The Song of Ruin

by James Golen

The Demiurge has revealed himself, and declared a vendetta against God. Hell is in turmoil as Lucifer - now with a mere imp as his Proxy - is surely planning a new war against Heaven, to reclaim the throne he calls his own. And those who are stuck on the battlefield have to find a way to survive. This is a story of how good men die. Book 2 of The Demiurge Duology.

49. Kindness

To be in Heaven was to be in perpetual decent weather. Sometimes it rained, but never did the rain lash at a body and snatch its heat. Sometimes it shone, but never did it bake. Sometimes there were clouds, but never did they cast regions in weeks of pall. Never the heat-waves of summer, never the cold-snaps of winter. Just a neverending late spring, twelve hours of daytime, twelve hours of night-time, and days that passed like seconds.

Until recently, that is.

Until the Thrones began to shift.

Now, with the Thrones upon which all of Heaven was built even subtly out of their arrangement, the magic which kept the weather so orderly and moderate was faltering, misfiring, and failing. And though the problems on Probity and Charity were manageable, with only moderate, essentially season-emulating variances that swept through the Clouds, Kindness was another matter entirely.

Kindness was now naked to weather the likes of which one might expect to find in the tempestuous Earth of mankind. And the rains pounded down with cruel abandon, only offering any kindness at all because the shield of the clouds cut the heat from murderous to merely uncomfortable, feeling as though one were being constantly rain-lashed by blood.

A static Heaven was one of the fundamental building blocks of construction in the years of desperation since the souls of mankind were cloistered here for the last centuries. The structures mankind could create using the comparatively meager resources Heaven had to offer could ill survive so much as a moderate wind, given the height and lack of craft that many of the Rat Towers were put up with.

So when the rains came, they crashed against the mud-brick that made up the building's foundation. And the bricks, of which few were properly fired, began to melt into muck.

Buildings were sagging, when they weren't collapsing. And every time one building collapsed, it dragged others down with it.

Roz flapped her wings, barely holding her position hovering against the driving wind as she beheld, in the far distance, a shifting like watching a giant drop dead. The howling of wind and lashing of blood-warm rain swallowed any noise that the building collapsing could offer. She sheered her wings, dropping down until she flared them at the last moment, hovering now in the blistering wind but now at least freed from the lashing rain at the foot of the failing Rat Towers of Kindness.

"Well?" Fiona asked, wearing her armor once more, because a satin blouse offered little protection from driving rain.

"It's bad in every direction," Roz answered. At least this time she didn't get struck by lightning when she tried. That had been singularly unpleasant.

"Yeah, but which direction do we go?" Angel Dust demanded, gesturing away from them all, standing here in ankle-deep water that ran through the rut between towers.

"I could only guess," Roz said. She gave it a moment's thought, then pointed in a direction not directly into the center of the Cloud, but a close enough thing that few would care. "I saw a group of buildings that looked a bit better off in that direction. If we go to them, we'll at least have shelter and people we can ask who aren't panicking or digging their families out of rubble."

"Then get to it," Striker said, and he took point, slogging through the water which ran away from the heart of the Cloud and toward its edges, likely to fall over the edge of the Cloud and descend as sunshine-drizzle toward Cloud Charity.

Maelstrom, though, hesitated to join the others as they began to trudge, remaining back where those capable of flight were hovering above the muck. "What about those Angels?" he asked, keeping his tone quiet, as he only started advance when they did.

"I saw an Angel, but I couldn't tell who it was," Roz said. The distance was tremendous, and the conditions made for poor visibility. It could have been Birah or Yeqon, or it could have been Forfax, or it could have been just about anybody else. She had no way of knowing.

"How far?" he asked.

"Far. At least two kilometers," she answered.

"That's not far for an Angel," Maelstrom noted.

"It's far for navigating in a storm," Fiona laughed. "Have some heart, comrade! We didn't survive that skin-covered-cockroach to get run down by a lucky Angel."

"I'd still rather be safer than sorrier," Maelstrom said. Roz could respect Maelstrom's outlook on things. He was used to being thrown without compassion or regard into situations which were strongly tilted against him. And now that he was the one who was able to choose what fights he took, he refused to take any that he hadn't stacked as thoroughly in his own personal favor as he could manage. He was a strong proponent of the notion that only idiots fought fair fights.

"I'd ask where your sense of adventure was, but it's clear to see considering you're here in the first place," Fiona said, a grin obvious even behind the shuttered visor of her helm. "If they come, we punt them into next week and keep on with it. We're nearly to the half-point, comrade. From here, it's an easier trip down than it was up."

"Would it kill you to stop tempting fate?" Maelstrom groused.

And true to his words, there was a mountainous crack that sounded from directly beside them, as bricks began to pulverise into dust which quickly got swept away as mud. A great crack began to spread upward, first only as wide as a hand, but then quickly expanding so that it was thicker than Roz's leg. Upward that crack spread, to the crumbling and crushing of bricks finally pushed that little bit further than their tolerances could sustain, and giving way entirely. Roz grabbed the Hound and Fiona in either arm and with a great pulse of her wings she hurled herself forward.

The cracking begat a roar, the roar of the top of the Tower that they were walking beside beginning to both twist and tilt, the whole structure undermined now that its foundation was compromised. She gave a glance to Fiona, having no time to tell her what to do, but Fiona was already looking back and offering a nod. So Roz opted to buy instants by not explaining and hoping that she and the Redeemed were as sympatico as she'd hoped. She hurled Fiona forward, toward the knot of the rest of the Hellspawn, such that she impacted Angel Dust, sweeping him up before careening into first Jun-Ho and then Striker.

There was a shift in the air, and then all four were gone, leaving only Uller for Roz's next pulse of her wings to intercept and grab. It clotheslined him, driving the breath out of his lungs, but the haste was necessary, because through a mechanism she wasn't entirely sure about, she could tell that there were now great chunks of Rat Tower plummeting toward her. She dodged and wove through the falling debris, kicking off of the un-crumbled wall of the Tower adjacent to it, off of the water-choked ground, and once even off of a falling chunk that housed a terrified, shrieking Innocent. Finally, she flared her wings and pulsed them one final time, streaking like a bullet past an 'intersection', where she could twirl, flare out her wings, and halt.

She watched as dust rose up in a suffocating curtain, the building twisting and crumbling until it wedged itself against both the building beside it and the building beyond it. It didn't collapse entirely. That was little comfort to everybody within hundreds of meters of the blighted thing.

The dust didn't hang in the air long, and didn't even have a chance to cake her, before the rain picked up again and dropped essentially straight down, giving her an ad-hoc wash and pounding the dust that had been thrown into a layer of slime.

"Satan's Balls…" Uller wheezed, only now getting his breath from the gut-punch she'd been forced to deliver to him to get him to safety in time.

"This place is a fucking disgrace," Maelstrom noted as he pulled his way out from her other arm.

She nodded. There was a weird splash sound, and when she glanced behind her, Fiona had returned from whatever interim safe-place she'd teleported to. Jun-Ho was staggering, clearly his machine having difficulty being so rapidly zipped around and keeping its orientation. Striker gave his head a shake, and was back to his standard, fighting fit. Angel Dust wiped some mud out of one eye with a scowl.

"That's what you get," Roz said, pointing at Fiona.

"I was not tempting fate," Fiona sounded a little defensive. Striker delivered the best dope-slap one of his stature was capable of, clubbing the back of one of Fiona's calves with his cybernetic arm.

"Fer fuck's sake, do I gotta do all your thinking for you? Get yer shit together! We've got enough trouble waitin' for us in this fucking Cloud."

"Yeah, yeah," Fiona rolled her eyes. She pointed in the direction that Roz had initially indicated. "It's a long way to go, so…"

So they had better get moving. Misadventures had already claimed a bit more than half of their food. If they didn't get this done quickly, then the mortals at least would start to starve. Still, they were close. The same Cloud as their target.

Now was the task of finding a single needle of hay in the entire hayfield.

---

Chapter 49

Kindness

---

The collapses of the first week had finally petered out. Apparently, those were an anomaly to the third Cloud of Heaven, an event which had never transpired before. As far as the few questions Uller had been able to suss from the people that they occasionally traveled in the same direction as, storms did happen, but a storm of that magnitude was unheard of even in the oldest of memories, an event without precedent.

That was definitely for the best, because if storms like that were a regular occurrence, then all of Kindness would be piles of ruin from Edge to centerpoint.

Still, they were now swallowed in a crowd, no longer traveling as the lone knot of itinerants passing through a hostile heaven. Now they were part of something alike to a migration wave, moving away from the Edge where the conditions were at their harshest and toward the Core, where they were still bad, but mitigated by the fact that they'd hit everything else first before they got there.

It didn't stop the Angels from looking for them. Now that the sky was merely overcast and showcasing shades of industrial and institutional grey that were typically reserved for the most depressing forms of architecture, they were patrolling from on high, staring down to try to spot the group. And they had passed directly overhead before. And time after time they did it, they always just kept on going.

"Still they miss us. I'll take what luck we can get," Jun-Ho muttered, staring up at the Angel that passed beyond a building and left their line-of-sight.

"What about…?" Uller gestured toward Striker's back. The human gave a shake of his head.

"He still has far to go. While the paths from Kindness to Charity have been much disrupted since my time in them, there are still ways to get from here to Generosity," Jun-Ho said.

"Why are you talking about Generosity? Our objective is on this Cloud," Uller said.

"Yours is," Jun-Ho said, before turning a glance toward Striker once more. "His is not. He has loftier ambitions. And frankly, I need to go all the way up to Temperance to see my own agenda through."

"So what, you two won't be joining us on the way down?" Uller asked, more or less rhetorically.

"Given Fiona's surprising return, I'd say you'll be just fine without us. One less mouth to… well, not feed, and a faster way down than having to retread all these footsteps," Uller said. There was a brief hesitation from the front of their cadre, where Roz turned a look back and Striker said something to her that was lost in the noise of the crowd moving. They all clustered to one side and moved out of the flow of traffic, scrumming just in time for another Angel to fly overhead.

"I'll be able to portal us to Probity. I've done the math," Uller whispered in the quiet.

"Wait, really? Won't that kill you?" Maelstrom asked.

"My math is good. It'll be fine," Uller said, then let the silence return.

Silence reigned until the Angel had vanished from sight, and was gone for two whole minutes.

"There's a sun-gully ahead," Roz said.

"So?" Uller asked.

"And there are a cluster of Angels at its far side. They aren't looking in our direction, but…"

"But crossing the gully would leave us dangerously exposed," Maelstrom finished her thought for her. "Could we cut in by a building and go around?"

"Exactly my plan," Roz said. She turned to Striker, who gave the plan a nod. There was no call to be reckless when caution would reap better rewards. Since Striker and Uller were so much smaller than the other humans around them – even with their Human Disguises giving them an extra foot of height – it was dependent on Roz, Jun-Ho, Fiona and Maelstrom to pilot their group through the crowds. Why not include Angel Dust? Because Angel Dust was distracted. Though his face showed focus of intense depth, it was fixated on distant things rather than immediate ones.

He'd miss the trees for the forest. So he was swept along with the imps.

Cleaving across the flow of human traffic brought them to the far wall, and they simply hugged that wall until they found a cleft that led away from the opening sun-gully that was making itself known ahead of them. Into darkness and dampness they went, the stink of stale and standing water sloshing as they began to tread through it. Uller, as a passing fancy, dragged his fingers along the bricks of the building next to him, and with his Magic he could feel that they were deeply compromised, one and all. They wouldn't collapse today, or perhaps even not this year, but they would collapse unless something were done to repair them. And to root himself and fix the damage himself would take more magical ethers than his body could even hold. So he gave his head a shake and left the problem behind him as he walked. He wasn't everybody's savior. Nobody expected that of him, not even himself.

The traffic on the new 'street' that they'd entered was lesser than the one that moved alongside the sun-gully, perhaps simply because it heartened the dead to see something growing as they trudged, starving, toward what they hoped would be more sturdy environs. Uller had little hope of that, if what he felt on that otherwise solid looking building were anything to say on the matter. The weather up here was breaking human inhabitation of this Cloud. And if it got any worse, they'd be driven downward, and increase the overpopulation of the lower Clouds to even more ridiculous extremes.

Uller had never seen a billion of anything before coming up here. And he was fairly certain he'd surpassed seeing a billion dead humans on their hungry hike to the rendezvous point back on Cloud Two. To think it could even stand to get worse than that.

"We have a tail," Striker muttered quietly, just loudly enough that Uller and Angel Dust could hear him. Angel Dust immediately whipped his head around, trying to spot who was following them, eyes racing along the sky. "Not up there. Down here."

"The fuck you say?" Angel Dust asked. "Where?"

"Looks human, black shirt. Too clean," Striker said, pointedly not looking back. Uller, though, pulled out the small mirror he kept in a pocket for aiming wyrds around corners and used it to pan his gaze behind him. And though it took him two sweeps, he did see a figure that had the gapped halo of an Innocent, in a shirt that was both black and entirely free of streaks of mud or dust, that was traveling in the same flow of traffic as their group was.

He had his eyes on them, and despite his gaunt appearance didn't show the same lethargy that the others that the squad was traveling through shared. In his way, he was too much like Striker's team. Too crisp in his movements, too steely of his gaze. There was no hopelessness and no fatigue in him, no weighty chains of starvation taking away what made people vital.

"Do we jump him?" Angel Dust asked.

"Don't be fuckin' stupid," Striker said. "If there's one we see, there's likely another five we don't."

"I feel something, did you guys see…" Roz said, turning, before she had a start and then forced her attention down to Striker and Uller. "Man in the black shirt."

"You're fast." Striker seemed even a touch impressed.

"Kurdish soldier. I've had to be," she said. "Who is it?"

"Could be anybody," Uller muttered, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck, giving him a chance to glance back and look at the follower. He didn't seem inclined to intercept them. Just follow them. "Could be working for anybody, more relevantly."

"We ought'a wack him, sooner rather than later," Angel Dust weighed in.

"Without starting a panic?" Maelstrom asked. Uller glanced to him. "He joined us when we reached this street."

"Was I the only one who didn't…?" Uller muttered, wondering how he'd missed that guy.

"What's weird is that we're down-wind of him and I can't smell him," Maelstrom said.

"Would he be drowned out by everybody else?" Uller asked.

"No. that's not it. I smell a lot of humans. And then I smell… something else. I don't know how to describe it…"

"It's an Angel hiding itself," Striker said.

"It could be," Maelstrom tentatively agreed.

"We need to jump 'em before they jump us," Angel Dust pressed.

"The element of surprise is on our side," Roz added.

"Would it be enough?" Uller asked.

"It'll have to be," Striker said. He gave a nod ahead and whistled for Jun-Ho and Fiona. They both turned to him. "We've got to kill a tail, then we're bolting through that tower up ahead to get away."

"Just like that?" Jun-Ho asked.

"I ain't got time to pussy-foot around people liable to kill me," Striker pointed out.

"How are we going to do this, then?" Uller asked. Roz tapped her own chest.

"I'll handle him. Just get to the tower when I move," she said.

"Think you can take an Angel solo? That didn't turn out well for ya last time," Striker said with a chuckle.

"This time he's alone too," Roz said.

There was a pregnant pause, as the flow of foot-traffic pulled them toward the tower they were going to use to escape. Uller cleared his throat and Roz glanced back at him. "I'm going to put a mark on you so that if you get pulled away, you'll know how to get to us."

"Couldn't hurt," Roz said. At that, Uller laid a hand on her arm, feeling a twist of his precious and slow-recovering magic bind to her. Then, he felt her tense under his fingertips. She was readying to launch.

Uller darted aside just as Roz launched herself back. Angel Dust half-moved to join her, only to be grabbed by both Jun-Ho and Maelstrom, dragging him toward the building. Fiona flexed her thick and muscular arms, and a swarm of red dust swept up around her, congealing into a suit of scarlet armor, a heater-shield strapped to her handless arm.

Uller prepared to give at least one parting strike before he joined the others in flight, some trifling advantage that Roz would, with good fortune, press to see her to victory. But even as his hands twisted and the words formed themselves in his throat, Roz reached the black-shirted incognito Angel. And when she pulled back from her feinted haymaker and drove a brutal uppercut into the Angel's gut, it didn't land with the crash of force impacting magic, or even that of flesh pulping flesh. Instead, there was a distinctly plastic ripping sound, a loud metal popping of fixtures snapping free of their place.

Instead of blood or gore from the hiding Angel, there came a burst of circuits, a few vacuum tubes, and a flare of severed wiring.

The angel immediately slumped, and as it did a Glamour on it broke, revealing its true form. And for some reason, that true form had the inward curving horns and hot pink skin of an Incubus, but clearly one of artificial construction.

"What the fuck?" Uller asked.

"What the fuck is even that?" Angel Dust asked, before he was dragged into the building. Roz turned a confounded look from the dead automaton, one which unlike a typical Exorcist offered no attempt at burning and melting itself away, and then to Uller.

"What the fuck?" she then added.

"Doesn't matter we'll worry about it later let's goooooo!" Uller pressured. And she heeded his good advice, diving into the building and plunging away from easy sight.

---

Birah snarled as he jerked up and out of his ad-hoc Control Rig, a splitting headache working its way through his brain. He puffed out a breath, and to his surprise it sprayed something from his upper lip. He daubed it with a finger to find golden blood there. He snarled, and wiped his bleeding nose. He didn't have time to deal with the feedback of being spat rather involuntarily out of his Avatar. He knew, in this moment, exactly where they were. It'd taken weeks of work to track these intruders, but track them he had, with only the meaningful help of Forfax, because for all Yeqon's sterling physicality, he was about as investigative as a flake of chert.

He stood, and flared his wings in his impromptu workshop, preparing to Transit to their location and drive them out into the light.

But instead he immediately found himself on the floor, his face hurting because he'd obviously blacked out and came to only after busting his brow open on the marble that ought to be beneath his feet.

"Birah, what happened?" Yeqon asked, pulling him up and leaning him back. Birah squinted against even the thin lights that his workshop offered. Yeqon then looked around him, taking in where he'd barged. "And for that matter, what is all of this?"

"I'm fine. Let me be," he said.

"You're not fine," Yeqon said. "You just face-planted onto the floor."

"I have their location," he said. Well, slurred. Because the room swam and he had to pause and take stock of himself. Oh. Oh that would certainly explain why his head was aching and his balance was shot; he was currently bleeding freely inside his brain. "A moment," he begged.

He then turned the Healing Miracle on himself, and through it felt the artery deep in his brain begin to drink back in the blood it had vomited forth and then seal itself closed. The headache abated, but only for a moment.

"You need a lot more than a moment. Did you almost die there? Your Halo was flaring!" Yeqon pointed out.

"I've been closer to death before."

"Oh for Father's sake just stop," Yeqon demanded, glaring at him with those crystal clear blue eyes. "I don't like Hellspawn being this deep in Heaven any more than you do, but if you kill yourself trying to kick them out you do nobody any favors."

Birah wanted to simply stare Yeqon down, but the First of the Grigori matched him glare for glare. And Birah, with his headache already starting to return, faltered first. "It's part of a pattern," he said.

"What pattern?" Yeqon demanded.

"It's got something to do with the Demiurge. Just trust me on that much," he said. It wasn't even entirely a lie. He could think of no other reason why there would be Hellspawn this deep into Heaven, unless they were specifically trying to reach the Demiurge. And it didn't matter whatsoever what they wanted to do with or to the Demiurge; they would have to be stopped regardless. Birah was not arrogant. He knew that stopping the Demiurge was something that was beyond his lone capabilities. But stopping a few Hellspawn?

Frankly, if he failed to ward away a few pit-fiends after they got this deep into Heaven's corpus then he would have failed in every way that he wished to consider himself an Angel in good standing. In so doing, he would have proved every Firstborn right in refusing to allow him to fight for his home, in that he'd have proved himself incapable of doing it.

"Well, they're stuck here, then. There's no way up if you can't Transit, and the Gating Circle is under guard all hours of all days, only Angels can go up, only gear can come down," Yeqon said. Perhaps trying to comfort him.

"There are other ways," Birah said. He then forced himself to his feet, finally able to trust his balance and get his wings spread. "I appreciate your aid, but we have no time to lose. We've got to go now."

Yeqon stared at him, then with a clench of his jaw, nodded and rose to his towering height above Birah. "Show me where."

Birah focused his will on where his Avatar had fallen.

There was a fluttering of wings.

And then there was noise around them as they appeared just above a tide of human traffic pressing from the outside of Cloud Kindness toward its center. He dropped down as soon as there was a gap sufficient for him, and rolled his Avatar over. Besides the impact which tore it in half, the Hellspawn had done no further indignities to it. Perhaps they were displaying prudence, spooked by the appearance of something they hadn't foreseen. If so, they were wiser than most of their degenerate ilk.

The damage was bad, but he could fix it. He had all the parts. He cast a hymnal over the shattered body and willed it back into his tiny workshop. He could fix it when he had time. Now, though… now they had to be nearby.

"That building," Yeqon said. Knowing that their window of opportunity was small, Birah didn't bother questioning the how or the why. He simply followed. The Rat Tower was rank, stinking of mold. As the two Angels stormed forward through the narrow hallways, with the inhabitants quickly darting out of their way, Birah could see mushrooms growing out of the masonry, so fouled was the construction here. And most vexingly to those living here, it was the fractal-capped Fry Astarite, which while not truly poisonous was nevertheless inedible and liable to do truly unpleasant things to a digestive tract.

There weren't even mercies in those things that ate of the rot, here in Heaven. Such a disgrace.

He swatted the back of Yeqon's arm, and pointed them toward the stairway that led upward. Unlike a lot of Rat Towers, this one looked to have been at least somewhat properly designed, before the weather and conditions began to weather it; its path upward was a central stairway. But they didn't have to go far. Because in the landing of that central stairway, he could feel a knot of teleportation magic residuum.

"Have they gone up?" Yeqon asked, craning his neck back as though there were any gap to see the higher levels through.

"No. They teleported," he said. He grabbed the knot which was slowly decaying before his eyes. They hadn't gone far. The longer the distance, the stronger the knot, and the longer it lingered. So this would have to be a teleportation to within maybe a dozen kilometers to be degrading so quickly. Since Birah had no time to lose, he pulled at the strands that he recognized, manipulating the magical remnant until at last it snapped into a straight line that pointed just off and past the centre of the Cloud, 110450 meters away.

"I know where they are," Birah said, before giving Yeqon the direction and distance. He waited until he started to hear the fluttering of Yeqon's wings before initiating the Transit himself. He was always faster than the Grigori, after all.

The stairwell blinked away, and in its place, there was a warehouse, one dark and lit only by the light of the two Angels' halos. There was utter silence in the wake of their Transit, and a quick pan of Birah's vision showed no footprints in the dust of this disused venue. And yet the teleportation had borne him here, as true as a bullet from its barrel.

There was something he wasn't seeing. Had the Hellspawn learned some new form of invisibility? Some way to avoid leaving traces of their passage?

"Something is wrong," Yeqon said, uneasily.

Birah looked at the building around him more closely. The empty shelves offered no protection from distant scrutiny, so he could see essentially from one side of the building to the other. They did block to a small degree vision along his 'diagonals', those vectors aligning where north or south met east or west. But it wasn't enough to hide them, especially not with the lack of traces entirely.

Then again, some of the distant shelves weren't as devoid of 'stuff' as most were. They had crumbled crates, playing host to decayed food, or unraveled cloth. Or crates containing nothing at all, simply left where they were, because their wooden lathes were too short to be useful for construction.

Birah leaned forward, growling, and rubbing at his aching head. He wasn't going to be played the fool by these Hellspawn. Even if the Demiurge – Samael, Yaldabaoth, whatever you wish to call him – was less the danger that everybody else thought he was, the mere fact of creatures from Hell being this deep into Heaven was an insult to the capabilities of Angels to protect it.

There was something out of place.

And when he narrowed his vision, and looked at a shelf nearby, he could see an edge. Well, it was like an edge, but not exactly. More like 'a terminus'. An ending where signal stopped and noise began. It was large, he reckoned. And not so much invisible, as forced out of tune with reality.

Well he would have none of that. He swiped his hand to one side, symbolically and magically stripping the unreality from that unknown thing.

What revealed was what were clearly a tetrad of missile warheads nested in a wooden frame, bound together by wires.

And a downward-ticking clock that just hit 00:00.81.

"BOMB!" he screamed, and with all the haste he had to him, he dropped the Touch of Noon and tried to get the Angel Skin into its place. He was fast, faster than any other spellbinder in Heaven. But even he couldn't get the protections solidly in place in time.

Heaven erupted into noise and flame.

---

"Do you think you got the timer right?" Striker asked.

"How did you even know to have that thing?" Angel Dust asked over top of him. Jun-Ho gave a chuckle.

"Do you really think I'm going to come all this way up into Heaven without having at least one booby-trap to stymie pursuit?" Jun-Ho said.

"Do you think it killed our pursuers?" Roz asked after a moment.

"We can't presume we're that lucky," Fiona pointed out. They were now further away from where they'd intended to go, but they'd traveled by a method that, according to Roz's second-hand understanding of Redemptor teleportation, was one that no force in Creation could track. They'd been forced to backtrack, but nobody would even begin to know where to look for them. And the sensible of their pursuers wouldn't guess 'back the way they came', as a direction to bolt if they still thought their mission viable.

"That's probably being sensible," Roz said. Striker gave a shrug.

"Maybe we got one 'a them. Maybe all we did was cause a ruckus that they're gonna investigate. Either way…"

"Either way, we have a bit of breathing room," Uller said with a nod, catching the elder imp's implication. He turned to Fiona. "You've spent time in this Cloud. Is there anywhere you've been that's closer to our way-point than here?"

Fiona blinked at him, then hung her head and rubbed at her face.

"I keep fucking forgetting I can do that now," she admitted, then gave a shamed shrug. "I'll take us on a little tour. Stand close and hold on."

Rather than have to retread old ground, this was a much better option. Jun-Ho joined the others, laying a hand on her spread arms, and braced themselves for the dropping sensation. When the world resolved itself, they were now mid-stumble down a meager pile of potatoes that occupied a small portion of a different warehouse. Well, one of two piles. One was the potatoes still firm and solid, the ones that the group dismounted before they fell on their asses. The other was alike to a lidless barrel, one that utterly reaked of potato rot. Probably it was the closest thing that anyone in Heaven had to fertilizer.

They stumbled toward the front of the warehouse, drawing a start from an Innocent who was sitting on a stool next to its exit door. "Empty your pockets! This food is for everybody," he said, standing up and hefting a rusty pry-bar.

"Go fuck yourself," Striker said.

"If you want food that badly, get it from another gully. This one is for our guys," he said, and despite his sunken eyes and emaciated look, there was clearly a look about him that he was entirely willing to fight to the death to protect that mediocre pile of produce back there.

"We have none of your potatoes. We're here with her," Jun-Ho cut off Striker before his abrasive nature could turn this into a slugging match that called undue attention to them. He was gesturing toward Roz, rather than Fiona; though both had wings, it was much more socially acceptable to be an Angel up here in Heaven than it was to be a Redemptor.

"This place was relatively spacious. I didn't want to embed one of them into a wall," Roz said with her practiced indifference, as though the humans ought to be glad she even bothered to offer them a word.

"I don't recognize you," the Innocent at the door clutched his prybar tighter. "Strength or Glory?"

"We don't have time to play these games," Maelstrom said. "Look at us. Do we look like thieves to you?"

"The last group we found in here pilfering our hard-grown produce didn't look like thieves either. Starvation makes Heaven cruel," the human said.

Maelstrom made a show of emptying his disguise's pockets. And the others twigged they could do likewise without actually interfacing with their actual pockets. Jun-Ho, whose outfit didn't have noticable pockets, refused to join them. Only when it appeared (thanks to the Glamours disgusing the fact that they did still in fact have bags of food on them) that they were empty handed that the human here finally calmed, and even then it wasn't all the way.

"Alright. Why here?" the human demanded of Roz, who appeared at least like she was in charge.

"...I just told you. So I don't embed one of them into a wall," Roz repeated.

"Give him a minute. His brain is fuzzed," Maelstrom said in a stage whisper. The human seemed a little insulted by that, but didn't deny it. He stepped forward, hands out to his side to show he was unarmed and not trying to be threatening, as though mattered in the slightest to a being who could rip apart tougher things than humans without a whisker of effort. "Can we talk to whoever's leading the lot of you? We're looking for someone."

"Plenty of someones in Heaven. Who?" he asked.

"Woman. More arms than usual…" Angel Dust began, but the human immediately started shaking his head.

"No Freaks anywhere near here," he said. And that pulled a furious twitch out of Angel Dust's eye.

"Don't you call my sistah a freak you fuckin…!" he began, only for Jun-Ho to interrupt him so this didn't completely spiral into anarchy.

"This isn't the place then. If he can answer that quickly, there's nobody with Aspect here," he said.

"I oughta kick your ass, talkin' like that!" Angel Dust said, trying to struggle past Maelstrom who restrained him from the human who was now growing alarmed again.

"Then this isn't the spot," Fiona said. She clustered the others around Angel Dust since it was clear she wouldn't be getting him to come to her. And then as soon as she had so much as a finger or wing-tip on all of them, there was another dropping sensation, and this time, it was into a room that had about half its floor space filled with looms. These ones weren't covered in dust, and immediately there was a yelp of alarm from directly behind Jun-Ho. They'd managed to teleport in directly in front of somebody.

"Greetings," Jun-Ho capitalized on her moment of shock before it could turn into panic by engaging with her. "Could you lead us to your foreman? We're looking for somebody in the know."

The weavery ended up being a bust just as the warehouse was, though beneficially to Angel Dust's temper, Molly was only referred in passing as an 'abnormality' rather than a freak. And though the foreman did know of abnormalities, those Humans who despite dying Innocent and going to Heaven manifested an Aspect like nearly all Sinners did, in his area, he could attest to no spiders among them.

Truth told, this was far better than just walking and hoping. But Jun-Ho could tell the trip was taking its toll on Angel Dust's sanity with every person who told them 'no, we don't know of this woman'. So it was when searching for one droplet of water in an ocean. There were many, many, many false starts.

"We will find her," Jun-Ho coached, while they waited to talk to their sixth overseer, here in a workshop that turned scrap-wood into basic furniture for the Innocent so they wouldn't be living in absolute squalor. It would still be abject, but that any number was an infinitude larger than zero.

"What if…" Angel Dust's anger cracked, and Jun-Ho could see a sliver of fear in it. "What if she's… switched off, y'know?"

"We will find her," Jun-Ho repeated. There was no other thing to it than that. Jun-Ho turned to Striker, who was simply watching the workers with wariness. The hardened imp turned a look back at him, and the look he gave was one loaded with impatience. He wanted to pursue his own goal, one that Jun-Ho would aid up until the moment that Striker turned back. The sooner that Angel Dust found his sister, the sooner Striker could pursue Striker's goal. That it was so tantalizingly close likely burned at him like a cinder in the palm.

"White and pink? Two big eyes and six little ones? Four legs?" the foreman asked. Instantly all eyes turned to him. The foreman didn't look starved, which doubtless meant he was a Penitent. The Penitent were a different breed than the Innocent. The Innocent were given this because they hadn't 'fucked up'. The Penitent, on the other hand, had fucked up badly enough to go to Hell, and then earned their way out. To them, unlike the Innocent around them, twenty years of starvation likely wasn't even the worst thing they'd ever suffered. Jun-Ho doubted so much as a single Penitent had ever Gone Numb. The Penitent gave a nod to Maelstrom. "She was in the district 'till last year. In Building E. Which, as you can attest, isn't there anymore."

"Where did she go?" Angel Dust demanded.

"Couple districts over," the Penitent said, producing a pipe and sticking it into mouth. He didn't light it, for he obviously had no tobacco to smoke, but the act seemed to center him. Chewing briefly on its stem he then pointed in a direction. "We had a bunch of folk move when E began to show structural failure. Got 'em out before the building came down in the wind. We aren't a lucky bunch, but diligence can buy what luck tries to cost a man."

"Is she alright? Still… you know… with it?" Angel Dust's naked desperation clearly showed on his face.

"Family of yours?" the Penitent asked, cupping the bulb of his pipe for a moment.

"Sistah," he said.

"You must take after your father then," he said, then let out a couple of staccato laughs. Angel Dust's expression grew dim at that. "It's just a jape, traveler. Just a jape. Yes, she's still upright and able. Helped some folk move some delicate things. More hands making lighter work. She's got arms aplenty."

"Is she still there?" Angel Dust pressed

"Can't tell you that, because I don't know," the Penitent mused. "Mail service failed entirely back in '97. Now only way things get known between districts is if somebody sees fit to tell us themselves. Rumor is our mail, now," Angel Dust began to growl, but the Pentitent gave a gentling gesture. "Look, just talk to Edith. If your blood isn't in that district, she'll be able to tell you where she went."

"Then we've gotta go," Angel Dust said, and began toward the door. Maelstrom, though, gave the man a respectful nod.

"Thank you. He'd say it himself but…" the Hellhound in disguise said.

"But a desperate Heaven makes for desperate men," he said. "I take no offense."

Striker and the other left, following Angel Dust, but Jun-Ho lingered, just for a bit. And he turned to Andrew Godwin, once called in Hell 'The Cannibal Splitter', and stared him in the eye, saying clearly, "Occidite Deum et subvertite thronum." Godwin nodded at the lingerer, intuiting from his words alone that despite Jun-Ho's appearance, it was in fact Jun-ho.

"Wondered when you'd show back up. New face?" Godwin asked.

"A temporary one," he said. He stepped toward the man who had for two damned hundred years been a serial killer of serial killers, before finally deciding to, pursuing, and succeeding at freeing himself from the shackles of Hell itself. "Do you have it?"

"Only half," Godwin admitted, reaching into a pocket and pulling out tabacco that he shouldn't have had, tamping it into his pipe with a thumb then lighting it with a flame that came from his fingertip. He nodded toward a brick, which Jun-Ho pulled from its seat and pulled a wrapped package out from behind it. It was… lighter, than he remembered. "Samantha has the other half. She's scouting a way to get from Temperance higher, right now."

"I'll have your half, then," he said, adding it to the parcel that he'd smuggled up from Hell. "What about the others? Xin Fei? Akoda? Blazkowicz? Sypax?"

"With her," Godwin said. Jun-Ho stared at him. "Not Sypax, though. He stays on Probity these days. Does deals with Outsiders. It's on him If they bite him in the ass. I'm here holding the others' door open if they have to come back down. My legs, they're not what they used to be."

"We both know your body is in better shape than it was when you were Damned, let alone when you were alive," Jun-Ho said. And Godwin finally released his own Glamour, letting his hair flicker and lick like living flame, his eyes turning the moody orange of his hair as they cast light into the room the two men shared under his new, gapped halo. "Are there any others still down here?"

"No. They either Went Numb or went up."

"So they all went up," Jun-Ho said. Godwin gave a chuckle that puffed smoke into a thin haze around him. At this point all of the 'fanatics' were too driven to give up. No matter what.

"They all went up," he said around a laugh. He then pointed with his pipe stem. "You'd best be after your group. They won't tarry long for you."

"Vox Populi, Vox Dei," Jun-Ho said.

"Mors Mortem Dei," Godwin answered. He gave Jun-Ho an off-handed salute. And then the two confederates parted, to their silent, but necessary agenda. There were already enough tyrants in Creation. Maybe they could see to the end of at least one of them.

---

"Ho there! Coming or going?" Eraniel asked – AGAIN – for the second time in thirty minutes of Yeqon as he came back to the entrance of Vigilance. And for once in Yeqon's millennias long existence he felt absolutely no intention of bandying words with the Principality who oversaw that place which Angels had closest in the spirit of a hospital. Yeqon was covered in too much of Birah's blood to be in any form of good humor. So he stomped past the in-theory much more powerful being that he'd ought not to snub, and offered it nothing. "How rude!"

It didn't matter. He'd gotten Birah to Vigilance before the First of the Second Flared Out. Birah was alive. And though it would take him time to recover from being essentially unguarded at the heart of a massive explosion, he would recover.

Outside, there were several other Angels, those who had been simply in the area when he Transited here in such entirely-due haste, cradling the dismembered and shattered body of Birah and rushing the Secondborn into the one place that could save his life. They all took him in, looking at his tabard of reds and yellows smeared with the golden blood of his kin. Hepsut, the Last of the First, was not here when Yeqon had arrived, but he was here now, a burning look in his eyes. "Is he going to be alright?" Hepsut asked.

"He is in Vigil. He will recover," Yeqon said.

"How did this happen?" Hepsut asked.

Yeqon instead pointed out Duriel and Forfax, who smoldered with much the same intensity as Hepsut. "Scour Kindness for those Hellspawn. Now they're trying to kill us."

Duriel nodded and instantly Transited away, but Forfax lingered. "Hellspawn are always trying to kill us," Forfax opined.

"This time they almost succeeded," Yeqon said.

"They've succeeded before. Or have you not read Atheed's entry on SEFIROT?" Forfax stressed.

"I don't have time for this. I need to get them before…"

"Forfax, Yeqon is right. We're wasting time bantering. Are you coming to help us hunt or are you not?" Hepsut cut in.

"A threat this deep into the Clouds of Heaven? My pride demands it," Forfax uttered.

"Then gather whoever you think will help us and come to Kindness," Yeqon said. And then, giving no more time for anybody to sway him in any direction, he Transited himself to that Cloud of crumbling giants.

The wind was strong today, raking along the sky above the highest completed floors of those squalid towers. He knew he had little hope of finding them, but he had to search anyway. So he began to fly, with the wind in his face, and to think.

Yeqon was not, traditionally, an Angel who thought too deeply on things. His passions had, in the days of old, always guided him truly without having to lead him down the unpleasantness of self-doubt and recrimination. But then he met Asha, beautiful Asha, and his passions dragged him so desperately wrong. Or at least, dragged him in a direction that the rest of heaven told him was wrong. In the ages since, he tried to convince himself that they must have known something that he didn't. What sin or crime had sublime Elias created? Elias was a good son, a good man, a good husband, a good father, and a good farmer. He bore in his heart no cruelty or malice.

And despite all that, despite the beauty and might of him, despite how he was in all ways the better version of Yeqon himself, he was butchered at his own front door. His human wife was cut down as she fled into the orchard. Their son lanced and left to bleed where he hid. Their daughter cleft in twain in her mother's arms.

Their house, and their orchard, burned to the ground.

There was a thunderous anger in Yeqon. One that he could fight and fight but never even match, let alone defeat. The question of why was one that no answers ever bothered to offer themselves to explain. And Yeqon knew he wasn't clever enough to pick them from those things left unsaid by the people around him.

Why had the Nephilim needed to die? Nobody even bothered explaining why. Only that Gabriel was ordered to spill their shining red blood, and to erase them from the world. As though it were a self-evident good. Well, those who thought that had never held a cooing infant in their arms, never ran their fingers through a child's hair, never laughed at the first awkward but silly joke that the child would invent. Never watched as the child surpassed them in some way.

Yes, Yeqon was bitter. He was so deeply bitter that he could feel it poisoning his heart and curdling his blood. There were so many things nobody even bothered to explain to him. Why Birah, the best of the Secondborn, was now in pieces facing a lengthy Vigil was just one of them.

Yeqon was so tired.

"You'll find nothing if you keep searching like this," Forfax said, sweeping in to match his pace as they soared above the Cloud.

"You have a better way?" he demanded of the greatest hunter amongst the Firstborn.

"What is my name?" Forfax demanded flatly, his thick eyebrows furrowed in insult. He winged closer and grabbed ahold of Yeqon's shoulder, and the First of the Grigori felt himself being Transited down and out of the sky. The new venue for them was outside of a warehouse, similar to the one which was trapped and had wounded Birah.

Forfax released him, and stormed through the doors, his eyes glancing at the empty, essentially abandoned building, checking corners of the room. He paused, glancing to the floor, then turned back to Yeqon.

"Well?" Yeqon asked.

"Not here. But I begin to see a pattern," Forfax said. Another Transit, and the two of them were in a weavery. Forfax immediately did as he had before, looking around, but Yeqon saw something else. The workers here were a-titter about something. He stepped away from Forfax, coming to one of the loomsmen.

"Ho there," he said, trying to force Eraniel's gregarious tone into a throat which really didn't feel any such sentiment. "Have you seen any strange folk come through in recent days?"

The loomsman flinched at being directly addressed by an Angel, but after a glimpse to his coworkers, gave a nod. "Yes sir, just today sir," the loomsman said. "They were asking after the location of an abnormality."

"An abnormality?" Yeqon repeated.

"One who looks like a beast even though they were Judged Good," a loomswoman offered. Yeqon narrowed his eyes. An Innocent with an Aspect? That was very rare.

"What kind of abnormality?" Yeqon asked. He then shook his head. "Did you know the answer to their question," he tried to redirect them, instead.

"A spider, sir," the loomsman said. "But no, sir, we didn't know of such a woman."

An Innocent woman with a Spider Aspect. They were looking for an anomaly the likes of which Heaven seldom created. But why?

"There was one, sir, he… I think he might have been her kin," the loomsman continued.

Yeqon snapped his attention back to the obsequious loomsman. "Why do you say that?"

"He was a particular kind of desperate, sir. I've only known men to ask after others with such tones when they were wed, or related by blood. And he struck me as more a sibling than a lover."

"What were they, this group who asked these questions?" Yeqon asked.

"Well…" the loomsman began, but blushed.

"He was too busy staring at the breasts of the large woman to pay much attention to much else. Forgive Rickard but once he saw her, his attentions were essentially locked," the loomswoman said. "They were a strange lot. Unremarkable men led by remarkable women. An Angel, and another who… might be an angel, now that I think on it. Her clothes were finer than ours are, given what we're forced to work with."

"An Angel was with them," Yeqon forced her to focus. "Red wings? Golden eyes? Halo looking like it was afire with crimson flame?"

"The very same, why?" the loomswoman asked.

"They were here," Yeqon said. He turned to Forfax. "We need to…"

"They didn't find what they were looking for here, however," Forfax interrupted him. He stared down the loomswoman. "Did they leave immediately upon learning of the spider-Innocent's absence?"

"Yes," the human said. Forfax nodded. He then closed his eyes, breathing deeply of the air and flexing his thick-fingered hands as though playing with string between his digits. Then his dark eyes snapped open and he turned to Yeqon. "I am near-certain where they went next. Godwin's."

"Who?" Yeqon asked.

"A known member of the VPVD," Forfax said. He grabbed Yeqon by the shoulder, and then Yeqon felt himself being Transited now into a furniture manufactorum, standing in front of a Penitent who didn't start in surprise at their appearance. Forfax took one look at this 'Godwin' character, at the spot in front of his chair, and then scowled. "The hellspawn are in this sector."

"Well, hello to you too, Forfax," Godwin said. "Do you greet all humans that way or just me?"

Forfax ignored the human and turned his incisive glare to Yeqon. "Call whomever you can to lock this district from all sides. We will push into its center and find them before they can flee. They will get no further into Heaven this day."

"I'll see to it," Yeqon said. Even though his heart was the farthest thing from 'in it' he still Transited back to the Barracks. "Gather all of your swords and shields! There are Hellspawn in Upper Aum!" He shouted. And the angels burst into action, preparing to follow him, to quarantine the district, and to crush the Hellspawn beneath their combined number.

And Yeqon was so very, very tired.

---

The building looked like any of ten thousand that they'd passed on this multi-month excursion deep into the guts of Heaven, just another mud-brick spire holding as many people as it possibly could to keep them out of the increasingly inclement weather. There was damage to the structure, damage even Angel Dust could spot – great cracks, reaching down its face where the wind had begun to shove the thing down. But for now, it held.

"As the stories go, this is the place," Jun-Ho said. He gestured forward. And Angel Dust swallowed past the knot in his throat, the swell of emotions that he wasn't sure he still had in him, and he pressed into the building.

Within, the building was unique, compared to all those he'd been in since coming to Heaven. While still structurally grim, it was different to all others because its walls were painted, one and all, in cheerful pastels of yellow and blue and greens, scenes of forests and brooks rendered in chalk, smudged by the passage of shoulders but still visibly art. The lights were doubled up, so that they didn't cast the dim, orange light that he was used to but instead a cleaner, yellower light that made the hallways seem, in some small way, like they were open to sunlight.

He paused before a scene depicting a chalk-drawn deer fawn, resting on chalk-drawn grass, and he saw his sister's hand in it. In all of it. He felt a tear in his eye. As it fell, so too did his Glamour. She was still here. And she was still with it enough to keep the art touched up.

Doors slid open from time to time, with Innocent moving between rooms, or else past him. Those who saw him in his Sinner form didn't even comment. Despite his lack of a gapped halo, they didn't question his presence, didn't fear him. But then, as he glanced into a room he passed, there was a guy with a dove's head living in that room, so maybe Molly's kind weren't as rare here as they were other places. He turned back, leaning into the room with the dove-guy.

"Hey, where's the one what put all this on the walls?" he asked.

"Who's askin'?" the dove asked, with an accent very much like Angel Dust's own, his face drawing down into a defensive look.

"Who the fuck are you to even ask that?" Angel Dust began, but he felt a hand on his shoulder, and saw Maelstrom giving a stern head shake at that. "Sorry, sorry. I just… It's been a dog's age since…"

"He's looking for his sister," Maelstrom explained on Angel Dust's behalf.

"A guy lookin' like that? You gotta be Molly's bruddah," the dove-Innocent said, getting to his feet. Though he was spare by his long malnutrition, he didn't seem to be giving up on having strength. "Which one'd that make you? Tony? Or John?"

"She talks about her brodduhs?" Angel Dust asked.

"Try gettin' her to stop," the dove let out a laugh. "We keep her up on the third floor, away from the damage and the wind."

"Show me," Angel Dust said. And the dove obliged, saying his goodbyes to another innocent whom Angel had barely even witnessed enough to care that she was there. The dove then bore them into the structure, toward the stairs.

"Name's Fredo. We mighta' grown up in the same street, sounds like," the dove said.

"Doubt it," Angel Dust said. The stairwell, like the hallway walls, played host to a mural, which spiraled upward following chalk-drawn birds spiraling upward and dancing in the sky, until the twisting of the stairs began to turn the chalken day into a chalken night, and now fireflies were lighting up below crisp white stars, made stark against a darkly blue background. There was another dawn coming, but the ascenders left the stairwell before they could bear witness to it.

Whatever small talk Fredo tried to offer, Angel Dust wasn't having it. He was so close. He could practically smell her. The hallway here showed a procession of people, drawn still in chalk for that was seemingly the only medium that she had available to her, of dozens upon dozens of people. All of them looking healthy. Happy, even. The sight of it, for reasons that Angel Dust couldn't even clearly enunciate, made his heart clench. Like he was seeing something of quiet but sad beauty, sublime in destruction. He didn't know why the subject had turned from scenes of nature to individuals. But somehow, despite their faces of contentment, despite looking fed and healthy, there was sadness.

Like all doors in this building, there were pictures on it, this one showcasing that chair. Henry Ragnie's chair. The one where he'd read to them at the end of the day back in the Bronx, when they was all still little. Back when they were still a family, and not a 'Family'. There was no accompaniment, but he needed none, to know exactly who was behind this door.

He knocked on the door. And since his patience had been burned down to nothing by the long trip here, he immediately reached to slid the door open.

"One minute! I need to put something on!" Molly's voice nailed Angel Dust's feet to the floor, stopping him in a way that literally nothing else right now could.

Maelstrom gave a quiet, encouraging nod, as though that were what Angel Dust required, rather than just needing a moment to get past that tide of emotions that just slapped him in the mouth. His hand fell to his side. He wasn't about to barge in on his sister while she was getting dressed. That was just uncalled for. Still, the minute and a bit it took for her to 'prepare herself' and open the door were some of the longest of his entire fucking life.

And when the door opened, there she was.

Molly Ragnie. Like him, she was all white fluff and pastel colors, her hair blooming out behind her like a more orderly version of Rachel's, only in soft whites bearing pink highlights. Her eyes, big and expressive as they'd been in life, were a particular shade of burgundy, and she had marks on the white fuzz of her face where other, vestigial eyes didn't quite peek through, more appearing pink dots than eyeballs. And just like she'd been in life, her body was more than half leg.

She stared in shock for a moment.

Then a beaming smile began to spread across her face. "ANTHONY!" she squealed, before launching herself at Angel Dust.

"Anthony?" Maelstrom asked, confused.

"Don't fuckin' ask, puppy-dog," Angel Dust ordered. Maelstrom shrugged.

"What are you doin' all the way up here?" his sister asked of him, staring up from where she'd mooshed herself up against his chest.

"What else? Gettin' you the fuck outta here while the gettin's good," he said.

"Whaaaaat?" she asked.

"When's the last time you et, sis?" he asked, and she pulled back from him with confusion on her face.

"What's that go to wit' anything?" she asked.

"Me and my bro, we've got a place down there that's… well, it's better than this shithole!" Angel Dust pointed out.

"You take that back! I put a lotta work into this shithole!" Molly said, her expression growing deeply miffed.

"Molls, babe, yer livin' in a shoebox, gettin' a meal every third month, and people are shuttin' their brains off to get outta here," Angel Dust said with stern tone. "I'm serious. There's a place that's nice and safe down in Hell, with good people. Better people than I even thought I'd find, to be honest. I mean, you've gotta meet Truly. You'd love her."

"I ain't leaving these people," she said, stomping one of her four feet and crossing two sets of arms before her chest. "I got a hubby now, and he's got people. Wait, Fredo, why are you hidin' out there?"

"Didn't want to get in the way, babe," Fredo said, twiddling his thumbs with show-innocence from a bit down the hall. Angel Dust glanced quickly between the two of them, and was able to read between the lines.

"Who the fuck said you could just get with Molly?" Angel Dust demanded of the dove, his protective streak starting to well.

"She did. That's the only opinion that matters, pal," Fredo said.

"Don't you go bullyin' Fredo tryin' to drive him off, Anthony! We ain't kids anymore!" Molly pressed.

"Look, one way or th'othah, you're comin' with me, down where it's safe," Angel Dust said.

"Angel Dust, you might want to take a breath," Maelstrom said rather sharply. And Angel Dust turned the other way, the way that had Maelstrom in it, and saw a number of other Innocent starting to gather bricks and bits of shit, rearing to go at protecting one that they'd claimed as their own.

"If Fredo ain't leavin', then I ain't leavin'," Molly said. "And Fredo ain't leavin' less his people go with him."

"What, are you askin' me to drag an entire neighborhood through the guts a' the shithole that is Heaven back to a place where there's food, water, and soft beds? Is that what yer seriously askin' me?" Angel Dust asked.

"We're a clan now. And clan sticks together," Fredo said.

"Nobody fuckin' asked you!" Angel Dust snapped, but as he'd turned to deliver that to Fredo, he saw Uller skidding into the wall in incredible haste. He glanced at the backs of the Innocent, and his eyes widened when he spotted Angel Dust, before he launched with his wings and began to outright maneuver above them, causing the humans to start and recoil that somebody was taking up the foot and a half they had between their heads and the ceiling. "What's this then?"

Uller landed in the edge of Angel Dust's scrum, his Glamour down and his red skin covered in sweat. There were concerned words coming from the hall, and Fredo all but manifested a set of knuckle-dusters onto one fist, but he didn't throw that fist, because it was clear that this hellspawn was here for words. "The district is Anchored," Uller panted. "There are Angels coming from every direction. The nearest ones will be here in five minutes."

"What? How many?"

"Hundreds," he said.

That made Angel Dust's guts finally settle. There was no time for family drama. A handful of Angels? That was feasible to take out, with the likes of Jun-Ho and Maelstrom on their side. But even with Angel Dust's broken sense of fear, even he had enough brains to know that once the number of digits in a number of Angels coming to kill you ticked above two, it was no longer a fight. It was a meatgrinder with wings.

"So what do we do? Can Fiona do that weird thing and get us out?" Angel Dust asked.

"Only on her own. Can't bring anybody with her. The Anchor hits her different," Uller said. He sighed, and then clenched his fists. "I can tell my Portals will work regardless. I can get us all the way to Fort Abandon. But it might kill me to do it."

"Starting to doubt your math?" Maelstrom asked, rounding Angel Dust and facing the imp.

"It's either die mobbed by Angels or die escaping them. And besides, my girlfriend can bring back the dead, it won't be that bad," he said. Maybe lied. He seemed on the edge of panic himself, so it was hard to gauge.

So Angel Dust looked at the math of things again, then turned to Molly, only to see that she'd left the doorway and joined Fredo, tucking in beside him. A portal, eh? That might change things.

"How 'bout this," Angel Dust said. "You get your people – every fuckin' one of them – through a portal right down to the friendly zone outside 'a Fort Abandon. A place where you guys can get food and all that good shit you can't find up here. And when you all do," he pointed at Molly, "you come with me to New Purgatory."

"There's easily two thousand people in this clan," Fredo said.

"Then'd you'd better fuckin' move quick," Angel Dust said. He pulled out his Hellphone, which though it showed zero bars of service he still turned on for the first time in months regardless. He sent a text, which, since the recipient was within one radar bounce, would set off Striker's phone and get him to activate it. The call came in a few seconds later.

"I hope yer getting your woman bundled up, 'cause we're gonna have to leave real fuckin' fast," Striker ordered.

"Slight change in plans. We're movin' a neighborhood with us when we do," Angel Dust said.

"The fuck you say?" Striker demanded.

"Get ready to defend the portal. We're all gettin' out outta this, even if we have to build a wall outta those winged-fucks' corpses!" Angel Dust said. Then he hung up on Striker. He'd be pissed, but they were running out of time. It was now or never.

"I'll go down and set the portal. Maelstrom…"

"I'll throw you through it if you pass out," he said. He paused, clapping Angel Dust's shoulder. "We'll give you every second that we can."

He looked to Molly, who gave a quiet nod. This would do, to her. So it'd be enough. He pulled all of his guns and the crowd parted for him as he followed after the Hound and the Imp, and prepared for the most batshit insane evacuation that Heaven had ever likely seen.

---

In the end, the defenses ended up being Rozarin, Fiona, Jun-Ho and Maelstrom, intending to hold a tide of Angels while the portal that Uller was struggling to remain conscious enough to maintain vomited some two and a half thousand residents of Cloud Three into the Occupied Zone of Cloud One. Striker had groused to high hell, calling it stupidity of the highest conceivable order and wanting no part in it.

"Then it's time that you leave," Jun-Ho said. Striker, who had been mid-tirade broke off to glare at him. "Make no mistake, I will be joining you, likely after a day to throw off my pursuers. You and I have spoken of where."

"What, you think you're comin' outta what these idiots have dropping on them in one piece?" Striker had demanded of him.

"No. I don't expect I shall. But I don't need to, either," Jun-Ho said. He dropped his Glamour, then, and those Innocent who had never seen a Blasphemer before gave a start and a ripple of confusion and alarm. His pack, once laden with food, was now mostly empty, and he dumped it on the ground. But from that pack, he pulled another cloth-covered parcel. "What's imperative is that you get away from the Angels and that they don't get this."

"Do I even wanna know?" he asked.

"You'll be happy to know it is intended to give somebody you'd despise the very worst of days," Jun-Ho said. Striker spat on the ground, but took the parcel and gave Jun-Ho a nod.

"Kill one fer me while you're at it, partner," Striker said.

"Oh, I don't intend on letting them kill me easily. Rest easy with that. Now haste, Striker! Cloud Generosity is calling for you!" Jun-Ho exclaimed.

"I ain't waitin' long for you," Striker warned.

"Please, if my memory is correct, you'll have to catch up to me," Jun-Ho laughed. And with that, Striker tipped his hat and darted into the crowds, leaving behind the press of Innocent who were carrying whatever they could bear with them toward the portal slapped against the wall of one of the Rat Towers of the neighborhood.

"Any words of advice?" Maelstrom asked of the Angel?

"Keep looking up," Jun-Ho said simply. There was a buzzing sound, and the shoulders of his armor folded away, releasing those tiny helicopter drones up and up and up, until they were above the level of the roofs and well out of sight. "Incoming estimate two minutes, 75."

"That's a lot of them," Angel Dust muttered.

"Bearing seventy-five," Maelstrom corrected him, pointing just north of east.

"That's the closest of 'em?" Angel Dust asked, putting away his smaller guns and swapping them for three sets of rifles, one of them a machine-gun usually mounted on a truck and the other two chambered to blow holes through feral Hellboars. Jun-Ho gave his assent. "Then you an' me bettah keep 'em from reachin' the ground."

"They will have a rude surprise in about ninety seconds," Jun-Ho agreed. Maelstrom turned another look to the crowds, which were passing through the aperture that bore them down two Clouds and well within the bounds of what Hell considered 'safe territory'. Uller, though one his eyes had burst and deflated, was still leaning against the wall next to the portal, glaring at it with his remaining eye and daring it to close.

And the great source of frustration for Angel Dust, obvious even to Maelstrom, was that Molly and Fredo intended to be the last Innocent through.

The thunderous crash of gunfire made Maelstrom's ears flick back and he glanced upward, just in time to see a hasty Cherub get shot to pieces, while the Angel who had been traveling abreast with it did a 'bullet dance' but didn't seem to be perforated the way the other was. Not, at least, until Angel Dust swung his machine-gun out of the way, planted his spine against the Rat Tower, and fired both rifles at the Angel above.

It wasn't clear if one shot hit, or both hit in the same region, but whatever the case may be, it tore off an arm and shattered the wing on that side, causing the Angel to overshoot the gully they were in and crash somewhere out of sight.

Uller turned and raised up a hand, one that was leaking black blood from his nail-beds, the fingernails themselves seemingly held on by well-wishes and hopes more than by connective tissue, and he spoke another word, causing a prismatic wall to appear above them, mere seconds before another group of Cherubs swarmed in, and began to lace down swarms of golden quarrels. They struck into the barrier, not unmade by it the way that many other ballistic implements tended to. Uller gave a laugh that spat out some frothy black blood, then turned his attention back to the portal.

Jun-Ho continued firing, because this barrier was unfair in Hell's favor in that it allowed firepower to go out, but not to come back in. The Cherubs had to fly spritely to avoid being ripped to shreds like their comrade who'd made the forlorn hope. But then there were great golden streaks, like fireballs racing down from the sky. Maelstrom knew that they'd land just outside of the Innocent mass, and launched himself to intercept, but even before he could get there, Roz and Fiona were already there, tackling the first arriving Angel, and together, embedding him head first up to his hips in the foundation of the Rat Tower across the way.

There wasn't simply one Angel, though. Another landed behind them, a blazing sword appearing in his hand, which he tried to thrust into Roz's back, but even though Fiona was looking the wrong direction she still managed to deflect the thrust away with her shield. And that put Maelstrom in a perfect position, with the momentum he had, to sweep his hand up past the Angel's arm and wing, to clamp his hand on the Angel's throat, and then first heft and then slam the Angel skull-first into the grey, unpleasant surface of Cloud Kindness.

Out of sheer reflex, the Angel tried to sweep a cut at Maelstrom, but he was able to lean out of the way, then with his other hand grab the sword-arm and slam it harder into the ground, embedding the sword for two thirds of its length in the surface of Heaven, wedging it there in an awkward angle so that Maelstrom had no restriction on throwing his leg over the supine Angel, mounting atop him, and driving a brutal downward hammer-blow with his fist into the Angel's face. The first one smashed the helm's visor so far inward that it must have shattered teeth while doing so. The second one snapped the hinge of the visor, so Maelstrom was able to rip the metal away and reveal the Angel's face. Yes, he had pulverized many of the Angel's teeth. Her teeth, as the case may be.

The Angel, desperation clear in her eyes, grabbed Maelstrom's thigh, but before Maelstrom could punish her inattention to the defense of her head, he heard a fluttering sound, like that of massive wings flapping.

Then it wasn't grey Cloud Surface before him. It was blue sky.

And he started falling, as when the Angel Transited high into the sky, she had done so reversing their orientations so that she was atop, and he below; he had only a fraction of a second to try to clench the Angel before a deadly drop, but the Angel, for all she was concussed and had a shattered face, still had enough wherewithal to kick him away, before another fluttering noise and she vanished entirely.

So this was bad. If the Rat Towers averaged two thirds to three quarters of a mile tall, that meant he was up three miles. Wind ripped by his face as he descended, the great blocky flagstones of Heaven's makeup racing up to meet him, the slender gullys running between them rapidly gaining definition by the second. But he wasn't alone up here. Below him, he could see other groups of Angels, ones who were waiting on Angel Dust and Jun-Ho to have to reload before making themselves known.

While Maelstrom was not a trained sky-diver by any means, he knew from reading his textbooks that a body could develop a bit of purchase against terminal velocity if you splayed yourself just so. So that was exactly what he did, and to his relief he did notice that his descent evened and stopped flipping, as he narrowed in on one target in particular; the biggest Angel he could find who was relatively close to straight down.

It turned out, that whoever just tried to murder him had done him a favor. This would hurt, but it would hurt the Angel just as much, he wagered. At the last moment, directly over the target's head just as he moved out above the gully where the fighting was heaviest, Maelstrom tucked in his arms and legs, tilting forward so his body formed a face-first spear, accelerating him rapidly until he thrust his fists forward and plowed into the descending Angel.

The Angel, who hadn't looked up, was caught completely by surprise. The deceleration of Maelstrom throwing reckless and grappled blows at the Angel was painful and nearly debilitating, but was a lot less lethal than impacting the ground would have been. The Angel, even still, was slowing their shared decent with flailing wings, trying to understand just how a random Hellhound dropped out of the fucking sky to punch him in the back of the head.

Maelstrom felt the wings under him flare and he was torn free of the big one's grasp and hurled away, now only a few hundred feet from the ground. Which would still be fatal, but less fantastically so. Have some pinache, large-Angel.

Maelstrom didn't have time to wonder why his 'dying thought' was lambasting his killer for not killing him in a more spectacular fashion, because he instantly felt a pair of massive arms grab around him and arrest his flight and descent, and felt armor plate at his back. He almost threw an elbow into the crotch before he saw that the armor was bright crimson.

"Timely!" Maelstrom said, sucking in a deep breath.

"Ain't I just?" Fiona said. Then there was a dropping sensation and Maelstrom was on the ground next to Fiona, who was also currently bashing another Angel with her shield until he stopped moving. Given his Halo still burned, she hadn't killed him. "Well? Get back to it!"

He glanced up, and saw that Roz had taken the fight to the sky, monopolizing the attentions of three Angels – including the big one – by herself. She blocked chops by their blazing swords with nothing but her bare fore-arms, and didn't even seem to be cut by them, before lashing out with battering-ram kicks and cannon-blast punches, punches which caused the air to rain down burst chain hauberk rings and unseated metal plates.

The problem was the ground, though. More and more Angels were showing up, outright Transiting here now that they had confirmed the location of the Hellspawn. And while Angel Dust was handy at keeping Angels out of his face at a distance, based on Maelstrom's understanding of his past experiences and lack of a Warform, if they got close he'd be plucked apart like… well, a spider.

Jun-Ho was caught having to split his attention between the Angels in the sky and the ones trying to reach the ground, while the procession of the Innocent plodded on with frustrating slowness. How long does it take to haul twenty five hundred asses through a portal, anyway? He had just caught his breath from his most spectacular near-death event when there was a crash nearby, and Maelstrom had to hurl himself aside to prevent having an Angel land on him like a mortar-shell and crater him into the ground.

Instantly, the Angel was swinging a mace of blazing flame at him, and he had to lean hard out of the way, so that the weapon crashed into masonry rather than cranium, before driving a kick hard into the side of the Angel; it hurt like a bastard, because Maelstrom didn't have shin-guards and the Angel was armored, but if there was one thing he was learning about his body in recent years it was that it was a hardened thing, even above the level that other Hellhounds could claim or brag about. It didn't inflate his ego, though. He knew the cost of such tempering. He wouldn't wish it on any friend of his.

The Angel swept his wings and halted his launch before he cratered into the wall opposite, then with a flap, launched himself in a twirling strike that, if Maelstrom were a third of the fighter that he was, might have struck him in the clavicle and ripped his torso in half lengthwise. As it was, he was still able to get just barely out of the way, and then use the Angel's own momentum and mass to grab the frill of the armor at the groin and slam him with all the force he could manage into the wall. The helm of the Angel crumpled as he went face-first into the only barely yielding brickwork, but he obviously wasn't a dunce at fighting because his blind back-swing with the Mace was one that Maelstrom had no choice but to block, which caused the bones in his forearms to creak but not quite crack, and his feet to dig ruts through the muck that this particular spot on the gully was layered in, almost tripping backward over the wooden planks that the locals had placed to try to get over the pools that formed when the rains thundered down.

Maelstrom heard thunder in the distance, the howling of wind starting to whistle in as the mercurial weather of Cloud Kindness began to be a bastard again, but this time its bastardry was more levied at the Angels than it was at Maelstrom. He'd take small victories. He steadied himself and flapped the pain out of his arms, as the Angel heaved himself out of the impact crater that Maelstrom had deposited him in, tearing his helm off to a light spray of golden blood. There was a deep-bitten wound where the helm had buckled into the skin of the Angel just below one of his eyes, eyes which confused Maelstrom for a moment.

Those weren't eyes of fury, of focus, or of hate.

Those were eyes of a dead man walking.

Instinct told Maelstrom to hop back, and he did so in time for Roz and another Angel to crash down into where he'd been standing, spraying both Maelstrom and his foe with muck as the interlocutors bounced away to continue their sloppy grapple over that way. There was something strange going on here. The Angel let out a shout, something primal and atavistic, something that didn't belong coming from the throat of an Angel, and hurled himself at Maelstrom, intent on shattering him with that mace. But Maelstrom saw an instant of opportunity, and instead of dodging this strike, got his hands into exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

The Angel barged into him, and the two of them staggered and stumbled, each fighting with the other for the control of the arm that the Angel used to swing that burning mace. Maelstrom didn't have time or opportunity to help Roz, but from the fact that she was currently breaking the arm of her opponent and hyperextending it in a direction it hadn't intended to go, she didn't seem to need it. Of course, Heaven wasn't so kind as to let her finish her enemy, before she was tackled off of him by another Angel and driven back into the scrum next to Angel Dust and Jun-Ho, who fought to keep Fiona's aerial combat mostly even-footed.

Maelstrom turned his gaze back to the Angel in front of him, and found himself staring into the eyes of the Angel he was grappled with. And there was no defiance in those eyes. No resolve. There was no hope in them. For just a moment, Maelstrom found himself shocked, looking into the eyes of an Angel who had given up.

He should have easily overpowered Maelstrom in that moment he was stunned, but he didn't. And that told Maelstrom all he needed to know about this guy. He didn't come to this fight looking to win, to kill the Hellspawn. He came here looking to die.

Instantly, the grapple that Maelstrom was contending in took on new meaning. He wasn't struggling to save his own life, because Maelstrom's life wasn't in danger here. He was struggling to... what? Put up a good enough show so the other Angels would agree he died a good death? The assassin in Maelstrom, that which had been crafted by Blitz Miller in the last few years of his life, could easily have given the Angel exactly what he wanted, to die spectacularly and gruesomely.

But there was something older than that.

Before Maelstrom was an assassin, he was The Dog On The Chain.

And the thought of being party to somebody else throwing their existence away in the name of despair was utterly fucking unacceptable to him. Even if that somebody else was a Goddamned Angel.

"Try, God damn you!" Maelstrom shouted at the Angel, who he swung with great strength and broke a brickwork bannister leading up to a Rat Tower entrance. The Angel grunted in pain, but didn't release his token resistance. "If you're going to fight me, fight me! Don't just stand there and wait for me to kill you! HAVE YOU NO FUCKING PRIDE?"

That last bit seemed to have stirred some whisper of outrage in the Angel, who lashed forward with a head-butt which hurt like a bastard, but it did his soul good to not be staring at a living corpse anymore. "My pride is what got me into this," the Angel said.

"So what, you're just going to let a slave-soldier from Hell kill you because you feel like you've fucked up somehow?" Maelstrom growled, jockeying in their grapple and when the Angel gave the slightest hint of despairing again, he hefted the Angel and smashed him through the wooden doors to the Rat Tower, finally throwing the Angel away. "Come back and fight me again when you mean it, coward."

The words were harsh, but despair had to be fought, and he didn't have Loona's gift of words to know exactly what to say in any given situation. He outright turned his back on the supine Angel, storming toward the main fight. The horde of Innocent was much reduced, most of them having now taken to running through the portal rather than proceeding through in orderly fashion. There were still several hundred left, clustered in groups trying to avoid the fighting of the Hellspawn and their allies.

Molly and Fredo still hadn't gone through. Which meant Angel Dust wouldn't go through. Which meant they were all stuck here. He coudln't see Uller, not until his passage rounded the corner and allowed him to look through the portal. And Uller was now on its far side. And he wasn't alone. There was, on that side of the gate, a well fed and massive Innocent limbering a metal bar as though to hit anybody he didn't like with it. Say what you would about Heaven's infrastructure. Its people? Its people were good, and knew how to look out for each other.

There was a shout from behind Maelstrom, that atavistic, unAngelic roar, that saw him turn just in time to be tackled from behind, the despairing Angel now having abandoned the use of his mace to simply try to overpower Maelstrom with raw force. And though whoever this guy was did have an advantage in terms of physical power, Maelstrom was the more skilled grappler. And when grappling, the best policy was to at all points use your opponents power against them. So even with his awkward angle and orientation, he was able to twist and set himself, the claws of his toes digging into the scrabble of Cloud Kindness enough that he could hip-throw the Angel to the ground.

The Angel didn't stay down, as he had before. Now, bleeding as he had been before, there was a drive in him he'd been missing in their previous grapple. Now he had something to prove.

He didn't want to kill Maelstrom at any point. And he no longer wanted to die to Maelstrom.. He now wanted to beat Maelstrom. Maelstrom could live with that. The next lunge to catch Maelstrom in his grasp was intercepted by Maelstrom darting back and catching the Angel twice in the face with lightning-fast jabs, now causing blood to leak from his nose as well as his cut cheek. That inspired another lunge, which showcased how much this Angel used his raw physicality as a crutch to win his fights. He had brawn aplenty. But to some extent, so did Maelstrom; the only person he'd known before this whole adventure began who was stronger than him was Millie, and she was a goddamned monster. While this Angel had some slight edge in power, Maelstrom had him blown all the way out in terms of skill.

His feet felt light as a feather as he darted around the Angel's telegraphed attacks, driving blows into his armored body, having to abandon the head now that the Angel was actually bothering to guard it. Each hit made his fist creak, hurting like an absolute bastard, but the impact of it clearly went all the way through the armor and bruised the Angel's flesh underneath it. Such plate as this might save the Angel from a sword, but would do nothing against a fist. Every hit he delivered cleared the defeatism a bit more out of the Angel's eyes, and tightened the desire to win at any cost that had taken its place.

The Angel was advancing through his counter-blows that he launched in response to every shift of guard that the Angel gave him. The Angel was used to being an attacker. He didn't have any perfect answers to technical boxing. But he weathered the assaults and pushed Maelstrom back. Maelstrom didn't have any knock-out hits, no weapons to kill him in a single strike. And the others were all busy with their own fights. Behind the Angel's back, Angel Dust was starting to retreat in their shared direction, having had to throw away a damaged and empty machine gun and whip out a Thompson submachine gun in its place. The Angels and Cherubs above continued to try to ventilate him with javelins or quarrels, but Angel Dust moved with almost impossible reaction time, allowing every single attack coming in at him to hit the ground instead of him.

Maelstrom's moment of distraction was enough to allow the Angel to finally get a hit in; though it glanced off Maelstrom's hasty guard and the side of his head, it reminded him that he didn't have time to worry about the others. Strictly, he didn't have time for a duel right now, either. But if he tied down an Angel who was even a journeyman at hand-to-hand from grappling and ripping Angel Dust apart, then he was doing his part. He felt himself back into somebody, and he could smell that it was an Innocent. The Angel hesitated, rather than pushing his advantage, since in harrying Maelstrom he'd pushed him into the edge of the crowd trying to flee from Cloud Kindness.

So he had enough basic kindness in him not to blitz through Innocent. What a shock. Maelstrom didn't advance on him, because that would put him inside the Angel's ideal range. The Angel was built like a grappler, shoulders wide as a barge and bearing almost unnatural muscular heft. Though Maelstrom's technique in grappling was likely superior to the Angels as well as his striking was, he didn't trust that it'd be enough to surmount having a larger, heavier, stronger opponent manhandling him now that the Angel was actually putting in effort. Given no better option, Maelstrom rooted his feet, and let a jab ruffle the fur of his muzzle before driving a brutal gut-punch into the armor, feeling his knuckles grind but the metal outright snap under his blow. A crack formed, starting at the hem of the breastplate and reaching up to about an inch above where Maelstrom's blow had landed. The Angel powered through it, though, and for the first time in this bout countered a counter, driving a hook which caught Maelstrom right in the fucking ear and sent him stumbling.

He gave his head a stern shake, his swimming vision showing three of the Angel advancing quickly, but only for a moment. He didn't have time to be stunned. Almost as an act of willpower he forced his sight to work properly, the tripled vision resolving down into one. Now that their positioning had shifted, he could see behind the Angel that the crowd was almost done pressing through the portal. And Angel Dust saw it, too. He mag-dumped everything he had, outright dropping the guns the instant they were empty, then grabbed Molly in one triplet of arms, and Fredo in the other, and outright launched himself over the heads of the teeming Innocent to crowd-surf into Cloud Probity.

"Close the fuckin' portal!" Angel Dust roared, while Maelstrom did something audacious, and started to advance on the Angel.

"NOT YET," Uller's voice from places unseen answered.

Yeah, of course not yet. Maelstrom was still up here.

Maelstrom knew that advancing on the Angel was bad technique, but he had to get through that portal himself. And he didn't get very far, before having to dart back, weaving back from bullet-fast jabs for his head. The last, a brutal body-shot that his balance wouldn't allow him to escape from, instead hit a crimson shield, which was held in place by Fiona.

"Stop playing with your Angel, Maelstrom!" Fiona shouted at him. Then she vanished, and he saw that she was actually just now landing and fighting a retreating war just like Roz was. Jun-Ho, though, refused to retreat. He was now at the heart of a swarm of Angels, three of them actively striking and cutting at his armor, slashing at him and launching stunning blows at his armored plating. He didn't even look toward the portal.

Jun-Ho wasn't even trying to leave. He planned to die fighting here. Well, as an Innocent, who couldn't permanently die, that was his decision and his right.

The tide of Heaven's forces was pushing them back in detail, now. There was only retreat for Roz and Fiona. And only damage and degredation for Jun-Ho. Maelstrom was unfortunate. He had to advance to get out.

He looked at the portal, during a moment of lull from dodging blows. He looked at its corner. Its edge. That spot that nobody was using, as though it'd cut them if they strayed too close.

Maelstrom had read about the nature of Thaumaturgical portals in the Codex Cruac.

Portals can't cut anything unless you happen to be in the way when they're opening. Once they're open, there is literally no way for them to harm you.

So instead of trying to beat this Angel in fisticuffs and then flee through the portal, he ducked under the first blow that went for his head that came in, then outright charged, shoulder first, into the Angel, and carried the both of them in a bull-rush toward that portal-edge.

He impacted the fleeing Innocent with his Angelic cargo, and their sheer weight caused him to strike the portal-edge; he felt it 'bend' around him, accommodating him rather than severing anything when it couldn't simply bounce him off. The instant he was through, and saw white puffy cloud under him instead of grim, dead grey, he slammed the Angel down, almost managing to pile-drive him into Uller in the process.

The Angel struggled, of course, grabbing and twisting hard on Maelstrom's arm. But Maelstrom had a trick for this. Instead of allowing the painful joint-lock to set, he twisted with it until he found himself on half-mount on the Angel, fish-hooking his mouth with his fingers and draggin his head back until the Angel was forced to release Maelstrom's arm to prevent the Hellhound from ripping his face open. Maelstrom scrabbled fast, managing to sweep behind the Angel, to lock his legs around the Angel's back, and pinion the Angel's arms into a useless position.

There was a bass drone, and a flash of golden light that raised all the fur on Maelstrom's body, but when the incoming Heavenly Artillery would have struck the back of the fleeing Innocent, instead there was Fiona in its way, being driven back under the sheer power of it but outright tanking the hit which ordinarily blew its targets to bloody chunks. Roz was the last one through, staggering past the portal-line with two Angels trying to drag her down. Through the portal, Maelstrom could see Jun-Ho, mobbed and flagging, his armor shattered, swing his arm one final time, swatting a Cherub out of the air, before one of the Angels assaulting him drove his sword through the shattered plates and then through the pilot no longer protected by them.

"Now!" Maelstrom said, and only then did Uller, looking like hammered hell, allow the portal to close.

The fighting didn't stop immediately, though, because Roz was getting mobbed and she was bleeding gold from numerous wounds, as though she'd been shanked a few times. Fiona was trying to get that pile off of Roz, but it was easier to pull chewing gum out of a hairball.

At least, it was, until there was a sustained explosion sound that grew closer until a behemoth of metal descended from places unseen in the claustrophobic environs of even the 'friendly' portions of Cloud Probity. It was fully twelve feet tall, its body covered in gently sloping plates of clean and pale-grey metal, something like 'feathers' extending back from its shoulders, head, and spine which glowed faintly orange as they radiated heat. The machine landed and skidded along the ground, managing to shift and weave so that it didn't reduce Innocent to past, and so that when it was ready, it could launch immediately at the hostile Angels in Hell's occupied zone.

It clamped its massive, armored fist onto the wing-spurs of one of the Angels on Roz and heaved up. The Angel let out a shriek of pain, releasing his grasp so that the machine didn't tear his wings off, and had no recourse but to be hurled up and away, cratering into the wall of a Rat Tower four storeys up.

Now that Roz wasn't completely mobbed, she was able to shift her grasp and press her foe down into the muck. The machine didn't seem to grasp that she wasn't an enemy, though, as it then closed its massive, mechanical gauntlet over her face and heaved her up, leaving here kicking and prying to keep it from squashing her skull like a grape. The machine then turned to the last Angel, the one which was scooting away in the 'dirt', as there came a horrifying noise, and green light began to well at the shoulder-mounted aperture the Machine pointed in that Angel's direction.

There was a horrible hellfire noise, just a pulse of it, as Infernal Talc raced to slather the Angel. But the Angel, who wasn't a complete idiot, vanished before the Talc could reach him. The other up there in his crater, seeing he was alone, fled likewise. That left only the one grappled by Maelstrom.

"Not running away are we? You're a braver one than most of your ilk," man's voice, smooth and dangerous, said from the machine. Oh, this must have been that thing that Blitz was talking about, the 'Blasphemer's Daddy', that he wanted to own one of just for the prestige of owning one.

"She's on our side! Put her down!" Fiona shouted. The machine turned and with a hellish roar let out another stream of Talc-fire at her. And Fiona didn't dodge.

She held up her shield, and had the Talc crash against it… snuffing itself out entirely and falling, inert, to the ground at her feet. When the torrent stopped, she remained, utterly untouched. The armor suit stared at that, then turned to Roz, who was still firmly in his grasp, then turned even further to Angel Dust and Uller, who were moving to bind the still struggling Angel in Maelstrom's grasp.

"...Fuck it, you're all coming to Quarantine. We'll let the Governor sort this out," the pilot in that machine said.

Maelstrom looked to Angel Dust and his sister, at the crowd of Innocent who were now being shepherded out of this melee by the local Innocent. Angel Dust gave them all a thankful nod, and then was pulled into a building. Just like that, the mission was done. Maelstrom got to his feet, as the Angel was lashed up in Black Binds, and Uller finally staggered back and wiped a bit of blood from his face.

"Well… we made it back," the imp said.

"We did…" Maelstrom said.

There was a heavy pause between the two, as the machine shifted its grasp of Rozarin so it carried her like a keg instead of lofting her by her face.

"Want to come with me to Envy to get my dad out of slavery before we go home?" Uller asked.

"...Do you think it'll be that easy?" Maelstrom asked.

"The guy who owns my dad and brothers – and technically me – is a greedy fuck and if I offer him money he'll do it. Besides, I need to make good on the excuse I gave Krieg for vanishing for nearly three months," Uller said, then he leaned forward and blew hard out of his nose. A fine spray of black came out, and he was able to stop mouth-breathing.

"Sure," Maelstrom said. "But first we're eating some actual food."

---

"You know, I actually heard about the VPVD long before they became a household name. In fact, my 'uncle' got help from them when Heaven was still ostensibly still serving God. They were a bit of a scattershot crew, but they were pretty much what you could expect of what happens to good people when put in unfair situations. They were agitators for change, for better conditions, for equality between Innocent and Angel. After all, hadn't they succeeded in every moral test that had been given to them? Why then were they subjected to deprivation and want while the Angels lived in luxury and without scarcity? Even in their afterlives?

If you take a good man with a working conscience and put him in a bad system, you will get one of two results. You'll either end up with the 'good man' shedding any masks of goodness he had and revealing the evil man who was under them, or you'll end up with a good man going to war. And there were tens of billions of good humans – legitimately good humans – up there who had no masks to shed and nothing to lose if they began to march. The seeds of the Second Heresiarchy were planted three hundred years ago, and had plenty of time to set deep and firm roots. When the branches went up, they were too solid and well-fed to be pruned back.

Of course, for every hundred VPVD, you get one person who's willing to take just that one extra leap of faith, that one step further into extremity. In the old days, when Lucifer was still around, they were the Mors Mortem Dei. People looking for an end to an age of Godly Silence, by whatever means possible. Of course, there were subdivisions within the MMD. Some wanted to slap God until he woke the fuck up. Others wanted to just kill him, to topple his throne. The problem with extremists in any movement is that only their extremity unites them, and they often fall to squabbling and bickering over any minute difference in perceived orthodoxy. So it was with the MMD after the Second War For Heaven ground to a halt.

Most people, they never had to worry about the MMD. They had representation through the Vox Populi, Vox Dei, they had collective bargaining power, and more importantly, they had the Three Boxes of Liberty. The soap-box, to announce their requirements. The ballot box, to let the Angels know that this wasn't a few radicals speaking when the vast majority didn't care. And when that failed, they resorted to the last.

The ammunition-box."

– Sir Lyve Wyre Miller, PhD and Doctor of Philosophy