Hellbound

by Matt Turner

  Simon only had a vague impression of the pulsing wall of flesh and the dozens of bodies it scooped up with its horrific combination of arms and tongues, but it was more than enough. Without another word, he reached out, seized Amaury by his hair, and spun him around so that they faced the opposite direction.

  “We are Legion!” a thousand voices called out after them. “Join usss, little fliesss!” It did not even pause to pick up the wounded lying on the floor; instead, it opened a dozen mouths along its bottom edge and scooped them up like a shovel as it ran along. Its outstretched limbs and claws tore soldiers out of the fleeing crowd ten at a time, forcing them into its engorged body, as it steadily grew larger and larger. “All Creation is oursss!”

  Simon had faced ten thousand foes in his time, but none nearly so horrifying. And so the Butcher of God ran for his life.

  24

  “What in the hell is going on down there?” Salome asked in frustration. Whatever it was, the reek of death hung even heavier in the air than usual; the pretty Prophet had been forced to wrap some of her silken scarves about her face to try to hide from the stench.

  “It’s Legion,” Ellie growled beneath her iron mask. “Always knew that freak was going to betray us.”

  “Any of the Praetorians left?” Salome demanded.

  “Sisera is not responding.”

  In spite of everything, Salome’s full lips curled into a smirk. “Good riddance,” she muttered. “Always hated that asshole.”

  Giles frowned down at the crowd of panicked soldiers fleeing from the palace of Pandemonium. He had given orders to the other legions stationed within the city to evacuate; he strongly suspected that throwing soldiers at this newfound enemy would only make it even stronger. “The Horsemen are down there as well,” he said.

  “Were they working with Legion all along?” Salome wondered.

  “Unclear. I will extract the answers from them myself,” Ellie promised in her dead voice.

  “We should go down there,” Abaddon argued through one of the locusts on Giles’s shoulder. “Finish this quickly.”

  Giles ignored the demon’s advice and turned to the captain of the Titan. “Hold this position,” he ordered. “Fire only on my command.”

  Captain Gudivada gave him a quick salute. “Aye, Lord Prophet.”

  “You want to fire Hellfire on Dis?” Salome asked in astonishment. She waved her hand through the open window of the airship to the city that lay below. “This isn’t the ass-end of the Fourth Circle, Giles—this is the capital!”

  “If Cain gets his hands on the Horsemen, then the capital won’t matter anyway,” Giles snapped. “If I have to burn down this entire city to save the Kingdom, then I will do so. No sacrifice is too small.”

  “What does the council say—”

  They still don’t know. Abaddon laughed in Giles’s ear. Your precious Kingdom is already dead!

  Then I will build a new one, Giles snarled back. “The Holy Council has given me full authority to deal with this situation,” he calmly lied. “This is a matter for the Prophets now.”

  “Captain! Lord Prophets!” one of the gunners yelled out from his position at the lower end of the airship’s cabin. “Look!”

  The three Prophets rushed to the window and gazed down onto the city below. At first, Giles saw nothing but the panicked crowds, frantically spilling through the streets—and then, he noticed a slight shaking in the buildings. The cobblestones of the street began to pulse and shift as though they were in an earthquake, faster and faster, as great tears began to spread throughout the ground. Soldiers and civilians alike cried out in fear as sinkhole after sinkhole opened up in the streets, swallowing men and buildings alike.

  “The dungeons,” Salome whispered in shock. “How big has—”

  A great tendril of flesh, tipped with claws the size of full-grown men, tore out of the ground and wrapped itself around a ten-story building. The falling brickwork and gunfire of the scattered soldiers tore dozens of bleeding holes into the thing, but it still violently contracted and the structure fell in an avalanche of brick and dust. Another tentacle emerged from the depths, then another, as Legion slowly pulled the arena-sized behemoth of flesh it had become out from the darkness beneath the city.

  “Shit,” Salome groaned. “I shouldn’t have killed that fucking Baptist.”

  This was Legion’s power all along? Giles had had no idea; if he did, he would have never allowed that monster out of his sight for even a second. He forced himself to throttle the emotions of revulsion and disgust warring for his soul, and allowed the cold, clinical side of his mind to assume command. “Captain Gudivada,” he ordered. “No Hellfire yet. Standard munitions only. Direct your fire on Legion’s perimeter; we want to keep them contained.”

  “What about us?” Ellie asked.

  “ELIE, find the Horsemen. Yours is the real battle; Legion is only a distraction meant to buy them time. I will provide you as much assistance as I am able. Salome, you and I are going to take down Legion.” He opened the window farther and placed the tips of his boots over the edge. “Any questions?”

  “This is going to be a real pain,” Salome grumbled, but she stood on the edge of the window alongside him. “Are you ready, Leviathan?”

  “Are you?” the devil she was bound to sarcastically asked back.

  The Prophet rolled her eyes. “Smartass.”

  With that last comforting exchange, Giles and Salome leapt from the Titan’s cabin. The wind from their shrieking descent brought tears to Giles’s eyes as they tumbled down to the hellish city below. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an explosion of light as Leviathan sprang into being, extending both his massive wings and catching Salome mid-fall. The other Prophet gracefully took her customary position on his back and swooped low over the palace of Pandemonium.

  The sharp spires of a dozen towers clawed upward at Giles as he fell to the ground, faster and faster. Now, Abaddon, he ordered.

  He could sense the devil’s smile. At last, Abaddon rumbled. Finally, a chance to stretch.

  Locusts poured out from every orifice and pore of Giles’s body, tearing through his skin as they rushed out, faster and faster. Once in the open air, they multiplied at an exponential rate as Abaddon unleashed his full power for the first time in centuries—in seconds, hundreds of thousands of them buzzed about in a mighty swarm about Giles; then millions, then tens of millions. He let a tight smile of satisfaction cross his face as their bodies—thousands of which were still partly embedded in his—stiffened and tightened about him.

  From chaos, order. Giles smiled wider as the swarm coalesced about him. An outer shell thousands of locusts thick formed around his torso, rendering him utterly impervious to any attack, and a pair of arms and legs—made completely from the locust-body of Abaddon, yet taller and mightier than even the Kingdom’s most powerful stiltwalkers—formed into being around him. Just before he collided with the ground, the score of locusts trapped within his skull bit into the soft tissue of his brain. He let out a piercing scream, but it was over in an instant—and suddenly, he was in full control of the godlike power of Abaddon.

  Fifty meters below his imprisoned body, the armored feet of the locust-giant slammed into the top of an army barracks. The building immediately gave way under Abaddon’s sheer weight, and Giles felt thousands of his locusts die from the force of the impact. The shock wave traveled up the length of the giant, making his teeth clatter fiercely. But in an instant the reverberation was gone, and he had already replaced the soles of his feet with a fresh layer.

  I am in control, Giles rejoiced. He reached down with one of his new arms and picked up a half-demolished stiltwalker that he experimentally swung through the air. He had forgotten the raw power that Abaddon’s true form possessed. It’s all mine!

  He took a step into the crowded streets, crushing dozens with each colossal step. It didn’t matter; he was a god, and the denizens of Dis were nothing more than insects scurrying about an upturned an
t pile. But this is my ant pile, he thought as the locusts within his skull relayed images of the outside world directly to his brain. Legion was still growing, and still pulling their massive bulk from the depths beneath the city. With each swipe of their limbs—they seemed to extend hundreds of meters in every direction—they consumed more and more of the fleeing crowds. How many had they assimilated into their bulk already? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

  “Legion,” Giles thundered out through the combined hissing of a million locusts. The sprawling mass of flesh shifted in response to their name—he could swear he saw the thousands of eyes scattered about its tentacular torso narrow. “This city is MINE!”

  With that roar, he charged forward, bulldozing through soldiers, crowds, and entire city blocks that were unlucky enough to stand in his way. Not this time, Giles vowed to himself as he drew a massive fist back, ready to smash it into the rapidly approaching abomination. This time, nothing will stop me!

  25

  “More!” one of Legion’s mouths squealed in Lao’s ear. “More, more, MORE!”

  “Legion, that’s enough!” Lao screamed in a panic. The walls of the dungeon were far too small for the shuffling behemoth that the Prophet had become—he glanced upward and saw the ceiling was beginning to give way from the sheer pressure of Legion’s bulk.

  “The Horsemen, goddammit!” Lao shouted. He tried to squirm free of the iron vise that several of Legion’s arms had formed around his waist, but it was no good; the monster had him in an unbreakable grip. They pressed him even closer against their heaving, sweating body (Oh God, I’m going to throw up, Lao thought in misery) as the bricks of the ceiling shattered and light poured through. With a sigh of relief, Legion stretched up into the air, bringing Lao along with them.

  Up they went—ten meters, twenty, then thirty, in an explosion of flesh like a ruptured pimple. Lao had a brief glimpse of the shattered wreckage of the street below them, and the thousands blindly fleeing from the hellish sight of Legion. But the Horsemen—

  “The Master wants the Horsemen!” he shouted up at Legion. There was no longer anything even remotely human about the Prophet’s shape; they were closer to a thrashing, wriggling spider than anything, so he directed his words at the nearest ear protruding from Legion’s sweaty skin. “Focus on them! The crowds are meaningless!”

  A tendril of flesh nearly fifty meters long whipped past his face, so close that the barbed bones protruding from it nearly tore off his scalp. Legion slammed the tendril into the depths of Dis, smashing it against the fleeing crowds. Lao watched in horror as hundreds were reduced to pulp in an instant. The monster did not even bother to bring the tendril back to the main part of its body; instead, it sprouted thousands of mouths on the tentacle that bit and tore into those fleeing like rabid wolves. The tendril visibly thickened and grew with each swallow of meat.

  “You asssked usss how many,” one of the mouths by Lao’s face sneered. “We are now at twenty thousssand ninety-sssix. And we want MORE!”

  “Get the Horseman, you idiots!” Lao shrieked. “The Master will give you all Creation for them!” His arms were still free enough for him to reach for the bag that he had slung over his shoulder. It was still there, thank the Master; there was still a chance that he could end this before Legion consumed all of Hell.

  “We have decided we need no Massster.” The mouth grinned. “We ssshall have the Horsssemen, though, never fear. And the heaven-man too! Essspecially him!”

  “You would dare cross Cain?” Lao was awestruck by the sheer scale—both in a metaphorical and very literal sense—of the idiocy that stretched before him. Their greed has overcome them. “You’re mad.”

  “You doubt usss?” the mouth snarled. In the street ahead of them, a small group of soldiers from the Eighth Legion were attempting to unload a howitzer from a stiltwalker; Legion almost casually reached out with one of their tendrils and consumed them. “For that, we ssshall sssave you for lassst.”

  Fucking shit. All of a sudden, being back in Salome’s bed didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Lao tried to think of a good reply to the monster, but he found it difficult to even think, as Legion tore more and more of themselves out from the underground caverns beneath Dis. Tendril after tendril exploded from the streets in every direction, nearly as far as he could see—and each grew exponentially larger as they reached into apartments, markets, temples, and fleeing crowds all across Dis, eating everything they touched.

  “Look at all the little fliesss running.” Legion extended a tongue from their mouth and gently ran a line of saliva across Lao’s cheek. He let out a groan of dismay at the warm, repulsive touch. “Why do they alwaysss run from usss?”

  The entire ground shook as Legion finally wrenched themselves fully out of the ground. Lao glanced down to see that the being’s massive body—good God, they towered over the entire city—was supported by a dozen or so massive legs, each the size of a building unto themselves. I’m trapped on a spider, he thought in horror. And all Hell is its web.

  But not all of the flies were running away. There was a distant series of booms overhead, and suddenly a salvo of artillery shells thundered down. Legion let out a shriek of rage from ten thousand mouths as one of their legs was split open by a well-aimed explosion; guts and charnel spattered down, enough to drown an entire village. Another shell smashed into the torso that connected the legs together; Lao felt the shock wave of the explosion travel through the flesh, and Legion’s grip on him momentarily loosened. He tried to reach for the bag on his shoulder, but he was too late; Legion’s iron vise around him tightened once again as the abomination raised a claw-like arm in the air to protect itself from the barrage.

  The Titan, Lao realized. He glanced up in the air and nearly let out a cry of relief; in the clouds high above, he saw the familiar shape of the Kingdom’s mighty airship. The most powerful weapon in the Kingdom’s arsenal, not even the Prophets could hope to stand against it.

  “Meddlesssome pessstsss,” Legion snarled. They shot a tendril up into the air, extending it farther and farther as they fed more and more flesh into it. The gunners on the Titan rained artillery and fire down on it, but the appendage became as fast as a whip under Legion’s expert control; their desperate shots did not even come close.

  Lao’s heart sank as Legion reached higher, higher, higher. Without the Titan, Dis is lost, he thought in despair. And if Dis, the most populous city in all Hell, were to be assimilated by Legion… Could even the Master defeat them?

  As if in reply to his thoughts, a mighty roar reverberated through the air. In the skies above, there was a flash of dark wings and a burst of fire as Hell’s mightiest surviving demon swooped down and ripped Legion’s appendage in half. The tendril of flesh crashed down into Dis, flattening an entire street, as Leviathan let out a bellow of triumph.

  “Legion,” another mighty voice rang out. A dark figure, clad in an armor that twisted and shifted with the scurrying movements of countless locusts, strode through the smoking, demolished ruins of Dis. “This city is MINE!” It sprinted forward, smashing through ancient buildings and walls as if they weren’t even there.

  Abaddon, the locust-devil! In spite of his predicament, Lao could not help but feel his mouth water at the sight of such power.

  Legion was not amused by the two challengers. “DEVILSSS, ANGELSSS, AND MEN!” they screamed in a voice that shook every window in the city. “WE SSSHALL HAVE YOU ALL!”

  26

  Deep underground, the wall of flesh still reached out for Vera. She blasted away at it with her machine gun, drawing geysers of blood from the forest of arms that it stretched out at her. But even with Seth sprinting inhumanely fast through the crowd of fleeing soldiers, around tight corners packed with screaming refugees, and over piles of debris from the quaking, collapsing ceiling, the abomination continued to gain on them.

  A limb made up of a series of arms linked together shot out of the monstrosity’s skin and sped toward her. “Faster, Seth!” she scr
eamed down as she squeezed the trigger and emptied the rest of her clip at the appendage. The bullets lanced through it in a dozen places, neatly severing it, but two more limbs rose to take its place.

  Seth did not bother to reply, but Vera could tell from his deep, ragged breaths that he was quickly losing wind. And still the abomination drew closer; she tossed aside the useless gun and hurled one of the grenades she had stolen at the thing’s body. One of the gaping mouths, still halfway chewing on a screaming soldier, opened and swallowed up the explosive. “Choke on that, asshole!” she swore in triumph, and flipped the creature’s bulbous eyes the bird.

  The explosion ripped the front section of the flesh-wall off, exposing a mass of shifting organs and entrails beneath its skin…and then a new layer of flesh simply grew back over it. She had barely bought them even a second of time. “Goddamnit!”

  “No…blasphemy,” Seth managed to wheeze out between his desperate gasps for air.

  “Vera!” Amaury called out. Somehow he and Simon had managed to keep up with Seth’s frantic pace through the tunnels; they sprinted on either side of her. Amaury nimbly dodged and leapt over any soldier slow enough to get in his way, while Simon simply smashed them aside with an easy sweep of his arm. Amaury flicked one of his fingers up to a crack forming in the ceiling above them. “Crush it!”

  She immediately grasped his meaning. Four-second timer on these grenades, which means… She slightly shifted on Seth’s shoulder to look at the dim hallway in front of them. It looked as though a corner was coming up. “Better run faster, lover boy,” she yelled into Seth’s ear, as she tossed the grenade just in front of them.

  “I’m…not—oh.” Seth barely managed to turn around the corner, just before Legion’s mouths opened and spat out a dozen shards of bone at them. The gruesome projectiles tore through several soldiers, impaling them to the wall, but Seth ducked underneath them and rounded the corner, narrowly avoiding tripping over the grenade. Behind them, Legion’s bulk slammed into the wall, and the worm-like monster shifted again, reaching for them once more—