The dome parted before him.
He put it back in place behind him as he floated into the ancient church.
Cal had been more conscious of damaging his environment of late, unlike collateral damage man out in the ruined square, tearing up the ground, breaking buildings, statues and frescoes.
The spires change had been something on his mind for the last decade.
No more tutorial meant no more hand-holding.
The automatic building repair function was near the top of the list of things likely to be removed.
Thus, more care was required lest he be personally responsible for destroying pieces of humanity’s history.
He’d only need to look up to see the history he had preserved in the artwork and architecture.
The smell was the first wrong thing he noticed.
Sweet incense shifted into that of rotting meat and back again.
It took a moment to alter his perception so that while the smells remained they couldn’t make him gag.
Then, he really looked around.
Not just with his physical eyes.
“I am regretful.”
Perhaps some things weren’t worth preserving when considering its current state.
Flashes of light from the battle outside provided more illumination than the sparsely-scattered candle light.
Not that he needed it.
This was one of those times that extrasensory abilities were a double-edged sword that cut him as it did his enemy.
On one side, it was necessary to avoid being cut by the demon’s many hidden knives.
On the other?
There was raw flesh draped on every surface.
How had anyone failed to notice?
The pews, the floor, the walls, the marble pillars.
Weeping flesh was spread out on everything. It was stretched taut in places, as though the basilica threatened to swell beyond its elasticity. In other places it hung loosely off the sculptures of saints in place of their marble robes. Perhaps, the worst of all were the piles of it scattered randomly like dirty blankets and sheets on cleaning day.
The high altar wasn’t spared desecration.
Four black pillars at each corner of the bronze canopy wept blood. The viscous red liquid seemed to flow with no end, spiraling down the grooves, yet not leaving a puddle at the base.
Red, wet flesh hung from the statues on each corner of the roof.
Strangely, the crucifix topping it remained unblemished.
Beyond the altar, high on the wall, the golden background of the frieze remained partially visible behind flesh curtains.
Below sat the great wooden throne.
Saint Peter’s Chair.
It, too, had been desecrated.
The current Pope sat slumped over as if sleeping.
The man looked to be in his middle years at first glance. In good health.
A prior scan had revealed that he was forty-seven.
He was dressed in the daily standard.
White skullcap. White cassock. White hooded mantle. Golden cross around the neck.
That was how normal eyes saw him.
Cal saw the truth hidden by the demon.
The withered, ancient-looking Pope’s eyes snapped open.
Sleep to wakefulness in an instant.
Cloudy blue eyes cleared as the demon rode the man.
Cal severed the connection.
“What? Where?” the Pope gasped.
Cal peeled the man’s brain open, reading his memories like a picture book.
A victim of the demon.
A victimizer of many.
There had been a reason why the demon had selected this man to be the first under its priesthood of all-lust.
“You’re rotten to the core.”
Cal’s voice echoed through the cavernous church.
“Who’s there? What’s happening?”
“This is your conscience.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know, forgive m—”
“Lies.”
“I thought she was an angel. I thought God chose me to lead the ch—”
“Lies.”
“I didn’t—” the Pope tried to stand, giving a pained cry as he failed. “She made me—”
“Lies. You know what you did. The pleasure you took. It gave you exactly what you wanted. Blinded by your lusts you refused to see what it’d truly cost you.”
“Please, I’m sorry,” the Pope pleaded. “If you’re a real angel, please, help me! I confess my sins! Punish me! Just free me!”
“I never thought much about deathbed confessions. It always reeked of selfishness and desperation. You’re the serial killer that only reveals where he hid the bodies the day before he gets the needle. True contrition would be doing that immediately and sparing the family of their victims years of pain. You’re the slave owner that frees his slaves after his death. You seek to buy your path to heaven. I see the truth of you. It’s only now that damnation opens up beneath do you remember your holy vows.”
“Please…” the Pope sobbed.
“You don’t deserve the freedom of death and I don’t know what awaits you. The existence of our Heaven and Hell is unknowable at the moment, but the demon suggests possibilities. It had to have come from somewhere, right? You’d know, wouldn’t you? Better than many. Try to remember your agreement with it. Maybe there’s a clause or two, hidden in a twist of words. If you signed your soul over, then I hope you end up in a place that fits your actions.”
A faint tickle touched Cal where he didn’t want to be touched.
It was time.
The one-sided conversation had allowed him to work in the background, unnoticed.
Cutting off the Pope from the demon’s touch forced it to focus all its attention into breaking through to get back inside its first above all.
It was now fully invested within the Pope as Cal severed the rest of its hooks to its depraved followers.
“Everything you desire will be yours.”
The words emerged from the Pope’s mouth, but the voice was that of a sultry young woman.
“Whatever you want.”
A man’s deep voice.
“You can be whole.”
His stump itched underneath the plastic and metal.
“With you, I can give this world everything.” The voice reverberated with both woman’s and man’s. “Give in to your desires and be… satisfied.”
He remained silent, hidden by his psionic powers.
Multiple worked in conjunction to prevent the demon from seeing his physical body, from reading his mind, from touching his soul.
The problem was that he couldn’t keep it up forever.
It was like a wrestling match where one needed physical contact to take his opponent down. The grapple gave the opponent the same opportunity.
The demon probed for Cal’s mind and failed to find it.
It pivoted and reached for his soul.
This time it succeeded, locating him where he floated above the great bronze canopy.
The demon wearing the Pope as a flesh suit moved in a blur.
Unfortunately, he had sped up his perceptions to the point that he saw everything in slow motion.
The dirty, blood-encrusted cassock burst open.
The Pope’s chest splayed from the center. Skin and ribs spread like a butterflied tenderloin into grisly wings as if in mockery of the cherubs scattered throughout the artwork adorning the church.
He— It floated upward on thousands of glistening strands like a spider in its web.
Spider webs would’ve been preferable, even the giant ones that he had encountered in Manhattan.
Anything would’ve been better than tendons.
He cut them by the hundreds with telekinetic force honed to the thickness of a single molecule.
Each one cut was replaced instantaneously so that it was as if he had never severed it at all.
He flew higher toward the dome to avoid grasping hands.
Sharpened bones had broken through the skin like wicked talons.
A dark heart pulsed wildly, each beat sending out a gushing wave of blood out to paint the flesh-covered floor.
The intestine struck out like a frogs tongue, lashing against a telekinetic shield.
Cal sliced the writing organ into a thousand pieces in an instant.
Exposed lungs inflated grotesquely large.
The subsequent screech tore through the dome behind Cal after it washed over his bubble.
He shredded the remaining organs in the body cavity with a thought.
The entire building rumbled.
Not from the battle outside, but from the inside.
The demon had been multitasking.
Those glistening tendons had extended into all the loose sheets of skin. Or had they been connected the entire time?
Perception was tricky even with powers that allowed one to transcend what was possible for the baseline human.
Great swathes of red wet skin sought to blanket him.
He flew through the swirling curtains, cutting them into shreds as he passed.
Tombs of former popes shook as the demon furthered its desecration.
They burst open with a spray of stone.
What remained of the popes emerged as flesh-wrapped monstrosities that only echoed the humans they once were.
They skittered across the walls and leapt great distances to reach him.
The demon directed them like a master puppeteer through those connecting tendons.
He took them apart with a thought, leaving nothing for the demon to desecrate further.
Perhaps, It realized the nature of Its situation.
An alien intelligence that a human one could never truly comprehend.
Even then, there was a sense of self-preservation.
It tried to flee to its true body hidden in the necropolis where it stayed to remain close to the depraved torture that fed it strength.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
It failed.
Every strand was cut before It could send what passed as a consciousness through.
It didn’t matter that It could travel on countless strands or that so long as it had the power the number of strands remained constant.
And it had grown fat with power.
Power enough to keep trying for months.
Cal didn’t have months. Nor did the team fighting in the necropolis. The prisoners definitely didn’t have months. Many of them were days, if not hours away from death and the demon claiming what was left of their essence. He wouldn’t use the word ‘soul’. He’d rather think that was out of the demon’s reach. His words to the Pope notwithstanding. It offended his sense of fairness that an innocent could suffer in life underneath evil’s hands and not have freedom in death. The thought that they might suffer an eternity in a demon’s clutches infuriated him.
He had yet to find a limit to his telekinesis. His power had steadily grown over the years with consistent and progressive overload. In a way it was like lifting weights for his mind. Big, small and everything in between. A supertanker on one end of the scale and the very building blocks of matter on the other.
There was plenty of biological matter remaining in the Pope’s body, despite the demon’s corruption.
Corrupted molecules were still molecules, at least at this stage.
Atoms were still atoms.
He took hold of a few of those and split them with a thought.
The effect was nearly instantaneous.
Energy erupted from the center of the blackened heart.
He contained it in a cylinder of invisible force reaching into the heavens.
The pressure wave, the heat, the radiation… all of it vented harmlessly into the cold, dark void.
The nuclear explosion temporarily blinded his many senses.
Blood gushed from his nose, trickled from his eyes and ears.
Desperately, he searched for any traces of the demon.
There was nothing left of the Pope’s body. His soul belonged to the demon, if it lived. Or God if he was lucky.
The weeping flesh sheets remained, though all laid immobile.
Eron flew in through the gaping ruin of what was once the dome.
“Overkill, much,” he said before notice the state of Cal’s face. “Bleeding from the face holes again I see. Thought you gave that up. I mean, makes you look super edgy, but—”
He silenced his brother with a raised finger.
The demon’s web of tendons remained.
It took a moment to find the one that mattered and that time was enough for the demon to flee with what remained of Its consciousness.
Down It went.
Into the necropolis.
Deeper still.
Hundreds of feet.
Then a sudden turn to the north.
Limestone.
A mountain ridge.
“I need to catch it.”
“No shit? That didn’t kill it?”
“You done?”
“Yeah, survivors decided to run for it. Iria’s going to get her avenging on. I was gonna help you out. So, where is it running to?”
“I’ll take care of it. Can you burn all of this?” he gestured to the flesh-covered church.
“Easy.”
“You can’t leave a single trace. Then do the same to the entire city. We can’t risk it coming back. I still don’t know what it’s capable of. I’m not sure its a fixed thing and I don’t want to spend more time than absolutely necessary touching its consciousness.”
“What about the corrupted priests and shit?”
“The risk— there can’t be anything left. The smallest piece of skin could be enough for the demon to return one day. It spread into them. Two in one body. The demon is the corrupted. The corrupted are the demon. They’re different, yet the same.”
“Fuck I hate weird shit like that,” Eron’s eyes blazed with solar heat burning wide swathes of skin along with the interior of the basilica.
The great bronze canopy melted.
Saint Peter’s throne burst into flames.
“I hope this stuff can be fixed,” he muttered.
Cal was already zooming across the dark night.
----------------------------------------
The first set of demon-corrupted priests and warriors came through the two tunnels Rand had laid spell traps in.
A net of razor-sharp light blades turned an unfortunate warrior into bloody giblets on the left. While icy spears impaled the first two warriors on the right.
Rand triggered the spells set farther into the tunnels.
Curtains of magical fire burned through protection spells, Skills and armor.
What stumbled out of the tunnels was a handful of charred men.
Blackstar punched star-shaped blasts through their chests, putting them out of their misery.
“Check those tunnels!” she barked.
Ethereal eyes zipped out of Rand’s face.
“They’re clear!”
“Link us up, Potter! Emmione, ready appraisal on my target.”
Rand’s spellbook flapped like an angry seagull denied the hotdog on the grill.
He murmured the words of the spell.
It was his highest level one and was difficult to cast and maintain. It would’ve taken a long time to cast it had he not prepared it in his spellbook.
Drake had watched the young man over seven nights as Rand spent hours each session inscribing the spell and feeding mana into the page.
As the young wizards had explained it to him the benefit of the way they did magic was that the spellbook held most of the mana required to cast the spell. All factors being equalized a spell that cost a regular mage twenty percent of their mana, only cost them five percent or less. So, the mage could fire off five spells before hitting empty, while the wizard could fire off twenty, provided they had twenty pages prepared.
The drawback was that without their spellbook they were limited to their basic starter spells. The ones every mage-type acquired before reaching Level 10. Any spell they got over that level had to be transitioned into their spellbook once they upgraded their class.
Naturally, the higher a wizard’s level the more pages in his spellbook.
And it was important to note that not all spells were equal. Apparently, there was an entire tier system that he had no idea existed. Higher tiers took more pages than lower ones. Plus, the spellbook’s mana storage capacity wasn’t infinite. On the upside, everything grew with levels. More pages, more mana, more spells.
Rand had let slip that their teacher’s spellbook was huge, like one of those old books in museums with, like, a thousand pages.
It wasn’t for Drake. He was more of a spear guy than a magic guy anyways. Stabbing things with pointy sticks spoke to something in his heart. One could say that the magic side of him enabled the stabbing one to be at his most stabbiest.
He spun his standard spear almost scraping the cavern walls.
Underground definitely wasn’t the best battlefield for the true god of weapons.
Still, he managed to cast a magic shield to block the burst of bullets from the tunnel at their 12 o’clock.
Gun fire poured out of the tunnel to his left. The sound would’ve been deafening without their helmets dampening the sharp retorts.
Blackstar had exposed herself with her attack and the demon-corrupted thought they had a clear shot.
The rounds bounced off an invisible wall from their point of view.
Rynnen’s shield of tank armor was useful, if impossible to carry for anyone without a lot of superhuman strength.
The big man was content to remain behind his shield for the moment.
“Where’s that battlefield link, Potter!” Blackstar barked.
Drake chanced a glance back while still keeping his spear spinning.
Rand’s eyes glowed bright, sweat dripped from his brow like he had just eaten a ghost pepper.
The spellbook’s pages flipped back and forth before settling on one.
Glowing script looked like alien writing to Drake.
He wasn’t the kind of magic-user that bothered to really learn the language of spell casting.
There wasn’t any one singular language anyways.
Seemed like too much work.
He was just fine with thinking the spell’s words or shouting it out loud when holding it in his thoughts was too hard.
“Link on,” Rand’s voice glowed.
“Fuck,” Drake’s hands almost slipped.
Sharing senses across the team was disorienting.
He saw himself from Howard’s perspective as the wild man was getting ready to pounce on the second demon-corrupted to emerge from the central tunnel. Like looking at a mirror with another mirror behind him.
He heard Blackstar’s whispered words into Rynnen’s ears.
Shadowy paws caressed his neck while shadowy whispers drowned out whatever Blackstar told Rynnen.
“Get it under control, please,” he grit his teeth.
“Sorry, working on it,” Rand said.
The sensory overload lifted in an instant.
Finally!
Rand would control the inputs, only letting the information each individual team member needed to know pass through.
“Visual only!” Blackstar fired her blasts into both dark tunnels. They broke automatic rifles on their way to breaking faces protected by steel helms.
Ruined faces didn’t stop the demon-corrupted men.
They got up.
“I need that appraisal now!”
Emma had already been in the process of casting the spell when Blackstar had barked the order.
“Oh god! I’m going to be sick,” Emma gagged. “Wet skin everywhere! Tendons! It’s in all of them!”
That sounded like demon shit!
Drake was about to tell her to cut the spell when she let out a relieved sigh.
“It’s gone! I’m okay, guys! I’m okay!” she pointed to both tunnels. “Three demon-corrupted warrior-types in the front. Two demon-corrupted priests behind them,” she dropped her right hand, kept the left pointing down the tunnel where Rynnen stood near in concealment, “oh crap! There’s a guy with a special class. I’m trying to see. To pierce the demon’s shroud,” her voice went into a weird monotone, like a machine, “First Templar Under ******…”
Drake grimaced.
Auditory protections did nothing.
That last word had come out in an ungodly shriek not fit for the human throat.
Wet chunks splashed the back of his legs.
“Emmione!” he turned while maintaining his spinning shield.
Bloody vomit had filled her sealed helmet before she had been able to retract the faceplate.
Her mouth worked.
“Shh… don’t try to talk. That must’ve damaged your throat. Heal first.”
“Have to—” she shook her head, voice a pained rasp. “Level 50… at least…”
“We got it, now heal! Blackstar!”
“I heard, you’re clear for special delivery. Wait for an opening.”
Rynnen finally opened up with the war crimes rounds.
He fired three round bursts one handed while taking return fire on his tank shield.
Burning rounds wormed their way through armor into flesh, yet the priests kept the warriors standing with rays of yellow light that made Drake want to vomit just looking at them.
Three demon-corrupted warriors charged out of the central tunnel.
The bullets bounced off Blackstar’s armor and his magic shield.
Nothing special in them then.
Howard chose that moment to pounce.
He landed on the last warrior with his short, stocky, even heavier than it already looked, body.
The warrior’s spine broke with a loud snap.
He made sure the priests couldn’t heal the man by sawing his head off with his cutting knife.
One demon-corrupted warrior turned, dropping the empty rifle to draw a wicked-looking axe.
Howard sprang from a crouch like a leopard, throwing the dead man’s head into the warrior’s face.
The man reacted with poise indicative of plenty of fighting experience. He ignored the helmet clad head, merely dipping his forward to protect his partially-exposed face, while committing to his downward stroke.
Skill-enhanced the blow cracked into Howard’s upraised arm.
Steel met Threnium.
The former lost, shattering into pieces.
Howard grit his teeth.
The blow hadn’t penetrated, but it had fractured his bones.
No big deal.
They were already healing when he slipped underneath the warrior’s guard to plunge his stabbing knife up the chin and into the brain, wriggling it around for good measure.
Hot yellow light splashed against his back.
The armor partially blocked it, but he felt the sting, forcing him to roll.
The third demon-corrupted warrior almost made it to Blackstar, but almost wasn’t good enough. This wasn’t horseshoes and no one was dumb enough to use hand grenades inside a cramped tunnel… so far.
The warrior’s face was pounded hamburger.
His steel plate was covered in deep, star-shaped dents.
A lifeless hand dropped the axe at Blackstar’s feet.
She pushed his dead body over before it could fall on her.
“I’m almost empty,” Rynnen said.
“Switch targets, on mine,” Blackstar sent a barrage of black blasts into the tunnel at 12 o’clock.
The demon-corrupted priests’ unholy yellow barriers held for a brief moment.
When they broke Rynnen fired his last rounds.
Phosphorus bullets burned holes into the priest’s heads.
“Get down!” Rand called.
Smoke twisted out of the tunnel to their left.
Teeth and claws bit and grasped.
Rynnen stepped forward to take them on his shield.
“Don’t let it touch you, corrupts and disintegrates, incense, but evil,” Emma rasped.
The surface of the tank armor shield sizzled and disappeared ablative layer by ablative layer.
Mere seconds had halved its mass.
Rynnen hurled several hundred pounds like it was a small discus.
The smoke dispersed in its passing, but re-formed quickly.
“I can’t see what it did,” Rynnen said calmly.
“Uh… they blocked it,” Rand said.
“The templar… boosting aura. Level 30, but can tank like 40.”
The sound of Emma’s voice hurt Drake.
“Got an idea,” Drake said. He chose his words carefully, they were on a secure channel, but it was technology. Magic could bypass that if it was skillfully done or powerful enough. “Special delivery,” he eyed Howard, who nodded. “Potter, is that smoke coming out of those things that look like meteor hammers?”
“It’s called a censer and yeah.”
“Templar guy using it?”
“Yeah.”
“Blackstar, please shoot down the tunnel. Rynnen, we’re gonna need a pickup after we do the delivery.”
Black star-shaped blasts kept the smoke from attacking them, while clearing a narrow opening.
The timing was dicey since the smoke kept re-forming and it ate anything it touched. The tunnel had enlarged noticeably in the short seconds the smoke had been in contact. Fortunately, Drake knew his stuff and he deemed it doable.
He hurled his spear at triple velocity with a Skill into the next opening Blackstar created.
“Ready, dude!” he rushed to Howard putting a firm grip around the man’s thick bicep.
Spear Teleport.
Drake popped back into existence with almost supernatural timing.
His hand gripped the shaft of his spear a split-second after it sunk into the cavern wall behind the demon-corrupted men.
He sagged to his knees.
“Fuck that sucks,” Howard grunted, but he was already up and recovered.
The short man was a lot denser than he looked. That’s what made him sit just on the right side of the line that separated normal human strength from the superhuman.
Teleporting someone with him had drained most of Drake’s mana.
He forced himself to his feet.
A Level 50 was a serious threat. A special demon class compounded the danger.
Howard wasn’t rated to take on a 50 one versus one. However, his healing factor would keep the templar tied up, unless he had the magic to weaken it or bypass it outright.
They needed to put a stop to that evil incense thing so that Rynnen could get through in good shape.
“Get your ass in the fight, Sticksies!” Howard roared as he leapt at the tall, armored templar.