“Ha. You really overestimate how organized Hell is, David. Maybe up in the Navameere Fields or the Red Pits, Morgana and Khazeer might have the demons under control. Everywhere else, not so much. Zel’s doing her best to get Death’s Grip running smooth, and she’s made some progress. But…”
Daoka clicked a few times and gave David a pat on the knee.
“Exactly,” Jes said. “Humans, even humans ready to eat each other, have this nasty habit of getting into groups and cooperating, especially when they have something to group up around. A person, or an idea. Cain’s both.”
David groaned as he let his head hang.
“I fucking hate people.”
“Ha, yeah?”
“Yes, I fucking hate people. Mindless animals without a single critical thought going through their heads. Stupid, selfish, self-obsessed, ignorant sheep. They can’t reason. They can only follow the group.” He looked at his right hand, and squeezed, imagining punching a moron, any moron, with enough force to break a jaw, like he’d imagined a hundred times before.
That rant came out of nowhere. He blinked down at the ground, and then Jes, as if she could explain. Jes just smiled at him, reached out, and poked him in the shoulder with her wing’s thumb claw.
“That’s the sort of thinking that’ll get you sent to Hell.”
He petrified. Living flesh to solid stone in half a second.
“… r-really?”
Jes choked on a laugh, but she couldn’t stop it, and it came out loud as she clutched her gut.
“No, you fucking puppy. I mean, it sounds like you got some personal issues, but I don’t think Hell goes around scooping up people like you.”
He let go of the breath he didn’t know he was holding.
“I guess. I didn’t–”
A battle cry cut through the noise, the remnants, the wind, their voices, everything. A shadow sped over the stones. David froze again.
Two blurs grabbed his eyes. One came low, close to the rocks, a dark red leather cloak billowing around them as they came in with a battle axe obviously too heavy for them. One came high, someone jumping, someone with a sword held in both hands over their head, a sword too big and heavy for them. Gravity appreciated the height and weight, though.
Jes dove to the side, and the man with the big sword smashed the huge slab of black into the stone hard enough it drew sparks. But the woman with the axe was waiting. She came at Jes from the side, and swung the axe horizontal. Jes jumped back, but not fast enough, and the axe hit her in the arm, deep enough a splatter of red blood cut across the stone, and over David’s chest. He didn’t move.
Daoka charged past him. For a second, some cogs in his brain somehow still turning, he thought maybe Daoka aimed for the woman with the axe she struggled to wield. But she went for the other target instead. The satyr rammed into the man with the sword hard enough the crunch of ribs was almost as loud as his screams. That didn’t stop him from swinging his sword at Daoka anyway, eyes wide, foaming at the mouth like a starving, rabid dog.
Somewhere in the dark matter of David’s brain, a strange thought bubbled up to the surface. Daoka grabbed the man’s sword arm, and ripped it off, as the quiet words fell out of David’s mouth, lost under the sounds of murder. ‘Don’t hurt them’. He tried to say the words louder, but nothing came out. The only sounds were more screams, as Daoka threw the sword wielder against the nearest boulder, and charged into them again. More crunching bones, her four horns hitting him in the chest with all the grace of a large ram breaking down a door.
So much for David’s supposed hatred of people. For some stupid fucking reason, watching this man get beaten and broken, felt horrible.
The man went down, clutching his chest with his one arm, and Daoka sliced open his throat with an almost casual slash of her claws. Before the man even realized it was his blood gushing out onto his chest, Daoka jumped over to Jeskura.
Oh shit, the gargoyle. David forced his eyes away from the dying, one-armed man, and the sword he still somehow held onto with his one hand, and looked at Jeskura. The woman she’d been fighting was already dead, and in worse condition than the swordsman. Demon strength, was unreal. Ripping off an arm was already an extremely difficult thing to do, something no normal human could do, not without years and years of training and probably an unhealthy amount of steroids. Ripping off a leg, was another thing entirely.
“Fucking hell,” Jes said, snarling as she clutched her arm. “Fucking fucking fuck. Let my guard down. Fucking David making me laugh and shit.”
Daoka clicked furiously as she helped Jes back up to her feet, and held out Jes’s arm in front of her.
“Yeah yeah, I know. I blame you, you know?”
Daoka stood up straight, clicked some more, and hit Jes in a horn with one of her own hard enough to earn tiny yelp from the gargoyle.
“He’s your pet! I shouldn’t be explaining things to him.”
More clicks.
“Well fuck me, I can’t help it. And besides, it’ll take years to teach him Hellian. You think he’ll last that long?”
Sighing, Daoka reached down for the one-legged corpse, and slid the one piece of metal that covered her chest and one of her breasts, down to her stomach. And just like she did with the imps and grems, she slammed a hand down into the corpse’s chest hard, hard enough her claws broke through flesh and skin. With some arm power, she used both hands and pulled apart, and David gulped down the need to puke — he couldn’t anyway — as the woman’s ribs broke apart.
David watched. He walked past the now dead man, half sitting against the rock David had been hiding behind, and looked down at the mess Daoka made as she ripped the woman open. And tore out her heart.
She handed the bleeding thing and the torn tubes still on it to Jeskura, and the gargoyle smiled at her lover before munching it down. A human heart. Similar to the other hearts he’d seen them rip out, but not the same. This was a heart he’d seen before, during his autopsy.
He stared down at the body, the broken rib cage, the hint of guts he could almost see under the skin fold flaps by her sternum. The blood flowed, and the stones of Hell drank it down like a hungry sponge. A human body, just like his own, lying on rocks under a fire sky, instead of a metal table and cold LED lighting.
And the two demons were eating a chunk of it.
Daoka grabbed the dead woman’s cloak, ripped off a long chunk of it, and tied it around the deep wound in Jeskura’s arm. The woman had hit her just above the metal armor covering the outside of her right bicep, almost deep enough to hit bone, and the blood Jes leaked was more than enough to risk a death to blood loss. But she shrugged it off like it didn’t matter, and used her good arm to hold the heart to her mouth as she scarfed it down.