangled at his back, and started loading that as well, but this one with special rounds he pulled from a magical pocket, and reloaded with haste he hadn't used when handling his other gun. "And it might be nothing at all but survivor's bias. There has to be some reason they avoid this Ring, while being an occasional but noted problem in Envy."
"So what's their deal?" Maelstrom asked, trying to get an idea of what they were running down in these tunnels.
"Their deal? They kill things, steal their skins and muscle, leave their brains and nerves behind the way that a hunter leaves the prey's offal on the ground," Moxxie said.
"So they eat us. Why wouldn't they be wiped out then? I know Lucifer could have it done."
"Good luck getting to them," Moxxie said flatly. "There's a known infestation of them in the Gulf of Adiigin, way down in the oceanic cleft, about 10,000 meters down. And as we know about water pressure…"
"That deep would turn anybody trying to push them out into a smear, and I guess they can just take it without complaint," Maelstrom finished for the imp. "So what? It's just 'inconvenient' to get rid of known Outsiders in Hell?"
"Don't try to make bank on the common sense of Hellspawn. You'll never fail to go broke," Moxxie said, as though remembering an adage. Another corner, and this time they both fell still, looking upon a mashed Hag Star corpse, one that let out a weird, uncomfortable smell. It wasn't foul, but it wasn't nice either. Both of the IMP employees moved to stand over the carcass. It was much bigger than the ones that Moxxie and Maelstrom had killed to get here, built more like a Wild Hippopotamus than the other fish-things. And by the oozing of its body out of its skin and shell, it had been dead for some time. Long enough for it to begin what it considered rotting.
"We're not the only things in this tunnel," Maelstrom said, steeling himself for a moment, then sniffing at the wounds of the creature. There was a particular odor amidst the funk of unnatural rot that this thing displayed. Another flavor of wrong to add to the soup. He looked ahead, at the area the clinical light ahead of them displayed, and found some sticky clear substance barely lit up against the floor. He carefully slid his fingers along it. Tacky, but tacky in a dry way, as though it would remain this way until dust coked it flat again. The faintly glistening trail led ahead of them, and when Maelstrom found a fork in their passage, he turned a look back to Moxxie, but found Moxxie following his lead. "Should we…?" he began, suddenly unsure of himself.
"I remember every turn we took to get here. We won't get lost," Moxxie reassured him. That was good. As long as Moxxie was conscious, at least. Maelstrom forced that caveat out of his mind and looked to the trail, downward and toward damp air and the stink of pollution. Maelstrom groaned, but continued onward. Every corpse that they dragged out of here was another wad of souls in their payment for knocking out this infestation. So finding more bodies was just good, even if it might be inconvenient to recover them, or terrifying to kill them.
The path opened suddenly, and the light now displayed a 'larder' of sorts. The stink of rot hung here, not powerfully like he had expected, but more of a tracer snaking its way through the air and always catching you when you were comfortable, or needed a breath for another purpose, just to strangulate your throat a little bit. The 'larder' had piles of bones stacked along one wall, all of them still stained with the colors of the blood or flesh that had touched them. And some bones were arranged into racks and shelves holding piles or strips of meat. Meat that was red, that of Hellhounds. Meat that was black, of imps or Devourers. Meat that was white, of Selachimorphs. And meat of other hues, be they of Dream Eaters, mutants, or stranger things. And the meat didn't show rotting. It seemed to be perfectly preserved, without refrigeration or salting.
The stink came from the bone-stacks. Which was weird.
But when Maelstrom rounded a set of meat-shelves, he recoiled back, swatting his hand into Moxxie's face and forcing the imp back with him. He wasn't sure exactly what he saw thrown into that side of the room, but it was even larger than the Hag Star that had been killed on the way here. Moxxie offered no words, silently slinking around and peeking 'round the corner. He turned a confused, concerned look back to Maelstrom, who likewise took that dire peek.
To say it looked like a locust was reductive. It had a locust's body plan, but it was writ terrifyingly large. To the point that the thing laying on that side of the room was bigger than some elephants. Utterly motionless, it remained there, the terminus of the slimy trail that Maelstrom had followed. There was a pregnant moment, as the imp and the Hellhound shared a fearful look. Then Maelstrom found his voice, even if at a whisper.
"What is it?" Maelstrom asked at a breathy hush.
"...A myth," Moxxie said. He picked held a shotgun in each hand as he rounded the corner furtively, then slowly approached the apparently-dead insect thing. The details betrayed it. While it had the covered wings of a locust, and long, spike-covered legs likely used for locomotion, the its face was not that of a vermin, but of something worse. Its eyes, lidless and unseeing, were too much like those of an imp or a Hound. And instead of mandibles, it had a set of naked, oversized teeth, the like of which were usually found in the heads of either humans, or former-humans. There was that clear substance oozed from the slack jaws. The foremost limbs of this locust-thing ended in hands, much like that of a Hound or an imp, but their proportions were creepy and wrong. The whole thing seemed… out of place. As though on a fundamental level, it didn't belong here, and not just in that it appeared to be a foreign entity that crawled in here and died.
"What kind of myth?" Maelstrom asked.
"I'd be paraphrasing paraphrasing to offer much. Just that there are Outsiders that are built like gigantic locusts, and that their hunger is unending."
"A monster worthy of Gluttony," Maelstrom offered.
"The only name for them that's not in the elder languages is 'The Chorus of Teeth'," Moxxie said.
"A worse infestation than we'd thought, then," Maelstrom said, adjusting his gauntlets so that they rested comfortably on his fists. There was a buzzing from Moxxie's hip, and the imp quickly answer it.
"Sir?" he asked.
"We found 'em! Could use some FUCKIN' HELP RIGHT NOW!" Blitz's voice was clear even though Maelstrom wasn't the intended target for the call. Maelstrom turned a look back, about to start running, but Moxxie gave his head a shake and then spun his arm in a great arc, a portal opening and revealing the split-point that their two parties had separated, up there where the rock was still limestone.
"Now we go," Moxxie said, running ahead, the globes that illuminated the path for them aping his movements. Now, Maelstrom could have outpaced the imp. It wouldn't have been that difficult. But that would have been stupid because he'd outrun his light source, and outrun his backup, too. And icing on the cake was that it would have been leaving Moxxie to get ambushed from behind, which Maelstrom knew was a most-bad-outcome of itself. So he kept pace, and as they ran, they ran toward the sound of sporadic gunfire echoing off of the stone, of muffled shouting, the words lost to chicanes and distance.
A part of Maelstrom wanted to tell Moxxie to pick up his pace. But the imp was already going at an impish sprint. He'd arrive winded. So Maelstrom growled, grabbed Moxxie and held him under his arm like a keg, and then took off. Moxxie squawked with surprise and a bit of indignity, but when he saw the speed at which Maelstrom could navigate these tunnels, he lost that last part quickly.
It was fortunate that Maelstrom was a Hellhound. The path that Blitz and Loona had gone down forked far more often than Moxxie and Maelstrom's had. But his nose and his ears didn't fail him. He just listened for violence, and smelled for the particular scent of Loona. He didn't even allow the concept of 'being too late' to enter his mind. He just ran, enforcing ignorance over himself so that he would not doubt that he'd get there in time.
And then he saw red light.
The path ahead being dimly lit by red meant that they were almost caught up; the path had opened so now all four of them could have walked abreast, as opposed to being restricted to one imp and one Hound per path. And even as Maelstrom approached the corner that cut off vision of what was ahead, there was a ballistic bang and a spang as a bullet deflected off of the stone and hit Maelstrom in his chest. He grunted, digging his nails into the shallow wound the much-reduced bullet had caused, grabbing the plate of lead that had dug into him and flicking it away, even as he set Moxxie down just before the turn, while he himself took it at full speed, launching himself across the distance such that he had to slam, feet first, into the wall to redirect him.
If he had had fear that Loona was being overwhelmed, to merely look at her now put those fears to rest.
She fought like a god.
Though Loona and Blitz were outnumbered fourteen to two by those Hag Star, both the smaller ones and the bigger ones alike, the two founders of IMP were holding their own, retreating from the tide of them without losing stride even as they broke the wave of incoming attacks with counterattacks of their own. Loona would duck a savage swing by a ragged claw, only to pop up on the inside of the limb, her teeth slamming shut like a bear-trap onto the fleshy joint, before wrenching her head back and having the limb become a useless, dangling clod of chitin with its muscles stripped out. Another spat a gobbet of acid at her, and she grabbed another ruined limb that was being flailed at her, and held it in front of the gobbet, allowing it to strike 'friendly' flesh and do no harm to the Hound. She rooted her feet, and pulled what looked like a flintlock from her side, pointing it directly at the spitter. There was a thunderous boom, the recoil of which sent Loona sliding back, even with her toes clawing into the floor.
The impact of that slug, fired from the restored pistol that Blitz had used last during the killing of Nathan Birch, hit the Hag Star right in the slope of its head, and sheered straight through like it was firing a guillotine blade. The Hag Star collapsed, its brains, lacerated, falling out of its skull.
Not to say that Blitz wasn't showing well. The middle-aged imp was a near-blur of movement, clambering over the Hag Star and using a sawed-off shogun in one hand and hand-grenades in another, to blow craters into the hides of the Hag Star, then wedge active grenades in to those craters, before jumping to another victim. And Blitz wasn't doing so with perfect poise and ease; he took brutal hits from time to time even as Maelstrom closed distance, but he rolled with them and used them to deflect him to a new victim. There was black blood running down the scarred white half of his face, and with every laugh, a spray of black foam left his mouth, meaning they might have punctured one of his lungs.
And then Maelstrom was upon them. Whereas Loona could, at best, maybe slow a strike to a halt under her own physical might, Maelstrom slammed into them with the force of an artillery shell, pounding the heels of his fists together into the eyes and head of the closest fish-freak that he could reach; the skull outright exploded under the force that Maelstrom was able to produce. The fish-thing kept standing, and now swung wildly and blindly, as this one apparently didn't need its head to live. It didn't last much longer, though, for as it was trying to swing in Maelstrom's vague direction, it suddenly grew pale and its momentum halted for just a moment, before there was a crack, and the thing rotated to the shattering of its leg.
Moxxie had frozen the thing with his magic; Maelstrom gave it a kick, and when it hit the ground, it shattered into shards.
"Well 'bout time you showed up! What am I even payin' you two chucklefucks for?" Blitz asked, managing to shove a grenade down a Hag Star gullet before bounding off of the thing a few seconds before it detonated and decapitated the miscreation.
"There's other shit down here. Tell you later!" Maelstrom said, catching a savage swing that was sent at him by one of the big ones. While catching the blow did send him sliding, he was left in the position where he could brace against an already-dead Hag Star which must have been killed when Blitz and Loona were on their way forward, before the tide forced them back. Then, with a heave which physically hurt to do, he tore the chitin plating off of the thing's limb, revealing the musculature, grey and slimy and slick, inside. Oddly, it smelled rather tasty. He chose not to heed that particular intrusive thought.
Instead, he used the chip of the thing's own skin to slam into the meaty joint, breaking the limb just as Loona had done with the smaller Hag Star. Another blow, this one arcing down to slam him into the floor, he caught though it drove him to his knee. He then pushed the claw ahead of him, pinning it against the horse-sized thing's body, and began to pound into it with brutal combination punches. The body didn't react the way the limbs had; instead of resisting with whole heart his every attack, the body had just a bit of give, but then when his strength was too much, it caused the body to locally shatter, chunks of chitin and strange greenish slime falling away wherever his fists landed.
Well, there was only so much of that cheating that it could do, because there was only so much body this thing had. And with its only useful striking limb out of position, it could only try to bull-rush him, blowing orange foam out of its mouth-like orifice as it did. But Maelstrom wasn't having that, either. He twisted, heaving the monster up then down, power-slamming the much larger creature such that it landed on two of its smaller fellows as it came down. The pinned limb flopped free, but another shot from Loona cut a kerf into the chitin almost to the core, so when Maelstrom stomped, it caused the limb to crack like a dinner-crab. Loona swept past him, catching her adoptive father as he launched himself off of another doomed Hag Star just in time for it to explode. That one didn't fall though. Moxxie swore loudly, then said a word of power that made a snap of heat descend on the creatures ahead of them, bathing them in flame even as Loona, fast as a blink, ripped the eyes out of one of the fish-things' head and kicked it back so that the Burning Rake would land on it as well. That left only Maelstrom's victim as outside-of-the-flames.
So he solved that problem as any Hound would when perched atop a fallen prey. He began to rip and to tear, with his hands and his teeth, throwing away crushed chitin and strange non-Newtonian slime, spitting out chunks of blood-vessel and connective tissue, until he finally reached an internal skeleton, which seemed overkill for this creature. Around that framework were organs which he knew not the purpose of. But at the same time, much as he knew not, he also cared not, so with a gleeful snarl, he began to evict the innards of the monstrosity, until he finally ripped at something that was connected to something akin to blood vessels. When he finally tore it free, the beast beneath him finally went slack, death claiming what life should have never allowed.
He looked up just in time to see Loona ripping with her teeth the flesh of the last of the burning monstrosities, back-lit by an angelic light.
Wow.
And then the light shifted and revealed its source, showing that Gadreel had finally joined them, covered head-to-toe in black, viscous blood, her halo brighter than Moxxie's globes and the weight of it pushing back coldly against the burning of the dying.
"Took ya' fuckin' long enough!" Blitz said, leaning against a column of seeped limestone, catching his breath and prodding at the puffyiness of the injuries of his face. Gadreel, too, looked not entirely untouched by all of this. Her left arm hang limp, the shoulder on that side a little lower than the other, and the killing knife in her right hand had a minute bend near its tip, as though it finally stabbed into something harder than it was.
"I managed to find the Bloat Mother and slay it," Gadreel said, her words a bit slurred, and when she paused, she spat some golden blood onto the floor, manipulating her jaw a moment before continuing. She seemed to have bitten into the side of her tongue. "This infestation will die out quickly, now that it's leaderless and will hatch no more monsters."
"Did ja' leave any of those eggs to prove how dogshit this guy's upkeep of the building was?" Blitz asked, jabbing a thumb upward, indicating the majordomo of the estate that they all were currently under.
"I would not allow them the chance of hatching and scuttling away," she said. Moxxie gave a sigh, but nodded. Of all involved in the fight, he alone was unharmed, but he looked winded and depleted all the same.
"We've got a royal-lawn's worth of corpses and I'm guessing dozens – dozens?" Gadreel nodded at Moxxie's query, "– of eggs. If they don't pay us with all that, we call the Paparazzi and ruin his career by showing all of Hell how useless he was at keeping a building running and free of vermin."
"That's ruthless. I love it!" Blitz said. "How much do you figure we'll pull in?"
"Presuming they find an excuse to hair-cut their offer by 30%, because they're bastards, with all these corpses, they're stuck giving us at least most of a million," Moxxie said.
"Well, a good day's work," he said. And then Blitz fell forward onto his face, apparently choosing that moment to lose consciousness. All stared at his battered, bleeding body for a moment.
"Should we be concerned about this?" Gadreel asked.
"He's just tuckered out," Loona said with a wave of her hand. She pointed at Maelstrom. "Imma need you to start dragging carcasses through portals. Can you do that for me?"
"Of course," he said, forcing his fatigue to arm's length for at least the next little while.
"Is that broken?" Moxxie asked, moving to Gadreel and placing hands on her arm. She immediately hissed, but he grabbed it and shifted upward, as though forcing the limb back into alignment to a wet and mushy crunch sound. Gadreel winced hard, but then blinked, surprised, as she could now move her left arm as normally as she could her right, even as Moxxie began to perform more traditional first-aid on Blitz. "Work's never done, is it?"
At least they were doing good works, with good people. People like Loona. For a Hellhound in Hell, this was about the best that Maelstrom could have hoped for.
It was a strange thing, to see a heavily pregnant Sinner. But apparently gestation in Hell was a slow and tricky thing, needing more than the human-standard of nine months to form their spawn. Uller found the whole thing laughable. Imps only needed six, and their spawn were usually crawling within months afterwards. Humans seemed so very frail in comparison.
"And you have been experiencing contractions… without a breaking of water?" Krieg asked.
"Braxton-Hicks contractions, yes," the Sinner, a teacher called Mayberry, said. "It's about time, too. I was worrying that something was going wrong."
"Well, regardless of Braxton or Hicks, whomever they may be, the spell will endure for a month yet. So if you must reach elbow deep in there and yank the spawn out, then I suggest you do it before then," Kreig said, obviously having only marginal patience for human medical issues.
"That's disgusting," Mayberry said. "But if it comes to it, a C-Section is an option. So a month. Just a month, not more."
"I would not chance it, were I wearing your distended clothing," Kreig mentioned, motioning to the woman's tent-like dress that made her seem merely fat, rather than gravid.
"Fine. I'll not take any more of your time," Mayberry said, rising to leave. She hadn't paid, but since she hadn't actually asked for anything but clarification on a spell already cast, Uller could see why Krieg mandated no cost before the human left through the door she had rather unceremoniously entered.
Also, possibly because the woman was now wearing a symbol of Satan as a medallion probably gave the Archcrone of the Miller Family pause. A human who dared bear one of those spoke to dire, if unspoken, contexts.
It was also the end of the day, and the office was quiet. The Miller building was now the fief of not just Blitz, but to literally everybody who could claim descent from Tilla Miller, whether by blood or by law. There was more than enough unused room in the building below that if Krieg's siblings ever got a business idea to capitalize on, they could easily find room under this shared roof which spoke to the supremacy of the bloodline of the Proxy of Lucifer. The rains of late winter beat against the windows, and when Uller joined Krieg in looking out at Imp City, they saw a city that was almost furiously under-construction.
Old urban decay was wiped away by the stroke of the Exorcist's Sword and the stroke of the architect's pen. And Imp City was rising up stronger than before. Which wasn't a hard bar to clear. In fact, history had put that bar so low that it was essentially a tripping hazard in Sloth, and the denizens of Imp City still managed to go down there and limbo with Belphegor and the Devil Himself.
"You have a pensive look, Uller. Are you thinking of doing something stupid again?" Krieg asked.
"Define stupid?" Uller asked.
"You keep glancing in the vague direction of the Fortress of Iron. Had I more credulousness, I would claim that Heaven has bewitched you somehow, to keep your eyes focused on it," Krieg said, wheeling her chair over to him. With Tilla working just one door away, they didn't opt for any public displays of affection; this office was a professional space. Affection was reserved for the RV, and for those places that Krieg ventured on those few days where she was neither working nor simply vegetating in bed for an entire day to recover from her ambitions. Frankly, Uller was certain that Tilla wouldn't gainsay Krieg and Uller's relationship.
Not since she came to work one morning, her hair snarled in knots, covered in sweat, with her clothes buttoned in the wrong holes; she had given them exactly no scrutiny. Not enough that Tilla had resumed her amorous pursuit of Bart – a decent enough fellow, if a young for Tilla in Uller's eyes – she apparently had been roped into a liaison with both Bart and Des. And since then, she had the most hilariously poleaxed look on her face each morning. As though too confused to fully accept being happy at what her life had given her.
"I understand your position on Heaven," Uller said, diplomatically. "But frankly, I think we're overlooking some incredibly profitable ventures," she opened her mouth to naysay, but he tutted, "but only those that aren't blatantly suicidal, like Battlefield Work. Let the Presbyters throw their old men into the meat-grinder. Us young sprouts will earn all the money they leave behind from the safety of Fort Abandon."
"You put way too much thought into these things," Krieg said, her tone making it clear on a fundamental level that she disagreed with him. Still, she didn't lambast him, so he considered his position slowly gaining strength. There was a time when the mere mention of putting an imp that she was responsible for on to the fluffy clouds of Heaven was met with shouted rebuke and cry. Now she just grumbled about it.
"How about this," Uller offered, leaning forward in his occasionally comfortable office chair. "Any day when I'm not required to either learn your newest, most deadly thing or aid you in casting said new, deadly thing, I go up and do some fundamental research in Fort Abandon. We could sell the information to Clan Cruac for a goddamned mint!"
"Fiiiiiine," Krieg relented. She then reached over and poked his chest with her finger. "But don't take this as an excuse to go 'spread your wings'. I am not done by a half of training you up to be a worthwhile Thaumaturge, and if you run I will drag you back here to finish your tutelage whether you want it or not."
"Why in the sweet fuck would I run away? Do you really think I'd fuck over my girlf… my employer and my teacher at the same time in the name of ambition?" Uller asked, having to catch himself to prevent saying that word out loud. Because as Krieg had said, Tilla Miller had ears like a bat. Krieg narrowed her eyes at him, then let out a laugh, and shook her head.
"No. No your failing was a dearth of ambition, not a surfeit," she chuckled a moment more, then snapped her fingers and pointed at him. "But if you die, I shall never let you hear the end of it after I track down the Bard to bring you back to life."
"You've got about ten more years to use him," Uller said, recalling the ancient imp's prediction of his own end-time.
"And therefore you are not allowed to die eleven years hence, either!" she said, as Uller rose and stretched his back. His muscles weren't at all tight, but movement still suited them better; add to that, not having to put weight on his wing-spurs was an improvement. He really needed to get one of those chairs that Succubi used. Those ones had a divot for the fiends to rest their wings.
Only good luck finding one of those sized for an imp. A lot of people either didn't know that Envy Imps could fly, or pretended they didn't know in order to be petty little bitches.
He left Kreig's office, looking at the complex up at the top of the building that Krieg had claimed as hers. Uller knew the finances, even though it was strictly Tilla's job to look after that; the money that Krieg brought in due to her magic and the things her magic could do dwarfed what the assassin business down the hall could offer by a respectable margin, because it had something that interplanar (or even extra-real) assassination lacked: steady business. The real trick of IMP was that they had essentially no overhead costs. They had all of the tools they needed, there was no inventory or cost beyond the utilities and the price of new bullets to replace spent ones, and the office could sit empty for weeks without causing a single problem with ongoing business. And when IMP did reap in business, it tended toward massive scores, as opposed to the steady flow that was Blitz-Krieg Magical.
Last Chance blew both of them combined out of the water.
For all Loona Miller's office was the smallest, smaller even than the side-project Moxxie had started, she had by far the most money flowing in and out. She was an industry unto herself.
To look upon the members of IMP, and those that IMP touched, was to look upon living legends. A living, breathing pantheon of imps and Hellhounds and other stranger things, those lowest on the ladder of Hell's hierarchy, somehow managing to claw their way out of the rut they were born into and make something spectacular of themselves. And because Uller, by sheer stubborn luck and accident, managed to align himself with one of them, now his star was rising too.
But still, for all his quality of life was now unthinkable compared to what it had been but two years past, he still felt unbelievably small. As though none of the work he had done, or likely would ever do, would earn a place in this living pantheon. It wasn't like he could bank on the fact that he might be one of The Bard's many great-grandchildren. That had no weight with him, and offered no succor.
Here he was, boyfriend of one of the most meteorically rising imps of his age, and he felt…
Well.
Envious.
He knew that such a belief was rife with what Blitz called 'little bitch energy', but the feeling was still there. She had made moves that freed her from her own nightmares of containment and abuse. That achievement more than anything else pulled envy from him. That she could face the prospect of a dark night and not fear what nightmares lay waiting for her was a feat that he might never match. And it rankled him. He hated that it rankled. In fact, it rankled that it rankled. But he still felt as he did. For all she seemed to like his presence and was eager to snog him when business hours were done, Uller was no equal of Krieg Miller.
His mind would feel as it felt, no matter what his rationality demanded. And it felt that as long as he was a small, petty thing compared to her, he could never be happy with her.
And he hated that he believed that.
He paused by the doors to IMP, marked with the sigil of the portal, and the three assassin imps in silhouette. Fuck the shade. Though a reasonable imp could have lived there, Uller was starting to realize that just like his teacher Krieg, he was not exactly a reasonable imp. And he wanted to prove, in some way, that he was as mad as she was, as ambitious, as meteoric in rise.
And he had a way in mind.
He turned back, to the hallway and waiting area in front of BKMS, at the empty chairs and disregarded magazines on the low table. He looked through the doors to where Krieg was visible only a moment as she walked from one room in her complex to another. Tilla, nearby, still looked poleaxed and love-bombed. Well, if he was going to do something crazy, he might as well start now.
"Tilla?" Uller said, pulling at least some of Tilla's attention out of the fact that she had likely been boned to within an inch of her life last night, and from the look of her, again over lunch, "Tilla!"
"Yes, I'm listening," she said, finally giving her head a shake and rejoining reality.
"I'm jumping out for today. And I won't be in tomorrow. Could you get Bart to fill in for me?"
"Of course. Where are you going?" Krieg's mother asked.
"Fundamental research, topside," he feigned a weariness that he didn't feel, making the gesture to indicate Heaven.
Tilla tilted her head, but didn't seem to disbelieve him. "Well, so long as you don't get yourself killed up there. We all know how focused she gets on killing people. Hell forfend what she'd do if she had to drag you out of a ditch in Heaven to Resurrect you."
"Yeah, I know, I'd never live it down," Uller said, waving the thought into the past and walking toward the elevators that would lead down.
If Uller ever wanted to stand side by side with Krieg, he'd need to achieve something monumental.
How about being the first of the impish race to stand on Cloud 2?
Rozarin was suddenly glad for plastic sheets and sturdy boots. She had, against Cain's warnings, tried making the first bit of the walk through the Qliphoth infested Sloth barefoot, if only because she had no faith that the boots he'd offered would be comfortable. But within minutes of treading on grey grasses, she suddenly felt herself fatigued as though she'd run a marathon.
"The pull of the Tree of Death is as irresistible as it is insidious," Cain had said, and handed over the boots she was now wearing. And in defiance of her expectations, they felt good on her. Unlike any other footwear she'd tried wearing since her death, in fact. Now, though, the two of them were sitting on a blue plastic sheet, which had been spread open on the grass near where a turn of the Qliphoth's root burst from the ground and ran, bus-sized, through the terrain splitting rocks and upending soil. Despite the long walk that she and Cain had done, she still didn't feel as though they were any closer to the Tree of Death itself. It still loomed on one horizon, choking the sky with its aura and forming a wall that would likely have blotted out the rising sun. Along the root of that tree, though, there were vines. And on those vines, each as thick as a tree-trunk, there were fruit.
The fruit of the vine was the False World of Sloth. They were great and glowing, alight from within with an azure light. The largest was as big as her entire room back in the Hotel. The smallest was far larger than the car she and Cain had used to drive to the Hellevator.
"Such a terrible thing," Cain said, looking at it softly glowing plant-flesh. "An excuse to pass out of reality and into gentle fantasy. I had considered it, you know? To enter into one of these things untethered. To let my world become a story which I could edit to my liking."
"Why didn't you?" Roz asked. She could understand the appeal.
"Because then I would lose my chance to apologize. And no matter what mirage of fantasy my mind would show me, I would always know. I would know, that the mirage was not real. And that I had failed reality out of weakness and shame," Cain said. He gestured toward the massive fruit before them. "That, Ahmadi, is the ultimate failure condition of our lives, more shameful by far than any death. It cannot and shall not ever be anything else. It is surrender-to-despair manifest. Remember that."
"So… why are we here?" she finally asked. "Not that I don't enjoy time away from Pride Ring. That place is a shithole. But why come all the way here, and then trek twenty miles into the wilderness?" she asked, not mentioning how there was actually some hitch-hiking involved in that trip, or the bribery Cain offered to the Dream Eater highwaymen to leave them be, or the glade of fiends of other Rings rooted to the ground, made still as root and shoot grew through their bodies and immortalized their corpses in wood. In truth, this journey was more an odyssey than a day-trip. She certainly felt like that old Greek having to navigate these strange horrors.
"Because the False Worlds are useful for other things than terminal-escapism," Cain said. He resituated himself with his legs crossed under him, staring at the glowing blue wall of fruit-flesh. "I have been within one of these, walked the dream of another. And I reclaimed what was mine from him, even though he was at the peak of his power in his endless and very final fantasy. And in so doing, I was made more whole. I need to see if your mind is as adamantine."
"Why?" she asked.
"There are things I can teach you. Things that are damaging to the psyche to even know. Before I would subject you to them, I would first need to know if I would be doing you weal by sharing them, or purely woe," he said. And Roz narrowed her eyes at him.
"There's another reason, isn't there?" she asked. He tried to demur, but she leaned in on him. "You're trying to look at some other part of me, aren't you?"
"...I will be frank, in that yes, I am," Cain said. He held up a warding hand though she offered no harsh rebuke. "Though still, I was honest with my stated reason, there was another, ulterior motive. I need to know to what level your stubbornness is akin to a stone, and to what it is akin to ice."
"I don't follow your metaphor," she said.
"Rock is rigid. It does not bend. And it can withstand great force and the heat of scrutiny and shame without deforming. But there is a point at which it can bear no more. It breaks suddenly, loudly, and catastrophically, never to be restored to the state it once was. Ice, conversely, can be reshaped. It is mouldable, plastic to a degree stone is not," Cain explained. "But ice is vulnerable to the same heat that stone ignores. It winnows under such scrutiny and influence, being sapped, undermined, and its strength turned against it. It does not break, but is unmade all the same. But ice, unlike stone, can be reformed into itself after the stressor is removed."
"Both sound like horrible options," Roz said. "I would prefer to be neither."
"...Ah, I see. I have misinformed you," Cain said with a chuckle. "Those are two separate spectrums. One does not move away from stone and necessarily toward ice."
Roz gave a nod. "Alright. So you're trying to understand which form of fragile I am, and seeing if whatever ill-defined purposes you have in mind for me can accommodate it," she said with a slightly bitter tone.
"Hardly ill-defined. I'm trying to determine how far I can depend on you if you actually follow through on invading Heaven with us," Cain said. Roz leaned back. "I've been here a long time, Ahmadi; the appeal of keeping secrets from confederates is long faded for me."
"You think I'll break and run in Heaven? After the insult they've done to me? After the insult they'll do to my family when they die?"
"That is what we're here to find out," Cain said. He got up off of the plastic sheet, and walked toward the massive fruit, pulling from his belt a bronze knife. Sensing she was supposed to follow, she joined him. Cain plunged the knife to its hilt into the flesh of the fruit, and then slowly, arduously, he dragged down, forming a cleft in the False World's skin. The light of the fruit seemed brighter in the ruptured flesh, pulsing to an alien and distant heartbeat. Cain quickly took up a coil of metal strand, the sort usually used for holding up telephone poles, and formed a loop of it, hissing a word of power and causing his fingers to weld the loop into place, before slipping the loop past Roz's horns, face, and shoulders. Once her hands were above it, he stepped back, holding the trailing coil of metal rope. "Go in. Look your demons in the eye. And if you can face them, you will walk out under your own power. If you cannot, then I will pull you out in two hours."
"And you'll know by that whether I'm up to your standard," she finished.
"I will have an answer. But not the answer. That one I will likely search the rest of my damnation for and may never find," Cain said with a fatherly smile, then motioned forward.
Ahmadi took a deep breath, forced her courage to gel in her heart, and stepped into the sucking, pulpy flesh of the False World.
Instantly, she felt a part of herself shatter. But it was a small part. A part that she hadn't been paying attention to. A part that she may not have even needed. There were sensations here. Longing. Hope. Anger.
For a moment, she saw her daughter again.
A moment later, her daughter was older, the age Roz had been when she died.
She saw her father again, her mother. They looked aged. As though they lived decades beyond the date when a Turkish mortar-shell caved their roof onto their heads and broke their bodies.
She saw a flag, waving over a government building. Red, white, and green, a sun blazing at its center. People dancing with bare feet onto the cast-down standards of red with white-moon and star.
But a part of her, the part of her that shattered, reminded her that these were all fantasies. Wishes of how the world would be. That part of her which shattered, her disbelief, now reminded her of what was.
Kurdistan was a dream. Her daughter would be in danger as long as she still drew breath in the mountains of Anatolia. Her parents were dead.
One by one, Roz discarded illusions, feeling just for a moment the joy of them, the thought of embracing the illusions tugging at her, but she would not heed them. They were dreams. And dreams fled before the waking at the dawn.
The figments became more acute. Her daughter in some nebulous danger, as though she weren't already in danger right now. Her parents begging for her to save them, though they were already long in their graves. The figments got inventive, beckoning to her with promises of personal power. Of knowledge and might. Of learning secrets unknown even to the Radio Demon of magical power and lore. But her disbelief, which was now pulling itself back together stronger than it had been before, outright laughed that fantasy away. For all Rozarin Ahmadi had a fantastical streak, even she knew that there was absolutely no way that she would out-learn the Radio Demon. Let the 'Scarlet Fucker' maintain his authority on argot lore.
A final vision. She could feel that the False World was throwing a Hail Mary at her, a final phantasm before she rejected it completely. Of her, her flesh splitting open, and having broad scarlet wings emerge. Of her horns crumbling away and a burning Halo take their place. Of becoming the Angel that circumstance had denied to her.
Roz felt her body again. She could see beyond the illusion of this fruit of falsity and failure. She could feel its pulp on her, seeping into her pores and dragging at her brain. She could taste it on her tongue, smell it in her nostrils. And her eyes, open forward, saw that there was nothing in front of her. Though her mind still dangled the prospect of an Angelic existence in front of her, her eyes, open to the world and wide awake, showed the truth of that promise. There was nothing there.
Nothing but flesh and falsity.
Roz closed her fist, feeling it squelch against the pulp of the False World, and focused on what she was, and what she knew. She was a Kurdish fighter. She died keeping her family safe. Heaven dumped her into Hell without even judging the good or evil of her life. She was supposed to have become an Angel, but now, was a Sinner like every other. And she was going to go to Heaven.
She was going to walk what had become of Heaven, and see what the Angels feared to let her see.
With a scowl now imprinted onto Ahmadi's face, she swung her arm to one side. And the False World tried to resist her. I tried to bombard her with fantasy and visions. She ignored them as easily as a whale ignores an amoeba. There was a shudder in the fruit, as the force of her arm-swing propagated out.
She didn't feel the coil of metal around her waist. That was concerning. She could feel all parts of her, but the metal that was supposed to safeguard her seemed missing. Well, to fuck with it. She swung her arm even more strongly in the opposite direction of the first swing. Feeling the shockwaves ripple through the flesh, she could 'feel' that a new rupture opened somewhere on the skin of the False World. The False World reacted in animal panic, trying to bury her in illusion. But she had her grounding. She knew what and where she was. No amount of pleasant distraction or dire confusion could touch her. Not today.
She pulled all of her limbs in, then rooted her feet, twisting with all of her might in a double-lariat the likes of which typically only was seen in professional wrestling or old video games. And she put such force into it, that the fruit of failure she was in had the choice of either being blended from within, or rupturing.
It chose to rupture.
Instantly, the fantasies stopped, and the flow of pulp picked her off of her footing and swept her outward, carrying her back into the world atop a slurry of glowing blue pulp. And as she pulled the slime out of her eyes, she saw that she wasn't alone. Not just because Cain was running around the fruit to skid to a halt at her shoulder, either. No, there were others who were sliding out of the fruit, the woody-skin and leafy-haired forms of Dream Eaters, all of them fully grown and fully dressed, being ejected from the False World as the glow from within began to die.
"Are you well?" Cain asked, concern writ large on his face. "There was a snag and the wire came back…"
Roz spat some pulp out, pushing herself to a sit, even as the newly minted Dream Eaters did likewise, sitting up and blinking in confusion at their introduction to Hell. She turned first to Cain, then to the False World which, having ruptured, died. "That…" she tried to summon the words for it. But now, looking back at the things she'd seen within it, felt that she didn't have the language for.
Even now, the press of the False World swamped her ability to form memories of it. She only had flashes. Visions of her family, either well, or in danger. Glory for her people. Glory for herself. She gave a cough, then slowly took her feet, using Cain to stand and look at the mess that she'd made. Cain looked as she did, then turned back to her. "Well?" he prompted.
"How in the hell did you get out of that?" she asked, only now understanding how overwhelming and how absolute the visions of the False World were, now that her own Gift wasn't burning cold to keep it from overtaking her utterly.
At that, Cain offered a laugh, and began to guide her around the skin of the False World to where they'd laid down that plastic sheet. It now had a chunk of pulp taking up a lot of it, a chunk which was slowly but visibly dissolving where the grass pulled at it, similar to how sugar dissolves into a puddle. "I had something worth more outside than it could offer me inside," he said.
"I guess that's how I got out, too," she said.
Cain nodded, and released her, shoving the chunk of fruit-flesh off of his set-down things and shaking the guck off of them. "You aren't the weak link," he said, not facing her.
"Excuse me?" she asked.
"If you are going to invade Heaven at my side, you have my blessing and my vouch-safe," he said, giving his jacket one last flap, then putting it on despite how it was still covered in False World slime. He turned to her. "Which means that the breaking point will be Arackniss or Jun-Ho."
"Wait, what?" she asked.
"Angel Dust is obsessed. His monomania will do ill for him in everything in his life except for his task in Heaven, but for that, it will make him unbreakable. Striker's ego is at stake, and I would dare say that imp's Pride is a distant but significant second to Lucifer's own," Cain said. He picked up his shoulder-bag of things that he didn't reveal to her, slinging it into place, then gestured that she walk with him, away from the False Worlds and back toward where Sloth was pink. "That leaves Arackniss and Jun-Ho."
"Jun-Ho is a cagey one," she agreed.
"Inscrutable is a good word for him," Cain said. "What his real desires in Heaven are, those concern me, though I deeply doubt that he's going to betray us to massacre at the hands of the Angel. The things he doesn't let us know may come to harm us."
"And Arackniss?"
"Of all those involved, I think most that he won't show up at all," Cain said. "His attentions of late have been everywhere but Heaven. He is not training, nor preparing. When the call comes, I wouldn't be so surprised if he ignores it."
"So how do we replace him?" Ahmadi asked.
"How indeed?" he asked with a smirk and a significant look at Roz herself. Ah. So that's how it would be.
"For the record," she said. "I never want to go into one of those things again."
"Then you will live a long and useful life, here in Hell," Cain said. And the two walked back toward the Hellevator, and to the Hotel which gave them purpose.
"You know, there used to be a fair bit of discussion back in the day, as to which of the Deadly Sins was the weakest. And inevitably, they all pointed their fingers and laughed at Baphomet. But the truth was actually a bit more multifaceted than that. Every Deadly Sin during the Luciferean Age had their critical weaknesses, those areas where, if you attacked them there and nowhere else, you could cripple them in a single blow, be it physical, mental, or social. And while Baphomet was a laughingstock, because all of the others knew that they were propped up as Pride Incarnate simply so Lucifer could bend the knees of seven kings instead of six, in some ways, Baphomet had them all beaten flatly.
Baphomet couldn't be shamed. There was no social attack you could levy on Baphomet to make them break their composure. They had been so inured to mockery that it was toothless against them. And the low status as 'the puppet Sin' actually ended up working to their favor in some ways. When Baphomet actually weighed in on something, others would knee-jerk against it, which Baphomet could easily use to manipulate the flow of discourse. Does it surprise anybody that Baphomet has such an easy life now that they've retired? They found a way to turn weakness into strength.
Consider Asmodeus! The Traitor Knight of Lucifer, who won a Ring of Hell through honest force of arms, is a physical threat beyond mere strength to conquer. But he was also a vain and egotistical Angel. One who wanted people to view him in certain ways. And he was easily tempted by novelty and forever drawn to the next bright thing. His sexual liaisons did him no favors in the political landscape. How many wives – and husbands – did he sleep his way through during his time in Hell? How many starlets and stars did he pull close then disregard as something newer and shinier came? How many people did Asmodeus leave bitter and angry? Many. An army's worth.
I'll be frank. All of the old Sins who died – and I do count Lucifer in that number – built the machine that would kill them. All of them put themselves into the position that their power would be turned against them and be brought low by it. Asmodeus dodged that fate, but just barely. Leviathan was eaten alive. And to this day nobody's sure what the fuck happened to Belphegor. The only Sins still standing are the ones who built strength instead of weakness. Satan, obviously. And Beelzebub, too. Yes, I was as surprised as you are to learn what she did for the last half century. But it obviously worked.
It makes me feel pity for my replacement. For all the power of the Deadly Sin is an intoxicating thing, it comes with too many costs, and too steep of ones at that."
– Seviathan 'The Godhunter' Von Eldritch, Emeritus Deadly Sin of Envy
