The king holds his flaming dagger aloft. Its reflected flame writhes on the gold statue of the medusa woman behind him. All eyes look expectantly to the door as it clangs open, followed by a nude woman with a bulging belly, who looks ready to give birth in a moment. Her eyes wide with terror, she is dragged down the stairs by two men in black robes. The muscles of her face tighten when she shouts, tugging futilely against the men escorting her down the stairway, but the sound of the chanting grows to drown her out.

Liana, Taur, and I have been fighting together for long enough now that nothing needs to be said, nor is there any need for me to lead the group. At the sight of the pregnant woman being dragged down the stairs, with the obvious intent of sacrificing her unborn child, the three of us leap into action. Without anything being said, Liana sprints toward the pregnant woman while Taur and I move to block the line of sickle-wielding worshipers from using their overwhelming numbers against Liana as she fights to free the captive with the heavy belly.

Springing from the wall, my sails whip open, and I am soaring above the heads of the Molech followers in black. I land behind them, but even before I spin around, I am leading with my tail, which sweeps the floor behind me to trip up the demon worshipers as they turn. Sickles are devilish weapons, which are effective in close. The robed mob closes in on me, wielding their short, curved blades more freely than if they bore longer weapons like swords or spears. But I haven't been idle either, and have come prepared with a panabas, which is an eighteen-inch machete mounted on an equally-long handle, creating a weapon that is as long as a sword, but has a longer handle so that it can be gripped like a staff and wielded in close. I know better by now than to try to reach up over my head with my short arms to where the panabas is slung, so I use my tail to slide it up out of its sheath on my back and drop it into my waiting arms.

Just as the first black-robed figures reaches me I shoot the tip of the panabas straight out, thrusting with both hands until they hit the base of the handle, for maximum reach. The tip of the blade, which is in line with the handle, pierces the closest opponent in the throat. I then twist the blade, sliding up my left hand to grip the panabas like a samurai sword, and cut to the right as I move to the right. Even though my arms are short, the length of the panabas gives me a reach advantage against the shorter sickles.

The sound of an iron club smashing a skull causes my opponents to look warily behind them, and see that they are confronted by both me and the muscled colossus Taur, caught between the two of us. Swinging his heavy iron club, Taur creates a wide berth, then suddenly lunges in with a headbutt, which crumbles a skull, causing a robed figure to collapse over his feet and his sickle to clatter on the stone floor. With a swipe of his head, Taur sends the tip of one horn into the throat of another acolyte, then rips as he twists to his right to wind up his bat. With a swing of his heavy war club, he clears a path in front of him.

I shoot my tongue through a mass of bodies, sending the bulb of sticky flesh just past the face of Taur and striking the eye of a robed man at his back, who has drawn his sickle back to strike down the horned man from behind. The force of my tongue adds to his backward momentum as the robed figure draws back his weapon, and he staggers backward. Just as quickly, my tongue recoils and rewinds, zipping back through the melee, but I have alerted Taur to the threat behind him. The muscular giant spins low with his club, coming under a wave of curved blades and smashing through the knees of the attacker behind him, who fails with a piteous wail. Another blow of the club, and the fallen Molech worshiper is silenced.

The king, who is recognizable by the flaming blade he carries, climbs to the black onyx statue of Molech gesturing downward to the pit. The king begins a series of incantations as Taur and I battle our way through the furious mob, working our way back to the stairway, where Liana battles for the pregnant woman. I spray acid into the hooded face of a cult member, who shrieks and runs across the stone floor to the pit, where he kneels to splash water over his face.

The well in the floor suddenly vomits a torrent of water like Old Faithful erupting at Yellowstone Park, sending the robed man riding a column of water straight up into the air. Water droplets cascade over the floor at the feet of the Molech idol, revealing the tightening coil of a tentacle wrapped around the wailing man. With a squeeze of the gray tentacle, the air is pushed out of the man, and with a whip of the tentacle, he is thrown into the stone wall. Erupting from the well at the feet of Molech is an octopus, with gray rubbery skin, and eyes as large as saucers nestled in its bulbous head. A writhing mass of tentacles whips the stone floor and flails through the air like a basket of vipers. The tentacles sweep up robed men and crush them, or fling them into the wall, or dash them against the floor.

Taur and I exchange looks. The king appears to have unleashed a monster that he has no control over, something unspeakable like Cthulhu that has surged upward from the bowels of the earth with no thought other than killing. Men cry to Molech or wail incoherently as the tentacles envelop them and fling them into the stone. This monster is clearing the room of the followers of Molech for us: the only catch is that we have to survive it, too.

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Taur catches a fleeing worshiper with a two-handed swing, while simultaneously sticking out his right foot to trip up another. No sooner has the first man fallen, hitting the back of what is left of his head on the stone floor after being struck in the face by Taur's swing for the fences, then the giant pivots and crushes the fallen man that he has just tripped. Another cult member fleeing the raging devilfish streaming up out of the well impales himself on a bayonet thrust from my panabas. I have to use my foot to push his torso off of my blade, and he crumples.

A tentacle lashes out, sweeping the stone floor and coiling around the ankle of Taur, who raises his bat, only to be faced by a second tentacle slashing through the air toward his head. I lunge forward, swinging the panabas two-handed, landing a powerful chopping cut that severs the tentacle wrapped around Taur's ankle.

But another tentacle coils around my torso, just as another winds around Taur. The two of us look to Liana, who sits on the stairs cradling the head of the captive woman who is about to give birth.

“Stay back!” Taur shouts to her, and we both know that the albino girl wants to join the fight.

I feel like I'm being squeezed by a python as the coil tightens around me, and the suckers latch onto my smooth skin.

Taur still has the use of his arms, but his club is a poor weapon against the monster's tentacles. I am being raised upward toward the ceiling, while Taur is being dragged toward the mouth in the base of the beast's spherical head, a rubbery globe as tall as a man, housing malevolent eyes. The king watches from his vantage point atop the Molech idol, gesturing with his flaming dagger toward the pit. The three beak-like teeth of the devil fish open up like the aperture of a camera lens as the brawny giant is hauled closer to the infernal maw. Taur swings his club, landing blows against the elastic tentacles, but in vain. I can cut at the tentacle that's binding me, but by then it'll be too late for Taur.

I jab the poisonous spur at my ankle into the tentacle that is crushing me. It's a nicking, slicing cut, and is certainly not enough to kill this leviathan but the poison quickly takes effect and the coils around me loosen, allowing me to suck in a deep, ragged breath. That's the good news. The bad news is that my snout is brushing the ceiling, and now that the tentacle wrapped around me has gone numb and loosened, I am falling.

Taur fights back, digging in with the striking end of his war club to keep from getting sucked into the beak of the behemoth, which clacks as its snaps in anticipation of a meal. Liana screams involuntarily from the steps, while the king shouts in excitement.

I grasp the handle of my panabas two-handed, with the blade tip down. I am hurtling from the ceiling, falling downward toward the pit of hell, which is filled with a leathery mass of tentacles and a black globe of a head, tilted back to engulf Taur. It's a trick of the native Hawaiians to kill an octopus by biting it between the eyes, and that's exactly the spot I aim for as I plummet downward, falling through flailing tentacles.

I land blade first, sending the eighteen-inch blade downward through the black orb of the creature's wobbling head, at the spot right between its freakishly large eyes, burying the metal up to the hilt. The impact knocks the octopus downward into the well, and in an instant the flailing tentacles go limp. Taur is released and stumbles backward while inert tentacles slap the stone floor as they fall. The unspeakable abomination slowly sinks downward into the pool, creating the impression that some larger force is dragging it back down to the depths of hell. The monstrous eyes are lifeless, so they can't see the pananbas buried between them as the water gurgles and the damp tentacles slither over the floor to follow the sinking beast down into the pit.

With a leap I bound from the carcass of the dead leviathan and stand beside Taur. The two of us watch the blubbery mass of tentacles slip back down into the abyss.

“The son-of-a-bitch took my pananbas,” I tell Taur. “That was brand new.”

“I hope saving our lives was worth it,” he replies with a grin.

The king stands beside the gold image of the woman with the ram's horns and tentacles for arms, legs, and hair. He runs the flaming dagger along the face of the image, and the tentacles begin to writhe. The eyes are unblinking gold, but there is the unmistakable appearance of life in the statue, and it seems that no sooner has one monster fallen than the king has raised another.

“Taur,” I tell him, speaking from the side of my mouth because the two of us are fixated upon the statue of the tentacled demon posing as a goddess, “you've got to get to that woman to protect her and the baby.”

The room is silent, and it's as if we're standing in an amphitheater with rows upon rows of baby parts in jars and a mummified fetus as witnesses. The only sound comes in the form of the pregnant woman's groans, a signal that she has gone into labor. Having fought one demon-possessed metal idol in St. Janith, I have an uneasy feeling where this is all headed. Whatever misdeeds Taur and Liana have done in their lives, they acted out of ignorance, and under the sway of malevolent spirits, but the sins I committed in my life were born of my own arrogance. I knew better.

I push the giant hulk of a man toward the stairs. Taur still has a shot at a wife and a child, but it's over for me.

This demon is the last of the dark gods on this planet, and it's got to die.