Garm bowled into Hræsvelgr, heaving and roaring. The great bird brought its wings down on either of the giant wolf's shoulder blades, managing skin-deep paper cuts that singed the tips of his feathers and curled them back in Garm's blazing aura. The wolf went for the bird man's throat, wrestling him to the ground. The feathered titan broke away with a great wind gust generated by massive flapping, pushing himself backward, one hand going to his throat to feel the puncture wounds dripping blood. He looked at his claw in disbelief.
"Ragna-"
"Sin Flare!" Garm roared over Hræsvelgr, drowning him out.
Let me finish! Hræsvelgr panicked, eyes bulging.
A riptide of dozens of giant red fireballs, each five times the size her base hellhound form's had been, shotgun spread across the street, and seven of them slammed into the Great Eagle like magma wrecking balls. They exploded in blinding flares that spat burning mucus football field's lengths away, like ropey napalm, sticking to and burning Hræsvelgr from the feathers inward. The explosions ripped entire patches of feathers and reptilian skin free from the bird's body, leaving exposed, angry red flesh and sizzling sinnew. Raw nerves screamed to the touch of the cool night air. Hræsvelgr screamed louder. One of the fireballs struck Hræsvelgr's wing dead-center, and burned a hole straight through it. The fireball kept going a mile off and struck a large billboard, incinerating it to ash in seconds. A red-rimmed, glowing ring of cooked flesh spread outward from where the flare had punched a hole in Hræsvelgr's wing, looking like a huge quilt that had incurred a cigarette burn all the way through the fabric.
While Hræsvelgr still screeched, Garm collided into him again, hooking her claws through the wing-hole on either end, and sinking her teeth into the shoulder-joint-like knob where the wing connected to Hræsvelgr's back. She thrashed wildly, lifting the eagle man off his curled feet and ripping the ruined appendage right off. A stark white knob of bone, glistening under the tattered rags of flesh and feather fuzz flapping in the wind, sprayed a huge mist of high-pressure blood. It coated Garm's face, tasty currents of it landing on her tongue through her open, vicious jaws. Tasted just like chicken. Splashes of blood landed in her eyes, and she paid them less mind than an un-goggled swimmer might feel with their eyes exposed to the chlorinated waters of a public pool. She was already seeing red, blood in her eyes or not.
When she tossed her head back and spat out the severed wing with a contemptuous snarl, it fluttered to the street and crushed it under immense weight like a raven-black crashed airplane, a few frayed feathers and degenerated pseudo-digits twitching as the fractured nervous system was sent spiraling out of whack.
Garm stomped on the big bird's feet, impaling them through the street with her steak-knife claws between the duck-like webbing linking his taloned toes. No personal space for you, asshole.
Garm savagely tore at Hræsvelgr, assumed a closed-fist boxer's stance, then rapidly rocked Hræsvelgr's head back and forth between wild hooking haymakers that each left sonic booms trailing at her wrists. She repaid each and every blow he had dealt her while stringing her up by his wing-grip. The shards of glass laying on the ground trembled with the quakes, and flew up as the wind intensified with the speed of Garm's punch flurry. She tensed at her hips, thighs bulging with swollen, vibrating muscle as she crouched low, and a meteor caul of flame enveloped her clenched fist. She sprang up with a vicious flying uppercut under Hræsvelgr's beak, clenching his beak shut so hard both mandibles began to crack and fracture. His head rocked back so violently that the spinal cord at the base of his skull was strained, and his brain came partially detached inside his cracked skull. With that same momentum, Garm twisted around, fist sliding off of the jaws she had broken. As she completed her turn, her fist unclenched and spread its claws. They were glowing red-hot, steam hissing off of them as they cut through the air. She swiped, like a grizzly bear, at the side of Hræsvelgr's mouth. His beak shattered to pieces that flew off to the side, chips embedding themselves in concrete. A gaping, bleeding hole was left behind, parrot tongue dizzily flicking about, looking to touch the mouth parts that no longer existed.
Garm completed a final spin with that same paw leading the charge, claws outstretched and burning. Throwing a lower-centered uppercut into the great eagle's belly, Garm punched straight through his stomach with her bladed hand, chopping through Hræsvelgr's spinal column, paralyzing him from the waist-down as her glowing claws jammed out through the leathery skin of the titan's back. Circular fires were burning around each claw at the exit wounds punched through Hrasvelgr's flesh. The momentum of the uppercut claw attack raised Hræsvelgr off his feet, above Garm's head, his limp legs dangling uselessly beneath him. A spinning column of fire like a pressurized pyro tornado exploded out of Garm's buried paw, blasting the exit wound hole open wider as the circumference of flame widened, and its spearhead pierced a cloud far off at a diagonal angle into the sky. The point-blank flame injection fried Hræsvelgr's vocal cords and blew an unlucky lung out the gaping hole in Hrasvelgr's back. It inflated and deflated weakly, like a dying bladderfish, as it hung from a pulmonary filament that was trickling fire.
Garm slammed the impaled, broken jötunn into the ground, fracturing the street further, and began to run on her other three legs, carrying Hrasvelgr with her like a floor buffer pad, literally mopping the floor with him. A blood smear trailed behind the road rashed Hrasvelgr, joined by his collapsed lung torn from its tether before deflating flat, and then his whole other wing, ground to the nub. Garm picked up speed the whole while, lifting her upper body out of the crouching run until she was full-sprint on two legs, carrying Hrasvelgr like a bloody worn rag. The skin from his back was scraped off entirely, leaving the back of his skull exposed. He was the one frothing at the - shattered - mouth now.
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"Kick his ass!" Richie called as loud as his comparatively tiny lungs could, cheering Garm on. He felt so vicariously invigorated by Garm's epic second wind, and absolutely brutal beatdown of the bully who had pushed his luck a step too far.
The dark cathedral loomed in front of Garm, like the end zone goal post of the imaginary sports field she was clearing.
I'll make a touchdown with your maimed carcass! Garm roared through the echoing chasm of her mind.
The wall of the cathedral above the arched double doors was a display of ethereal stained glass with patron saints and holy mothers. A ledge framing the upper portion of the spire, shaped in a square had spike-like fixtures jutting out of the rim - gargoyle perches. Garm threw her arm up and tossed Hræsvelgr into the cathedral. One of the spikes pierced through his chest from behind, staking the area of his aorta. The gargoyle seated on that lookout broke off at its base and plummeted to the cathedral steps below, breaking to rubble. Stained glass shattered and joined the fall.
Hræsvelgr hung there from the spike, feet dangling off the ground. He was burned, flayed in places, had his wings torn off, was punched through the stomach, had his air sac organs cooked - no more pesky decibel spamming - his spine severed, his beak shattered, and his head massively swelling internally. His eyes were pinpricks, constricting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The light wasn't what he was expecting.
Garm stood on her hind legs, an aura of dark red energy crackling and sparkling around her as fire burned in a circle at her padded feet. Curled, ringed goat horns bulged from her forehead and grew high like the brow ridge of a true fallen angel dyed in red, and red electricity arced between the horns themselves. They seemed to act like excess demonic energy vents. To Richie, they looked like targeting sights. Garm's jaws came unhinged like a snake's, her cheek skin splitting open with a velcro-like ripping noise. A red-black light glared in the back of her throat, which looked like a bottomless volcanic kettle. A red ridge of fur, glowing brightly, emerged out of Garm's chest in the unmistakable shape of an inverted pentagram. It overlaid her heart, which Richie had no doubt burnt hot like a nuclear reactor.
Hræsvelgr raised a limp, half-conscious arm to ward off the coming baptism by fire. Behind its battered head, the stone-carved face of Mary smiled gently. Part of Garm thought the virgin mother winked at her.
"PERDITION CANNON!!!" the declaration boomed out from Garm's aura, despite her vocal silence.
A geyser of black fire ringed with wreaths of red and orange jetted out of Garm's hellgate maw, crackling with more red electricity at its flickering edges. The flame was so condensed that it resembled shadow plasma or a dark laser more than any earthbound combustion reaction. It was almost a solid thing.
It was also exactly six thousand, six hundred, sixty degrees.
Celsius.
Hræsvelgr was a shadowed blur, arms scalding away to skeletal kindling that didn't buy so much as a second's reprieve, then he and the entire cathedral behind him washed away like erased pencil marks. The radius of black fire expanded into a swirling dome that swept the streets, the backwash from her own shot flying back into Garm's face, as she too was consumed by the purgatorial flames, along with the entire city block.
…
A bottomless crater yawned where streets once were. At the smoking edges of the street where the vaporization had abruptly cut off, Freyja stood, clothes incinerated along with her topical layer of skin, her eyes rolled back into her head. Steam and smoke were still pouring off of her, and her nerves were twitching involuntarily. She stood there, swaying on the edge like a drunken sleepwalker. At her back, where her abusive father had stabbed her with a broken beer bottle, the strain of her demonic power hitting critical mass and melting down had aggravated the wound. A cracked vertebra, leaking boiling spinal fluid, was sticking out alarmingly.
Little Freyja was no longer at Richie's side. The other eleven auras were gone. The cathedral and the bird stuck on it was a black skidmark. There was only one Freyja - the one she had been before her awakening, and after meeting Richie and leaving the Backyards.
Richie dove to take her hand before she swooned backward, and was too late. Freyja had literally burned herself out, and broken her own back with the recoil of her cataclysmic breath weapon. She dropped into the crater, and Richie jumped in after her, swimming through freefall to catch and save her.
Richie only tumbled, like one tumbles out of bed, still wrapped up in their bedsheets, out of this long, long vision, into the junkyard of Station Bay, exhausted and already depleting his memory. His first venture into the Backyards ended as it had, and he crawled into the junked car to sleep off his bad trip. He would be found in that same car later, and arrested, and so went the cycle.
Richie himself remembered none of this, nor the encounters in Tide Town that would come a bit later - but his dragons remembered. They remembered everything.
And the Freyja of two years ago would sink into her own version of the Backyards to rest and heal, licking her wounds from the massive debt her wrecked body incurred when it became a floodgate to some Abrahamic lake of fire drifting mischievously through the fabric of spacetime. When she emerged, a new girl - she still carried the "limp".