It was a nearby crash of thunder that woke Alain from his deep sleep. Immediately, he catapulted awake, his chest heaving. Blearily, he blinked, looking around his room, only to find that there was nobody there. After a moment to collect himself and take a few breaths to calm his pounding heart, Alain went to lie back down again, his eyes fluttering shut.

Barely a few seconds later, another flash of lightning and deafening crack of thunder from overhead made him wince. A thought suddenly occurred to him, and he sat up straight in bed, weighing his options as he did so.

Something about this storm didn't seem entirely natural. Maybe it was the frequency and sheer volume of the thunder, or perhaps it was the way every flash of lightning made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He wasn't entirely sure what the problem was, but there was some kind of sixth sense about it – some feeling that told him something about this situation was decidedly wrong, and that he needed to check things out.

Still groggy, Alain climbed out of bed. He was dressed in his nightclothes, but that didn't stop him from pulling on his boots and slipping his pistol belt around his waist. As he finished hooking the belt around himself, footsteps from outside his room caught his attention. Alain paused, listening carefully to them. By now, he'd grown accustomed to his friends enough that he knew their distinctive tells – Sable tended to walk at night while making hardly a sound, no doubt due to her natural predatory instincts; Az, meanwhile, tended to make a lot of noise when he moved, owing to his massive stature. Danielle, on the other hand… moved fairly normally, he supposed.

And whoever was outside his door sounded like none of them.

Carefully, Alain moved over to the wall next to the door, pressing his back against it even as he drew one of his revolvers and thumbed the hammer back. He sucked in a breath.

"Sable?" he asked. "That you?"

The response came immediately, in the form of a shotgun blast tearing through the wooden door, scattering shares of lumber throughout the room. Alain instantly threw himself to the floor and began to return fire, pulling the trigger and thumbing back his revolver's hammer as fast as he could. Several shouts greeted him as he blind-fired through the door and wall; whoever had come for him, it clearly hadn't been just one person.

His first revolver clicked empty, and Alain holstered it before drawing his second. Shots were still tearing through the wall and door towards him, but they must not have expected him to have flattened himself against the floor, as they were all going several inches over his head. Alain continued to fire off what was in his pistol's cylinder, even as he pushed himself towards where he'd leaned his Winchester 1887 against a nearby wall.

His second pistol ran empty just as he reached the shotgun. Alain holstered his other revolver, then grabbed the shotgun, working the lever to chamber a shell as he sprang to his feet. From down the hall, he heard the sound of splintering wood, followed by heavy footfalls resounding against the hardwood floor; a moment later, the screaming started.

Sable and Az had entered the fray, it seemed.

As soon as the gunfire had started, it suddenly stopped, a deathlike silence settling over the room instead. For a moment, Alain heard nothing except for the ringing in his ears and his own pounding heartbeat.

"Alain! Are you okay?!"

Thankfully, that changed as Sable called out to him. Taking that as a sign that it was all clear, Alain marched over to the door and pulled what little remained of it away from the frame, then stepped through. Sure enough, through the frequent flashes of lightning from outside the windows on either end of the hallway, he could see that Sable, Az, and Danielle were all standing there; Danielle had her own weapon drawn, smoke curling up from its barrel, while Sable and Az were both spattered with dark red blood, none of it their own. Alain breathed a sigh of relief, relaxing a bit as he saw them.

"Hey," he greeted as he looked around. There, on the floor between them, were what had to be a half-dozen bodies, all dressed in black cloaks. It was difficult to tell exactly how many there were; Sable and Az hadn't been clean with these people. He couldn't help but scowl at the sight of them.

"Guess they're getting bolder," he stated.

"It would seem that way," Az confirmed.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Alain went to respond, only to pause. As he was about to reply to Az's statement, he caught sight of something strange-looking outside the window. Curious, he stepped over to the window, only for his eyes to widen when he noticed the rain impacting against the glass.

"Uh, guys?" he asked. "What the fuck…."

His friends stepped over to where he was stationed at the window, their eyes widening when they noticed it, too – the rain falling against the window wasn't water; rather, it was blood. Slowly, Alain turned back to face the three of them.

"Well," he said, "clearly, something bad has happened. The only question is what-"

More footsteps from the floor below instantly made everyone tense up, though they soon relaxed when they heard Father Alex's voice.

"Alain!" he shouted. "Are you up there?!"

"Right here, Father," Alain said, stepping up to the stairway. Sure enough, Father Alex was standing at the base of the stairs, flanked by several other priests, all armed with rifles. "What's going on?"

"We don't know for sure," Father Alex told him. "The storm started about an hour ago – first just the blood, and then the thunder and lightning. We think it's part of a ritual or some kind. And to make matters worse, all those young priests and nuns we were talking with yesterday? They're gone."

"What do you mean, they're gone?" Alain asked.

"I mean, they all appear to have left in the middle of the night, and nobody else knows where they are," Father Alex specified. "And they all took their weapons and equipment with them, too."

It didn't take long for Alain to put two and two together, enough to realize what Father Alex was trying to tell him. "...You think they went off on their own, and something bad happened to them?"

"It's possible," Father Alex admitted. "Probably even downright likely. All of them disappearing and taking their weapons with them, then this storm popping up shortly after is too much of a coincidence otherwise. And then there's the cultists who just attacked you."

"You knew about that?"

"We heard the shots from outside. We were already coming to look for you regarding the missing clergy members and the storm, and just so happened to be nearby when the fighting started."

Alain looked Father Alex up and down. His vestments were covered in blood, no doubt from the rain, as were the vestments on the other priests as well. His story was certainly more than a bit suspicious, but Alain wasn't sure if that was just him being paranoid or not; Father Alex had never given him a reason to doubt him before, and he couldn't afford to start now.

"Alright, what do we need to do?" Alain asked as his friends came up behind him.

"That's the thing," Father Alex specified. "The storm is intensifying, that much is certain. There's no telling what will happen when it finally hits its apex."

"Do you know where we need to begin searching for the missing clergy members?" Sable asked.

Father Alex grimaced, then shook his head. "...I wish I did. If I had that knowledge, believe me, I'd be leading the charge there myself."

"Then we're stuck," Alain begrudgingly admitted. "Alright… I think the only thing we can really do is start poking around some of David Gibson's other properties, like we originally planned on doing. Let's all go ahead and-"

Another crack of thunder, this one even louder than the last, rang out overhead. It was deafening and sustained enough that all the humans present were forced to cover their ears, wincing as they did so. Outside, several bolts of lightning flashed, impacting against the ground.

And when they cleared, several tall figures emerged from the craters they left behind, then began to march towards them all.

"What the hell are those things?!" Danielle called out, raising her pistol and thumbing the hammer back.

Alain was inclined to ask the same thing. They were tall, about Az's height, with dark red skin, and were rippling with tightly-corded muscle. Pointed horns curved up from their foreheads, and leathery wings and bladed spade-tipped tails poked out from their backs. All of them clutched obsidian weapons in their hands – greatswords, halberds, spears, and even the occasional longbow and arrow.

As Alain took it all in, pulling the stock of his shotgun into his shoulder, Father Alex took an involuntary step backwards, his eyes widening with shock.

"...Demons," he growled. "They're all lesser demons."

Az suddenly tensed. Alain turned towards him and found him grinding his teeth, clenching and unclenching his fists as he did so. But there was no time to worry about that, as the lesser demons suddenly surged forwards, feral yells erupting from their throats as they screamed a challenge in some harsh, unidentifiable language.

They all reacted all at once. Alain, Danielle, and the priests all opened up with their guns. Each round fired met its mark, Alain's shotgun even tearing entire chunks of flesh off as payload after payload of buckshot screamed downrange, but the lesser demons hardly reacted to being mutilated by gunfire. They just kept coming, their obsidian weapons poised and ready to strike. Desperate, Alain cycled his shotgun's action, then slowed down and went for a headshot on one, as did the priests and Danielle. He pulled the trigger, sending his final loaded shotgun shell full of pellets directly into a demon's skull. The demon's head erupted like a volcano, the top half shearing off from the sheer force of the impact.

And yet somehow, it wasn't enough. The demon's body came tumbling to the ground, its obsidian sword slipping from its clutches. It laid there for just a second before it began to writhe, and then to Alain's dismay, the body began to lurch upwards.

It didn't get far before Az darted over to it and wrenched off what was left of its head in one fell swoop. With that, the demon finally laid still. Without a second wasted, Az turned to Sable.

"With me, my lady," he said.

She blinked in surprise. "Az? What's-"

"I'll explain as best as I can later, my lady. For now, we must make haste."

Two other demons closed in on Az, and he turned around just in time to avoid their strikes. As he moved, he lashed out with both hands, burying one each into the demons' chests before wrenching them back; his hands came back into view, grasped tightly around twin black, still-beating hearts, but only for a moment before he crushed them both, spattering the nearby area with inky-black blood. As the two freshly-killed demons fell backwards, Az looked over his shoulder at Alain and the priests.

"Understand how to kill them?" he asked. "They're tougher than undead, but they'll go down with enough punishment, same as any other living thing."

Alain swallowed nervously. "Az… how do you-"

"Later," he growled. "For now, we need to focus on what's important."

As if on cue, an obsidian arrow came screaming at him through the night. It never got the chance to impact, as Sable suddenly darted forwards and batted it out of the air. She was about to take off after the archer, but Az beat her to the punch, and sprinted through the night after him before she had the chance. Alain watched him go for just a moment before turning back to the priests and his friends.

"You heard the man," he said. "Let's move out."

They all nodded, and after a moment to reload, they ran off after Az.