by Eric Vall
Oh well. If I couldn’t move Metatron’s foot, I’d just have to move the ground.
I summoned green Hellfire into my hand and then cast it onto the earth below me. Instantly, my body passed through the interdimensional portal, and I found myself briefly floating through space and time. I made myself reappear directly behind the Archangel, and I swung my pitch-black blade into the back of his armor.
There was a loud screech as enchanted metal struck enchanted metal, and Metatron stumbled forward.
He recovered nearly instantly, though, and spun around to retaliate.
I blocked his attack with the Unhallowed Sword, and the two of us locked eyes as our black-and-white blades struggled against each other.
“Why are you being so stubborn?” Metatron demanded. “The Exalted One just wants to ask you a few questions.”
“Why are you being such a dick?” I spat back. “We’re innocent.”
Metatron gave me a shove, and I stumbled back as our blades released from their gridlock. The Archangel raised his sword behind his head and prepared to go for a powerful blow.
However, before he could go through with his attack, the glowing red tail of Ira’s whip wrapped around his blade.
The succubus gave her weapon a tug, and Metatron was pulled off-balance.
At the same time, three small balls of red Hellfire struck the Archangel in the chest.
Metatron stumbled backward, tried to retain his balance, and then fell on his ass.
The second he was on the ground, a beam of lime green Hellfire spread across the terrain, and a rocky formation grew up around him and encased the Archangel in a sort of natural prison of stone and dirt.
“Forget about us?” Eligor mused as she and the rest of the team ran over to my position.
“Actually,” Metatron growled as he struggled to break free, “yeah, I kind of did. Too bad you just wasted your only shot at taking me off-guard.”
“What do you--” the blonde knight started, but then her words were cut off by a miniature explosion.
There was a blinding wave of light as Metatron surrounded his entire body with Divine magic. He let out a grunt of anger as the spell increased in power, and then the earthly prison around him exploded into a hailstorm of dirt and debris.
Now, the Archangel was floating in the air, and his armor had been upgraded. His head was covered by a bullet-shaped helmet made up of the same ivory metal as the rest of his armor. A golden cross sat across his face, and small slits lined up with where his eyes should be. On his back he now had a long, flowing cape of pure Divine light.
“Now we done fucked up,” Todd whistled. “He went from Megatron to Galvatron!”
Metatron unleashed another blast of Divine light down on our position, and it was all I could do to throw up a dome of purple Hellfire over my friends and myself.
I fell to my knees as I let out a scream of frustration and tried to hold my barrier in place.
“Jacob won’t be able to hold this much longer!” Sia gasped. “We need to do something!”
“I’ve got an idea,” Todd exclaimed. “Lib, I need you to be an Ewok.”
“A what?” the dark-haired succubus asked.
“Don’t question it!” the imp implored. “Just pick up two trees and follow my lead.”
I could feel myself making a deeper imprint into the ground below as the Divine light beared down on us. Sia was right, I wasn’t going to be able to hold this for much longer.
Suddenly, there was a loud “crunch” sound, and the beam of light ceased.
I looked up to see two large tree trunks, glowing emerald with telekinetic Hellfire.
Both of their ends had been splintered into oblivion, and Metatron was now lying groggily on the ground. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. Liby had smashed the Archangel between the massive logs, and the blow was enough to at least knock him down.
I figured we only had a few seconds before Metatron recovered, so we needed to make this count. I released my purple barrier, and the six of us sprung into action as Metatron began to pull himself back to his feet.
“Sia, Ira, and Eligor, subdue him!” I commanded as I charged at the Archangel. “Liby and Todd, follow me!”
Liby, Todd, and I began to charge at Metatron. At the same time, a tree branch encased with lime green Hellfire wrapped around his left arm and held it in place. Superbia’s black Hellfire covered his body, and Ira’s whip wrapped firmly around his right leg.
Metatron struggled against my friends’ spells, but the combined effort was too much for him.
Todd struck him with a few snowball-sized balls of red fire, all while Libidine assaulted his Divine armor with spears of yellow.
The Archangel weakly deflected the attacks with his sword, but then I was upon him.
I heaved the blade of the Unhallowed Sword up against his, made a twisting motion, and disarmed the Archangel in one fell swoop. Then I summoned bronze Hellfire into my hands, spun around, and blasted him point-blank with my spell of judgement.
Metatron’s body vibrated violently from the attack before he was launched into the air like a ragdoll. The Archangel let out a grunt of shock as he flew backward, and then he went silent as his body smashed into the ground and rolled across the landscape like a runaway cannon ball. The armored angel took out nearly a dozen trees as he bounced helplessly against the ground and then finally rolled to a stop about two-hundred feet away. His body laid there, motionless.
“Holy fuck,” I sighed and decast my spell. “I think we just defeated another Archangel.”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” Eligor purred into my ear. “You’re a Demon King now. Keep gaining followers, and soon an Archangel will be little more than a grunt to you.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Eligor,” Sia warned. “Jacob still has quite a ways to go before that happens.”
“I’m confident he will get there, Sister,” Libidine giggled.
“I appreciate the enthusiasm, guys,” I admitted, “but we need to get the fuck out of here before these guys start coming to. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to fight them two times in a row.”
“What about Martatelli?” Todd asked with a hint of worry in his voice. “Is he gonna be the headless horseman forever now?”
“Of course not,” Sia explained. “Demons and the Divine can interact with ghosts just as we can with Shades. However, much like down in Hell, you cannot kill something that’s already dead. Angelo will be fine.”
“He’ll have to catch up to us along the way,” I announced as I pointed to a stirring soldier. “We need to split right now.”
I motioned for my friends to follow me, and then we took off into the woods.
The sounds of chirping insects and howling coyotes filled the air as we wandered aimlessly through the forest. Wet, soggy leaves schlurped under our feet as we jogged, and there was a cool, brisk breeze that chilled me to the bone. Finally, after a few minutes of unsuccessfully trying to find our way out, I turned to Libidine.
“Liby, can you fly up there and see if there’s any sort of civilization around here?” I asked the Sister of Lust.
“What if somebody sees me?” Liby questioned. “Aren’t we supposed to remain hidden from the human world?”
“Honestly,” I admitted, “at this point, I don’t give a damn.”
Liby nodded, and then she summoned her large, bat-like wings with a flash of purple Hellfire. She took a few hurried steps and then crouched down and pushed herself off into the night sky. The succubus soared up above the trees, turned around in the air, and then whistled.
“There’s a road with a gas station just off in the distance!” she exclaimed.
“You heard the succubus,” I announced with a grin. “Let’s get over there!”
Eligor and Ira’s sub both sprouted their own wings, while Todd covered himself with his black Hellfire.
Ira’s sub backflipped into the air, flew around behind me
, and grabbed me just underneath my armpits.
Eligor did the same for Superbia, and then they lifted us up into the sky.
Once we were all airborne, it only took a few minutes to fly over to the gas station. I still didn’t know where we were, exactly, but I could tell we were out in the middle of nowhere.
The gas station looked like it hadn’t been remodeled in thirty years. It still had the old-timey analog numbers on each pump, and the building itself was missing large chunks of siding. One of the windows had been broken out and replaced with a piece of plywood, and the large neon sign read “Cigarettes- $9/pack.”
“I’m really hoping these people will let us use their phone,” I sighed as we approached the door. “If they even have one, that is.”
“Bro,” Todd gasped. “We don’t have to worry about that. Look!”
I followed the imp’s clawed finger and saw he was pointing at a large glass rectangle just off to the side of the main building.
It was a fucking pay phone.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked rhetorically.
“It is, Jakey,” Todd cackled. “I feel like we just stumbled on the remnants of an ancient civilization.”
I wandered over to the phone booth, popped open the door, and stepped inside. As I fumbled through my pockets to see if I happened to have any change, I realized my efforts were pointless. I could manipulate metal with my silver Hellfire, after all.
I called forth the silver flames into my hand and aimed down at the metal floor of the booth. Instantly, the area around my feet began to liquify as it glowed with the gray shimmer, and then I carefully ripped up four quarter-sized pieces from the floor. I forced them to harden in my hand, and then I placed them one-by-one into the coin slot of the phone.
Finally, I picked up the headset, held it to my ear, and punched in the numbers I wanted to dial. The phone made a dialing sound as it tried to connect, and then I heard a ring on the other side.
“Hello?” a familiar, feminine voice answered.
“Hey Jane.” I couldn’t help but grin ear-to-ear as I talked to my most beloved cultist. “It’s Jacob.”
“J-Jacob?” Jane gasped. “Is it really you?”
“It sure is, dear,” I answered coyly. “We’re on our way home.”
Chapter 2
Turns out, Todd was wrong.
Despite the distinct smell in the air, we had reappeared out of the Porta ad Terram in southwest Colorado, not New Jersey. Still, Jane informed me that it would be nearly a seven hour drive between our mansion and our current location, so the seven of us had to lay low in the gas station until the cavalry arrived. Well, as low as we could lay, given Eligor’s outfit, but thankfully night shift clerks have seen all manner of shit, and the guy behind the counter barely batted an eye when he saw us.
At first, we all hung out awkwardly in the aisles of the convenience store, but then the clerk finally figured out what we were doing and offered for us to lounge in the break room.
After we’d been back there for a few hours, the clerk finally popped his head in.
“How’s it goin’ back here, friendos?” the balding, middle-aged man asked. “Still waitin’ for your buddies to come pick you up?”
“Unfortunately,” I confirmed. “They live really far away, and they ran into some traffic issues.”
“At four-thirty in the morning?” the clerk asked with raised eyebrows.
“There was an accident, bro,” Todd, now disguised in his human form, explained. “Apparently a fucking roadrunner came outta nowhere.”
“A roadrunner caused a back-up?” the balding man still sounded unconvinced.
“It wasn’t the roadrunner,” Todd said as he shook his head. “It was the damn coyote chasing it. The car hit the poor bastard, and the big-ass rocket strapped to his back--”
“What he’s saying is our friends hit a coyote in the middle of the desert, and its bones caused a tire to blow out,” I interjected. “But they got it fixed, and they should be here any minute.”
“Okay … ” the clerk sighed. “I was just letting you all know I’m about to head out for the night. My manager’s coming in for the morning shift, and I didn’t know if he’d be okay with y’all being back here.”
“We’ll be out of your hair shortly,” Libidine reassured the clerk. “We appreciate your hospitality.”
“If you say so.” The man shrugged, and then he walked away while he whistled a cheery tune.
“I still don’t understand why we can’t just fly to your home,” Eligor grunted. “I can’t stand all this sitting around and doing nothing.”
“Because if we fly,” I explained, “it’ll make it way easier for Metatron to track us down. Unlike the place you’re from, we don’t have a lot of flying humanoids around here. Our ride should be here shortly, and then we can blend in with the morning commute.”
Eligor’s face contorted into a look of disgust.
“Morning commute?” she gasped. “What is this place?”
“Welcome to Earth Realm,” Todd snickered. “Where you work eight hours a day so our corporate overlords can give us money that we then turn around and spend on things created by our corporate overlords.”
“That sounds dreadful,” the knight admitted. “This is … normal on Earth?”
“Only for squares, Goldilocks,” Todd said as he leaned back in his chair. “AKA not the Toddster.”
“Yeah,” I joked to the imp, “since your transformation, you’ve always been a little more circle-shaped.”
Todd sat forward in his chair as he eyes narrowed, and then he flicked a small wrapper of gum in my direction.
“Very funny, bro,” he chuckled. “Regular ‘ol Rodney Dangerfield over here.”
“Thankfully, Jacob is not your average mortal,” Sia explained to Eligor.
“Oh yes,” Liby added. “I can promise you’ll never have a dull moment when you’re around him! Cupi and I have been in Jacob’s world for almost three years now, and we don’t regret it one bit. In fact, I’d say it was the best decision we ever made.”
“I’m quite aware of how … fun Jacob can be,” the knight purred, and her eyes looked me up and down as she spoke. “I hope he’s just as aggressive here on Earth Realm as he is as King of the Fourth Circle.”
“Believe it or not,” Ira’s sub spoke up, “he might even be better.”
Todd stood up from his chair, threw his arms above his head, and headed for the main area of the convenience store.
“I’m gonna go into the other room before everyone finds out what I had for lunch yesterday,” he sighed as he walked through the door. “Trust me, vargrat curry isn’t gonna look that great coming back up.”
“Was it something I said?” Eligor looked perplexed as she watched the imp walk away.
“Todd’s weird about all that sex stuff,” I explained. “He claims it makes him ill to hear us talk about it.”
“He’s probably just longing for that woman we met out in Kansas,” Liby added. “Remember? The one at the diner?”
Ira’s sub sat forward in her chair.
“Todd has a girlfriend?” she gasped. “Tell me more!”
“He admired her from afar,” I chuckled. “He was invisible the whole time.”
All of the women in the room let out a collective “awwww” as they listened to the imp’s plight.
“Maybe we should have the bus go out there first?” Liby suggested.
“That would add, like, hours to our drive,” I reminded the succubus. “Besides, that was years ago. I’m sure that waitress has probably moved on to greener pastures by now.”
“He’ll never know until he goes back out there,” the Sister of Lust said with a shrug.
“Maybe after all this shit with the Exalted One dies down,” I conceded. “But for now, we need to lay low until we can regroup and figure out the next step of our plan.”
“Speaking of ‘the plan,’” Sia interjected “what exactly is your plan, Jacob
? I know we’re checking in on your cultists, but then what? Are we immediately returning to Hell? Do you plan on bringing your forces with you?”
I rubbed my temples in frustration and sighed.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I was thinking something along those lines. But that was before the forces of the Divine came along and threw a wrench in all those plans.”
Suddenly, there was a shrill whistle from the other room.
“Yo, Super Friends!” Todd called out. “Our chariot has arrived!”
The succubi, Eligor, and I got up and began to walk out to the exit.
“Wait … ” Sia pondered aloud. “Where’s Martatelli?”
“Oh, yeah,” Todd mused, and then he turned and cupped his hands over his mouth. “Casper, you can come out now. The coast is clear!”
The second the words left Todd’s mouth, the spectral form of Angelo Martatelli burst forth from behind the refrigerated beverages. The scientist appeared to be shivering as he grumbled to himself in Italian, but he floated over toward our position and followed us outside.
“Won’t the cameras see him?” Liby asked curiously.
“Probably.” I shrugged. “I guess the Paranormal Channel is gonna get some new material.”
The sun was just beginning to peek out from behind the horizon when we stepped out and were greeted by the early morning. Birdsongs rang out in harmony across the landscape, and the dewy air felt cool on my face.
Off to the left of the convenience store, underneath one of the large metal awnings, sat a giant white and black bus. The entire upper half of the vehicle was covered with modern, sprawling windows that were covered on the inside with red curtains. The lower half featured a couple of large compartments where luggage or other travel necessities could be stored, and it had one of those strange purple-and-blue, nineties swirl patterns on the side.
The door of the bus opened, and a man in a dark navy robe poked his head out and then waved.
Yup, that was definitely our ride.
“Just as beautiful as I remember,” Todd whistled.
The imp in disguise marched over to the door and hoisted himself in, and then we followed him in a hurry.
