by Eric Vall
“You guys know this song and dance,” I explained over the sound of demonic hisses and Hellfire swishing past my body. “Liby, I want you on crowd control. Cupi, you need to try to get these little guys into position so that Gula can take them all out with one fell swoop. Todd and Tris? I don’t know what you guys should do, but I’m putting you together. I know both of your reefer-fueled minds will figure something out.”
“Yes, sir!” Todd exclaimed and reappeared beside us. “The Dynamic Doobie Duo is on the case.”
The imp motioned for Tris to come closer, and then he whispered something into her ear. The brunette giggled joyously, bent down, and then Todd hopped onto her back. She sprouted her large, bat-like wings and then took off like a rocket across the museum.
“Where the fuck are they going?” Gula demanded. “The battle’s right here!”
“Just trust them, alright?” I reassured the succubus and pulled out my goat-headed dagger. “When Todd’s got an idea, it’s usually go big or go home.”
I blasted another one of the small demons with red Hellfire, and then I moved my hand across the blade. Instantly, the steel began to glow, and then it extended to form a cutlass-shaped blade of pure Hellfire.
Meanwhile, Libidine had grown out her wings and flown up to the ceiling. The dark-haired succubus was now zipping back and forth, strafing the demons below with handfuls of enchanted spears.
I looked over at the two remaining succubi. Gula had conjured up her battle axe, and Cupi had somehow produced the polearm that she had been gifted from the cult headquarters. How she got it in here, I had no idea, but there were some questions best left unasked. They both nodded and then we charged.
Cupi and Gula went off to the left and cleaved through the tiny demons as they ran. Another grunt of pain rang out through the exhibit hall, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few of the little fuckers tossed into the air.
My friends could handle the grunts. I was going to help Aruna.
The Rakshasi and Azar were locked in hand-to-hand combat. With one hand, the assassin in the leather coat was lashing out at Aruna with her own chakram. With the other, he was trying to get enough space between them so that he could get a clear shot in with his pistol.
That wasn’t gonna happen.
A few of the small demons tried to swipe at me as I ran, but I made short work of them with a few blasts of Hellfire in rapid succession. Once I got closer to Aruna and Azar, I reached out with my green Hellfire and picked up one of the concrete pedestals. The pillar wasn’t super heavy, but it was still definitely not something you wanted smashing into your head at a high velocity.
Aruna must have caught my drift, because she fell backward onto the ground, pulled her feet up into her chest, and then launched Azar a foot or two into the air with a double-legged kick.
Right as Azar reached the peak of his ascent, I moved my glowing fist and launched the pedestal right at him. It smashed into the leather-clad man right in his chest, and his body went flying back through the room. There was the sound of shattering glass as he knocked over a bunch of displays before he finally came to a halt against the far wall. Most importantly, though, was the fact that his pistol and Aruna’s chakram were now laying a few feet from his body.
Aruna reached out with her left hand and summoned her weapon back to her. At the same time, I used my emerald Hellfire to pull the enchanted pistol into my hand. That was when one of the tiny demons screeched and jumped up into the air in front of me. I hit him dead on with a swipe of my enchanted sword, but it did little but knock the little guy out of the way.
“Why are these fuckers so hard to kill?” I asked the Rakshasi.
“They’re Daeva, Jacob,” she explained as if this were common knowledge. “They’re very thick skinned. As you may have already discovered, blades can’t pierce through their hide unless they are traveling at high velocities.”
The Daeva I had knocked away charged at us once again, and I raised the sight of the pistol in front of my eye.
It’d been a very, very long time since I’d actually fired one of these things. When you have powerful Demonic and Divine magic, you don’t really need human weaponry. Luckily, I’d had plenty of training from my dad back at the gun range near my house.
I squeezed the trigger, and there was a loud pop as the bullet exited the muzzle. A gory hole instantly appeared between the Daeva’s eyes, and bits of his brain matter splattered across the floor behind him like a tossed bowl of spaghetti. The demon’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell down to the ground, dead.
I could actually get used to this.
The pistol began to glow with black ectoplasm, and then it started to be tugged out of my hand as if it were attached to an invisible string. I fought against the assassin’s magic for a second, but it was too much for my regular grip, and the gun flew through the air and landed back in its owner’s possession.
“Haven’t you ever heard that you shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to you?” Azar hissed and fired off a few rounds.
I tossed up a purple shield in front of us, and the Hellfire seemed to disintegrate the enchanted bullets as they struck. Normally, this was where I would drop my shield and counterattack with a spell of my own, but this guy was relentless. There was only a split-second break between rounds of fire, and he seemed to be reloading the pistol at lightning-fast speed.
“We’ve gotta get that gun out of his hand,” I demanded to Aruna.
“Way ahead of you, Jacob.” The Rakshasi nodded and then pointed up at the ceiling.
I understood what the assassin meant, so I changed my sword back into a dagger, sheathed it, and then raised my right hand up at an angle. There was a flash of purple flames as I created a small angled platform in the spot Aruna had been pointing, and then I gave her a quick nod.
Then Aruna spun around and launched her chakram at the makeshift shield. The weapon hit the violet fire, and the angle of the platform caused the chakram to ricochet directly at Azar. The spinning disk of death struck the unlucky bastard in the hand and knocked his gun across the room.
I released my wall of Hellfire and instantly retaliated with a massive fireball of red. Azar tried to cartwheel out of the way, but my attack was able to catch the bottom of his left leg and caused his body to spin around like an out-of-control top. Before he could reorient himself, Aruna lobbed a ball of black ectoplasm at Azar.
The gooey magic substance struck the assassin in the chest and pinned him down onto the ground.
“Make him suffer, Jacob,” Aruna growled. “My weapons will do no damage.”
I clapped my hands together, summoned a massive inferno of red Hellfire all around my body, and then funneled it into a beam of molten magma directly at Azar. The blast lit up the fucker like a fleshy firework, and sparks of red sprayed all around the room. I held the attack at full power for another few seconds, and then I released. Once the shimmer of the magic subsided, there stood Azar, still alive and well.
Well, maybe not well. The demonic assassin had burn marks all over his skin, and his jacket was burnt at the edges, but he was still very much in one piece.
“You’ll have to try harder than that,” he growled as his hands began to glow with black ectoplasm. “Us Deava don’t go down that easily.”
Azar shot a glob of the ectoplasm in our direction, but Aruna and I were quick to dodge. The blob of goo landed on the ground behind us and then sizzled. Suddenly, the scent of hot metal filled the air of the museum.
This fucker’s spirit magic appeared to be similar to molten lava.
Azar hauled back his fist to unleash another blob of sizzling magic, but I was much faster than this asshole. Right as the demon’s hand opened to release his spell, I threw up a wall of purple Hellfire in front of his position. The molten ectoplasm struck the shield and then splattered back onto Azar’s chest and upper torso.
The assassin shrieked in pain as he grabbed at the goo on his face and stumbled backward.
Azar finally managed to toss the sizzling goop off his head, and his face looked gnarly as fuck. There were now puss-filled welts all over the right side of his ugly mug, and it looked like there was a small hole in the side of his cheek.
“My face!” the assassin hissed. “Look what you’ve done to my face, assho--”
Aruna’s foot struck Azar in the stomach and turned the whiny bastard’s words into a grunt of pain. The assassin took a swing at the Rakshasi, but she was too swift. Aruna uppercutted the leather-bound assassin, grabbed him by the sides of his burnt face, and then brought his head down into her knee. While he was still dazed, Aruna twirled her body around and slashed Azar in the face with her chakram. She continued her brutal assault, but it looked like it was doing little more than dazing the assassin.
Finally, Azar’s hand glowed with the ectoplasmic substance, and his gun flew back into his hand.
Then he thrust it up into Aruna’s gut and squeezed the trigger.
I only had a split second to act, but I was able to get up a green portal in time. The fucker’s shot zipped through time and space and then reappeared out of a second portal directly behind him. An enchanted bullet blasted downward into Azar’s calf, and there was a spray of blood on the floor as his tibia and fibula shattered.
Azar let out a blood-curdling scream and fell to one knee in agony. He raised both of his fists into the air, summoned ectoplasm, and then slammed them into the floor. The simmering goop began to spread across the floor like flowing lava.
Aruna backflipped out of the way of the attack, ran back to me, and then grabbed my arm.
“What are you doing?” I demanded. “I can stop it with my--”
“Spiritual magic overrides Hellfire, remember?” the Rakshasi explained. “We’ve been over this before.”
The two of us dashed backward, back to where Liby, Cupi, and Gula were still fighting off the Daeva.
Libidine was still hovering above the small crowd and firing off handfuls of yellow spears. Meanwhile, both of her sisters were engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the demons. A few Daeva bodies were lying lifeless on the ground, but there was still plenty of the group still kicking, as resilient as Aruna said they were.
“We’ve got incoming fire, guys!” I warned. “Literally.”
Cupi knocked a few of the black-and-red demons away with her polearm and then used her weapon to push herself into the air. As she did so, her dark angel wings sprouted and pulled her out of the path of the incoming lava. Gula was kicking up several of the Daeva with her battle axe and creating what almost looked like a wave of bodies. She jumped up, summoned forth her wings, and got out of the way.
I summoned a large platform of violet flames in front of Aruna and myself, and we hopped up to safety. A few of the little fuckers tried to hitch a ride on our floating island but were quickly dispelled by Aruna’s foot.
A quick look around the room told me that this stuff was serious business. The pedestals that housed the museum’s artifacts began to melt from the intense heat and sink into the ectoplasm like a deflated buoy. The Daeva began to howl in pain as the molten ectoplasm engulfed their lower bodies, but none of them seemed to be dying. Suddenly, their shrieks of pain morphed into uproarious laughter. These assholes were just fucking with us.
“Cupi,” I commanded. “Give these motherfuckers something to laugh about.”
The blonde succubus nodded and then unleashed a wave of blue Hellfire down on a few of the Daeva. Their eyes went wide as they were frozen in place. The next thing I knew, their heads were shattered into a million pieces by Aruna’s chakram. The flying disk made a pass around the room and then flew back into the assassin’s hand.
“So there is something that can break through that thick hide of theirs,” the Rakshasi mused.
Another series of gunfire exploded through the air, and I had to use my free hand to dispel a slew of incoming bullets with my jade magic. The enchanted projectiles appeared through a portal in the ceiling and rained down on the Daeva. A few of the tiny demons were able to dodge the attack, but the rest weren’t so lucky. The bullets tore through their skulls, and their brain matter exploded out the back of their heads and sizzled when it hit the molten lava below.
To finish off the little assholes, Cupi darted through the air and blasted the tiny demons with her freezing spell. Immediately afterward, Gula zipped past and lopped off their torsos with her glowing battle axe.
Off in the distance, a booming thundering noise rattled the floors and walls, and with every boom, it sounded like it was growing closer and closer. Suddenly, the wall behind Azar was smashed into oblivion. The man in the leather jacket dodged out of the way of the falling debris and was forced to release his spell. The floor returned to normal, and Aruna and I were able to jump back on the ground to safety.
There was a beastly sound that was similar to that of a trumpet, and I looked over at the chaotic scene. As the dust and debris settled, I finally got a clear look at what was the source of the sound.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I half-joked.
There, standing in the rubble of the broken wall, was a fucking Wooly Mammoth. The creature was somehow even more massive than his skeleton, probably because it now had zombified flesh clinging to its frame, and he was encased with orange Hellfire.
There, on top of his mangy figure, sat Todd and Tris. The succubus was holding a pistol in her hands, and Todd had a comically large bone laid across his shoulder.
“The cavalry has arrived, bro!” the imp yelled from across the room and then pointed forward with the bone. “Charge!”
The mammoth let out another trumpet and then began to barrel its way toward Azar.
The assassin had a look of pure terror in his eyes as the creature approached. He fired off a few rounds of enchanted bullets at the lumbering beast, but they did nothing but bounce off like pieces of hail on concrete. The mammoth finally reached the limping Azar, reared its head to the side, and the struck the assassin with its massive tusk.
The fucker in the leather coat tumbled through the air like a ragdoll and then smashed into the lava stone wall. He finally fell to the ground and went limp.
Todd continued his charge over to our side, and then he and Tris leapt off the mammoth. The imp landed with his hands in the air like some sort of gymnast pose, and then he readied his makeshift club.
“Fore!” he cackled as he swung the bone and smashed one of the Daeva in the face. The tiny tattooed demon was tossed up into the air where he was then finished off with a bullet from Tris’ pistol.
Meanwhile, the rampaging mammoth reared up and stomped at the Deava. With each stomp, its gigantic feet turned our enemies into nothing more than messy heaps of gore and bones.
Cupi and Gula made one final sweep of the room, and the last Daeva’s frozen body shattered under the heavy blade of the redhead’s axe.
“Did you just reanimate a fucking mammoth?” I asked in disbelief.
“Well, Slothy did, but we sure as fuck did.” Todd smiled and patted the creature on the leg. “Can we keep him, Jakey? I’m sure he’s house-trained.”
“Sorry, Todd.” Tris sighed. “He’s going to turn back into a fossil as soon as I release my spell.”
“Well that’s a bummer,” Todd said with a frown. “I’ve always wanted a pet mammoth.”
“No you haven’t,” I argued, but I was still dumbfounded. “I can’t believe you literally brought back an entire mammoth.”
“What?” Tris shrugged. “I figured it was a lot less work to bring back one large creature rather than hundreds of smaller ones.”
; “It was either this guy or the T-Rex,” Todd explained, “but I’ve seen how that movie ends when Jeff Goldblum isn’t in the cast.”
“But…” I stuttered. “How did you, bring something back with just its bones? Doesn’t a zombie have to be freshly killed or turned or--”
Todd made a shushing sound to cut me off. “Don’t think too hard about it, bro,” he chuckled. “Life, uh, found a way.”
A gurgling cough from off in the corner made me realize that we weren’t quite done yet. The seven of us walked over to the downed assassin, weapons at the ready. Azar just looked up at us, chuckled, and then spat blood out onto the floor.
“I’m flattered.” He coughed through bloody mouthfuls. “I’m on the verge of death, and you’re still keeping on your toes. I must admit, bringing an extinct animal back to life? That’s a new one, even for--”
Azar’s words were cut off by a swift punch to the face from Gula.
“That’s for trying to kill my friends, asshole,” she hissed.
“Oooh,” Azar mused, “she’s quite the firecracker, isn’t she?”
“Why are the other Daeva involved in this, Azar?” Aruna demanded as she crouched down to eye level. “You’ve always made it quite clear that you work alone. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“What?” The assassin grinned. “Can’t a Daeva just want to include his brethren in his career? Maybe I was just giving some down on their luck demons some work.”
“Snarky, even at the end.” Aruna sighed. “You and I have a long history, Azar. Please don’t make me torture the information out of you.”
“That’d be the noblest of deaths, wouldn’t it?” Azar chuckled. “Killed by Aruna, the legendary Rakshasi who has never been defeated in battle.”
“Defeated in battle once,” the Rakshasi corrected.
Azar looked over at me in shock and then back at Aruna. “No…?” he gasped through his collapsing airway.
“Yes.” Aruna nodded. “Jacob now has the distinction of defeating not one, but two of the universe’s greatest assassins in battle.”
