"You don't look so hot," Loona said, as Maelstrom fidgeted in front of the portal that she'd opened. "You don't need to come if you're not feeling it today."
"No, I'm coming," he said, but for all he should have looked a terrifying beast man, his brow was furrowed not in anger but in worry. Loona, though, rolled her eyes and activated her Human Disguise as she passed through into the Human World, exiting her warehouse and entering a nearly identical one a plane away. This building was owned by a business which was owned by a business which was owned by a business which was owned by she herself, a weirdo piece of corporate Three-Card-Monty that Tiff had been explicit about when dealing with the humans. Loona didn't see why all this skulduggery was needed. She could just be another racketeer making money off of medicine. There were plenty of those up here.
The portal she'd come in through dumped her into her office's bathroom, a spot that only she had access to. It was a pretty good bathroom, all told. You could probably put two shitters in there if you wanted to. But that would have lowered its utility for its actual purpose; as a portal landing-pad. It was easy to get these dumbass humans looking in another direction and pitch things down a hole she made where they weren't paying attention. It was a lot harder to blindly open a portal into the Human World and be sure that nobody would see her. She'd frosted the glass of the bathroom window just to make sure that such a thing was essentially impossible.
"Is this a toilet?" Maelstrom asked, looking around her spot with his own Human Disguise coming online, still leery of crossing the threshold. Loona sighed, reached back, gabbed his collar and gave him a tug forward, which stumbled him across that invisible line that he'd been so terrified of. He stood, locked solid in an awkward pose as though awaiting some horrible curse to fall on him for his transgression. All that resulted was a continuing electric buzzing noise making its way through the bathroom door.
"And shut up for a second," Loona said. She moved to one of the tiles on the wall, pushing it in then sliding it aside, allowing her to peep through the hole into the office. There was nobody in there. Glorious. "Alright. We're clear."
"I don't feel clear," Maelstrom muttered.
"Stop being such a puppy about this," she shook her head and moved into her office her in the Human World. Well, she was the 'acting manager', the nepotistically appointed daughter of a man who existed only in paperwork, to oversee the goings on of Last Chance LLC. She knew the humans hated the thought of a bitch that looked like her giving them orders. She also knew that one of them was trying to rat her out to her 'father', not knowing that one didn't exist and the other was an imp who would back her all the way to the hilt if she asked him to.
"So this is the Human World? It's so... ordinary," Maelstrom said, as he looked at the portrait of an older moribund human who was vaguely similar to Loona's human disguise; her 'father's visage being yet another fabrication to keep the humans eyes away from the prize.
"Yup. They live boring fuckin' lives. Put this on. Our jobs are medicine adjacent," she said, throwing him a paper mask.
"Wear it where?" Maelstrom didn't know what to make of it until she put her own on. Leave it to humans to make looking stupid a pandemic response. After all, it wasn't as though Hellhounds like them could either catch or spread whatever plague they were so worked up about. He had only just gotten the thing in place when the door rattled, somebody 'knocking' with a boot.
"Unlock that for me?" she asked. Maelstrom pointed at the door, then opened it, causing a portly human to flinch, not expecting this door to open right now.
"Tabernack, who are you?"
"I ain't paying him, don't complain," she said from the desk. Maurice looked past the door, and the glamoured Hellhound holding it open, to look at her.
"When'd you get in?" he asked.
"I sleep under the desk. What is it, Maurice?" she asked. Maurice turned a suspicious glare to Maelstrom, then to her.
"Y'know, I think I need to actually ask this. Who the fuck is this guy?"
"I'm... ah..." Maelstrom said, no doubt realizing just how strange his name was to the likes of humans.
"That's Mal, he's skittish, and he doesn't work here. Quit your piss-babying. What's got you kicking my door?" she asked, settling back in a chair which was, by design, not sized for somebody of her proportions, stature, or weight, but instead for somebody quite a bit bigger.
"I've heard back from Dagtayrev out in Vladivostock," he said, pulling out his phone and showing her a rack of messages in a language she was having time picking out. Spoken language was easy for a creature from Hell like her. But written language? Well, she was weaker in those than most, in that there were whole 'language families' that she reflected off of. Slavic languages were a particular lack for her. She gave an impatient shrug, making sure her expression was a bit less than impressed at having been 'ambushed' by a foreign language. "Fuck, right, sorry. Forgot. He's talking about Mir 7."
"I work with dozens of medicines each day, if not hundreds. You're going to have to be a lot more specific than that, Maurice," she said. Maurice was a worrier by nature, and a stress-eater – hence his belly.
"The Phages!" Maurice said. "The treatment we were getting to sell to people dealing with methicillin-resistant Staph A. Ever since they got it in their heads they can just repaint the map, our transport people backed out, and now the Russians are refusing to release what we paid for! Which means that by the time the log-jam clears, it'll all be spoiled product."
"Well fuck me, that's a couple mill down the shitter, then. Insured?" she asked, projecting for all the world that she didn't give an actual fuck about the sheer amount of capital she'd just wasted, as though it was a problem that she would be sheltered from. Inwardly, she was shrieking.
"It's the Russians, Ma'am. They aren't going to pay shit," Maurice said. Fuck. FUUUUCK. She wanted desperately to roar 'FUUUCK' so loudly that it broke every window in the entire building, but she couldn't afford to look personally invested in this. She was the undeserving daughter of a reclusive pharma-billionaire. Her place was not to give a shit about when things went wrong. Which they absolutely were.
"Well, write it off, get back to business," she said. "Anything on those immunosuppressants?"
"Ma'am... that was most of our discretionary budget that the fucking Gopniks shit on. We can keep our lights on, but we're going to be going through a fucking lean quarter, unless your father decides to bail us out."
Which he wouldn't because he didn't exist, and Loona literally had no money that she could throw at this problem. But she had appearances to keep up. Maelstrom just stared at her as though he'd never seen her before in his life, and was alarmed at what he saw. She pulled out her Hellphone and faked dialing out, kicking her feet up and raising a 'wait a minute' finger at Maurice. "Heya daddy! I'm just... no. I don't... I don't need a fucking abortion, I haven't had sex in like... WHY AM I TALKING ABOUT THIS!" she snapped, which caused both of the men in the room to recoil away. "Daddy, the Russians – it was Russians, right?" she quickly asked, to which Maurice nodded silently "fucked us out of our money. Can we get a little bit of help?"
And then, she was silent for a long time, her expression moving from confusion, to disappointment, to just a moment of outrage, followed by resignation, all according to what she presumed would be an authoritarian tyrant of a father saying 'no money, solve it yourself' would deliver over the phone.
"Fine. I'll do it myself," she said, and aggressively hung up. "I'm gonna go solve this shit. Don't let the hens scatter," she declared as she got up, grabbed Maelstrom by the arm, and stormed out of the office to the stammering of Maurice. She quickly descended through the catwalks to the teeming warehouse that was stacked with large metal boxes – industrial refrigerators, perhaps, and to the back of the thing where the trucks would park.
"What just happened?" Maelstrom asked, voice pitched low.
"Somebody just fucked me, that's what happened," she said.
"I'm sorry, what?" he asked.
"Somebody. Fucked. With. The money," she said. "So I'm going to go unfuck it, somehow."
"Wait a minute wait a minute," Maelstrom said, getting ahead of her. "We are the only two Hounds up here. If they detect us..."
"Humans are remarkably oblivious in most cases," Loona said. "And we're not the only Hounds here in the Human World."
"Really? Then who?" Maelstrom asked, his arms crossed before his chest. He could already see that there were humans looking at the scene they presented, of somebody staring down their 'boss', and gossiping. That made his demanding tone wilt a touch, perhaps, but it didn't outright kill it.
"All of our truck-drivers," Loona said. She then pointed one out, a big fellow with nearly-white hair and mismatched eyes. "Like Terry, here. Did you hear the shit-storm, Terry?"
"What? What happened?" Terry's voice didn't match the look of him, being an octave too high.
"We've lost all of our Phage money," she said.
"That was a lot of money, boss," Terry said.
"Think I don't know that? Fuck! What the fuck are those humans thinking? Why would they cancel all that fucking medicine?"
"Human reasons don't need to be sensible to sway them," Terry said with a shrug. "I mean, look at their elections some time."
"How 'bout I don't and say that they're awful?" Loona muttered. She wiped her hand down her face with a groan, then faced him. "Alright, Terror, we're going to have to do some illegal shit so we don't end up so deep in the red that we'll never see the black again."
"What kind of illegal shit are you thinking about?" Terror asked.
"Please don't do illegal shit when we're surrounded by potentially hostile humans," Maelstrom tried to rein her in while such a thing was still possible.
"We're always surrounded by hostile humans. Why do you think so many of them turn into Sinners?"
"I hear conflicting stories about that," Maelstrom noted.
"Well, whatever. If you're so desperate not to do the obvious thing and back-fill that money with some good old larceny, how would you go about saving my business from fucking insolvency?" she asked, fists on her hips.
"Do those humans that 'fucked you' still have your money and their goods?" he asked, providing air quotes because it was still a pretty firmly held rumor that she hadn't 'gotten fucked' by anybody as yet. Which put her in a similar boat to Maelstrom, actually.
"Yeah, they probably do, the fuckers," she said.
"So why don't we just... take them ourselves?" Maelstrom said. She leaned back, as his words seemed to hit her like a ball-peen directly to her brain-matter, revealing what she had overlooked.
"Mal, either you're a goddamned genius, or I'm a goddamned moron," she said. She then reached behind her, to where her tail no doubt was, and pulled out the Proxy's grimoire, with which she violated the barriers between planes and places with equal contempt. "Wanna go save my business?"
"...you know what? Why not." he said.
Chapter 17
Beware Of The Devil You Don't Know
Krieg was already starting to get annoyed by Uller as a student.
It wasn't that he was lazy, because he wasn't. When she assigned him work, he launched into it with verve and vigor, indefatigable and unflinching. Even those wearisome projects which she had always dreaded, the crafting of those alchemic reagents she used for her more potent Thaumaturgies, he took to with eagerness.
It wasn't that he was disrespectful, because he wasn't. He hung on her every word, treating them as the gospel that they were. He didn't question her refusal to teach certain things that most other would-be warlocks would be striding toward heedless, merely accepting that she knew things better than he did, trusting that her knowledge and her blinkers on it were not out of jealousy, but prudence.
It wasn't that he was slow, because he wasn't. He was learning things as quickly as she could teach, already having eclipsed in a month what it had taken Mother and Krieg working in quiet concert a year for her to learn. He could even perform weirds with modifications despite her not having yet taught him how to. For to Uller, it seemed that the hard-fought victories of impish magic were to him mere talent, something that he could breeze into. Alright, maybe there was some jealousy there, but not with regards to her knowledge, but his advancement.
Frankly, she hated having somebody was doing this faster than she had.
But she calmed herself, took a breath, and faced the old proverb once more; who is the greater master? The one who succeeds ten times in a row? Or the one who fails ten thousand times in a row, then never fails again?
He was playing catch-up to her heedless advance. So be it. She could stomach that he wouldn't eclipse her because he needed her to forge ahead, and she needed him to consolidate her footing.
"You're glaring at him again," Tilla said, gently rocking the son that she'd entitled 'Wayland' in her arms as he just calmly looked around. She again felt an urge to have her mother check that he was actually a boy, because the hair that was growing in on his head around his slowly hardening horns was a lot darker than male-imps tended to have. But she knew that such claims would only rile her mother and do her no favors.
"I am not," she blatantly lied. Well, some lack of artifice on her part was to be expected, as she'd only seen seventeen years and frankly she wasn't even done growing yet. She would never be Tilla's mutant height – the woman was taller than some humans, for the Abyss' sake! – but by Krieg's reckoning she had still an inch left in her to shoot up. If nothing else, she could possibly equal the height of her uncle/half-brother Blitz. It would fitting if nothing else, because a crone should cut an impressive figure, and dainty women no matter their power are seen as weak.
Mother didn't even dignify that falsehood with an opinion. She just turned a flat look at her middle daughter.
"Fine. I was. How does he learn so quickly? I took twice as long to learn half so much!" she complained, glaring at the door to the reagent-lab, which was glass and soundproofed. Well, it was air-tight in truth, but that made it necessarily soundproof with how it was done.
"How well supported were you when you were learning?"
"I was well supported! By you!" she pointed at her mother.
"A mixed-blooded non-Thaumaturge who was not even supposed to be allowed to read, let alone learn the secrets of our blood-sorcery," she said. "Whereas young Uller is learning from one of the most well read Thaumaturges outside of the grasp of Cruac. Of course he's coming along faster. You had to build the road that he can speed along on."
And that was exactly what her musings had told her, but coming from Krieg's mother instead of her own mind actually made them land a little heavier, and a little truer.
"I suppose that when he's a competent enough sorceror, in a year or so, his rate of increase will slow to a crawl, and he'll be trailing you for the rest of his magical career," Tilla said. She paused, leaning in to sniff at Wayland's swaddling. "If you don't do it soon I'm going to the doctor."
"Still constipated?" Tilla asked.
"Not to compare children, but you were shrieking and shitting pretty much endlessly in your first few months. And look at him!" Tilla turned Wayland toward Krieg, and the little spawn just casually blinked at her, not mussed in the slightest.
"He's adorable," Krieg said.
"He never cries!"
"And you're complaining after dealing with me?" Krieg couldn't help but laugh.
"Every spawn cries! Usually a lot. If you hadn't gotten out of Bal Matheer, you'd... you'd probably know that first hand by now," Mother seemed to hitch as she recalled exactly why and what drove Krieg to put her foot down, drug her mother, and smuggle her family with Blitz's help out of that cult compound. Still, Tilla Miller was a resilient imp. She'd had to be. And that apple fell straight down, as the saying went.
"And instead, I take a pill and my life continues as I deem fit, instead of by the designs of Ruut Nuckelavee. All is well in Hell. Except perhaps my young brother's compacted bowel, but that's what doctors are for. It's not like we lack the funds to pay a visit!" Krieg pointed out, and Mother had to nod and agree. While Mother was indeed resilient, she'd had to bend a long time, and to an extreme amount. Learning how to bend back would be a feat of decades. She was not used to having people willing to help her.
Neither was Krieg, but she knew part of that was because she had a well-deserved arrogance regarding her gifts.
Whether the conversation was going to remain on the topic of shitty babes, jealous regard over strident apprentices, or forge new dialectical roads would remain a mystery, because at that point, the doors were pushed open by a strong-armed shove. And in came a Sinner, about as tall as Mother if no taller, his body covered in fine but total grey hairs, and his face was home to many burgundy eyes. The strangled yell of pain that announced the door opening hit the air, and Krieg sat a little straighter in her seat. Customers again. Today had been, so far, slow.
"Welcome to Blitz-Krieg Magical Solutions. Do you have an appointment?" Mother asked from her spot near the door. The spider-Sinner turned to her, taking a measure of her, likely considering her not to be a danger, and then gave a shake of his head.
"Naw. I'm here to talk about a wizard."
"What frame of wizard are you seeking to subvert or kill?" Krieg then asked.
"What? No, no. That ain't what I mean. Fuckin'... I need to hire a wizard for a job."
"Then you had best look in Pentagram City, for most of the Presbyters' Union is headquartered there," Krieg said, but from the look of confusion on the Sinners face, he didn't even know that such a thing existed, let alone where to find it. Which meant he was ripe prey for the likes of her. Fools and their money were soon and easily parted, after all.
"Or perhaps you were using 'wizard' in its most figurative sense, and need some purveyors of the mystical arts, in which case you need come no further. What is the nature of this work that needs doing?" Krieg asked, already starting to create a tally of what this would cost him.
"Wizard shit," he said, as he dug for a Hellphone and opened it. Wizard shit? Really? Her opinion of him decreased, and her costs increased. But once he had his phone out, he started reading from a list. "Uh, says here we're gonna need some shit like 'Ward Breaking', 'Anti-Scrying', 'Anti-telekill', 'ley-tracing', 'local portalling', and some form of teleportation. Fuck me, that's a fair bit."
"What's going on out here?" Uller asked, having cracked the door to her lab and now looked at the client in front of them. This was obviously just a gopher, Krieg decided. The true moneyed individual would likely send such a fool to be deniable and at-arm's-length from their contractors. It was only prudent.
"A client has come," she said over her shoulder, then faced the Sinner once more. "I can provide all of those requirements. I trust there are more as well, secondary ones? Warding of harm? Damage mitigation? Farsight? I can offer those as well."
"I'mma take your word for that one, toots," he said. "How much that gonna swing me?"
"Duration?"
"Couple days," he said.
"Local or remote?" she then asked.
"Pretty fuckin' remote, all considered," the spider-Sinner said.
She quickly did the math in her head, tacking on the fees and various bits and bobs that would need to be compensated, and then the multiplier for her having to do it outside of Imp City where all of her 'power base', such that it was, could be found. "Twenty one thousand per day for the whole soup of it," she said. He outright flinched at the number. So that was utterly unreasonable to him. "There are certain ways to lower that price, if you are willing to shed certain protections. A minimal-deliverable-package would pull from you some fifteen thousand, but would lack certain... desireable protections."
"Fifteen's a bit more workable," he said. "I think he'll agree to that."
"Grand," Krieg said, rounding her desk and moving to the Sinner with a hand extended. "I think we can do business with you."
"This should be informative," Uller said, now standing on the other side of the door with the rest of them.
"Yes, you'll likely learn more through days of practice than you could in months of study and theory," she said. The Sinner looked unhappy for some reason, musing on something that she didn't care about, before starting to extend his own hand for a shake. But both sides were cut off when Mother got a suspicious look on her face, and then loudly cleared her throat.
"Ahem? Before you make this formal? I have a question," she said.
"Out with it," Krieg paused.
"Remote is a very broad descriptor. Where is this magic supposed to take place?" Mother said. And now that it was mentioned that was a very important question that Krieg had overlooked. So yes. Answer that one, spider-boy.
"Oh, right. Lower Clouds of Heaven," the Sinner said. And with that, not only did Krieg retract her arm, she flinched back two steps.
"Are you fucking mad?" Krieg said.
"Lemme guess: Doin' your shit in Heaven's gonna be more expensive," the Sinner bemoaned, not grasping in the least her level of alarm.
"Absolutely not. In no Hell and under no God is this to be," Krieg said. Tilla, too, had taken her feet, and Uller was moving to Krieg's side.
"What's going on?" Uller asked, eyes on the Sinner.
"What are you sayin'?" the Sinner said.
"To launch me against Heaven is to ask me to quite messily provide suicide, which you cannot pull for me for any amount of wealth in the vast tracts of Hell, or all the vaults of its grim regents! There is no cost which I consider equal to the task, no demand you can inflict upon me which will bring me abouts, and I will now ask you to abandon this foolishness and never to bring it to me again."
"You can't be serious. Just a second ago you were sayin'–" the Sinner said.
"I was indeed saying, and as soon as the lunacy of your plot was revealed to me, I ceased saying, and declared with full throat and utter clarity 'no'. I will not work for or with you on this endeavor. And I recommend that you leave," Krieg said.
The Sinner looked at all of them, one fist clenching for a moment. In her place behind him, Krieg could see Mother reaching into the gun-safe and extracting a pistol, but before she could even bring it slowly up to keep the Sinner in check, he growled, and pointed at the two thaumaturges in front of him with a different hand, one that looked like it'd been split in half and that other half lost. "Fuck you. Fuck all a' yuz for fuckin' me around like this," he said, and then threw the door open with a tremendous bang that managed to shatter the bullet proof glass, flatten the inner door-knob, and cause one of the screws holding the hinge in place to fly out of its place, before storming out, looking not even wrathful, but instead possessed of a rageful disappointment.
All in the office were silent for a few moments, as he no doubt made for the elevator, and descended back to the ground floor and left their lives.
"I can now see why it was a bad idea to work with him... but why were you so adamant not to go to Heaven?" Uller said.
"I have done magic in the rings of Lust and Pride. I have stood in Purgatory's rotting corpse and beheld an impossibility and felt the weave and woof of the power that flows through all of us," Krieg said, still staring at the door, preparing to do something to defend them all if he decided to come back. With the chime of the elevator arriving in the hall, that worry was put paid. "In Heaven, imps would be at their least forms, so far away from the Abyss as Heaven has been constructed. I have no intention of going to a place where I am weak to do the most dangerous magic of my life. And there is no money which the likes of he nor even Lucifer Himself could offer me to spend my life so foolishly."
"So we just palm him off onto the next wizard who'll be less competent than us, and hope he dies before he gets a notion of revenge?" Uller asked.
"That is precisely what we do," she said. "Whatever insanity that he has in his head that would require magic of Hell in the fields of Heaven is the sort that we are better left out of."
"If you say so," Uller said.
"I do say so. Mother, you can rest, he's gone," Krieg said. Wayland, still in the crook of her arm, made occasional baby-noises, but didn't launch into wailing so all was right on that front. She finally nodded, sitting down as though the mere encounter had exhausted her; it must have, because she didn't even put the gun back, dropping it onto her desk and sitting back in her chair. "And as for you, you still have alchemic work to do. There will be other jobs, and other less-lunatic lunacies for us to launch ourselves against. Go to, apprentice, go to!"
If depression was a city, it's name would have been 'Vladivostok'.
The facades of imperial glory were either worn down and pocked by improper care and acid rain, or else covered in the most vulgar forms of profane graffiti that Slavic spite could imagine – and there was almost as little end to the vulgarity of the Slavs as there was to the cruelty of Lucifer. The place was built by a dying nation, overtaken by an insane ideology, and then allowed to die when the hegemon that had once ruled it left it to rot on the ground.
The tangled streets followed no grid nor any concession to common sense. Hell itself showed more sense in creation than the civic planners of this sad city on the far end of an uncaring country. If nothing else, Maelstrom had a far easier time understanding how the bus-routes worked in Imp City than they did here.
"Why do humans even live in this place?" Maelstrom asked, trying desperately to hug his coat closer to himself. They had stepped through in their previous clothing, and then immediately noped back to Hell for more appropriate garb, because the scene of Vladivostok here at the turning of the year was one of temperatures so frigid he was fairly sure he could feel his piss freezing solid inside his bladder. Considering that Loona was as bundled up as he was, she was not immune to its effects.
"Who the hell knows why humans do anything they do?" Loona groused, as she trudged through the snow-choked streets. They'd obviously landed on the tail-end of a blizzard, such that the city was still digging itself out. It did so fairly robustly, no doubt having to do this several times each year, but still, it was inconvenient. And it was fatally cold. "Let's just get to dick-face before my tits freeze off."
"Couldn't we have just portaled into his place?"
"I can't portal inside a building I've never been in before," she said. Then she grumbled and shook her head. "Okay, I could, but I'd have the same problem I do in Tours. I can't let them know I'm from Hell. So I gotta go in, and portal out."
Okay, that made a bit of sense. But still, he would have almost preferred to run that risk, than to have to trudge through these frigid, frigid streets. Fuck, this was miserable. How did temperatures even get this low? You'd think the planet were dying to allow the thermometers to dip to this level. But that was Maelstrom not understanding a number of things, including the notion of Global Warming, how it radicalized the effects of local climates, and that the universe outside of Hell was a lot weirder than he gave it credit.
"At least we're in the right spot," she said. The locals didn't turn any glance at them, their heads down as they underwent their late night-shift trudgings. Maelstrom felt at least a ghost of sympathy for these menials. They were out here in this stupidly cold weather despite not even having fur of their own because their employers and overlords demanded it of them. The spot, as Loona had pointed out, was a large warehouse not too distant from the docks that dominated a huge portion of the cityscape. It was being guarded by one surly, possibly drunken looking middle aged man that Maelstrom could see, there on the front side of it. But there were other entrances, both around the back of the wall of warehouses and likely from above as well.
He didn't relish the thought of having to climb up to those upper windows to break in. As bad as the wind was down here, it had to be be practically lacerating up there. "So how are we going in?" Maelstrom asked, shaking with cold.
"The front door, obv's," Loona said.
"The fron – what?" Maelstrom asked.
"Just let me do the talking," she said, as she started to hustle toward the door-guard, rounding a yet-unblown drift of snow, until she was practically standing in front of him. "Ho there, comrade. Fuckin' freezing enough for you?"
The middle aged man just stood, wavering in the wind, and stared.
"I said... Buddy? You alright there?" she asked.
She gave him a prod.
His arms, legs, and head fell off as though he were a poorly stacked pile of meat.
"The fuuuuuck?" Loona asked.
"The fuck? What the fuck is...?" Maelstrom asked, right over top of her. But he was cut off when he smelled something wafting in from the door behind him. Something... wrong.
She smelled it too, because her confusion fled for wariness, and she pulled him flat against the door that the now pile-of-dead-human had been 'guarding'. The door turned out not even to be locked. And when Maelstrom could look at the thing, he could easily see why. The locking mechanism – and only the locking mechanism of the entire structure, it alone – had crumbled to a sort of moist, pulpy rust that oozed from the degraded latch. The card reader still displayed a red light, saying that the door was still locked. The card reader was blind to the fact that it's body was now dead, just like its guard.
Maelstrom pushed the door open gently. Within, he could see a reception desk and a time-card clock setup, a young human woman with blond hair sitting behind the desk. As motionless as the guard. Loona looked utterly debilitated by the smell, wincing and blinking against it, so Maelstrom snapped off a curl of ice from the side of the building, and under-hand lobbed it at the reception. It hit her fairly lightly in the temple. Her head then rotated 180 degrees and flopped down onto her own chest, staring upside down and bonelessly at the opposite wall. Okay: gross, weird, and fucking terrifying was the order of the day? How familiar.
"The fuuuuuck?" Loona asked again, this time much quieter in her throat, as the oppressive gloom of this entire region now imparted silence onto her as well. Occasionally, she wretched, reacting to something outside his range of smell. Which was odd, because he was in front of her. "You ever see shit like this?" she asked.
Maelstrom turned a glance to her, then moved to the receptionist. Yup, deader than dogfood. He gently touched her arm, and noted how the joint slid around as though there were nothing holding her limb in place except for the skin containing it. When he finished, the carcass oozed to the floor, the asymmetry causing her to flop to one side, then essentially disconnecting every co-location of anatomy that was keeping her upright. She didn't so much fall out of the chair, as pool out of it, leaving one leg cocked upward at a weird angle.
"Her bones are intact, but there's no connection between them. What the fuck?"
"Why is she dead?" Loona then asked, holding a hand to block her snout, which in her glamoured form made it seem like she was perpetually about to stifle a sneeze.
"I don't know. Maybe the bones aren't the only things not connected to each other?" he asked. He had no desire to touch this collapsed pile of dead human anymore. He left it behind, and moved to the double doors. These too were breached the way the one to the streets of Vladivostok had been, with the locking mechanism turned into some strange meat-like substance and then easily overpowered. He was delicate with the door. Just from the feel of it under his fingertips, he could tell if he moved rashly, it'd squeal and give them away to whatever the source of that stench was.
Beyond was a warehouse floor, not too dissimilar to the one that Loona had set up on that city about ten hours of planetary rotation away. The signage was different, obviously a differing language that he, unlike Loona, had no difficulty translating in his head. But the main thing that caught his eye, more than industrial machinery that he was familiar with from his time in Hell, were the puddles of dead human, and the carcasses more understandable to his mentality than that who were near them.
"What is this?" Loona asked at a whisper, ghosting with him into the structure.
"A raid," Maelstrom said. He had been trained for this kind of shit in the Legion, before he got snapped up by Birch. And the signs were all here. "Surprise, shock, and violence of action. The puddles are the ones that didn't see it coming. The carcasses are the ones that did, and tried to run."
He paused by the carcass nearest him, and tugged at the hole in his vest and shirt, both stained red by the human's blood which was still tacky under him. He died recently. Which meant that the one out the front door had died first, possibly as much as a half hour before this one... and then froze in the cold so that any jostling caused him to shatter. This hole was odd, too. Not a bullet-hole – too big and the wrong shape. He pulled the body off of the floor, gently, and looked at its other side. The wound went straight through.
"Humans use guns, right?" Maelstrom asked at a whisper, ducking back behind a cargo container and guiding Loona with him. Not because he saw anybody or anything, but because it was not wise to be in the open in freaky circumstances.
"Usually. Why?" she finally looked like she wasn't about to outright vomit, but the discomfort was clear on her face.
"That one was stabbed. By a blade, six centimeters wide, single edged, razor sharp on the cutting surface," he said. He leaned around the corner, spotting another human carcass, this one cut into two parts, the top part landing near a tool of some sort that was caked in drying blood. He'd been split in half about the longest direction a human could be cut. "And another, split like a log. Why? Just use a gun! It's easier!"
"Unless this was people sending a message," she said. Maelstrom shrugged, and skulked out from the corner, skittering across the floor, avoiding the pools of blood that would betray his passage and moving to another stand of carcasses. This one, though, was a massive behemoth of a human, one who probably would have done well in the Bleeding Pits. He was nevertheless dead, all two meters and a hundred plus kilograms of muscles that he was. His hands looked singularly messed up, as though he'd punched so hard and so often as to shatter them. He was dead by a hole that was driven through his eye and out the back of his head.
"This is disconcerting," he murmured.
"Wait... what's... this?" she asked, lifting the ham-sized fist that he'd given only a momentary inspection, and with her slightly longer fingernails was able to pull something out of the wounds. It was a pin, bent but still obviously a shiny silver 'D'. "The sweet merciful fuck?"
"I'm only seeing dead workers, and this guy should have put at least one of the attackers down," Maelstrom said, gesturing to the dead human beside him.
"Maelstrom, I know who did this," Loona said.
"Who?" he asked.
"The last guys I saw wearing this pin? I massacred dozens of them. They were not capable of this kind of mayhem!" she hissed, then flinched, grabbing him and pulling him flat against the open door to the industrial refrigerator that was next to them. It was chilly, waves of misty condensation rolling out around their ankles, but it gave them freedom from eyeshot from whatever she was worried about.
After a moment, glancing around the corner, he could see one. He was a human, from the look of him, a lot smaller than this warrior human who was dead at Maelstrom's feet. He wore a finely tailored black suit, a black tie, and black shades over his eyes. But it was the way that he moved that gave him away. Maelstrom had killed plenty of Sinners, and they like the humans that they'd been before were beholden to anatomical laws, laws of movement, points of rotation, methods of gait. This human broke all of them. His movement was too smooth. His stride ate too much ground. And the way that he did it in fancy shoes without making so much as a click just nailed the fucking weird into place with one final nail.
Loona leaned around above him, about to go further but Maelstrom gently eased her back so that only one eye peered around the edge as his did. He knew very well how not to be seen even with Hellhound physiology. And he was very much getting the feeling that he ought be doing it now. "Who are they?" Maelstrom asked in a breathy whisper, so faint that he almost repeated it, because he wasn't sure it'd meet Loona's ears where they were positioned less than a meter away.
"Just a minute... I... holy shit there she is," she hunched low, her body now pressed on his back as though trying to press the two of them invisibly into the floor. Maelstrom's gaze flit about until he saw the one that had seemingly inspired her fear.
It was a human woman, her skin a few shades paler than Maelstrom's disguise, but her hair a pale blond. She wore wraparound shades on her face, moving a bit more normally than the others who were up there in the foreman's office with her. They slid like they were made of slime, gliding rather than walking. The woman, though? She walked. She walked with terrible weight.
"I thought they were just a joke but... but now I understand," Loona whispered, staring wide eyed in terror at the beings which were obviously not human, obviously not normal, obviously not natural. "What the fuck happened to the DHORKS?"
"Yup, all on its way back to 'ya, don't you worry about a thing," Blitz said as he re-entered the office, the door slamming shut behind him. Weird that he wasn't using the portals.
"One would think you're trying to curry favor, the expediency you show," Lucifer's voice came from the phone in his hand that was on speaker. Blitz, though, outright laughed at that.
"What was I s'posed to do? Wait until he had that shit under lock and key? Or a lock and key that mattered at all? Fuck no. Do it now, have it done," he said.
"Then your business today is concluded. But since you're already in your office, you knew that. I will call on you again in the future," he said, then hung up.
"Uh... sir? Is it wise to use that kind of tone with the King of All Hell?" Moxxie asked a fairly obvious and important question.
"Hrm? Oh he's fine as long as I get shit done fast," Blitz said with a dismissive wave. "So folks, this is... wait a minute, where's everybody?"
"Just us imps today," Millie said.
"Your daughter called in 'busy with bullshit', and said that Maelstrom is with her," Moxxie said.
"Oh, well that explains why she wanted the book," he shrugged. He looked at the wall of jobs, a long line of them crossed out one by one until there was only one left, and that one was being offered to Maelstrom in particular. "Well fuck me. Long weekend, guys?"
"I wouldn't say no to that," Millie said. She paused, though, after leaving her chair, and turned to Blitz. "Are you gonna be okay, Blitz? You seem kinda... different."
"Huh? Oh, that's nothin'. I'm fine," Blitz said, but had a very distracted tone. And demeanor. And behaviors. All of it was pointing out to Moxxie's now broadened and deepened senses that there was in fact something either wrong or unsettled about Blitz, as clear as though he'd taken to carrying a giant neon billboard pointing down at him and saying 'I have problems but can't talk about them'. And that word, 'can't', was the one which stayed Moxxie's proverbial hand. As much as the fairly awful imp that was Blitzø Miller nevertheless could count himself amongst Moxxie's few friends, it was clear that he had to actually think about whatever his problem was, or he'd just flail around and make a mess to no good effect. Besides which, leaving now meant that he could go home now. It had been a taxing week, all things considered. However wealthy they were making themselves by their own hands, it was still tiring work.
"You sure 'bout..." Millie began, but cut herself off when Moxxie slipped his tail around hers and gently tugged her toward the portal he was generating. It was so Satan-blessedly handy that they could just portal to-and-from home. Not having to keep up a car, or deal with traffic, was keeping his hair from falling out early as such worries had inflicted on his own grandfather.
The Manse of the Voice was much improved over what it'd been before. Ordinarily, repairing the damage that had been inflicted on it during their showdown would have taken months and heavy equipment. Moxxie, though, was now a thaumaturge. He could simply rewind the thing. And he did rewind it, past Birch's entire ownership of the grim and moody manor estate, and then past several other Proxies in turn until he found one who had an agreeable aesthetic. Gone were the dark, oppressive shades, the stark and unadorned lines, and in their place filigree and traces of gilding, the dark veins of Qliphoth wood inlaid with moonsilver and plain old gold to make the three colors pop and give the entire building an autumnal feel.
The ghosts of this place were somewhat mollified by the change in decor, he could sense. With the gloom that had bound them in horrible death lightened, they now had a less unpleasant environment to immaterially wander through.
It'd taken a bit of futzing around, and a bit of work, but he'd managed to turn this tomb-domicile into an actual home.
"Any plans this weekend, hon?" Moxxie asked as she began to essentially skip toward the big, comfortable couch that was now sat before a television that could have served as a theatre screen.
"Oh no. This is a lazy weekend. I'm not doin' nothin'," She said, jumping up into the human-scale sofa, then sprawling out on it and kicking her hooves up. Moxxie turned another glance back to Blitz, before the portal closed. He would have to deal with his problems on his own. Hopefully by now he'd actually picked up some facility in doing that. Well, if he didn't he was now an hour away and without his book, so he'd have to drive all that way to bug him again. At the very least, Moxxie wagered, he had an hour of Blitz-Free Time.
Moxxie wasted very little time hopping up onto that sofa behind her, opting to take the step-up that a short stool provided, because for all its comfort, this thing was not intended for imps. He didn't let his hooves fall onto it, though, because they were still slick with slush. He gave them a few shakes, until the worst of it was on the floor and out of his immediate concern. Then, he scooched up next to his wife and began to knead her ankles, flicking the occasional bit of detritus from them. And he even took a moment to prise a hex-nut out of the heel of her hoof. How had that even gotten in there? And how long had she ignored it, for that matter?
She gave a languid sigh of relief now that it was out, flexing her legs slightly now that the discomfort that she may well have either been ignoring or was only borderline aware of now departed her.
Honestly, Moxxie could have just ramped up his mind and spent a decade in this moment, with her smiling and comfortable in their palace of a house, with Blitz an hour away, with all of the concerns of a Hell at war with Heaven for the moment levelled on somebody else's shoulders. It would hurt nobody to do it. All of Creation would go on later without even noticing that he'd chosen to spend years enjoying a single, perfect moment.
But he didn't. Because the next moment might be better.
It was a sort of heady, almost terrifying form of optimism that pragmatic Moxxie had never had in his existence before. His Satanic upbringing demanded of him power that he'd hadn't had. His 'apprenticeship' under Blitz Miller (nee Nuckelavee) in the art of killing for cash was a long-awaited and much-preferred change. He'd cut his teeth on the rampaging and indiscriminate violence of mafia hits. They always bothered him in how… messy they were. Precision was more his style. And now that precision was making money by killing the deserving. And while yes, Blitz wanted to kill everybody for no good reason, Moxxie could temper things at IMP. Keep them killing authoritarian dick-heads, and letting those more undeserving of lethal business slip to the back burner, and then eventually, all the way off of the back of the stove.
He was lucky. He was tremendously lucky, that he got to live the life he was now living. He didn't discount that in the slightest. If luck were truly a force in nature, and not just people's proclivity to blame their own bad decisions on misfiring pattern recognition, then luck fucking owed him this. It owed both of them this.
"Wanna binge-watch some shitty human TV?" Millie asked from where she was sprawled out with her legs up in his lap.
"I'd love to," Moxxie said. And as they turned on the SinLink and connected to what the humans called 'entertainment', Moxxie noticed something as he held up the remote. A smell, in particular.
He put it down, the smell receding. Then he lifted his hand again. The one that'd pulled the hex-nut out of Millie's hoof. It smelled... like burnt sugar.
No.
Moxxie sat there, trying to come up with another reason why he should be smelling that right now. But when he ran out of them (it didn't take long, as he was certain that Millie wasn't afflicted with Romeotism), he did something that would be a bit more blatant, but much more sure.
He licked his wife's ankle.
"Moxxie! Stooo~p, we're just gettin' started!" Millie giggled, her tone indicating that she was not averse in the slightest to him continuing. But unlike usually when Moxxie applied tongue to wife, this was not to the intention of getting her motor running. She was a hair-trigger in that regard; it didn't take a lot of effort to get her ready to go. No, this time he did with his tongue not to imbue sensation, but to acquire taste.
Anise and molasses.
Her sweat tasted like anise and molasses. He was still for a moment as the implications settled onto him.
"I was just jokin', hon. You can go on if you like," she said, idly prodding him in the face with her hoof. But when she actually turned back, and saw the look on his face, she paused. "Hon? Is something wrong, sweetie?"
"W... When..." Moxxie began. Then he realized exactly who he was talking to, and the circumstances. He cleared his throat and forced the strangulated sound out of his words before he started uttering them, even managing somewhat to sound 'casual' as he asked his question. "When did you stop taking your pills?"
"A while ago, why?" she asked.
"When we moved in?" Moxxie asked.
"A bit before that," she said. "Moxxie, you're actin' kinda weird. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," Moxxie said. Then he tried to find a proper way to say it, but failing that, opted for any way. "It's aaaaah... you."
"I'm not okay? I feel fine," she said, sitting up now, right next to him.
"You're pregnant."
"Pfft, sure. Sure I am," she said, giving him a bat on the chest.
He just stared at her.
"I think I'd know if I were pregnant, dummy!" she declared.
He continued to stare at her.
"I... holy sweet merciful motherfuck am I actually pregnant?" she asked, as her confusion started to overtake her dismissal.
"You certainly taste it," Moxxie said. Like a lot of their bodies Impish reproductive biology didn't make a lot of anatomical sense (their bladders were a converted, inactive second-stomach for Satan's sake!), and why the first half of the gestation made the mother smell and taste different was a matter of intense debate. Debate that in this particular moment Moxxie couldn't possibly give less of a fuck about. "You're pregnant, honey!"
"I'm pregnant?" she asked, as he stood up on the couch. She rose up, her confusion giving way to effervescent glee. "I'm gonna be a mom!"
"I love you so much," he said, trying to encapsulate all of the overwhelming torrent of his feelings into words, and managing only that much. It would have taken a thousand poets a thousand years to adequately describe his feelings for her, in this moment, let alone the next moment, but he was only one imp. And he was more a killer now than any kind of bard.
"I'm gonna be a mom!" Millie thrust her fists up into the air, in victory.
Well, if that was a victory for her, it was his victory too. That despite the hand that they'd been handed, as the dangling link in the chain of creation, that there was nothing in the cosmos that could undo the joy he felt in this instant.
He kissed his wife, the bearer of their child.
And all was right in Hell.
The entire place was painfully rank. As a Hellhound, Loona had both the gift and the curse of a very effective sense of smell. Right now, it was the latter. She somewhat envied Maelstrom in this moment. His nose must have been far weaker than hers. Not only could he not pick her up from the other side of a door, he also wasn't on the verge of vomiting at the unashamed wrongness that assaulted her here in this warehouse in the ass end of Vladivostok.
She slipped out from her hiding spot, eliciting a hiss from Maelstrom as she skirted around the back of the industrial refrigerator and over a small pile of dead humans, who looked to have been carved up and left to bleed on the floor. It was a bit of a hop to get over the blood, so she wouldn't leave footprints, but she managed it easily enough. And she knew that Maelstrom was following her. She moved closer, closer to the foreman's office, drawn with ire in her breast at the presence of whatever the fuck that DHORKS chick was doing here.
And then when she was about to step out from another corner, she found herself arrested, Maelstrom's grip on her upper arm stronger than steel. "What are you doing? We should leave!" Maelstrom hissed into her ear.
"These fuckers have my money!" she hissed back.
"Who cares about the money!" Maelstrom said. She tried to pull free of him, but couldn't. It seemed his intent to keep her from running those bastards down and ripping them apart just for the sheer inconvenience of making her come to fucking Vladivostok won. She didn't even consider that her anger was a bit... much... for herself. Her eagerness a bit... too... ripe.
"I'm not goin' back to square one 'cause of that bitch," Loona said, gesturing toward where the foreman's office and the blond woman were currently situated.
"Better square one, than dead," Maelstrom said, turning her square to him, holding her now by her shoulders. "I didn't recognize these things at first, because they didn't look anything like human last time... but I recognize them now. The way they move? The injuries they cause? Loona... I've fought these things before. In the Bleeding Pits."
"In the b... Why would they be in the Bleeding Pits? Who'd they piss off?" she asked at a whisper.
"No, you don't understand. They weren't thrown in. They Came Through. These things, they're from Outside," Maelstrom said.
"Why are they here, then?" she asked.
"Who cares? Let the humans deal with them! It doesn't have to be our problem!" Maelstrom stressed.
Then there was an electric crackle, as the public announcement system came on.
"You do realize you're standing right in front of a security camera, don'tcha?" a voice came through the speakers. Both Hellhounds froze, then slowly turned and looked up, to the little black hemisphere built on the side of a metal pillar. Yup. That was a camera alright.
"You'd best not be running for the doors now. You'll find it a lot harder to get out than it was to get in, stranger. Why don't you just settle down while we collect ya?" she continued.
"Fuck no?" Loona asked.
"Fuck no," Maelstrom agreed. And the instant that one of those things silently rounded the corner, Maelstrom instantly reacted, a practical blur of motion that released Loona, grabbed the human man by his face and driving it hard into the side of the refrigerator, then again and again in less than a second to a squelching sound of collapsing bone. The... thing... still tried to stab Maelstorm, even with part of his cranium now flat, which firmly proved Maelstrom's point that this thing wasn't human. Maelstrom responded to the attempted stabbing by sweeping the knife up, breaking the arm holding it, and driving it down through the thing's collarbone.
And then, having used up an entire second's worth of combat, he dug his fingers hard into the wound that the knife had cut, and then heaved with a sound of tearing fabric – not just from the victim of his attack but from his muscles shredding his own clothing at the same time – which was followed by a sickening plorp of chitin being torn apart.
The human seeming thing fell, his body now split from shoulder to navel vertically. There were no innards inside him. No gore, no viscera. Just a strange pink slurry that refused to spill and pool like blood.
And the tearing wound was already starting to pull itself closed.
"Whatever you do, don't use your teeth," Maelstrom said, grabbing Loona and dragging her back whence they came, now careless of the blood. "And if you do, spit like your life depends on it, BECAUSE IT DOES."
"Uh-uh-uh, you're not getting away that easy, not with my boys comin' in," the amplified voice of that bitch called from the foreman's office. And she was saying that as Loona grabbed the book, and opened it.
The pages she needed were all blank.
"WHAT THE FUCK?" she demanded, flipping and finding other magic, but finding nothing in the Grimoire that could get her away from here.
"DUCK!" Maelstrom said, forcing them down as an iron-studded club appeared, swinging toward them. It crashed into the metal, causing a dent in the steel, and the air seemed to vomit out another DHORK, leaving a festering wound in the air which slowly pulled closed behind her.
She lashed out with a brutal kick into the front of the DHORK's neck, one that landed not with a crunch of collapsing larynx or breaking bone, but the splut of a bullet fired into mud. Still, the DHORK staggered back under the impact, and she was able to tear the club – a tetsubo, as it was known – from the alien thing's hands. She immediately thrust it into Maelstrom's waiting grasp, as they left the recovering miscreation behind them.
"I don't know how to use this thing!"
"It's a club! You hit people with it!" she countered.
"THEY NEVER LET ME USE WEAPONS!" Maelstrom snapped at her. Right. Slave-soldier. But she wasn't going to just let that stand in his way. So she did as she'd done months before, against the fucker who had suborned her will and sent her father to die in the Human World. She reached out with her will, forming a connection to the Hellhound beside her. And the instant it snapped into place, she shared something she had that Maelstrom didn't. Basic and intermediate weapons training.
Maelstrom seemed to activate on pure instinct as the air shat out another DHORK, this one swinging a katana in a downward arc to bisect him. That instinct, now augmented by her worksman's knowledge of how to use stuff to fight other stuff, allowed him to block the blade, then twist, catching its edge on the studs, before wrenching hard and snapping the brittle blade. With movements almost too fast to follow, he then baseball-bat thrusted the tip of the weapon straight into the DHORK's nose, before swinging it over and down in a brutal, pile-driving blow that caved in the DHORK's skull from crown to lower jaw.
"How did I do that?" Maelstrom asked.
"Just keep moving!" she stressed, spotting the exit. And there were a pair of large motherfuckers in front of it. One of them wore a pair of metal claw-cestuses on his hands. The other didn't even bother with weapons, spikes of metallic bone erupted through his forearms and hand, creating a cactus of misery and ruin at the end of each arm. His face was also featureless, not even having eyes. If it wasn't for the stupid haircut and the black suit, she would have never even thought to consider this thing a former human.
"Plan B?" Maelstrom ducked back, and there came another squelching sound, not unlike throwing a pound of slightly rotten ground-beef at a car-door. She turned just in time to catch the business end of a spear of some description being driven into her from behind. It didn't lance her the way the owner, a black-spectacle'd DHORK no doubt intended, but is still hurt like a bastard and cut into her fourth-favorite top. She wrenched hard, bracing even with her feet against the haft to snap the spear-tip off and pull it out that inch into her that it'd gotten. She then serial-killer stabbed the DHORK who'd gotten the jump on her with its own stolen weapon-tip until it collapsed, twitching, to the floor. "Loona, are you alright?"
She growled, and pressed her hand to the wound. Her fingers came away red, black, and bloody. She didn't have time for this. She knew that Fatty and Millie could heal themselves with sheer willpower. The question was... could she, too? So she tried. After a few seconds, she rubbed the injury. Beyond the blood that was already there, it was as though there'd been no wound at all. She felt lessened somehow by that, proof she couldn't do it forever, but still.
"Why do I think I've seen you before? I could'a sworn I saw you before," the blonde's voice came from the speakers.
"We need to move," Loona said, accepting Maelstrom's hand up. When she looked toward the door, she saw that all of the air there was twisting and pulsating, as though somehow it had been transformed into some sort of alien, meat-like substance. Meat that, when it bulged and dilated, vomited forth more DHORKs, who glided out of the orifice in the world like a particularly blood-thirsty bowel movement.
The back door was their best option. They just had to cross corner-to-corner the entire warehouse to get to it. Which was an ache in balls that Loona didn't even have. And they had no time to worry, or to argue, or in fact do anything other than run. Run and dodge. Because the sickening wrongness of the place was growing worse by the moment. Metal pillars began to sport veins that pulsed to an alien heartbeat. The floor began to have pores emitting foul and noxious, and tacky sebum. The refrigerators began to twitch and gurgle, no longer machines but organs of a larger, unthinkable body, to which they were nothing but pathogenic invaders. And the DHORKS were the white-blood-cells that were hunting them down.
They had to change their course once, then again, as they found themselves moving toward a wall of encroaching DHORKS. Okay, fair to say that whatever they were, they weren't just DHORKS anymore. The DHORKS of New Jersey had been less than cannon-fodder. They'd been squishy targets for her to let out some aggression on. These were not that. And every now and then, she had to recoil back or twist and duck as she felt something sharp hit and cut into her. She knew they were likely throwing-stars and darts, but they lacked the sheer penetration needed to make it into a Hellhound's innards, so she could ignore them. Well, she could ignore the damage of them. They still hurt like hell.
They were herding the two of them. She could feel it. Maelstrom was managing to keep them intact, parrying, counter-attacking, and bashing down anything that came within sword's reach of them. Twice now, he'd had to exchange a broken weapon for a stolen one, once to a katana, which didn't last long, and then again to a sledge-hammer, which was proving much more robust. But they were desperately outnumbered, by things which Loona was becoming increasingly convinced they weren't actually killing. She could see the first one, the one that Maelstrom had ripped in half, right over there, trying to feather them with arrows. Those were easy enough to dodge, they just had to get around the corner.
Which turned out to be a critical mistake. When she darted around the corner, she was immediately grabbed by her throat and slammed down into the nearest refrigerator organ with such violence that its veins began to rupture and bleed coolant and something akin to blood. It was the blonde bitch.
"Oh, now I got's ya! You're that werewolf what fucked us over in Joi-sey!" the blond said brightly. Maelstrom tried to beat her down like a tent-pole with an overhand swing of the sledgehammer, but she caught it as though he were attacking with a paper-fan. And then she yanked him a little closer, before twisting her body in a manner impossible for a human, driving her shin with bone-breaking force into Maelstrom's gut and sending him rocketing across the pathway between the banks of refrigerator organs. He crashed into a door which cracked and split apart with a chitinous crunch, having to take a moment to catch his breath, as the blond bitch continued to rotate her lower body to complete a 360 degree rotation, facing her again. She idly tossed the sledge-hammer over her shoulder, not even seeming to care that it put it relatively near Maelstrom's landing spot. "Y'know, I've been lackin' one of yous for a couple months now. I need your kind. And... waaaait a minute. You're different. You ain't like that sack 'a dogshit back there," she cast her thumb over her shoulder at Maelstrom.
"Let go of me you rancid bitch!"
"Now now, there's no need to be vulgah'," the blonde said with a shake of her head. Maelstrom kipped up to his feet, grabbing a dismembered leg and swinging it at her, but it was caught by another of the DHORKs being extruded from the air, taking the hit for what was increasingly seeming to be its master. The bone of the severed limb broke on the DHORK, rendering it, as a weapon, useless, and even though it crushed the DHORK's shoulder, it was still able to glide around Maelstrom and put him into a half-nelson with one arm, whereupon another three raced down from their places running along top of the gurgling, pulsating once-refrigerators to tackle and restrain him. To Maelstrom's credit, when being held by four, he almost got free. But then five more joined in, almost seeming to meld into each other to utterly pile down Maelstrom under hundreds of kilograms of restrictive meat-pudding.
"I'll be as vulgar as I wanna be!" Loona said, her hand questing along the floor, until she found the box-cutter that had been abandoned there during the first massacre of this day. The instant it was under her fingers, she extended the blade as far as it would go, and then thrust it hard at the temple of the one which had her in her grasp.
The blade sunk in for several inches, paring through the arm of the bitch's shades, and causing them to dislodge and fall from her face. Her eyes were seething, meaty pink blobs, covered in veins and lacking anything like iris or pupil.
"Oh why'd ya have to go do something stupid like that. Now I'm gonna need new glasses," she said, utterly unfazed by having two inches of utility knife inside her skull. She pulled back, turning those meat-globes to the others who were now encasing Maelstrom to the extent that he was now utterly encased in black suits and inchoate flesh. "Whip up a Fistula so's we pass 'em through the Near. We're gonna have some fun with 'em."
"Alert," one of the few not ganged up on Maelstrom said, turning on her heel and staring east.
"Oh what is it now?"
"Code black, Sacramento," the outlier said, her voice what Loona would imagine a lackluster robot trying to pretend it was human would sound like.
"Gimme a second," the blonde bitch said, turning to the east. Then her smile dropped away. She then flit through outrage and fury, then started chuckling. "You sneaky bastahd. Just had to do it when I was outta' the country, din't ya? Alright, everybody drop everything. We've got a real problem to deal with."
The mass of meat swarmed off of Maelstrom, leaving him arduously breathing in, because apparently they'd come close to suffocating him in their time crushed around him, and all of them started walking east. The air puckered and opened, revealing a... a something that Loona didn't like to look at. Everything was everywhere, and all things were alive as all things touched all things, and the noise that it made was like the gurgling of an empty stomach writ horrifyingly large. The DHORKs walked into that orifice into insanity, vanishing from Vladivostok without second thought, second word, or even bothering to finish whatever it was they'd started here.
Then with a sound like the cutting of gristle with a dull blade played in reverse, that wound in the world sealed – as much as it could be said to seal – and the two Hellhounds were alone in a now blasphemously alive warehouse filled with human corpses.
"What the fuck was that?" Loona asked.
"That... was a..." Maelstrom wheezed, as he pushed himself to lean against the squelching, bleeding pillar next to him, "Being From Outside."
"Yeah, you said that. But what was it?"
Maelstrom finally puffed out a breath which seemed substantial, and gave his head a shake. "It's an infestation. It turns everything it gets inside into more of itself. We can talk more later. We need to go! Is your book still buggered?"
Loona reached back and pulled the book, and saw that its pages were once more filled with magical bullshit. "Yeah, we're good. But I've gotta do two things before we leave."
"Are you utterly insane?" Maelstrom asked, coughing lightly and rubbing at his torqued arm.
"Maybe?" Loona offered.
"What are you doing?" he then asked, giving no shits and fed up.
"One, I need to get my phages and my money," she said, pointing up at the foreman's office.
"And two?"
"When I've got them? I'm going to burn this entire place to the ground so that whatever this bullshit is doesn't spread," she said.
"This isn't our problem," Maelstrom said, moving to take her by the shoulders, but she stepped back.
"Yes. Yes this is," she said. She remembered the group of five peoples she had been warned that would forever be enemy to, during that magic fuckery up in Purgatory. And today, she knew that she had met one of them. "You've fought these things before. I know their name. And I am not going to give the Adjacent one fucking inch. Now either help me get my money, or start setting a fire. The faster we do both, the faster we leave."
The headquarters of his new employer turned out to be the same place he'd spent a fair bit of time reconnoitering back during the previous summer. The Happy Hotel (or Hazbin Hotel, if one went by what was actually on the signage) was a big old bastard of a building, one that looked like it'd been through a couple of gnarly Teleport Errors from the fact that it had another building and a fucking boat stuck inside it's skin. Still, it was fancy in a way that Striker didn't often get a chance to enjoy.
Just as well he didn't, really. He had to be a hard bastard, and soft beds didn't play well with that. The place had changed of course. With the New War For Heaven, the Hotel was now bustling where once it was nearly deserted, with a bunch of soldiers and whatnot keeping the Exorcists focused on easier targets through use of bursts of autocannon fire. It made the Hotel a fairly safe spot from a lot of other things as well, as time would have it. Just not from the things inside.
Like that little darling who was following along behind Cain, the First of the fucking Damned, her one large eye batting coquettishly at him as though trying to woo him without words being said. Striker knew full well that Niffty was about as far from a coquette as a dame could get. She was less of a firecracker and more of a thermobaric bomb. As much as he might enjoy sly from a Sinner when he could get it, he was actually a bit happy to see that she didn't turn him a second glance. Her fickle nature worked to his benefit. It shielded him from her obsessive streak.
Come to think of it, the creepy letters pretty much stopped the instant that Cain reintroduced himself to Hell. Take the deus ex'es that you can get, Striker figured.
The meeting was set to be held in the sitting room over yonder, with the pornstar-ex-mafioso Angel Dust. While Striker's recon of the man said that he could be safely ignored as beneath concern, he'd then turned around and massacred two of the V Triarchy not long after Striker had made that assessment, which put big fucking error bars on his previous assumptions. Either Angel Dust had been sand-bagging the entire time that Striker had been watching him, or this ridiculous place was actually doing its job and sobering the blood-soaked faerie up.
He was about to cross the threshold when he felt his head jerk back, as though somebody had grabbed him by his horn and arrested him. He took a step back and turned, noting how the fucking Radio Demon was holding the tip of his right horn between a single finger and thumb, as impossible to free himself from as it was for Striker to flap his arms and fly to Heaven. "What do you want?" Striker asked, setting his augmetic hand on his side-arm. It wasn't his good one, but he held little faith that even his fancy gun could meaningfully hurt The Beast That Grins. Still, the symbol was important.
"Oh, nothing, little fellow. I'm just reminding you that you're not done yet," he said, leaning down toward Striker with his everpresent grin.
"The fuck are you talking about?" he asked, trying to tug himself free of the Radio Demon's casual grasp, but as well piss into the wind and shift a hurricane.
"You are going to repay your debt to me, for saving your little life when Samuel was throwing his tantrum. Whether you want to or not," Alastor said, chuckling low in his throat in threat. Then with a flick of his hand, rubbing his hand at his side as though trying to grind away smut on his fingertips, he released Striker. "Whether you're even aware of it or not. Whether you try to or not. The debt will be paid. That is all. Go and play your games."
And with that, he turned, humming ragtime under his breath. Striker flicked a rude gesture at him with his augmetic hand. It wavered as he did so. Fucking goddamn it. With a snarl, he turned to the doors and pushed them open, revealing the whore, his coming-up-in-the-world brother, the bomb-flinging anarchist, and a couple of empty chairs. "Alright, I'm here," Striker said. "Let's start planning a goddamned raid."
Truth told, Striker didn't have a lot of faith that this was going to work, an audacious idea like going deep into Heaven for the sake of carnage. But one way or another, it'd shake the yips from him. Either he'd be brazen, crazy, and lucky enough to prove that he was the smartest fucking imp in Hell, or when everything went to absolute shit, he'd prove himself the toughest, roughest bastard of an imp to ever fight against Heaven. Succeed in glory. Survive with glory.
Maybe it'd be enough.
"Ordinarily, trying to classify the Beings Outside is an exercise in frustration. It was certainly beyond me when I started, and I started pretty young fighting them, let me tell you. But my point is this; not all Outsiders are created equal.
Some of them are like you or me. Well, frankly, they're a bit more like you, in that even the best of them are kinda awful. Fuck you too, Killjoy. But the distinction is that they have minds that think in ways that we can more or less understand. Their thoughts aren't so alien that they leave us gawping like morons with every decision they make. They can be talked to. They can be reasoned with, to a degree. They can be employed, or housed, or put to work for the good of the community. Shit, man, the Glimpse has been doing that for more than a hundred goddamned years!
Then there are the ones which are essentially animals. No higher thought. Just pure instinct and self-indulgence. They are predictable like the weather or the tendencies of my wild cousins down in Wrath. You put them in a particular situation, they'll react in a particular way, give or take some variance. That's not to say they're not dangerous. Storms are dangerous, and Bloodwolves are dangerous. They're dangerous as hell. But they can be leashed, to an extent, forced back out where they belong, or put into a spot where we can kill them.
No, the ones to worry about are the Realm Minds. Or Invaders, or Xenoformers, or Noumenon or a thousand other names. My point is this: think about an entire universe building a single mind of itself... or something. You want the intricacies of it, talk to Penemue or the Waymaker, they understand it better. My point about the Realm Minds is that they're universally malevolent, universally expansionist, universally corruptive, and universally harmful to the very being of Hell. The Adjacency is a perfect example. They want to be... how do I put this... adjacent to everything. Even you. They want to be inside you. They want to touch everything, to be everything. Forever. Regardless of what we want. Or how terrifying the reality that they'd make in order to do that. So we fight them. So I fight them, even with my creaky joints and arthritis, because Hellhounds of my generation don't get to retire, and it's going to be at least another decade or two before the Angels get their shit together and start doing their fucking jobs again. You'd think they never had a change of office before!
It's a pity. All that fracus up there, and not a damned thing changed down here.
You know what I meant. Except the things we changed ourselves, I mean."
-Purifier Maelstrom, Patriarch of the Free Hounds of Dennys