I feel like a damn roulette ball, spun and forgotten, waiting to drop on the number. What number? Fuck if I know.

Apollo put his shoulder against the door. Dion kept close behind him. Apollo’s eyes, locked onto the peephole. Red, crazed. The silence in the hall was nauseating. He had forgotten to breathe in the sudden rush. Apollo faced the door, the peephole, observing it. He saw a blackness in it, a placid darkness. Then once. Twice. It moved, across, to the right. A smudge.

He broke the door. He pulled back from the door, readied the shoulder of his amputated arm and pushed. Once. A single thrust that shot the door inward. The metal hinges flew. Apollo ran into the room with the immediacy that comes from fear and excitement, with his eyes focused and moving every which way. Dion, behind him, flipped the switch. The clank of the switch nearly ten times louder. As all things are, after coming from abrupt silence.

“The lights aren’t working,” Dion said.

Apollo turned to him, the light of the hallway behind Dion, he put a finger up to his lips and shushed him.

He stuck his hand into his coat. With one swoop his blade came out, tall and wide and nearly covering the door frame and the light shining through it.

From the kitchen was a door, leading to the living room, and a hall leading to their bedroom.

Apollo did not hesitate to thrust his sword into the door. It imploded. The wreckage of the composite wood door filled the room with sawdust. That was the first scent.

The second was of dried blood. And sweet, flesh rotting.

Combined, the smell of the corpse and the smell of sawdust, he could not help but feel at both an urge to cough and an urge to hold his breath.

Smoke and darkness clouded the frame. Both their eyes flashed red, it helped in seeing.

Apollo stepped through the half-torn door, one foot at a time.

“Watch the hall, alright?” He said. Dion posted himself next to the hallway, his head turning, however, to the room Apollo was slowly encroaching upon. For that’s where the smell came from.

"What’d you find?” Dion asked, his voice rattling with a certain tremble. Apollo put a handkerchief over his mouth, his eyes looked up at the wall. Blood was always hard to make out in darkness, it dried too fast and colored too darkly.

He supposed then, that he was slightly lucky, that a lamp laying on its side on the floor still had the strength to buzz on and off. He raised it, the bulb was shattered, the lampshade was torn. It looked like shadow puppets dancing along the wall as Apollo raised the light above him and towards the blood and the smell of rotting.

There was an arm. Dismembered. The blood ran out from its point of severment, the bicep. It was stabbed through with a small knife, and on the arm, with the bold green colored tattoo; the mark of Mammon glowed.

It was a Wolfe’s arm. Female. Though, in the darkness with only the bare minimum of a broken lamp to give him guidance, he could not tell whose. He only noticed nail polish and frail and soft fingers.

He dug out the knife pinning the arm. The fingers twitched as he did so, though knew it, even in his fear, that they were merely muscle spasms. The arm plopped on the floor, and he looked down at it.

“It’s a warning?” Apollo asked himself.

That was about the time Dion got his phone call. He could hear his voice behind him, in the kitchen, pacing back and forth. He understood most of what happened and expected Dion when he came in, afraid. Apollo kept staring down at the arm, on the trail of blood on the wall leading down.

“She’s in danger,” Dion said, briefly. “We gotta hurry.”

Apollo remained for a moment, staring at the arm before his eyes narrowed.

“So it was a distraction.” He said. And he walked out.

♣

They did not ride the elevator and had only taken the stairs halfway before they found most of the doors blocked. After that, it became a job of door busting and lock shattering before they could approach the doors. The high stakes poker room that had been re-assessed and transformed into what was formerly, the party ballroom. Now it was neither. Neither a place to wager nor a place to indulge. Now all it was, was a pulsing nightmare, a panic room for a supernatural monstrosity that did not want them in.

They stood in front of the doors, only to find them a pulsing, flesh mess.

The black, almost leather colored skin of the creature protruded through the small gaps of the doors. The fibers of muscle had at both devoured and combined itself with the door, such that, the pale doors appeared to be like wide teeth. An infants teeth, crooked and shaking with the pangs of pain of a new protrusion.

The doors could not stop wobbling. The muscles, could not stop flexing, breathing in and out.

Wet. Slick. Greasy.

"What the fuck is this?" Apollo asked.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

“It’s not small time." Dion wiped the sweat from his face. “A justice, maybe? A justice, Jesus…”

A Justice, a group of third ranking hierarchal monstrosities. Third, which should not denote weakness. For a Justice, was that of which bordered insanity and chaos, and corporeal form.

It was the Justice that gave him shaky eyes.

Dion could not keep still. He wavered to the right, pressing his hand against the wall.

“Stay cool.” Apollo said. “You can shoot, right?”

“Maybe?” He said. “I don’t know. I can’t know that, can I?”

Apollo, whose blade stood at a horizontal perpendicular to himself, looked forward to the door. He punched the muscles of the demon (wall, furniture? He wasn’t sure, it seemed to contain and devour all).

“It doesn’t look that mobile.” He said. He looked up, small tendrils were extending out and beginning to consume the LED lights and the panels of the ceiling. Sparks flew from the wiring. One of the tendrils backed away, quickly slithering from the sparks and the electricity and the hanging wire.

“It’ll start overlapping as much space as it can, and it won’t stop,” Dion said. “On and On. Who the - Who would summon this?”

“When you act this naive, it makes me wonder if you even have a brain, Dion.” He said. The exasperation of the climb had caught up to him and made his words sound winded, dragged along by sighs and drawn-out vowels. It was a tough climb, one worse on his crippled leg, the sum total of the massive steel blade burdened on his body like a cross. He had taken this sword - what felt like - fifty fleets of stairs. And had come to this end, the overindulging, overflowing demon.

Fifty fleets that he argued were necessary to climb with the blade. Because, as he reasoned, drawing it naturally from his coat would waste too much time. Time! Of course, which could cost him his life.

“I don’t care what it is. We’ll just kill it.” He said. His breath, still drawn and heavy.

Apollo put his foot against the flesh-door and pushed his weight in. His foot sunk in through the wood, out the other side, caught in a web of muscles and fibrous purple flesh. He put his other foot into it (and he felt stupid for doing it too!) and found himself caught once more, into flesh.

Dion had to pull on him, had to drag him out, splitting marble tile underneath his feet just to grab the traction to pull him out.

"I had to try," Apollo said, with his palms to the floor, catching his breath. "It’s like living clay though. A dynamic, living, quick-sand trap."

"She’s behind that, isn’t she?" Dion put his hands to his head. "Jesus Christ, she's behind there."

"Yeah," Apollo asked. He raised himself slowly. "And putting your hands in the sky won’t help her. Where’s your grit?"

Apollo lifted his blade off the ground. The sleek metal glowing silver from the little light showing overcast. It looked pristine, white as if the moon had been fragmented and him, given a piece. As a gift. As a safeguard. As duty and curse.

"Move." Apollo put the blade horizontal to him. Dion stepped back. He focused, as well as he could, feeling for the circuitry of arcana bleeding through his arms. It was not quick, not really, especially with how unusual the mechanics of the blade were to him. The coordination and drawing and directing of arcana or his essence was all a strange task.

It took long. Maybe too long, for Dion was biting his teeth and beginning to run out of nails.

Then they felt it. Both of them. It struck them, the sudden hot flash of air like being hit by combusted steam pipe.

They felt the vexed air. Apollo, unusually calm. His eyes were closed.

The flux came steadily, currents of hot and cold both wrapping and drawing away from the blade. He could feel the heat of the blade in his hands, in his arms, as the life essence (Arcana) of his was transferred to, through small veins that appeared little more than spiritual schematics, and into the blade, where it began to glow and heat up.

The air cried out. Seething, screeching from the heat.

It whistled. From the three perforated holes along the base of the blade, like exhaust. And the flame, unlike his last blade (which wasn't really his), wrapped around the sword. The fire spat out each hole. Mainly the lowest, biggest, hole. Which must have been two hands wide.

Like a faucet of red flame that engulfed his sword and heated it to a glowing yellow.

There was nothing in this dark room that was not shined, not flashed with the bright light.

Dion had to put his hand against the light. Then, moved - ran - further away and behind a corner wall, as Apollo raised his blade overhead.

Though crippled, through struggling to stand, he did so. His bones cracked. He felt his joints dislodge. Wrist, shoulder. He put the sword now behind him. His muscles flexed. He couldn’t help but scream. In pain, in exhausted fury.

He shot out towards the door.

The room exploded.

The large screen of flame came from every angle, surrounding him and the area around with the outline of yellow flame - the sound of combustion, deafening and the pain of his feet as they struggled to stand upon burning and melted floor made him kneel. The glass was smoldering yellow, burning through the floor. Glass walls surrounding him shattered, night air swept in immediately. To cool and tighten and harden the melted glass. Three floors up, three floors down. The glass was broken all along. They couldn’t hear it shatter though. Nor could they hear the sound of water falling from the emergency sprinklers.

The world was muted to them. Apollo, specifically, who suffered most of the acoustic humdrum.

He couldn’t stand. He stabbed his sword, now steaming from the water faucet, in front of him.

At least the door was open.

And that wasn't all.

And so was every wall around him. He was almost afraid he had killed Dion, and would have cried for his name had he not heard him walk around the corner (what was left of a corner).

Sweating, soot-covered, the smog ran past them both, out the windows.

They walked towards the open slit of the demon, into the room. Hot-glowing water pipes shot steam out from above them.

And the creature awaited in front of them, Aenea too, who was being dragged into the saw-blades-for-teeth mouth. Apollo pulled away from Dion. His last bit of oomph in it. He spun and threw his blade. Out, towards the limbs grabbing Aenea.

The limbs were cut (the smaller ones seemed weaker than the flesh walls).

She fell, what must have been five feet, right on her sides.

As did Apollo, who fell from his standing position.

Dion ran to her first. Apollo face planted onto the floor.

He looked backed, as consolidation, just to say: “Are you alright?”

Apollo, face down, said briefly: “No. No I’m not.”

He felt a crack in his abdomen as the words were expelled. He wheezed out in silent pain, the air escaped his lungs. The explosive, the blast must have left him injured. The very vibration of air, compressed against his body had left him with broken ribs and a broken arm. And he had not eaten, feasted on a philosophers stone. So also, to the list of brokenness, was his regenerative capabilities.

He was weak. His body slunk. Not crawled, slunk. Like a worm.

"You said you were ready to fight, right?" Apollo coughed. Blood lubricated his throat to coax the words.

He looked up to Dion whose eyes were shaky and whose hands could not even hold a still grip on his clothes. The purple monstrosity was all surrounding, all seeing. Omnipotent and seemingly, omnipresent.

"You said you could do it, right?" Apollo looked away from him, towards his blade stuck in the side of the flesh wall of the creature. It was absorbed in, stuck in the wall. He looked back to Dion, still shaking.

“Well you better do something quick.” He said, vision fading. “I’m not going to be conscious for long.”

And he felt stupid again. Like he had with Bartholomew. For he had given his weapon and himself, to the moving walls - to be eaten, and spat, and eaten again like a meat grinder.