There was a tension in the air at the Hotel. Cain could feel it. As though some unspoken curse had slipped loose and now strangled the hopes and dreams of all who dwelt here, Cain included. And Cain wasn't a meek or retiring man, and only had such paranoia as was befitting a man of his precarious heights. He knew that it was human to see a pattern in randomness, to invent a threat where there were only leaves blown on the wind. But he felt that there was more than just pareidolia at work today.
Today, Cain felt dark fates settle around Charlie's ambitions.
He knew that, because he wasn't the only one who felt it.
"Tell me," Jun-Ho said, his posture hunched as though awaiting a blow. "Am I the only one who awoke this morning to the feel that somebody walked over my grave?"
"Considering where yer grave is, that could happen thousands of times a day," Husk refused to commiserate. He then shrugged, his wings tucked back. "Still, something bad's coming. I could tell you that much for free."
"So magnanimous of you. Surely you're but one good deed from ascent to Heaven," Jun-Ho said.
"Fuck you and fuck your warm sake," Husk snapped. Cain just walked away from the desk, and into the Hotel. Many of the 'guests' and clients of the hotel went about their business with blithe and blissful ignorance of the pall of dread that Cain felt. They were ignorant, and there was in ignorance at least fleeting bliss. In the company of such luminaries as Husk the old-soldier and Jun-Ho the royal-spymaster, he was in a state of true and inescapable awareness. Like the priests of the Mnemosynian Mysteries at the shores of now-lost Lethe, he was forced to know with utter clarity, and ignorance was denied of him.
Charlotte was just inside the lobby, talking to one of the elder clients, a Sinner who had attempted Atonement before, when that was an option still open to her, and now sought out its replacement with desperate vigor. She was a Gargoyle Demon, stone of skin and thick-winged. And she seemed to be losing her patience with the only Nephilim in Creation. Cain moved to interject betwixt the two of them.
"Charlotte, you seem rather tense. Have you been sleeping properly?" Cain asked in conversational tone, ignoring the warning that his nerves and wits were telling him. It was a frustrating ability, to be viscerally aware of such threat but consciously unable to elucidate it.
"You know I haven't," Charlie said. She turned to the Gargoyle. "I'm sorry, Marie, but I'm not going to give you military aid. This place isn't about getting revenge. It's about moving past the need of it."
"There can be no 'moving past' as long as Kirklan is still holding my friend in a leash made of contract-paper," Marie Gatineau said. She had been a rarity of early-Renaissance France; a female hired-killer. He never quite grasped why she ended up morphing into a Gargoyle when she clearly would have been a shoo-in for Iron Elemental. "And if you won't help me, I'll go out and do it myself."
"Please, reconsider. There are other ways to…" Charlie began.
"Other ways? What other ways? Kirklan is the kind of monster that Hell is too good for," Marie pointed out, her words as hard and unyielding as her skin. "By my edge, I will send him somewhere worse."
"Charlotte?" Cain asked.
"What?" she asked him, exasperation leaking into her voice.
"Perhaps it would be prudent to simply allow her," Cain said.
"Oh not you too," Charlie whined. She stared him in the eye, her own anger bubbling to the surface. "I am not going to just go out and stomp down all of the problems of Hell! This place is supposed to be better than that!"
"And it will be, once those dangerous and destructive personages are removed from the playing field," Cain said. He gave a nod. "Gravestone."
"Cain," the Gargoyle greeted him, acknowledging her nomme-de-guerre. She pointed at Cain. "You have no problem with him putting his affairs in order."
"I'm afraid your case and my own are not comparable," Cain said. "I live here. I am not in Princess Charlotte's program."
The ancient Sinner glared coldly at both of them, then without another word stormed toward the back of the Hotel. Charlie sighed. "I suppose there wasn't a better outcome for that argument, was there?" Charlie asked.
"Who can say?" Cain said. And since she immediately turned and left the doors of the hotel, Cain followed her, lacking anywhere else more pressing to be. "Your mood is more grim than usual. Is there something going on in the background that I'm left unaware of?"
"I just… I'm going to go shout at some Dealmakers. Maybe that'll make me feel better," Charlie said, obviously veering because she didn't feel comfortable revealing what truly bothered her.
"Would you allow a companion?" Cain asked.
"Oh, of course," she said. She had Razzle and Dazzle zip out of the Hotel and quickly bring the debateably living limousine around so that the pair of them could climb into its comfortable rear compartment. She looked very, very down. Silence reigned for a time in the back as they drove toward North Central, and this week's meeting of the Dealmaker's Conference. Finally, she looked up with those sad red eyes at him. "Am I just being stupid?"
"About what?" Cain asked.
"About wanting to get people into Heaven. Even Wendy says it's bad up there. Real bad," the princess said, her voice wavering. Cain sighed, and laid a hand over hers, hoping that some warmth would remove the chill in her soul.
"If you were merely offering a transit from Pride Ring to another Ring of Hell, I would still say without equivocation that you are doing the proper thing. The correct and morally right thing," Cain nodded. She tilted her head at him. "Humans, as I'm sure you're aware, do not fare well in captivity. Stagnation is a poison which erodes the soul. It makes bigots of homebodies. It makes monsters out of bullies. And it makes conservatives out of people with working brains. There is a reason that humans tell myriad stories of escape from imprisonment, why there are myths of escaping an unjust afterlife from many cultures."
"Really?" she asked.
"Yes indeed. I remember speaking to Sisyphus on the matter," Cain said. "It was, oh, around fifteen hundred years ago. He considered Hell a respite only briefly from pushing his rock 'ere your father destroyed the underworld that he was forced to push it up. He thought that not having a task would allow him to relax, to enjoy. But in the end it broke him. The stillness cut his brain the way that a lash would cut his skin. And one day, he picked a fight against the wrong Sinner, and that was done of him."
"Who's Sisyphus?" Charlie asked.
Cain could only laugh. "Ah, I sometimes forget how divorced you are from the histories of human beings, considering that your mother was here longer than all of them and your father considers them beneath notice. He was a man fated to endless, pointless toil for the sin of tricking Death. One of the few tasks your father did that actually cooperated with anybody else. Of course he betrayed Hades in the end, regardless. Sisyphus was one of few mortals could actually pull one over on the Horseman. And my point in invoking him was this: Sinners need to move, or they die. They are rather like sharks in that regard. They either move toward heedless excess, as Angel Dust once did, toward their own destruction, as many now do even without realizing it, or towards something better that they cannot even see, and don't in their heart of hearts actually believe exists," he clasped her hand as though binding an oath. "And as long as you continue to provide that impossible dream for them to pursue, you are diverting them from the worst outcomes Hell has to offer. I have seen countless many make demons of themselves, or march heedless toward their own destruction."
He leaned back, puffing out a breath. He tilted his head toward the far distance, in the vague direction that the Gates of Purgatory once had stood. "And I have seen billions of fetid, foul and wretched creatures pick up the broken, pulverized shards of their lives, walk the Path of Atonement, and be granted freedom from the imprisonment of Hell. It is a modern day thing, a sadness of the now, that the Sinner's third and best option was denied to them through no fault of their own," Cain said. "So do I think that you are 'being dumb' about releasing these Sinners from their own worst impulses and self-destructive habits, of healing their broken minds and cracked souls, of giving them safety in a Hell which is very determined to strip that away from them?"
"I get it, I get it. You've made your point," Charlie said, having lost her most despondent look as Cain rambled on. "It still feels… wrong, though. Like they should get an actual reward for all the work they put in, instead of just being shuffled off to a place which is almost as bad as this."
"Oh, I don't think you need to worry about that. Wendy seemed rewarded aplenty," Cain said with a laugh. Charlie furrowed her brow.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean it was obvious that she is now a Power of her own right. If that is the reward of Redemption, I would gladly have it even if it meant now being relegated to a collapsing Heaven."
"Wendy was just Wendy. She did have an extra eye, but that was probably because when she was a Sinner she was a cyclops," Charlie said. Cain blinked at the woman, but didn't question it. Maybe she saw something fundamentally different than Cain had. Cain's perceptions were more rarified than most, after all. He also didn't bring up how that made no sense of its own right. He'd just spent an entire speech perking Charlie up. There was no point in bringing her back down again so soon.
The limousine was navigated through the snarls of Pentagram City traffic, never being brought to a halt, because both the traffic lights and the flow of traffic itself was enforced to give her preferential treatment here in the Capital of Hell. What would have been a miserable hour long slog through gridlock and morning rush-hour, instead passed in ten minutes at a leisurely if metered pace.
Cain opened the door first, as no matter his titles, he was not the equal of the First Daughter of Hell. The venue was the Elagabalan Tesseract, an old structure which rose up from the concrete and metal of the city surrounding it as an utter impossibility, a fever dream given form. It was a physical building that, because it was located directly in one of the 'folds' that allowed Pentagram City to multiply its effective land utilization without expanding its footprint, was technically four dimensional. To navigate it you either had to be especially good at higher-dimensional mathematics (a subject matter that Cain sadly only dabbled in), obey the magical tethers which render most of the structure inaccessible, or else simply have spent so much time wandering it that one memorized its physically impossible floorplan.
Cain had memorized its floorplan.
Approaching the 'building' was itself a test of wisdom, magic, or stubbornness, because even finding an entrance to the damned thing was a trial worthy of myth. There were some times of the day, on some days of the year, where there were no entrances at all. A fire had broken out inside the structure on one of those days, about five hundred years ago. Everybody within suffocated as the fire stole the air before the building opened to allow anybody out, or more telling, allow air in. Whoever this 'Elagabalus' was who inspired this thing, he would have to be at least half as mad as the architect who put it up more than 1,400 years ago. If he was a human, then Cain considered it a sin against history that Cain had never met him.
"Ugh. Why do they keep using this place?" Charlie asked as the two of them rounded the Phallus Profunda that stood as a fairly reliable indicator of where a door could be found… most of the time. And though by far the largest specimen involved in the construction of this multidimensional madhouse, it was far from the only one. But the venue was useful for other reasons than its penile fascination and incomprehensible layout; it was also one of the most magically potent parts of the City that wasn't under Lucifer's direct control.
Inside was every bit as mind-bending as the descriptions implied. There were people walking up and down particular walls, the ceiling held a decorative water-feature whose flows never reached the floor, and the pathways were replete with puffed-chest, smug smiling Dealmakers, who were out in the halls exchanging deals amongst themselves. The Litigators amongst them did it to mitigate risk, to pawn off their more tentative Deals in exchange for ones perhaps less fruitful, but more certain to be delivered upon. Others exchanged trying to create monopoly, or monopsony. Others still did it to fuck over another Dealmaker in particular. Cain, who made and kept only Deals with regards to himself and no other, saw it as pointless jockeying. He was not in the business of owning souls, and hadn't been for some millennia, now.
"Well, there's a face I didn't think I'd see right now," Charlie muttered. And true to her tone, rounding a corner and stepping off of a ninety-degree wall and onto the floor, came Alastor, with a small cloud of other Dealmakers crowding around him making demands. The Radio Demon grinned and strutted through their scrum as though they weren't even there. One of them tried to get out in front of him, only for the Radio Demon to first step on the Dealmaker's foot, and when he tried to block him more directly, to chest-kick the fool's onto the floor and then step first onto his groin and then onto his face to bypass him. The other Dealmakers, seeing that this was not the kind of usual easy-meat that they could browbeat or bully into submission, became more cautious afterwards.
Charlie, though, ignored him. She plunged through the crowds, navigating not most efficiently, but well enough, as though she were navigating by a means neither mathematical nor rote, but still managing to find a faster way to one of the conference halls than just following the lines on the floor. The conference room was being blocked by a pair of Outsiders, strange buggish fish things that made Cain's skin itch just being near them. One of them let out a gurgle, extending an arm to prevent entry, but Charlie simply punched the wall she was walking past. The impact sent a shudder through the building, a crack running all the way from the floor to the ceiling and reaching nearly to where the Outsider was standing. The Outsider might have been an alien being with an alien brain and alien psychology, but it obviously had a healthy understanding of the very animal concept of fear.
They let the two of them pass.
Within were the old-guard. The most established Dealmakers of Hell, those who were so insulated by their success that they could trade for anything. Wealth? Simplicity itself. Power? Certainly. Immortality? Through the prudent and calculated fucking-over of the Concubi, even something like that was within their reach.
"I'm looking to buy a Deal," Charlie announced.
"Pity, I'm not much interested in selling," a Devourer who had been near the top of Hell's Dealmaking Heirarchy for more than five times his natural lifespan said. "You're going to have offer something of worth for me to even hear it."
"You know who I am," Charlie said, her hair parting and her horns beginning to show through golden locks.
"And you know the influence we deal in," Kraz said, grinning with his freakishly wide mouth, and its many, diamond-hard teeth. Devourers were not an aesthetically pleasing race by any metric. But they were cunning, terrifyingly strong, and ridiculously hard to kill. No small wonder that the most ancient armies of Hell were replete with Devourer warriors. "Nobody is immune to it. Even your overpowering father would have to buy from us. He knows how… petty… our kind can be."
Charlie glared at Kraz, then to the seat next to him, which was empty. Kraz was not yet sitting in 'the big chair', which was given only to the commonly-accepted greatest living Dealmaker, but that was only because apparently the Goat of the Apocalypse had only been killed late last year, and consensus had not yet been reached that Kraz was truly the next best thing. It wounded Cain that the Goat died before Cain could see him again. He had helped the Goat kill the name, Collin, that he had arrived into Hell with back in the 17th century. And considering he was now held as one of the lynch-pins of the Demiurge's rampage, Cain took at least some solace in that the Goat's grand scheme managed to go off with only minor hitches, death being included in them.
"You're not getting 'a concession' out of me. Because I know the price you'd ask," Charlie began.
"So you have nothing that interests me. With all respect due to your station and your paternity, go away," Kraz said with a flippantly dismissive gesture, then turned to one of the other High Dealmakers beside him. "I know, she's such a buzzkill. I don't know why anybody puts up with her."
Charlie's eye twitched, and her black lips pulled into a snarl, the seams of her clothing beginning to pop as she seemed to start to swell to a greater and more muscular stature. "You will not dismiss me like a fucking com–"
But whatever complaint she was going to hurl at the Dealmakers was cut off when the entire building shook again, grains of dust falling down from the ceiling. There was a moment of stillness and silence from all involved, including Cain, wondering what the hell just happened. But then the lights went out, plunging the chamber into utter blackness. There was an alarmed shout, before another Dealmaker ignited fire above his hand and at least gave the chamber some small amount of light.
"What just happened?" Cain asked.
Then, alarms out in the world finally announced, matching the alarms that had been firing all morning in Cain's mind. He felt a sort of very-petty vindication at that, at finally being proven right.
There was another dreadful shudder, and the alarms grew louder. Before long words were added to the noisy klaxons. Remain indoors. Remain indoors. Remain indoors.
Cain knew that such a thing as that would only be announced on Purge Day.
The Exorcists were attacking the venue.
Little did Cain nor Charlie know, the Tesseract was only the outskirts of it all. That of the sixteen thousand Exorcists still operational in Heaven, fully ten thousand of them had been dumped, pilot-less, into Pride Ring's capital city to cause mayhem, while the armies of the Angelic Host began to invade the rest of Hell.
Chapter 38
Metronome 1
If the Angels thought they were just going to tear up Lucifer's domain without resistance, he was going to prove them sorely fucking wrong. He'd spoken to Gadreel when that Goetia child that he'd sent up to Heaven brought her back, and the Grigori had given dire warnings. It pleased Lucifer's heart that more of the Grigori were finally seeing reason, after a lifetime of miseries inflicted by an uncaring Father; first those of his followers, then Penemue, and now Gadreel saw the light and turned their backs on a system which betrayed them.
And Lucifer welcomed all traitors against Heaven.
He had gotten word from his commanders up in Heaven that the skirmishes at the edges of the Occupied Zone continued unabated. A more witless Angel than Lucifer would have taken this to be a contradiction of Gadreel's account, but he knew that if he were going to suddenly open a new front against a bitter enemy, he'd have to make that enemy think that he was dedicating his forces into an obvious attack. A target-fixated fool was all the easier to stab in the back.
Still, Lucifer kept Gadreel always a far enough distance apart that she couldn't get uppity and attempt to stab him, even as she showed him where the armies were going to land. And with that information, Lucifer immediately ordered Satan to mine the ever living fuck out of it. Either she was going to waste minefield money on a random piece of Greed before Lucifer murdered her for lying to him, or the forces of Heaven were going to find themselves heading Heavenward against their own desires, and in several pieces besides.
The armies of Hell were broad, and Satan had brought forth that which he could summon in an hour, a vast column of Wrathian Hellspawn and imps who even now were trying to set the mines in the ever closing window that Gadreel's advice supposedly gave them.
Then, Lucifer felt it.
A shifting in the air. As though all that was Lucifer's was being forceably displaced so that something undeserving could take its place. A smile, cold and cruel, came to Lucifer's face, and he raised a hand to the clicking of his armor gliding its joints past each other. The workers continued. They would continue until it was too late for them. Fuck 'em. There were always more Hellspawn to replace them.
There, the fluttering of wings. An angel appeared in Hell. And Lucifer laughed. The Angel, decked from toe to crown in plate armor, didn't grace Lucifer with the moment of alarm that he got to feel, realizing that his attack had been sold out, and that he was about to die. There was a click, lost to distance, as his foot slid back. Then a blast, one that shredded the Angel and the bunch of imps that didn't even have time to realize that the first Angel had arrived.
A moment or so later, another flutter, another Angel invading his kingdom. Another blast, as they Transited onto an already armed landmine, and another dying or wounded Angel. Then the transits became faster. Three a second. Five. Then with a great whoosh, the body of the force appeared, so broad that it stretched beyond the extents of the minefield which was their 'welcome mat' into Hell. The Hellspawn, who had realized that remaining in the field was begging for death, had already started sprinting away. The sheer mass of the entire minefield detonating as one ripped those cowards apart regardless of what a few seconds of flight had bought them.
"Run them down!" Lucifer began to shout, but even as the shredded Angels vanished from view, not even leaving their carcasses, there was another whoosh, and this time, the force that took the place of the wounded was pristine, unbloodied and unbroken. They marched forward to shrill flutes and pounding drums, and as soon as their back rank cleared where their front rank had started, there was another Whoosh, and another five hundred Angels appeared.
"My King?" Asmodeus asked, his panoply dented and battered from his last run-in with the assassins of Heaven. He'd repaired it well enough, but it would likely bear the scars of Heaven's best and only shot at killing the lustful Fallen for many years to come.
"Drive these pretentious fucks to the Edge of Purgatory!" Lucifer demanded, and in his hand erupted a sword of oily golden flame, that let out lashes of thick smoke that nevertheless dissipated within feet of leaving the blade. Asmodeus, towering over Lucifer and the gathered Hellspawn of the First Legion of the Damned, swung forward the standard of Lucifer, the Star Of The Morning, and gave a cataclysmic shout.
And then the armies surged forward. Hellspawn furious and eager, rushing to reach places that their weaponry could tear apart the armor of the Angels. The Sixty-Sixth followed quietly behind them, not nearly so hasty, but they didn't have nearly a fraction of the land to cover; they were mounting machine-guns, anti-materiel rifles, rocket launchers, and howitzers.
The armies of Heaven were not eager, not hasty. They moved with deliberation. While Lucifer would love to say that they 'were cowards, flinching at the thought of an advance'. Even Lucifer's arrogance had a horizon, and he wasn't nearly stupid enough to think that his enemy on the far side of this war was an utter fool. They were moving forward slowly so that they could maintain cohesion. And if he was not entirely mistaken, the middle of those Angelic ranks held less-armored Angels of the Secondborn, those not wielding their burning weapons. Mages. The entire advance was providing a hard skin around a soft, magical center.
And when the first howitzer from Lucifer's army lofted into the air, it burst not in the midst of Secondborn and Firstborn interlopers; it bloomed explosive against a shell that hung in the air above the Angels' heads.
"Michael, I see your hand in this," Lucifer said, staying back with the Knights of Hell which served as his honor guard, while Asmodeus directed the vanguard. "But what can you do with… oh. Oh now that's a bastard's move, right there."
The forces of this invasion force were arriving five hundred at a time, five ranks of a hundred Angels wide, now stomping through lands denuded of landmines by simple law-of-large-numbers. It would take hours for the purported millions to storm Hell at this rate.
"We're getting hit in several places," Lucifer said. He snapped his fingers and pointed at one of his knights. "Send a runner to Mammon. Tell him that there will be company coming for him soon."
"Yes, my liege," the Knight said, and then thundered away with his Hell Horse tearing up the ground in his haste. Lucifer, though, flicked some magic to one side, and opened a panel lined in surging flames.
"Satan, where the fuck are they coming through into my kingdom?" Lucifer demanded of the lesser king now displayed before him.
"A simpler question to answer would be 'where do they not'," Satan said, eyes narrowed as though looking through and past Lucifer. "I have heard through mine forces that a host hath appeared in Wrath Proper. Most of the sons and daughters of Wrath are under thine banner. They have caught me open."
"Then you'd better fucking close it," Lucifer warned. If there were already Angels in Wrath, then Gadreel's information, though accurate, had been incomplete. And he didn't even have the luxury of blaming her for lying to him about it; it was very likely that she simply didn't know about this aspect of Heaven's plan. Leave it to Michael to mislead his warriors so.
He felt a moment of worry, and then checked his Hellphone. There was a message from the Palace's automated systems. Notably, one of the panic rooms had closed, with Lilith inside of it.
"Fucker in a pair of shoddy sandals. He's hitting Pride, too," Lucifer snarled. He let his body unravel and reformed it once more at Asmodeus' side. "Grind them into gristle. I have another fucking thing that I need to take care of."
"Of course, your grace," Asmodeus said. Lucifer then outright released his form, not caring how it boiled down into vile ichor and foetor, casting his true self across the barriers between the Rings and back into his Capital. He appeared, oozing out of the sky, above his city, and with his brilliant eyes could pick out in an instant the forms of Exorcists in the hundreds rampaging in whatever direction he cared to turn. This was fucking unacceptable!
He streaked down, slamming fists first into one of the Angel's reaping machines. The thing tried to recover, to invert its joints so that his place at its back would be negated and launch an attack at him, but Lucifer wasn't about to let that happen. He manifested his blazing sword and slammed it through the 'belly' of the machine, before tearing up and at an angle, carving the machine so that there was a narrow 'V' of ruin running through its entire body. It quickly caught fire and burned away, while another Exorcist tried to stab him in the eye. He was quick enough to easily capture the spear-head between two armored fingers, and then with a massive downward blow, cleave this intruder in twain, one half of the body blazing and melting away.
Lucifer was about to drop his current body and move to the next bunch of fucking tinmen who were making a mess of his beautiful city, only to be stopped when a fist smashed into his face.
Of course, that ordinarily would have been a laughable event, but this time, unlike (almost) every other time he was beset by pugilism, it was Lucifer that was launched back. He felt his body slam through a wall, bricks shattering and dislodging in his flight until finally he slowed enough that the next wall merely bowed back by his spine's introduction to it, as opposed to outright crumbling. He pushed himself out of the crater and bent his neck to one side, feeling the satisfying crunches of his bones now loosened into fighting-fit. And when he looked through the hole that head been blasted using his body as the cannon, he saw the second-highest name on his personal shit-list.
"Gabriel, hasn't it ever been a long time?" Lucifer said with his arms spread wide in a showman's pose, advertising clearly that however much Gabriel had put into that punch, it had clearly availed him nothing. "What? Do you have nothing to say? Or is it that it's hard to talk with Father's cock in your mouth?"
"Big talk coming from the little man," Gabriel taunted, looming over Lucifer with his greater height, as though that served any function other than the edification of his own ego. Lucifer's more refined personage didn't need such petty physicalities to let his supremacy be made clear. "I'm going to enjoy breaking all that you hold dear. First your mud-hut kingdom. Then your whore wife. Then, when I find anything that you actually care about, I'll destroy that in front of you as well, just so you can know how badly you've fucked up."
"I hear a very big unspoken 'if' in the beginning of that sentence, muscle-head," Lucifer said, and ignited his blazing sword anew. "I will give you nothing. Exactly what one such as you deserves."
"I'm going to feed you your own tongue," Gabriel promised.
"Keep talking like that and I'd think you were making a pass at me," Lucifer chided, and raised his blazing sword. Gabriel, despite having one, didn't bother, merely clenching his fists. Today was turning out to be an interesting one.
The blasts of buildings being bombarded and the everpresent rumble of structures collapsing was a din of absolute chaos. It assailed Rachel as she tried to duck under flying debris from where a section of a building, several blocks away, had had an Exorcist smash into it and began to swing a gargantuan hammer with wild abandon. She'd already been pelted by broken brick and crushed concrete just getting this far away from the perimeter of Charlie's newly militarized zone that was centered on the Hotel. The only thing she was good for on the street was dying, and having done that once already since coming to Hell she wasn't in a hurry to repeat that event.
She had imagined that the soldiers would be laying down lacing suppressing fire on the distant Exorcists, to try to drive them away. Instead the soldiers merely held their posts and waited, guns trained on the angel machine but remaining mute. "Scailes! Why are you outside of the Secure Zone?" Obie Roth said, essentially grabbing her and pulling her a bit faster than her stride could match through the soldiers who were sweating as the sword of Damocles wavered over their collective heads. However well armored and well armed the soldiers of Charlie's half-formed Legion of the Damned were, all knew that they weren't equal to the threat of an Exorcist.
Angels could fatigue, be beaten down, become distracted. Machines would simply kill until they were told to stop. And with such a surge, Rachel doubted such a call would come.
"I'm trying to! I'm not gifted with legs that reach from here to Heaven!" Rachel snapped back at him. It was perhaps a bit terse, because he was trying to save her life, but those soldiers weren't the only ones in a state of alarm and fear. Dying hurt. That she could come back from it didn't change that fundamental fact.
Roth didn't offer her any more back-chat. He simply pulled her along, practically dragging at times, past the second line, and then the third, which ended two blocks out from the Hotel. There were fewer soldiers by far here, and those that were here were moving the Hester AFVs to a position where they could open fire on something should something that approach. She saw Addam bent over the open hood of a final vehicle, his hands practically a-blur with movement trying to do something to it, but she didn't understand the nuances of military-automotive repair, and didn't have time or inclination to ask.
"Incoming!" a call came from somewhere behind Rachel, and when Roth looked back, his eyes went wide. He outright lifted Rachel and hurled the two of them aside, as a car crushed into a torso-sized sphere streaked down from the sky and slammed into the road, before bouncing and crashing into the side of the Hester that Addam was working on. The vehicle spun on its front axle, the force hurling Addam away and having him crack his head on the pavement. He lay there for a moment, a wince on his face, and then stood as Rachel and Roth got to their feet. There was a smear of blood on the pavement when he rose.
"Scailes, get inside. Addam! You're not front-line! You get inside too!" Roth said and then shouted.
"I can get this one working," Addam said, stubbornly returning to the Hester.
"I'm giving you an order!" Roth bellowed.
"I'm not in your military!" Addam shouted back.
Rachel ignored the two of them, which was alright because Roth apparently gave up that fight at around that point, and she started to run as quickly as she could sustain past the walls of other buildings that hemmed in the Hotel. It didn't remove the venue from vision. It still towered over its surroundings, the neon sign at the top flickering gamely that the Hazbin Hotel was even now open for business.
This was worse than the day of the Purge Unending's beginning. There had only been three thousand, once the accounting was done, that had been released during that fight. Now it seemed there were a lot more of them. Finally, Rachel rounded a corner and the entrance to the Hotel was before her, with soldiers already at its sand-bag wall. She couldn't see within, but that was what walls were good for. She just kept running. Then she saw several of the heaviest soldiers, those wearing that sci-fi armor that was rapidly gaining popularity, rise up to his full and augmented height, and point a similarly massive rifle at her.
Rachel was not a fool. She didn't think for a second that her employer's soldiers would in this moment randomly decide to fire at her for no reason. And a flicked glance over her shoulder revealed that she was right. Arresting itself at street level, its face glowing with a maniacal grin, was an Exorcist with something like a shining grey pick-hammer in its hand. A more panicked person would hit the dirt, so that the soldiers could fire over her. That course would lead to Rachel stop moving, which would be foolishness of the highest order. She opted to dart toward the nearest building, running now parallel to it, and opening the street and sidewalk for clear lines of fire.
And the soldiers needed little prompting. With thunderous booms, the soldiers unloaded on the automata which infiltrated to the heart of their line with ease. It held its one wing out before it, a barrier shielding the head and chest of the device as it stomped with imperious purpose toward the Hotel, having essentially disregarded her (rightly) as a threat. One of the heavily armored ones shouldered past the firing line, holding up a weapon that ended not in a gunbarrel or a wide, naked bore, but instead a flap-panel. The flap flew open, and a missile shot out from the armor.
The Exorcist fucking caught the rocket, grabbing it just behind its warhead with one synthetic arm. The face and the grin displayed on it didn't alter a hair as it flicked that arm away, and the still-burning rocket arced in a course that actually sent it streaking into the building dangerously close to Rachel's back.
The detonation of the missile mostly blew into the building, but there was enough shockwave that it caught and ripped her from her feet, sending her tumbling along the sidewalk. She gave her head a shake and then pushed herself first to a crawl, and then back to a run. The Hotel was so goddamned close. Rachel recoiled inwardly (because she didn't have time to recoil outwardly) that the Exorcist had overtaken her and was now closer to the entrance than she was. Suddenly great flares of white-hot flame were racing upward or sideways, melting the walls where they hit, hitting and deflecting off to some degree the chest-plate of the Exorcist. And the Angel Satin of its war uniform was only slightly singed in crazed lines describing where the heart of the armor's attempt at burning it down had swept in their attempt to kill the thing.
With an aborted dial-up modem noise, the Exorcist launched itself at the sandbag wall and the soldiers behind it, while Rachel staggered to a halt. What point was there running toward the entrance if there was an Exorcist waiting? The hitherto unseen lesser-armored soldiers were struck with head-coring strikes with the pick-hammer, or else simply punched with a Purgator which sent them rocketing back, body broken first by the blow and then again by the impact of their body against the far sandbag-wall. Those without armor stood no chance at all.
Once they were gone, the Exorcist finally turned its attention to the heavily armored supersoldiers. One of them pressed its autocannon barrel through the wings of the Exorcist and right up against the body, and let out a burst of fire. Though it caused the Exorcist to hitch and turn, it didn't stop it. And then the Exorcist swung that pick-hammer at the one who had 'offended' it. The pick-hammer shattered into the heavy plating of the soldier, who stumbled and staggered to the side, not quite falling down. The Exorcist then with a flick did likewise to the next supersoldier, burying the pick its entire length into the soldier's chest-plate. But the first soldier, who wasn't quite dead, lurched up and grabbed the wing which was with contemptuous ease keeping the other Supersoldiers off balance and unable to aim, dragging it to a halt, and then pressing that autocannon barrel directly to the side of the Exorcist's head.
The Exorcist didn't give the soldier a chance to fire. With its open hand it grabbed the barrel and with a tense of its fist pinched the weapon closed. The burst that followed tore the weapon apart and blew shrapnel into those nearby. As all of them still remaining were suitably armored, none of them seemed to care. The Exorcist tore the pick-hammer out of the chest of its current victim, who fell to his hands and knees, and in a lightning-strike crushed in the headplate of the first soldier entirely, a spray of violet blood spraying the front entrance of the Hotel as the armor crumbled, its controls finally gone slack.
The others, seeing one of their own fallen, redoubled their violence. Two of them abandoned trying to get shots at the Exorcist, and simply hug-tackled those troublesome wings, pulling them out and back. The Exorcist tried inverting its joints, but the instant its head rotated back, the fallen-but-not-dead soldier launched a missile at ridiculously close range, so that it caught the Exorcist right at the base of its horns. The explosion blew one of the horns off completely, causing the burning halo to flicker for a moment, while another pair of supersoldiers finally kicked their way through the doors from inside the hotel, bringing their number up to six (excluding the dead one).
They mobbed it, trying to restrain its arm. The Exorcist with its half-broken head struck down mercilessly in a double strike, throwing the first grappler in an arc toward Rachel; the soldier stopped grinding on the roadway about three meters from her. Then, two pick-hammer blows first shattered the armor of the reeling soldier on the ground, exposing the vital machinery of the armor's spine. The second blow plunged the pick into the machinery, and then tore, causing a great rent and spray of scarlet blood. The others finally had enough, three of them simply body-blocking the pick-arm so that it couldn't even swing effectively. That still left its empty hand, which drove brutal punches into the armor, its fingers grabbing plates and ripping, sometimes managing to outright tear armor free of its mooring.
But the tide had turned against it. And since it was no longer focusing its destructive efforts, the five supersoldiers still standing finally managed to pull the pick-hammer from the Exorcist's grasp and then repeatedly bash and smash the hindered machine until its head staved in entirely. It kept fighting, but now blinded it was mostly just flailing. The beating continued until finally the hammer hit something important, and the machine began to catch fire and melt. Rachel started running again for the doors.
"Scailes!" A soldier with a wide-open hole in his armor's chest said. "Get inside! We'll hold this entrance!"
Rachel didn't bother answering him, but she felt herself being hoisted from the ground, landing in a pile near the doors. A glance behind her showed another automata, but this one was far stranger. It looked ancient, its face not digital screen but instead an impassive (and heavily cracked) ceramic mask. Its every movement was announced by loud ticking noises. Rachel scrambled then bolted through the doors, while the soldiers without another word offered rushed to intercept the reaper of Heaven.
Finally inside, she saw Husk with his back to the rear wall at the bar, the whole structure folded away and the autocannon he'd had installed inside it revealed again to the Hotel. Flanking that gun were two more of the heavily armored supersoldiers, then a whole line of other soldiers manning sand-bag 'foxholes' built around the structural pillars flanking the lobby. Jun-Ho was also at the back of the room, just off-set from the doors which led deeper into the hotel. Where Husk was manning a significant-caliber autocannon, Jun-Ho seemed to have opted for the Military Laser Weapon, mounted up on its tripod with a set of robust cables diving back through the doors and sneaking into a nearby room where its batteries and capacitors would be secreted so nobody could 'get lucky' with an attack and blow them up.
"Rach! What the fuck is happening out there?" Husk shouted from the far end of the room. She was still running, though, because her legs were short and so was she. She hadn't gotten a chance to answer him, making it only half way through the lobby when there was a building-shaking crash, and one of the armored supersoldiers was sent crashing through the wall, creating a new portal to the outside world outside of the doorways. The strange, ticking Exorcist was weathering the onslaught of all of the soldiers outside. It didn't intercept bullets the way most Exorcists did, nor shield itself with its wings. It simply face-tanked every blow, uncaring. And though slower to deal out its blows, when those blows came, they were every bit as spine-shatteringly powerful as any other's. "TYPE ONE!" Husk roared.
Upon having a new entry opened into the hotel, the old machine's face locked on the soldiers within, and it began to stomp forward, through the hole it made and ignoring the supersoldiers around it. It seemed that it could afford to; none of their weapons did squat to it. As soon as it was free of the soldiers, both Husk and Jun-Ho opened fire. The shells from Husk burst on its skin, not even slowing it down. The invisible beam of ruinous heat from Jun-Ho caused a portion of the mask to explode, and some of the metal there to melt, but still the machine kept coming. This time, Rachel did throw herself to the floor, so that the incoming fire would miss her; she didn't have much further she needed to go, and there was plentiful cover for her if she was scooting.
She didn't pay attention to the sounds of ticking and rampage, or the sounds of the others from outside now attacking its undefended rear. It didn't seem to care. Once during Rachel's crawling-flight, she felt a searing and terrible pain bake her left arm and left side of her head, and smelled burnt hair. Her arm instantly started to throb, and her sweater's sleeve was on fire. A deflected shot had winged her. She counted her scant blessings that it hadn't winged her worse.
Rachel was pulled to her feet by one of the other soldiers of this place, who put himself between she and the Angel Machine. They were all firing now, a lightshow of things hitting the measured and slowly advancing Exorcist without slowing it a flinch or causing anything more than superficial damage. What the sweet hell was this thing made of? And why weren't more of them like this? Rachel was unaware of how Type Ones, the very first Exorcists ever made, were made to a very, very different template, being heavy, slow, essentially indestructible, but with a pitiful amount of stamina. And she didn't get a chance to learn this before the Type One spotted the soldier standing in front of Rachel, and pulled from its armored hip a mallet with a massive, shining grey head, which a flick of its hand hurled toward that man. The hammer flew like a bullet, trailing behind it a pristine white cord, and struck the soldier so hard that Rachel could hear his chest-cavity being rendered concave, body armor or not. And because of Newton's Laws of Motion, that significant left-over velocity had to go somewhere.
That somewhere was directly into Rachel.
The already dying soldier slammed into Rachel, and the two of them impacted the pillar behind them. Rachel barely had the presence of mind to realize that she'd ought to have dodged before the back of her head smashed into the pillar and consciousness fled her entirely.
It was the pinnacle of folly to ignore safety warnings which were offered in a place like Hell. Hell had little care for the notion of personal wellbeing. So if Hell decided that something was bad enough that it required prudence and care, then you fucking well paid attention to it. And when Hell sternly declared that you had ought to remain indoors, only idiots went outside.
Cain didn't like to count himself as an idiot, but at the same time, his pride wouldn't forgive him if he simply allowed Charlie to brave the streets on her own. She was a good host to him, a kind heart in a place where such things were rare. To abandon such a thing to the vagaries Heaven's cruel ambition (such a strange notion to hold, that) was anathema to him.
And if Cain had thought that the streets of Pentagram City were a madhouse during the opening of the Purge Unending, then he was getting an education in how mad this house could truly get.
"I suppose this was to be expected," Cain said to Charlie at the valet's lot. They, two, were essentially alone in willingly being out here. Charlie had asked, then demanded assistance for the Hotel, and was roundly laughed out of the room, her position toothless when arrayed against an infrastructure many, many times older than Lucifer's reign of Hell. She even made a point-blank demand for Alastor to go back and protect the Hotel, and he snubbed her. So Cain, being as he was a man of at least some pride and gentlemanliness, made sure that if nothing else whatever peril she faced outside of the Tesseract, she would not be facing it alone.
It seemed that the lot, being a relatively flat place with only occasional blockages, was chosen as an ideal place to land a bunch of Exorcists. They had wrecked, crushed, or outright hurled those cars present out into the streets at targets. And the faint pink limousine which had conveyed them here was now parked at an odd angle. The odd angle was because at the middle of its spine it was bent downward to roughly 45 degrees, its front end lifted up and off of the ground
Razzle was sitting, stunned and bleeding, next to the off-the-ground engine compartment, while Dazzle was trying to help the limousine 'heal' faster. Charlie turned a look to him.
"You're not going to like what I say next," Cain said, feeling the magical snarl of the area. "If I try teleporting us, I'll likely end up embedding us in a wall or the street-surface. The Fold is tight today. Heaven chose its day well."
"Then we start to run," Charlie said, and began to jog in the most direct path toward the Hotel, which was a counter-intuitive thing, given the way Pentagram City was. And Cain kept pace with her. Both because each was well served in staying next to the other, and because Cain's pride wouldn't forgive him if the provider of his roof and luxuries was made low by his lack of effort.
They barely got two blocks before there was another Exorcist, a newer model by the look of it, which was excavating the thoracic cavity of one of Hell's more infamous feuding Overlords. And from the Demon Bone Ash that was laying about amidst the gore, it was clear to Cain that this time, there would be no getting up for Furious George Stirling, nor for any of his cadre who had the misfortune of attending him this day.
The automata snapped its head toward Charlie and Cain, face blinking off for an instant before returning in its cruel and grinning visage. It pulled from the carcass of one of Stirling's minions a particular fore-canted blade that hadn't seen popular use in about 3,000 years. The Khopesh was a rare sight, and doubly so to see one made of Angel Steel. Come to think of it, that blade was oddly dull in color, as though it used the Alloy Primus, the first formulation of Angel Steel which fell out of favor when the current method of making the metal was discovered not long after Cain's damnation. That blade was likely a thousand times older than the machine wielding it.
By the purified wounds it left, it would still kill him if he was cut by it, though.
So Cain didn't let the Exorcist strike him with it. He spake words of cthonic power and flared his hand in a sorceror's gesture, and the very instant the Exorcist began to launch itself at the two of them, the very direction it was going stopped making coherent sense; instead of rocketing toward the two, it took what to an outside observer was a sharp right-hand turn and plowed directly through the wall of a building nearby. Cain would have kept the Curse of Moses, who had been doomed to wander forty years in a 20 square kilometer area, going longer if he had the option. Since he felt the automata's Weirding Engine engage and snap the curse, he knew he should count himself lucky it worked as well as it did.
Charlie noticed the Exorcist, but didn't even offer a word of acknowledgment. Since it wasn't in their way, they didn't interact with it beyond making it go away. They'd be well passed it before it pulled itself out and came after them. Hopefully.
"I can't believe this," Charlie muttered, her usual tones fled before a deep-seated anger. "The minute – the INSTANT! – I step away from the Hotel to try to help people this kind of BULLSHIT happens!"
Cain nodded, not offering a word to her. It was clear that she didn't want his input. She wanted another person to agree with her. And though he knew that this calamity had not been waiting on her schedule, but upon the day of The Fold's inherent tightness, he didn't say so. If there was one lesson he'd learned not just from matrimony with his two wives, but from his long liaison with Charlie's own mother prior to Lucifer's arrival in Hell, it was that when a woman was truly angry, truly beside herself in spitting rage, you either helped her in pursuing it, or you stood well out of her way. The truth, in that instant, be damned.
The next Exorcist that came upon them did not beset them from behind, as Cain feared that it might, but from directly above. Cain felt the whoosh of wings slowing a descent just soon enough that he could dodge a side and careen into Charlie, causing the two of them to only be blown by the wind of the landing rather than stomped into gore under boots of the Exorcist. The two of them were sent up the sidewalk, rolling over each other until they came to a halt with Charlie discombobulated atop him. Cain flicked a glance back, and saw something distinctly nostalgic back there. That was a goddamned Type One. He hadn't seen Type Ones since… well… a very long time. It stomped toward them with the slow deliberation of Death itself.
"I don't have time for this!" Charlie declared, pushing herself to her feet and snarling at the thing, her horns now fully extended from her hair, and when the machine reached where Charlie advanced to meet it (Cain of course staying back because as ponderous as a Type One was, it could still turn a human sized object into a ball of crushed goo the size of a basketball in a matter of seconds using only its bare hands), she tried to haymaker it in its ceramic face and shatter it.
And then she spun away, even in her more furious and mighty form, her expression turned from outrage to shock and pain, waving and flailing her punching-hand. The machine hadn't flinched in the slightest from the impact. And when it grabbed her left arm in its vice-like grasp, Cain started and spoke a trickster's cantrip, his long-earned mastery over the accuracy of such magic allowing him to localize it entirely on Charlie's elbow and forearm. When the hand began to clamp, the pressure itself caused her arm to slide out of its grip, as Cain had reduced her arm's coefficient of friction to zero. Charlie backed away, tearing the entire sleeve of her dress off and leaving it in the hold of the Type One.
Its other hand flexed, and its claws were shining grey, a blow which Cain was too slow to ward, which Charlie only barely got out of the way of; they raked along her other shoulder, then because of the contortion of her another swipe ripped along her abdomen, causing bright, shining scarlet blood to leak from Charlie as she took what Cain would later learn was her first laceration in a fight of her entire life. It didn't slow her, though; she planted a foot on its over-extended chest, and kicked back, launching herself into a very nicely acrobatic backflip to earn some distance, landing her close to Cain. Cain spoke the trickster's cantrip again, this time to prevent the Exorcist from following, but even as he did he realized the folly of it. While ponderous, the Type One was not stupid. There was a flap of its great metal wings, and it launched itself at them once more, ignoring the frictionless street that Cain offered it.
""̸̞̪͍͉̘̕Ë̴̛̼Ǹ̷̥͈͇̥̣̅Ǫ̷̝̣́͑̓̋͊͘̚U̸̼͎̦͆̒̿͊̈́͝G̶̳̜͑̋H̶̛̙͚͗̔̎͗̀̍!̸̥̜̤̋̈́̈͑́̈͘"̶͖̗͓̳̤͛͜" Charlie roared, and with a flex of her limbs, her clothes burst off of her; Cain had an instinct to look away at sudden nudity, but the instant that her old outfit was gone, she was wearing a new one, this one all in the subtle grays and clean whites that the Exorcists themselves favored. And when the Exorcist barreled into her, its claws flashing, this time they ground against her Angel Satin gown as though it were the finest chain-mail, unable to part their way through. Charlie took the blow with a furious scowl, her usually cherubic and hopelessly kind face transformed into a nearly demonic visage of pure and unadulterated hate. She grabbed the arm and, with her body shifting and gaining another foot of height and hundred kilograms of muscle-mass, lifted the Exorcist off of the ground. It was a hard thing, as the Type One was, as Angel Dust would put it, 'one chunky boi', but she managed it, and then managed to subsequently body-slam the device into a brand new crater in the sidewalk.
She launched down with a brutal blow into the thing's chest, her fingers like knives, but though sparks flew at the impact, she didn't get what she clearly wanted – a penetration. Her blade-like nails all broke off and became jagged when she pulled her hand back, rage fighting pain when she couldn't simply rip-and-tear this thing apart.
"The halo! Break the Halo so it can't see us!" Cain shouted to her, trying to beat the drumbeat of her own furious heart and the blood no doubt pounding in her ears. He knew a few things about the Type One, such as how its halo was used to detect the Damned. It was a weakness all subsequent versions rectified. She grabbed it, but the instant she did she let out a cry of pain. Before she could wrench it apart, the Type One grabbed her by her forearm and far shoulder, and with a great heave spun them, rolling from the center of the crater up toward its wall so that the Exorcist was now atop and Charlie at the bottom. Its butchering claws shone in the light of the day, and Cain uttered now the words of the Elder Devils, and made a War Sign.
With the Exorcist's attention locked on Charlie, the slow and easily-foiled War Sign was given sufficient time to actually complete, and when it did, there was a bass drone that rebounded in the deepest of registers and a swirling beam of violet light. It should have blasted its target either into atoms, or if they were made of sterner stuff, to the far side of the horizon.
It displaced the Type One by four meters.
It hung above the street, violet ruinous energy crackling over it, degrading every metal body part that it touched, but failing to penetrate to the deepest and most critical parts of it. As far as the machine showed, the only sign that it had been struck at all in this fight was that there was a single crack in its ceramic mask of a face, and a few dents and furrows in the metal of its body.
"Oh, that's unexpected," Cain said. The advantage of the War Sign was that they were as powerful as they were easy to interrupt; if they ever typically went off, they ended fights. The Type One pounded its way forward, its empty eyes shining with black glass to the manic ticking of its internal mechanisms, then with a flare of its wings it launched itself, tearing the roadway, toward both of them.
Charlie had gotten to her feet, driving a brutal-head kick into the thing as it approached, but even with her increased stature and obvious power, only managed to hurt her own foot and spin herself back around as the machine barged into her space without care. It grabbed onto her arms, and began to torque. Cain hissed and sucked in a deep breath, willing into being the furnace of Azoth, stoking it high with his personal magic and power, so that he could hypercharge for a brief moment his own physical might. He didn't try to pull away the arm; that would have been folly. He focused all of his brief super-strength into twisting the Type One's thumb out of position.
It was all Charlie needed to rip her arm free of the Type One's crushing grasp, then drive a flurry of immense blows into the thing, each one ringing like a gong under such speed that they formed a dull, bass drone in aggregate. The Type One continued moving forward, and Charlie continued to move back, with Cain swirling his arms again, creating a new War Sign. This time, the machine flicked out with a wing, smashing Cain in the face and hurling him across the street, embedding him spine-first into a car.
Cain wasn't about to allow that to stop him. He pulled himself out, and Charlie… changed… again. She stopped looking like a more wrathful mixture of her mother and her father, and became, well… It was not an easy thing to explain. Her face began to be lost in cold white light, a flickering of light appearing above her head, jolting and never complete, almost a halo but visibly not, as her body now shrunk slightly but her blows grew even stronger. Now they didn't strike like a gong, but like a cannon-shell slamming into the armor band of an iron-sides. And at long last, the Type One was checked in its advance. It couldn't continue to press her back. The coils and plates of its body were beginning to deform under her strikes, and the sheer impact was beginning to make the metal skin glow with deformation heat. It managed to drive a brutal gut-punch through Charlie's onslaught, which caused the bombardment to cease as she staggered back.
He needed to stop this. And he had in this moment a notion of how to do it. He staggered, then ran toward the back of the thing. It knew he was coming. There were the same empty black glass 'eyes' on its wings as were embedded into its head. But he didn't need it to be unaware of him. He just needed it to be nearby. So he slid to a halt just out of its wing's-breadth, and spoke different words of power, an Impish Thaumaturgy that he had earned in trade from the young father whose mother Cain had protected from the Radio Demon out in the Pride Wilds, and invoked Absolute Entropy.
The ticking, which was already proceeding as a fast, staccato rhythm, suddenly became a grind. The machine turned, and swung with its wing, the wind blowing Cain back a few steps, but it failed to club him, so it didn't stop him. He kept forcing his magic into the Wyrd, and forced entropy to proceed to its final state with incredible haste. The clicking of the mechanisms of the Type One became first a grind, then an outright whir. Cain continued to retreat as the machine stomped toward him, frost growing on its body as the blows Charlie had levied on it rapidly became chill, and the machine held an arm toward him. From out its forearm came a crossbow, loaded with an Angel Steel quarrel. Cain flinched to dodge it, but when it launched, it struck and bounced off of his simple satin shirt, dissolving into rust moments after hitting the sidewalk.
The machine now staggered. Now halted. And Cain finally let his grasp of the Wyrd fall as the clicking of the Type One ceased completely. He had drained its mechanical battery utterly. Now it stood as a statue, battered but not meaningfully harmed, and would remain there until something capable of shifting six tonnes of Heaven's cruelty could come along and remove it.
"Charlie, are you alright?" Cain said, bypassing the deactivated machine and moving to where Charlie had ceased belting out the cold light, had her horns retract back inside her hair. She was breathing deep, as though the one blow had knocked the wind out of her. But when he saw her shirt, and saw the four plunging knuckle-spikes that cut through her suit-jacket, he almost tore those clothes open to assay her wounds before his mind caught up and reminded him that she wasn't bleeding anymore.
"What… the hell…" she gasped. "I haven't fought… one of those… in a long time."
"They're a frustratingly resilient breed, aren't they?" Cain asked. He then swooped his arm around her and guided her toward the hotel's direction once more. At the very least, they could be making progress toward their home.
"How did you stop it?" she asked.
"I forced its flywheel to run out of power early," Cain simplified. Charlie offered a sort of coughing laugh.
"Neat," she said.
"Very neat," he agreed. And then the two of them were jogging briskly toward the Hotel once more. Doubtless others were having as miserable a time as they were.
Lucifer was having the time of his life. "It's been far too long since I beat on something that could take a hit. I've reached the point where I actually miss the feedback of having a blow hit something resilient, you know?" he laughed, as Gabriel flared his wings and hovered over the battleground of Pentagram City. "What do you say we do this again next week, but in your degenerate kingdom?"
"If you could stand in the lands of the Father's rejection, you'd already be there," Gabriel chided, waggling one finger before him. "So how about we cease the braggadocio. It's not doing you any favors."
"It's not bragging if its true," Lucifer said blithely, swishing his flaming sword through the air in lazy arcs. Gabriel stared at him.
"That is exactly what bragging is," Gabriel said. He caught himself, raising his hands up in a warding gesture. "You know what? I'm just going to kill you and put all of this behind me."
"As if you even could, beef-brain," Lucifer said. He launched himself at Gabriel, levying a brutal sweep of his blade, one that the 'roided-out 'Might of God' blocked with his forearm. And frustratingly enough to the Archangel of Want, his blade didn't even cut through the fucker's skin. Gabriel swept his arm forward, pulling Lucifer off of balance, then dragging him directly into a place where a brutal downward haymaker blow could impact Lucifer and drive him rocketting toward the buildings, and crush his way through the facade of one from top floor to bottom.
Lucifer sighed, and released the shattered body he was in, forming a new one directly behind where Gabriel was descending to continue the fight. This time, Gabriel didn't manage to block Lucifer's blow, and the blade slammed into Gabriel's ribs. But just as before, it failed to slice through his skin and render him in twain. Lucifer glared at the Blade of Avarice. How dare it fail him in such humiliating fashion! Gabriel grabbed the thing, pinning it to his side, and swinging his other arm back in a lariat which Lucifer was able to lean away from. Lucifer tried to saw the Blade of Avarice through the skin, perhaps slicing might succeed where sheer impact failed. But Gabriel clenched it in his hand, and as he spun loose of Lucifer's strike, he smirked, then closed his fist.
The Blade of Avarice shattered.
"Oh that is NOT FUCKING OKAY!" Lucifer roared, back-hand slapping Gabriel with such force that the Archangel of Might was sent careening through buildings and leaving a streak of ruin in his wake. Lucifer didn't even bother dropping his body. He simply Folded the city so that he was already there where Gabriel would finally come to a halt. "NOBODY TOUCHES MY THINGS BUT M̴̧̧̛͇̘̠̗͍̪̼̥̎̈̈́͘É̴̜̟̝͈̜̆̍̏́̏̿͆̀̊!̵̡̙̼̘̹̙̱̞͚̻̜̪̬̤͛̿̀͛̋̂͑͌̈́̈́͆̿͌͘͜͝"
Gabriel had the audacity to smile at him, despite the dull orange back-hand print across one side of his face that was starting to swell. "Funny thing about that: I already did. And I'm about to do it again."
Lucifer dodged back, but this time he wasn't quite fast enough to evade Gabriel. Truly, a mound of muscle as big as Gabriel had no right being as swift as he was. And with that unnatural swiftness, Gabriel grabbed Lucifer's receding left hand and tore. Lucifer pulled his hand back, but felt a ripping of the skin on his fingers, as the gauntlet crumpled and stripped lines of skin off of them. When he had his hand out, it was dribbling bright golden blood from where it had been partially degloved. A thought saw his hand reform itself, but with the ruin gone, Lucifer found a new outrage.
He was missing his rings.
Gabriel smiled the grin of the shit-eater, holding the Ring of Puissance, the Band of Untold Sorcery, and Lucifer's wedding band between his fingers. Then with an even darker grin, he crushed them all into ruin with a flex of his hand. The first two rings exploded with shrapnel and magical power. The last simply warped.
It didn't much matter that there was no actual magic in the last one. It was his. It symbolized his wife, the mother of his child, and the anchor of his dynasty. To fuck even with the symbol of it saw his heart hammer and his eyes limn with red. Gabriel tried to catch Lucifer as he all-out charged the fucker, but Lucifer's fury was in that moment greater than Gabriel's strength. Lucifer slipped past the clenching arms of the Archangel opposite him and managed to grab him by the side of his throat, thereby allowing Lucifer to grind Gabriel's face along every wall that he sprinted past at super-sonic speeds. Sparks and superheated chips of broken concrete and brick flew away from where they were abraded by Gabriel's face, but before Lucifer could belt-sand the fucker's face right back to the spinal cord, Gabriel finally found a grip that favored him.
There was a crash as Lucifer had his momentum turned, and the direction which a moment before ran parallel to the wall now ran straight into it. Lucifer tried to still his charge, to regain control, but it seemed Gabriel had accounted for that, so that when the Archangel of Want turned, Gabriel was able to in a single motion grab him by his throat, lift him up, and slam him down so hard into the street that concrete ten yards away was upthrust by the downward force of Lucifer's body against the center of this new crater. Obviously, the raw violence of that impact reduced Lucifer's body to pulp. So he abandoned it and formed a new one, utterly unharmed, behind Gabriel, hooking his fingers into the shit-for-brains' eyes and threw him that way through a wall.
There was a moment of quiet, as Lucifer picked up the twisted snarl of gold that somehow made it all the way here (perhaps subconsciously, Lucifer had willed it so). How fucking dare he? An insult to the symbols of Lucifer's glory was an insult to Lucifer himself. And he could count on one hand the people whom he would allow even the slightest bit of 'teasing' without immediate and violent retribution, a number which didn't even reach past the middle finger.
Then, a rumble, as Gabriel emerged from the ruins. His face looked only a bit abraded, not done nearly as badly as Lucifer would have hoped. He smiled at Lucifer. "Did I strike a nerve?" Gabriel asked.
Lucifer merely glared. And noticed with a quarter of his mind that there was an Exorcist trying to ambush him. He half turned to it, keeping his eyes on Gabriel, and thrust out two fingers. The machine which had silently launched itself at him now was impaled up to the elbow on Lucifer's arm, its body twitching and spastic. Lucifer cast that hand and the metal carcass upon it down without breaking Gabriel's gaze. "I will make you eat your own heart," Lucifer promised.
"You couldn't do it ten thousand years ago. And with how decadent you've become, I severely doubt you can do it now," Gabriel said. This time, when he lashed forward, it was not with a fist that could shatter moons or a foot that could dig an ocean with a stomp. He did so with a flare of blazing white flame, and when it swept down, Lucifer, swifter than the Might of God, was able to batter the head-strike aside harmlessly, revealing at last Revelator, the Sword of Gabriel. "And I've just about run out of patience with you."
"Well, if you're only now getting serious, then you have no place winning this war," Lucifer vowed. And he called to himself the shards of his sword, an easy thing as they were part of him. And he mixed them with that sliver of Prima Materia which he had smuggled into Hell and kept viable and uncorroded for the last eon. From them, the Blade of Avarice was remade, reborn, and reforged.
When Gabriel slashed forward with the Revelator, this time it was intercepted by WANT, the blade of desire, the extension of Lucifer's mighty soul.
Revelator deflected away to a sound like a mountain dying. But contrary to Lucifer's expectations, Gabriel didn't seem alarmed or dismayed in the least. He looked eager and pleased. So that now there came a flare in his other hand, and this time a long haft of flame solidified into some smoky wood, its broad head a thing of solid white fire. Lucifer knew not the name of this axe, as he'd never seen it before. But WANT was able to deflect it as easily as it had the Revelator.
"YES! Show me what Michael faced in Diligence on that final day! I want to see it!" Gabriel demanded.
"If you want to see death, then I'll FUCKING INTRODUCE YOU!" Lucifer howled, and let WANT guide him.
While he never cared, as such, about such things as collateral damage in Hell, with WANT in his hand and drawing out the greatest and most powerful parts of Lucifer's very essence, now he was no longer aware of it. He didn't see how every broad swing of WANT severed through buildings, slashing them down as the hungry edge stole a cubit of matter around the impact point, and the buildings, suddenly bereft of structural stability, did the only thing availing them and collapsed. He didn't see nor care the imps or fiends or Sinners who were ripped apart by his careless backhand, or the passing helicopter which was split in half as he drove the blade in a downward swing to try to cleave Gabriel like a log. He was heedless of the new scar on the surface of Hell's moon that a flailing slash had rent.
And Gabriel grinned, and laughed, and fought like the demon that everybody claimed that Lucifer was.
"More! MORE!" Gabriel demanded, his eyes starting to glaze over, froth starting to form in his mouth. Lucifer saw no reason to deny him.
He would see Hell burned to the ground before he saw one iota of it handed over to a shit-heel like this.
So came the Razing of Pentagram City, the largest single destruction of Hellish infrastructure in any single day since the end of the age of the Rotten Kings.
And it was not wrought by Gabriel or any force of his angels he directed, but by the blindly-furious attacks of a slighted false-king.
Consciousness returned in a snap, and Rachel groaned, finding that it was easy to breathe since there was no longer a dead guy stacked atop her. She blinked, trying to get her bearings and see just where she was. The where turned out to be simple; she was at the back-wall of the lobby, walled off from the entry-doors by a pile of empty ammo boxes for massive bullets. She looked and she saw Husk still there, still on the guns, his cigar burned almost to his lips, firing the cannon whose barrel glowed faintly red any time something was visible ahead of him and wasn't one of Vaggie's Legionaries.
Oh, and the entire front of the Hotel was blown open now.
"Rach? You still with us?" he asked, the act of speaking burning his lip so that he finally spat out the nub of a cigar.
"If I wasn't you'd just have to wait until tomorrow," she said, having to raise her voice, because the sound of gunfire outside was deafening. It was like an entire war had converged on the Hotel, not simply the half-hearted raid that had assailed this place half way through December. And there were soldiers retreating in panic, some at a run with their guns flopping as they may, others retreating in good order with their weapons covering their own backwards advance. But it was clear that the outer defenses were failing, and that the Exorcists were coming.
She looked for Jun-Ho, and in the worst way possible, she found him. He was a slaughtered mess, left abandoned in the centre of the floor, and not far from where his carcass was deposited there was the clockwork horror that had marched in with such impunity, now collapsed and still. However Jun-Ho had spent this particular life, it had not been cheaply. But that meant that perhaps the most able of the Betrayed was out of the fight. All that left was the soldiers, Rachel (who was no fighter by any means), and Husk. She glanced around.
There was Rozarin, like Jun-Ho motionless on the ground with her neck raggedly torn open. But though she lay in a pool of her own blood, there was no Ash on her, and her wounds though grisly were the color of parted flesh, and not of Purified flesh. There was a destroyed Exorcist near her, one that looked like it had been ganged up on and torn to pieces. Considering she seemed to be Regenerating, then it wasn't even a life spent to a good end. And it still left Rachel with few good options. So she snapped her gaze toward Husk.
"What do you need?" she demanded, as he would know better.
"The laser, get on it," Husk shouted to her.
"I don't know how to use this!" Rachel pointed out as she nevertheless did as he asked of her.
"Just pull the trigger and keep the reticle on the machines!" he offered, before opening fire again. The shells he sent out just barely missed braining a retreating supersoldier and in so doing flew past and knocked an Exorcist for a loop, preventing a launch at some unseen threat and instead causing it to plow into the facade of the cafe opposite the Hotel.
To use a vulgarity in a moment in-extremis, the situation was utterly fucked. Within what remained of the lobby, people were now using corpses as sand-bags to gain cover, and the super-soldiers, too large for such protections, were out of luck and simply had to stay out of the way. The Exorcist that Husk had tagged extracted itself from the bricks, turning its electric grin toward them. There was a flick of its hand, and a harpoon, very much like the one that Vaggie once owned, appeared in its hand. It lashed out as it advanced, hurling the harpoon at something outside of Rachel's vision. There was a shuddering in the air, like watching a hummingbird's wings, and the harpoon returned to the Exorcist's hand, now covered half its length in crimson blood which steadily turned to grey demon-bone ash and fell off of the weapon, leaving it clean once more.
"Incoming!" a soldier roared. And the entire lobby opened fire.
"FUCKING OBVIOUSLY!" Husk screamed above the thud-thud-thud of his cannon firing.
"NO! FROM BEHIND!"
Rachel didn't question the veracity of it. She knew her luck was just bad enough that such a thing could be true. So she quickly cranked the turret around so that it was pointing straight at the wall. And through the wall, in the digital display of the Laser Weapon, there was an indistinct smudge of white that was moving past the darkness of wood and stone.
She didn't hesitate. She pulled the pair of triggers. There was an instant loud snap, as the wall in front of her burst into flames, then had chunks of it explode back toward her. The chunks deflected off of the deflection plate on the front of the weapon, and she bored those lasers through the superstructure of the Hotel, through stone and steel, until the pale smear only seen by her weapon's sensors began to actually react. It swept a fainter blob toward her, and continued its advance. Well, that was troublesome.
Cutting through the wall had to kept being repeated as she tried to track the angel machine, only managing a few moments of useful attack-on-target at a time before the machine advanced into a spot where her weapon needed to bore through material anew. The flames were rising, now, the paneling which was the outermost skin of the Lobby on this side now robustly afire and spreading as she kept pumping more heat into the system.
There was a beeping noise, a warning that the array was overheating and would soon automatically shut down to prevent itself from melting. So she had to make the last few moment's count. She released the triggers, and then swept the gun toward the edge of the door itself. And, ignoring the sound of gunfire, and the fact that an almost-hit by a tumbling power-armor had caused some of her hair to catch aflame, she waited until the blob reached the right spot.
And as the machine prepared to launch itself into the lobby and start reaping lives, Rachel pulled the triggers again.
The launch became a stumble, the Exorcist revealing itself and showing the melted sections of the feathers on its wings, the burnt tracks along its dress. The khukri knife in its hand had a section near halfway-point which was melted dull, a blob where edge should be and a void above it. She doubted that reduced its killing power too much, though. Her luck wasn't that good. The machine swung its head toward her. But not toward her, exactly. Toward the gun. Husk, on the far side of the Angel, could only see its attention turn toward her, and with a roar of desperate fury, all-but-instantly dropped into his Warform, a hulking androsphinx with one claw on each paw shining with the stolen steel of Angels.
The Exorcist swung its wing back, intercepting the raking blow that Husk tried to levy on it, then turned away from her. The harsh buzz of the machine shutting down was in the air. She could do no more with it until it cooled.
Until something changed, she was just going to sit around doing nothing.
The soldiers at the back of the room tried shooting at the machine briefly, but the open hand of the machine blurred and caught the bullets while not even slowing in its attack against Husk. There, emerging from the edge of her vision came the hulking, rhinocerous-hide-bound Amos Dresden pushed out from the line of soldiers whom he overtopped by head, shoulders and pectorals. In each hand, Dresden held a sledgehammer with the ease that most people would hold a ball-peen. With a shout devoid of words but rife with rage and challenge, Dresden charged, launching his hammers in crushing blows. The Exorcist darted to one side, and Dresden only managed to miss braining Husk because Husk, even in his Warform, didn't lose any of his savvy. The exorcist continued to deke and dodge Dresden's blows and Husk's swipes, its face remaining an electric grin.
Rachel turned her head toward the front. The Exorcists were gathered into a knot of four. No wait, three now. Even as she watched, one of them finally, under ludicrously overwhelming fire from everybody in the hotel not distracted by the donnybrook in the back, collapsed into scrap and melted down. The other three were much more advanced versions, though, their wings up in protective aegis in front of them, outright ignoring the bullets and rooting their feet so that the sheer tide of momentum that was being launched at them didn't nevertheless pick them up and deposit them backward. One of them had a section of the wing burst in a snap of metal under tension failing, metal feathers launching away and the machine staggering slightly as the wash of lead and plasma finally caused some harm to it through its strongest defense.
She didn't have time to worry about those. Three was really really bad, but there was material proof that if the soldiers of the Hotel survived long enough and kept firing, they would eventually fall. The fight in the back was much more open to debate. She turned back to it just as Dresden let out a cry not of rage but of surprise and pain. A splat of hot, red blood hit Rachel in the face, blinding her for a moment until she wiped it clean. Dresden had been slashed under the arm, his incredibly thick skin saving him from outright dying, but there was a notch of wound in him that was greying and Purified, oozing copious blood. The pain redoubled Dresden's ruinous efforts, and seeing Dresden launching in with wild abandon prompted Husk to try to do likewise, to capitalize on the openings that dodging Dresden would leave.
Dresden never landed a clean hit. Not even once. But because the Exorcist was warding, deflecting, or dodging those wild and crushing blows, Husk managed to slash the machine a few times, though never more than 'skin deep'.
There was a zorp-sound, followed by dial-up noise, nearly lost in the din of gunfire but for the fact that it was so familiar to Rachel. When the click ended the noise, it turned its attention away from Husk and then stepped inside a strike by Dresden, allowing the titanic Sinner to overextend past, putting the fore-arm of Dresden into something like an arm-bar. But this particular arm-bar had a khukri involved. When the Exorcist ripped its way through, it didn't tension the arm; it dismembered it.
Dresden swung again and again, only on the third swing realizing that he had no arm to swing with, and a sort of horror dreading on his dark, not-too-intelligent eyes when he looked at the purified edge of the wound that now would never heal and would not Regenerate. Even thought he Exorcist's face was a set, electronic depiction of a cruel grin, it nevertheless somehow managed to gain even more cruelty, spinning into action in graceful violence, ducking a swipe and back-hand by Husk to race around the side of Dresden's knee and gash out the sinews, then the knee itself, so that the leg flopped uselessly and Dresden crashed to the floor.
And then, again without changing its face, but still somehow seeming smug, it hopped up Dresden's back, grabbed the bristly hair to drag Dresden's head back, then slashed the Sinner's throat right through to the bone.
Husk tried to tackle the Exorcist while it was fixated on ending Dresden, but the Exorcist was faster, releasing its empty hand and using it – and Husk's momentum, to hip-throw the androsphinx away while it finished its deed. And because of the angle involved, that meant that Husk was being thrown directly at Rachel.
Rachel hit the deck, and Husk flapped his wings, using the thrust to make him fly past her instead of into her, cratering inelegantly into the corner-pillar. She scrabbled over to him. Even in his Warform, she could still tell that he was hurting, and tired. His eyes were a bit glazed, as that hit had not been gentle and in saving her he'd taken it badly. "Get up, damn you!" She shouted, grabbing the fur of his cheeks. She gave his head a shake. "GET UP!"
There was a squelching noise behind Rachel; she turned to see that the machine had just pulled the head off of Dresden's body, which was already starting to fill up with Demon Bone Ash. It'd taken longer because the knife it was using was partially dulled by her attempt at melting it. The machine hurled that head at one of the soldiers still shooting at it, causing the gunfire held at bay by its wing to lessen for a moment. Its gaze was firmly on Husk.
No.
"No, I don't accept this," Rachel swore.
The thing tensed its wings, then launched itself.
And Rachel did the dumbest thing a being of her physicality could do. She got directly in front of the point of the on-coming knife.
It felt like being hit by a car all over again, but somehow localized, followed an instant later by a second blow from behind. The sheer velocities involved had thrown her backward from her place standing and into Husk. She looked down, and saw that there was a thick-bladed Khukri driven almost its full length into her chest. Considering her knowledge of anatomy, she knew that it had parted her aortic arch. She'd pass out in… about seven seconds and then bleed to death once the knife was out. But there was one minuscule advantage that being stabbed gave her.
In stabbing her, the Exorcist gave up vital knife-inches having to both penetrate and impale her and come out the other side. The blade was, for all its angelic manufacture, a fairly representative khukri. It was only 45 centimeters long, or roughly 18 inches. And once one factored in Rachel's torso, and the dulled knob that caught against her skin and ripped its way in, forestalling the blade short of actually plunging to the hilt, that left about an inch of useful knife-tip on the other side of her that slammed into Husk.
The wound cut into Husk was grey and oozed blood, but it was less than an inch deep. He'd survive it, even with minimal help.
The machine tilted its gaze at her for a moment, as though surprised to find her here. Then with a great swing of its arm, it threw her off of its blade. She hit the ground with a thud.
Six seconds of useful consciousness left.
There was as spray as the blood launched out of her heart. Where am I, and what can I do, she thought?
Another launching spray, adding a new shade of red to the walls and floors. The Laser!
Five seconds.
She reached for it, grabbing the retaining pin at the bottom of the tripod. When she ripped it out, the entire thing telescoped down and slammed to the ground with a metal bang, the weapon now less than an imp's height in total.
Four seconds. She grabbed it and pulled herself, turning the barrel of it with desperation even as her limbs felt leaden and her head packed with cotton. Her blood sprayed the barrel, where it promptly boiled and burned.
Three seconds. She couldn't use the display. She had to aim from the proverbial hip. But considering the Exorcist was right there, struggling to slowly drive its khukri into Husk despite his full-bodied effort to hold it at bay, she didn't need fancy targeting. The hip would do. She clenched the trigger shut.
The loud snap sounded, and there was pain in her leg. She saw that the leg running aside the barrel started to burn. And though it was tremendously painful, she didn't stop. There was a sparking on the Exorcist's back, the laser boring through its body now that it was locked into place and unable to force her to have to sweep the beam across it. The laser became a drill.
Two seconds of useful consciousness. She felt insanely weak, and tired. But her mind, for all it was already starting to deal with the fact that her blood was rapidly departing it with nothing new to take its place, was locked onto one simple task. Hold the laser, keep it firing. Her leg had been burnt down to the bone. The pain was gone. She was mostly numb anyway.
One second left.
And then, as her vision darkened and the demise of this body claimed her, there was at least a jolt from the machine. She didn't know what she accomplished, and would have to learn later. She just hoped it would be enough.
Thus again Rachel Scailes died at the hands of the weapons of Heaven.
Gabriel was laughing at him.
He was fucking laughing.
If there were a Gift of Rage out there in Creation, Lucifer would have willingly traded his Gift of Ambition for it, just so that he could be properly fucking furious at the temerity of this bare-chested chuckling douche-bag. The fight had gone on for unclear duration, it could have been minutes or hours or even days of Lucifer simply waling on Gabriel with his Holy Sword WANT and trying to kill the infuriating crate-of-dicks. While Gabriel was a very good fighter, he wasn't the best fighter in Heaven. That accolade belonged to an extremely begrudging tie between Michael and Lucifer (that fucker cheated to beat him last time) and a minor honorable mention to a firstborn named Hepsut. Gabriel was merely the strongest fighter in Heaven. He used dumb brute force to make up what skill failed him.
Countless times WANT had struck the flesh unarmored of Gabriel, only to have the bullet-proof idiot's skin halt the edge. Only a few times comparatively did Gabriel return the favor, striking out with the Revelator or that unnamed axe. Of course, Lucifer preferred to ignore the fact that any time either of those weapons struck him they shattered the body he was currently wearing and he'd had to reform a new one to continue his onslaught. Leave it to the lapdogs of Heaven to cheat at so simple a thing as a fight to the death.
Whatever Gabriel was using to keep himself from dying, Lucifer wanted it. And when he had it, he'd be one step closer to claiming the High Throne of Cloud Diligence.
It never occurred to Lucifer that Gabriel was just built to a different standard than Lucifer had been. One that gave little thought to vulnerability of the body. If Lucifer had given it thought, he would have redoubled his efforts and dedicated however the fuck long it took to impart some vulnerability on that grinning jackass. Nobody should be invulnerable to Lucifer's attacks. Nobody.
Not to say that all of this high-velocity drubbing with the impossibly sharp edge of WANT was doing nothing to Gabriel. In those places where Lucifer had struck close together enough times, places like his left shoulder, his right hip, and the middle of his left forearm, there were sullen brown bruises and raw, delicate lacerations that oozed just a dribble of golden blood. Proof perhaps that Gabriel's invulnerability was not absolute after all. And if all Lucifer had to do to surmount it was keep hitting him? Well, that was just better than therapy, right there.
He was reeling for another massive strike when Gabriel hooked the incoming swing along the haft of the axe, and caged Lucifer's strike with The Revelator, swinging hard and smashing Lucifer thereby into the wall of a mostly-crumbled building. Gabriel's smile was delighted and cruel, the grin of a child picking the legs off of an ant. Lucifer's furious glare washed over him without catching so much as a whit. There was then a tremendous and explosive drone that washed through the air, one that caused both Gabriel and Lucifer to turn upward, their bodies jerking to do so with complete disregard for what their wills demanded. Lucifer's bile grew even more sour at that, at hearing that noise.
Raphael had blown the Horn of Apocalypse, and all things born of God's Hand or Word were forced by their very beings to heed. And there, in the sky, there was a stag of white with antlers gold. Seated bareback on its spine was the massive form of Raphael, horn now raised to his mouth, and the pristine white standard of God The Highest clenched in his other fist. Another dreadful drone that ripped the clouds from the sky, and the stag began to charge through the air, driving south-west, toward the nearest point of the Pride Wall. And Lucifer waited to see the others that followed.
Only nobody did.
It was Lucifer's turn to grin, now, as he looked up, and beheld not a man astride a pale horse, whose name was Death, with ruin following after him. Beheld not the bone steed of Pestilence, whom Lucifer was not even aware had perished a century ago. Beheld not the crimson steed of War, whose lance could split all battlefields and arrows could fell all warriors. Beheld not the sun-eating-black steed of Famine.
"It seems that the Horsemen don't agree with your little power play," Lucifer chided. Gabriel stared, his own smile fading, and an angry glare taking its place. "Did you really think you had the weight to throw around that you could set their path for them? You really are as stupid as everybody says about you," Lucifer outright laughed.
Gabriel turned back to him, and all of the good humor that had been on his face was gone.
Faster than the speed of light came Gabriel's downward hammer-blow, crashing the pommel of the Revelator into the clench of blades. And the force of it drove Lucifer downward with impossible force, the ground swallowing him as it parted in a shuddering wave, a fault-line being split into the surface of Pride Ring for the first time since Hell's creation at the beginning of coherent time. Downward, through the flesh of Pride Ring Lucifer went, propelled by that spite-fueled blow, his body only held together because every atom which ought to have been blown apart were being projected downward at the same rate.
Then there was a crash the likes of which had never been heard before, as Lucifer abandoned his dissolving body and replaced it with a new one now that he was no longer sent hurtling through no-longer-solid rock. He looked down. In the impossible distance below, he beheld Greed Ring.
"Definitely touched a nerve there. I'll have to remember that," Lucifer said to himself, ignoring the pain of a no-longer-relevant body. And his instinct told him to put the Holy Blade WANT just so, thus when Gabriel exploded from the stone of the Ring above, he went chest-first into Lucifer's weapon. Gabriel deflected his chest-thrust, and wonder of wonders Lucifer beheld a shallow split in Gabriel's hitherto almost impenetrable skin, the momentum of Gabriel working against him. Now swinging with lunatic intensity, Lucifer darted back and to the sides, grinning wide as the tides now turned to favor him.
Until at long last, Lucifer managed to get WANT exactly where he wanted it, the strength of his blade under the bill of Gabriel's unspoken axe, and with a contemptuous flick, rip the weapon from the Archangel of Might's grasp. It slammed into the bottom of Pride Ring, embedding its blade there. Then, at long last, Gabriel seemed to pause, to collect himself, glaring though he was.
"Well, I think I've done enough," Gabriel said with unctuous tone.
"Big words coming from the one bleeding while my body is flawless," Lucifer countered.
"Oh, I've done more than enough harm to you already. And I didn't even have to do much to do it," Gabriel said. His insufferable smirk returned. "Tell me… how is your city doing right now?"
Lucifer stared at him. Then he glanced upward.
He hadn't been paying attention.
With a final glare to the infuriating fuck down here at the bottom of the Ring, Lucifer abandoned his body again, and reformed one high above the city of his grand kingdom.
And he saw that city in ruin.
Ruin caused only in small part by Gabriel.
The rest of it, the countless buildings that were slashed free of their moorings and fell, that were displaced and crumbled, that had holes blown through them, those were ruined by Lucifer's strikes. Not Gabriel's.
"You'll pay for this. I swear it," Lucifer demanded, learning exactly nothing from this. And with a burning away of foetor and filth, he vanished from the sky of Pride Ring. He wasn't done with killing Angels by a half, today.
Whatever illusions Cain had about the resilience of Hell in the face of Heaven's aggression, they were dragged into the street and shot by the time that the two of them finally crossed the blocks and blocks of the city – which began to shudder and quake as something great and terrible happened out of eyeshot – which separated the Tesseract from the militarized district of the Happy Hotel. And when Charlie reached it, her run slowed to a stumble.
The bodies were everywhere. It was no surprise to Cain. Those in the outlying areas of the Hotel knew that she was increasing its military hardness. So when Exorcists started appearing in numbers, the sane act of a civilian was to flee to a place where the military could protect you. It had availed them all nothing, though. The wings of Exorcists had been faster than legs of the Sinner, the Fiend, the Hound and the Imp.
And it only got worse when one passed the barricade.
Cain stood at Charlie's side, trying to be a comfort-in-being by mere proximity. The way she stood told him that she would accept absolutely nothing more overt. That she was on a razor-edge. That she was close to letting that part of her which came from her father, out.
Her eyes didn't well up as she crossed the line which separated her burgeoning New Purgatory from the rest of Pride Ring and Pentagram City. She stared with laser intensity and focus. At every single body that was laid in ruin. Many of them were ragged and disheveled, those from just outside the wall who had managed by hook or by crook to get inside, only to be struck down regardless. Of those who weren't the teeming masses, the majority were soldiers in Charlie's newly restored Legion.
She stooped, leaning over each of the soldiers she had seen in passing while pursuing her passion. As though dedicating a face and a name to memory. Cain saw no reason to interrupt her. If this was what it took to steel her heart for what greater ruinations would come in the future, then it was a decent price to pay for it. He offered no words. He needed none. His mere presence, looking over the fallen seemed to whisper in answer to her unvoiced question 'I know; I know'.
The first noise that escaped her mouth was a peep of sorrow, her hand rising up to her face to bite her fingers so she didn't actually sob. And there did Cain see Addam, son of Nasir and An, butchered and broken on the pavement, his halo extinguished as the life of this body was spent. While Cain knew that Addam, as a Betrayed, would return unharmed, the carcass was a symbol of just how bad things had become. Addam was not a fighter. He was a builder-of-things, a far more valuable man in the scheme of civilization. To have such a craftsman cut down was an enormous insult to a people, to deny them not just a fighting arm but thousands of hours of expertise and decades of lessons passed from one hand to another.
Cain had fought entire wars down here over less grievous outrage.
"Such needless waste," Cain found himself saying. While he and Addam were very different people, he approved of the man. To see this desecration of his skills, his role in the world, and his place in New Purgatory would not stand. Cain would see to it.
Charlie moved inward. The flood of bodies became a trickle. And now there were Exorcist wrecks amongst them. The soldiers had given perhaps not as good as they got, but more than well enough to mark them the elite amongst Hell. Few were the Legions which had the wherewithal to fight a single Exorcist, platoon on unit. And there were four of those things out here, so that put Charlie's Second Legion of the Damned, The Dawn Legion, as de-facto one of the best just to have managed this, even if they were wiped out by it.
But then they rounded the last few buildings, and saw the hotel itself. There was a fire trying to burn through the facade, uninterrupted, and the heavy armor of her special soldiers was shattered and broken in the street. But there were more dead Exorcists here, as well. The front wall of the Hotel was torn away entirely, as though someone had peeled the lobby's street-side entrance off and hurled it as rubble to one side. And at last, Cain saw a body on the ground which wasn't obviously dead.
Near enough, though.
Obadiah Roth, the Brigadier General of The Dawn Legion, was laid on the ground, blood pooled under him but bandages packed tight onto his wounds. His chest rose and fell steadily with his breath, so he wasn't dead. But from the massacred left side of him, perhaps that wasn't a mercy. He had wounds raking up his face, across his bared chest, and doubtless under that blanket that preserved him from shock as well. His arm and leg on that side were missing. From the state of his face, perhaps he'd lost that eye as well. But he was breathing. In calamity, take what small victories you get.
Charlie was pale as a ghost as she walked past Roth, then rounded the crumbled front of her Hotel, her greatest hope and most ardent dream. And in the lobby, she saw the wailing, the desperate, the dying, and the dead. Triage had pushed out the door, it seemed; that meant that Roth was in God's hands, now. He would either live or die on his own, and active hands helped those who they could.
The room had four dead Exorcists in it. That brought Cain's count up to ten. Ten Exorcists in this tiny speck of Pentagram City? That was overkill of the highest order. And those were just the ones which were destroyed. And was that a Type One over there? Was Heaven really pulling Type Ones out of retirement across the board, and not just a one-off strangeness for Cain to contend? Ah, but there was the answer to how the thing fell; Jun-Ho, his stolen Angelic armor shattered and warped, was laid at rest near many of the other dead. He, too, would return, like Addam. It still did his heart no good to see a corpse of a man he had spoken to mere hours ago.
He paused in sweeping his gaze at Rozarin Ahmadi, who was sitting with her back to a pillar making horrid, rasping sounds with every breath; the front of her throat was still open and Regenerating, last vestiges of a truly devastating wound that had been granted to her to put her, even temporarily, down. Rozarin was a powerful woman. The Exorcists likely recognized that, and moved to still her. And yet despite that, her wounds were not Purified and she yet drew ragged and unorthodox breath. He gave her a nod, and she, her rattling breathing through the hole in her throat, was unable to speak and thus only nod back.
Cain looked to the back of the room, and past all the pained cries and moans of anguish, he beheld Husk. His face was swollen to the point where it was almost a grotesque mask, as though he'd been beaten in the face almost to death. And he dribbled blood constantly from a wound in his pectoral, one that from the look of it had been cut by the steel of Angels. But it was what was in Husk's grasp that gave pause to both Charlie and Cain.
Husk was cradling Rachel's corpse.
Again.
Unlike the other dead, who had been laid aside so they could be disposed of, Husk seemed to have jealously and almost atavistically claimed her and refused to allow anybody anywhere near her. He had received no treatment for his wounds. Cain grasped why. He would rather hold to somebody who he cherished, even in the broken way that he had it in him to cherish things, than be free of such trifling matters as an open wound and severe concussion.
Charlie turned, looking at those gathered. And the penny dropped for Cain. She was looking amongst the dead for Vaggie.
As she was facing left, at the corpses laid yonder, the doors right which led to the kitchen opened, and Vaggie actually appeared. "Charlie!"
Charlie turned to her, but though it was clear to Cain that her worst fear failing to be realized was a good thing, she was nevertheless struck still and mute. Vaggie crossed the distance, grabbing ahold of her lover and hugging her tight, rambling about how terrified she was that Charlie might have gotten hurt or killed. It was a blinkered viewpoint. Cain knew that as Charlie was both a daughter of an Archangel, and was a Nephilim (as though those two could be separated), she had nothing really to fear from the machinery of Heaven's cruelty.
Slowly, though, Vaggie seemed to dawn upon what Cain already knew. That Charlie was in A State. One for which comfort was alien to her mindset and last on her list of priorities. And when she took that eventual step back, refusing to relinquish her grasp on Charlie's hand, she understood as Cain did that they were seeing something hitherto unprecedented.
They were seeing Charlotte the Morningstar, Song of Dawn, Redeemer Princess, in an inconsolable rage.
To see Charlie in even a minor snit, to see a fragment of her father's legendary anger emerge from the cage she imprisoned it in, was a terrifying thing to behold. Perhaps not to the ignorant who dwelt in Hell, but each time that fury boiled near the surface, Cain always stepped quietly, and edged away. The fury of a Nephilim was a thing unknown; they had died before they could make their power truly known, and even now, Charlie was by far and away the longest lived Nephilim to have ever been. To see her on the edge of losing control was akin to watching a star die; glorious, but also insanely dangerous to be nearby.
Then, as Cain was looking about, he saw something that turned his heart and dropped the floor out on his stomach. He stepped away from Charlie, and moved to the side of a figure laid out on the floor. She was a tiny thing, and made all the smaller because her short legs were severed not far from the hip, tourniqueted to prevent her from bleeding to death; considering the edges were faded gray, that was a real and meaningful threat to her. One of her arms was also separated from her, having been so pulverized that it was already Ashen and was removed to spare needless pain and likely exsanguination. That big eye opened, though, as though it could sense Cain's approach. She tried to smile, Niffty did. Her face was missing half of its teeth, and the cheek on that side was ripped open.
"Y-y-you took long en-en-enough to g-ge-g-get back. I w-wa-was winning," Niffty said. There was still manic energy in her eye, but the body around it seemed faltering and failing.
"I'm a gentleman of my word," Cain said, putting on a warm smile for her. She was dying. Nobody was tending to her because there was nothing left to save. That she still was conscious even now with these wounds was a testament to her madness and the monumental willpower that it provided her. "I think you've earned another point just for staying up late for me."
Niffty beamed in her ruined state at that statement, no doubt her faltering mind trying to keep up the score and add another point for her on it. She reached up with the one limb she had left, her fingers clammy and cold against his cheek. "C-c-ca-c-can we c-call the ga-game a b-bi-bi-bit early?"
"Of course, darling Niffty. Congratulations on your victory," Cain said. It was a lie, but she deserved a happy lie right now. "What would you desire of me?"
"Could you p-pl-p-please just hol-hold me?" she asked, by far the most innocent thing this depraved little pixie had ever asked. And Cain nodded, keeping his sorrow off of his face, because for her this was victory. He pulled her close to his chest, felt her one arm clutching at his shoulder. She breathed deeply of his scent. She breathed again. Again.
And then her arm came loose from its grasp on Cain. He didn't look. He just pressed a kiss into the bloody mop of her hair. And then, gently as a gentleman ought, he laid her down, and set her hand atop her stilled heart.
Charlie watched. And it wasn't sadness on her face. Cain got to his feet again, his ripped clothing now stained with blood and Demon Bone Ash. Already the bleeding parts of Niffty were choking with grey. It was done. She was done. He moved back to Charlie. And when he tried to say something, he found that his mouth opened but nothing would come out. For the first time in centuries, he was utterly robbed of speech. Charlie nodded, understanding innately, as she stood in the slaughterhouse that had been brought to her life's ambition.
Nobody spoke to her. Even those who thought Charlie 'weak' because she opted for a soft touch where the rest of Hell opted for a blow by closed fist knew that there was an explosion coming, and could hear with their low-cunning the hiss of an ever shrinking bomb-fuse.
"Well, this is quite a mess, now isn't it?" the words of the Radio Demon intruded onto the tension of the hotel. He, unlike everybody else here, was still wearing his scarlet finery utterly untouched by violence and ruin. He strutted forward, his microphone cane preceding his steps with a crack like splitting ice with each footfall. "It seems that the defences of this place weren't quite up to scratch after all."
"Where. Were. You?" Charlie demanded.
"Don't be obtuse, my dear. You saw me at the Dealmaker's Conference. It's not like the taxis are running right now," he said, not for a moment having his eyes slip down to the massacred and butchered people on the floor. For all he was concerned, apparently, they weren't even there.
"You should have been here," Charlie said.
"Well, I wasn't," Alastor said with a shrug. "I'll be up in my studio if anybody needs me."
"No you won't," Charlie said. Alastor, having been caught mid stride, paused, turning to her before he had a chance to pass by the place she was standing.
"...I'm sorry, did you just say I wouldn't?" the Radio Demon asked, his grin losing much of its breezy mirth.
"Get out," Charlie demanded, her voice tight, her eyes bloodshot to an extent they were almost red from pupil to lid.
"Fine, I'll get out of your way until you're calmed down a touch," Alastor said.
"Get out of my hotel. Leave and never come back," Charlie made her point clear. And Alastor, who had already started walking not waiting for her response, was again caught up and turned to face her again. He stabbed his cane into the floor to the shattering of a floorboard.
"I think you're allowing your emotions to get the better of you. Sleep on things, my dear. All will be right again in the morning."
Charlie, though, pulled free of Vaggie and marched over to the taller Radio Demon, glaring up at him. And then she started to swell, her own height growing until she matched her mother's eight feet and a touch more. Then she started to expand in less physical ways, until she somehow dominated the space of the room, and Alastor had no choice but to recede before it. She glared at him. "This is all you've ever done here, isn't it? Used my home, my hopes, as your fucking amusement."
"Of course. That's exactly what I said I would do," Alastor didn't even bother looking chagrined by that. "Do you not recall our exact words?"
"Ë̴̡̨͓͈̥͇͒͛͒̑͆͠N̸̡̬̞͖̮̘̭͎̪̽̅̿͌̂̈́͑̄O̴͍̤̻̻͑̽̈́̍U̵̩̭͚̗͉̫̭͇͙̇̄̏͗̀͆̈́́̎͝G̵̛͖̓̍̈́̈́͝Ḥ̶̢̧̢̬͕̼͗͌̊,̷͈̟̌͂̊̌̋͒̈́͝" Charlie demanded, cutting off the strange malediction that Alastor could call forth as easily as he breathed. Her word echoed through the building and out into the street, and at last there was a crack in Alastor's armor of extreme lack of care. "You're not just going to leave. You're going to run away, Alastor. You're going to run away, right now. You're going to run away so fast and so far that I will never find you again. Everything you built here is forfeit: it is mine now, as it always should have been."
"You wouldn't even know what to do with it…" Alastor began.
There came a crack somewhere in timbre between a whip-crack and a gunshot, but meaty and bone-against bone, as the back of Charlie's hand smashed against Alastor's cheek with such incredible force as to make even the Radio Demon turn and blink from it. Charlie was left holding a hand out beside her that was actually smoking slightly, and the Radio Demon's cheek was instantly began to puff and bruise, before his titanic Regeneration began to fix it.
Everybody saw it. The Radio Demon tried to Radio Demon his way through things.
And Charlie bitch-slapped him for it.
The shocked expression on Alastor's face should have been recorded for posterity for the good of all of the citizenry of Hell. A proof in picture that consequences could even fall down upon the Radio Demon himself. He blinked at the blow, reaching up and thumbing away a bead of black ichor that welled up at the corner of his mouth.
"If you are so useless that you're unwilling to defend your own home, then everybody was right about you. You're a parasite. Get out," Charlie said, her voice shaking with rage.
"My dear, you don't get to…" the Radio Demon began.
"Run away," Charlie ordered. "And if I ever find you again, I will unravel you. I will tear you apart, thread by thread, until there is nothing left."
And the grin on Alastor's face died, then. There was no more mirth for him. "This will cost you far more than it costs me," Alastor promised.
"I don't care what it costs me, s̷̞̅̏́ò̸̢͈̖͒ ̵̭͎̂l̶̳̻̉̀͝ö̵̱̆͆̕ń̵̢̩g̴̬̠͐̒ ̸̧̻͍̌̄å̵̖̉s̵͎͝ ̵̝̮̣̚i̴͍͕̇͜t̶̢̝̐͂̿ ̸̭̖̼̤̑h̶̙̅u̶͍̮͓̍͝ṟ̷̒̇͐̑t̶̻̎̕ș̶̖̦͈͠ ̴͖͓̬̓́̄̈́y̵̦͖̦͈̎͗̚ô̷͎̄͛͝u̴̢̡̧̱͆," Charlie promised, finally sounding note-for-note a rendition of her father's pettiness.
"Then let the costs start tallying now," Alastor said. He snapped his fingers. "Niffty! Husk! We're leaving."
There was silence, and a glare of almost nuclear heat, as Charlie turned a pointed look to the corpse of Niffty. Alastor followed her gaze. And when he saw that Niffty was no longer amongst the Damned, he let out a tsk.
"Well, one out of two is good enough," he said, promptly ignoring the pixie whom he'd roped into this hotel endeavor without a second glance. He snapped his fingers as though ordering a dog. "Husk. We leave."
Husk did stand, still holding Rachel's bloody corpse against his chest, and walked toward them. But then he walked past Alastor, and stood behind Charlie, at her left hand, glaring with all of the hate that the man likely didn't know he still had in him. Rozarin took that opportunity to rise, still unable to speak, and stood in battery with Husk, creating a bulwark against which the Radio Demon would contend. Ahmadi's glare paled in comparison to Charlotte's. Alastor's expression grew ever more vexed. It was shocking to see the perpetually grinning monster finally showcasing other expressions, and in such short succession.
"Yes, that's very cute, Husker, but we are leaving," Alastor said, and there came a dreadful rattle as a chain that glowed with sickly light appeared, shackling Husk's throat to Alastor's fist. Husk didn't react to being yanked, instead reaching forward past Ahmadi, clasping Charlie's left hand in his.
"Upon this day, I, Husk, the Swindler Incarnate, offer and swear upon Naked Law, free of duress, aneternity of Service to Charlotte the Song of Dawn, above and exclusive with all other masters in Heaven, Hell, and the Realms Outside," Husk declared. There was a loud magical snap, an outline of green surrounding the two of them. Now, Alastor actually looked angry, the eye not playing host to his monocle twitching.
"I, Charlotte Magne of the Morningstar, Song of Dawn, Heir of Hell, CLAIM your service from now until a time of your manumission by my word, above all other leaders and causes," Princess Charlotte answered, glaring Alastor in the eye as she did. There was a loud metallic bang, as the Deal was struck and she outright stole Husk's soul away from Alastor, the chain jumping from being connected from Husk's throat to Alastor's hand, to instead being held lightly in Charlie's.
Oh you clever cat, Husk. Cain found a smile coming to his face, as he joined Charlotte, at the Princess's right hand, standing so that Vaggie was in Cain's protected shadow. Charlie herself released the chain, and it faded from view. The rest of the hotel had gone silent, even the wounded ceasing their moaning for the sheer gravity of what they shared the room with. All knew they were witnesses to something that had never happened before in the history of Hell, and might never happen again.
They were witness to the Radio Demon not just losing, but facing utter and absolute defeat. Humiliating and unqualified rout.
"This isn't over," Alastor began.
Charlie cut him off by grabbing him by the collar of his jacket in a fist that could have halted the transit of the moon in the sky, glaring at him. "You'd better pray to that God that you don't believe in that it is. Because I promise you this is the last chance you're ever going to get from me to run away. And you have ten seconds to exit my sight," she said, her expression a portrait of her father in his legendary rage. "Nine."
She threw him, and Alastor, despite his best intents and his considerable attributes, stumbled two steps toward the ruined face of the Hotel. He stood, straightening his bow-tie, and held out a hand. The cane that he'd embedded in the floor ripped its way out, racing directly toward him, heedless of how it would slam through Husk to do it. Charlie, though, caught the thing before it could do so, then without hesitation hurled it like a javelin out of the doors so that it crashed through the front of a building across the street.
"Eight," Charlie said. "Seven."
Alastor glared, but turned and strode out of the hotel. When he reached the sidewalk on 'five', he extended his hand again, and the cane once again extracted itself from the rubble and raced into his grasp. Half way between 'four' and 'three', he walked down the street and vanished from view.
"This is going to have consequences," Cain muttered.
"Everything does," Husk muttered. "At least now we're not going to have to face 'em with a knife already planted 'tween our fuckin' ribs."
"I fear that knife is already there, just waiting for him to push," Cain said. "And now he has no reason not to."
"Then we'd better stab back when he does," Husk said, and moved Rachel's body at long last to a spot on the ground, directly beside Niffty. He crossed her arms above her breast as Cain did his best to do for the pixie, then rose. "I mean it," he said, not turning back to Charlie. "Not just to get out from under him. I mean it."
"I know, Husk," Charlie said, her rage having faded, and now quiet tears were welling in her eyes. "I know."
They found Angel Dust an hour later, Regenerating from an impalement related 'death' in the rubble at the back of the Hotel. All told, of the twenty eight in the program, six were Expunged, and of the other two hundred ninety living in the building, eighty joined them in demise.
Thought the swarm of Exorcists didn't return, the Harrying of Hell lasted for days, with Gabriel marching millions of Angels through Hell's population centers and leaving them ashes and ruin in his wake. Only at the hinterlands of Wrath did the charge grind to a halt, its grim momentum spent. More damage had been done in less than a week to the structure of Hell than had been done in the months before it. And once Heaven's momentum was spent, they didn't even need to fight their way free or bother to defend. They simply left, vanishing as though the force which cut that rut of ruin had never been.
Above the heads of all, even the densest, was now clearly hanging a sword of Damocles. And they could hear the tick-tick-tick of the cords of its thread giving way.
"Metronome was more than just a turning point in an otherwise mediocre television series. It was a symbol which the series embraced for the rest of its run, even to the current day. A machine, heedlessly ticking to rigid rhythm. A symbol of conformity which allows no deviation. In a way, it was an act of utter brilliance to name that stretch of three episodes after a device of temporal control, if only because of the context that it implied.
The sound of it is a terrifying thing. It calls to mind a clock in its most fearsome element, not just counting away time, but maliciously devouring it, because the count is never quite congruent with what the listener is used to in common time-keeping. It sounds either slow, creeping, and relentless, a predator creeping through the underbrush constantly at your back and waiting until you tire and become distracted, or it sounds too fast, rampaging, and hungry, the predator already in its pounce and leaving you nowhere left to run.
Brilliance can come from unexpected sources. A few rebellious demons and damned men managed to create a narrative which, in its lashing out against the series' own mediocrity, made it something of an oracle, not for itself but for the war which gave birth to it. Tick, and there was death, massacre, and pain. Tick, and there was sorrow, grief, and loss. Tick, and there was anger, resentment, and rage. Tick, and there was death, massacre and pain anew.
But there is the brilliance of both Metronome as a subset of the television program, and the metronome itself as an object. Entropy always wins. Friction robs the device of its stability and its energy. While the continuity of its motion holds for longer than most care to pay attention, it always fails. And given enough time, the metronome falls still, and silent."
– Werner Herzog, late Film Critic and former Heavenly Propaganda Secretariat.