Ilsa lunged, sword drawn. Caedes melded into shadow, and her blade skewered nothing save the empty air of the cold, dark night. Then a small, glabrous, and hirsute figure with a pointy hat came hurtling through the fog, slamming into Ilsa and sending her crashing into the wall behind her. She spit blood, climbing out of the rubble as her dozens of supporters swarmed the elf.
She had no clue he was that strong. A surprise, but one she could handle. As the sleet began to roar and spin in a vortex around the elf, sending Third Circuit cultivators flying, she gathered her own alphanumeric qi.
“(-b±√(b²-4ac))/(2a),” she swore from vermillion lips, fingers forming the letter chi in the middle of the air. Streams of qi flew down, creating a colossal daemoniac architecture in the empty street. It rose on all sides of the combatants, a towering polyhedron rising square by square, its inside filled with geometrical mandalas.
Instantly the atmosphere changed. The storm died down, and a crushing, oppressive weight lay across the surface of the earth. The demonic cultivators Ilsa had brought vaulted into the air, using the lines in the mandalas as platforms for their foul and murderous dance. It was a pre-arranged trap, of course, and Ilsa felt her lips twitch up as the elf stood warily in the middle.
Now this, this was vampirism: the Architecture of Despair, she’d called it, and it was her own and finest technique. One day, she knew, it would bring her to the top of Das Gleiche, but for now it would kill this elf.
Once more she motioned with her fingers, not to direct her qi but to signal to her soldiers. In a rush they descended, spiders coming to the kill, webs of algebraic evil spilling from their poisoned fangs.
Ilsa dashed with them, lattices of demonic qi bouncing across her fingers, her face sneering in a hideous rictus grin.
And then, to her horror, the elf smiled back.
***
Yaaroghkh was enjoying his evening immensely. He couldn’t believe he’d been lucky enough to find someone willing to fight him hand to hand. So far all the demonic cultivators he’d come across since the start of this venture had either tried to shoot him with a gun, or with mathematical qi bullets, or else they were like the homunculi and made of paper. But here, here was a real challenge.
Yaaroghkh didn’t know his cultivation levels, but he sure knew his techniques. The Fury of the Crystal Seals (his regular fighting art) had been disrupted by her formation array. He’d break said formation in a moment - it wasn’t necessary, but it would be funny to see the look on her face - but she’d merited his using a superior fighting art.
As the cultivators moved in for the killing blow, the elf clapped his hands.
***
The elf smiled back at her, three rows of wicked canines curling into a half moon, and Ilsa felt her stomach heave. The mass of eyes in his head glowed with a sickening luminescence, warping the very light around it, and then…the elf clapped his hands.
The earth shook and heaved under Ilsa’s feet, the air hissing and fragmenting around her. She fell involuntarily to the ground as the peal of bells resounded through the heavens, indescribably quietly yet with a volume that tore her asunder. She looked up in terror as the fabric of reality was rent into pieces, bells of gigantic size swinging merrily through her collapsing formation. The elf had not broken her formation; he’d shattered the sky itself.
Her qi was fragmented, her meridians incapable of connecting, but even if they had she wouldn’t have had the will to fight. She knew what those bells were, for they’d resonated with the very depths of her soul: the harmonica universalis, the music with which the Dao had sung Heaven and Earth.
Wings of a pure, blue-white qi spiralled out of the elf’s back, crystalline feathers forming a fractal in a sky whose horizons suddenly seemed to Ilsa to be infinitely expanded, and yet for her contracted nearly to nothing. A sword of flaming ice, darkly gleaming, appeared in his hand. The elf’s tone was cheery as he spoke, five mouths moving as one.
“Come - you’ve heard my rendition of Jingle Bells; now it’s time for The Nutcracker Suite.”
***
Isabella, executive #0008 of Das Gleiche, watched what was happening and tried not to hurl. Their plan had been simple enough - Ilsa was to charge the thing and, when he was distracted, Isabella would finish him from behind.
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There was no way that would happen now. Ilsa’s charge had been broken outright. She was rallying her men, crying orders as they tried to recover from the destruction of her formation, but it was clear from the tears from her eyes that she was acting from desperation.
The monster, for his part, seemed barely winded as he glided with lurid grace through the cultivators, bodies falling in pieces behind him. There was no longer a storm around him; he was the storm. His body flickered with a weird light, blade snicker-snackering in gentle, formless strokes against the cultivators who stood in his path.
There was nothing she could do to stop him. Feeling a little bit of bile still in her throat, Isabella turned to flee…and stopped dead in her tracks.
The creature’s partner stood before her, if ‘stood’ was the right word. He hung on the shadows by only his feet, hovering in midair and gazing down at her like some vengeful god of old. His arms spread out to either side, wickedly curved blades held in both hands.
His face was expressionless as he lunged.
***
The last of the small fry was bleeding into the earth, only Ilsa remaining before him. She was kneeling, one of her legs having been cut off from under her. Her tongue was ashen in her mouth, and she couldn’t even beg for mercy as the elf padded towards her across the snowy street.
He said nothing, at the end, the clicking of his mandibles merely habitual. One disturbingly clawed hand reached out, and grabbed her head.
He squeezed once, then addressed Caedes without moving.
“Did you want to look in on your girlfriend?”
Caedes blinked. He was touched that the first thing Yaaroghkh thought of, when they were out of combat, was his wi- uh, girlfriend. “She’s probably fine. The right thing to do is to check, though - it will make her feel good.”
And whistling a merry tune, he stepped over the corpses as he went to find a phonebooth.
Yaaroghkh turned his sword into a staff, and banged it twice on the floor, singing that ancient charm - ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’ - under his breath. A wave of snowy qi flowed out, blanketing the bodies, and when it faded they were gone. It wouldn’t do to leave the bodies lying around: it might upset a child in the morning.
The elf continued to sing softly, luminous eyes shining in the sleet, until he heard Caedes finally hang up (the man was a peerless expert in the art of sweeting nothings) and rejoin him.
“So, what next?”
The elf crunched down on a Christmas cookie, shambling horribly down the cobblestone streets. “Next, we meet the last children.”
“Now?” Caedes asked, jogging to catch up. “But it’s nearly midnight.”
“Mhmm. The only time to meet them.” Yaaroghkh agreed.
The streets were deserted, barring the ghost of a cow, which was busy haunting a suburban townhouse. Normally, of course, cows do not become ghosts, but Daisy was the exception. She had not terribly minded being killed – in the case of Cow-Heaven, the grass really was greener on the Other Side (and sweeter, too), and there were no flies – but then she learnt that a man named Oscar had bought a whole twenty pounds of her flesh and let it all go to rot, and that was unacceptable. And so she had returned from the afterlife to exact her REVENGE.
“Moo,” said the cow.
But however scary a ghost may be, a cow is not particularly noticeable, and anyways as she has no relevance to the plot there is no point in talking of her further.
What was worth talking about was the increasing warmth. It was late November; the rest of the city was frigid, and though the day had been on the warm side for November it now started to get warm in a more common, but unquieting, sense. It must have risen to forty or more degrees Fahrenheit, and the sleet slowly turned into freezing, then regular, rain.
Stranger still, Caedes no longer knew where they were. He’d been wandering this city for years now, day and night, yet he no longer recognised the buildings around him. They towered above him, hunched and crooked, rambunctious and twisted buildings leaping out of the ground. They were made of wood which was old, though not rotting, with boarded windows and wrought iron fences. Though he could see no one, Caedes had a distinct impression of being watched.
“Why is it so warm here?” He swore, shivering as the unaccountable presence intensified. The rain was heavy, and as it obscured even the dark, the inscrutable, limpid forms moving about in the background took on an ever more menacing cast.
The elf looked at him in confusion, then pointed to a sign. “It says why right there.”
It did, in fact, say it, somewhat - it said ‘WARNING: Extreme Urban Heat Island In Effect’, which was nominally an explanation but wasn’t a particularly convincing one. Caedes was no scientist, but even he knew the urban heat island effect made for a difference of two to three degrees, not twenty to thirty.
Less convincing yet were the trees, arching over the road to either side. The last of the leaves had fallen a week ago, but here, they were still orange on the trees, with little piles of red, yellow, and orange leaves littering the ground. There was no evidence of ice or snow.
The elf walked nonchalantly past sunflowers, corncobs, and pumpkins, Caedes trailing nervously behind, until at last they reached the end of the road. Standing before them, rising out of the mist, a thousand torches lighting it even in the rain, was a mansion. It must have been four stories or more, but was no wider than a normal house, with garrets and towers poking out of a black tiled roof. The iron gate was swinging slowly back and forth in the wind, and ringing the pathway between them and the door were…
“…Jack O’Lanterns?”