The ground cracked more, and bits of the cathedral ceiling crumbled, broke off, and fell around them. It wasn’t a building, but a cavern that’d been carved. It didn’t bend with the vibrations or warp, it just broke, like a rock half sitting in a fire, and shards of blackstone shot out in all directions from the walls and ceiling.
“Moriah! Tzipporah!” the angel yelled. “Quickly, before it happens again!”
Yells, screams, and cries of pain poured in from the other side of the cathedral entrance, but it was full of bodies coming and going, Cainites unsure of what to do. The quake settled the question for them, and layers of the splitting cavern crashed onto them. Rocks fell, stones as big as David’s head, and some as big as David, and they broke shoulders and skulls on the way down. The only reason David wasn’t crushed was because he knew the quakes were only going to get worse, so he paid attention to the ceiling, and rolled to one side to dodge falling debris.
David picked one rock up.
“Kill the angel, my children!” Greg yelled, dragging himself to his feet. An aura flared out of him, one of rage and defiance. “Eat their hearts and we will end this–”
Greg yelped as someone crashed into his side, someone small with shaggy red hair.
Out-of-body experience? No. David knew what he was doing, saw it through his own eyes, but some part of him had put what was happening in a box. Greg went down, David fell on him, and before Greg could push himself up, David brought the rock down.
His aim was off slightly and hit Greg underneath the back of his skull. The man jerked hard, muscle spasms nearly throwing David off, and the man turned over onto his back. But David stayed on, and slammed the huge rock down with both hands again against the man’s face. The following scream became a gargled mess half covered by blood and broken flesh. But he was still alive, and the quakes continued. David smashed the man’s face in again and again until bone broke, until something wet coated the rock and his hands, until the rock went in and crashed into something soft inside the broken eggshell of a skull.
The quakes stopped.
Greg was dead. The last hint of his aura flared for a moment before fading into nothingness.
No one noticed. Every Cainite, in and out of the cathedral, was locked in battle, and judging from the sounds, they were losing. The ding and clank of metal hitting metal filled the cracked cathedral, but at least the rumbling had ended. The angel inside was busy, slaughtering endless Cainites, and again his strange laughter cut through the noise of battle. He was enjoying himself.
“Death to the sinners!” he yelled and crashed forward through the crowd. What the fuck was wrong with this angel? He cut through the swarm of Cainites, blood rained down on his huge wings, and the chaos of the fight turned into an orchestrated dance as the angel cleaved through bloodthirsty cultists. And he was coming David’s way.
David stood up and looked around. He refused to look at Greg, but glimpses of his broken skull, and exposed… stuff, past the shell of his face, cut through him into his heart. Nausea flooded him, and he fell back away from the corpse onto more corpses. Rocks everywhere, several giant cracks along the floor, lava trickling between them, and body parts. It was like the battle with the remnants all over again, except these people weren’t remnants.
They were people. Functional, aware, alive — sort of — people. Except now they were more like a teeming mass, a riot, a full-on swarm of insanity and hunger, throwing themselves at the angel in some mindless attempt to get the thing they thought was more important than anything else. All those videos David had seen of people rioting in the streets, doing things they’d normally never do while taken up by the group mind of a swarm, felt so much more real.
He picked up a dagger, ignored the ludicrous weight pulling on his wrist, and moved toward the archway exit. Get up and get out. Put the sights and thoughts in a box, ignore them, and get out.
The anvil? The vein it was connected to was broken. It probably didn’t work anymore. The book? Greg had the information inside him, and had transferred it to David when they touched. Maybe it had more, but no way David was going to go for the book with Cainites and a crazy angel around; plus, the pulpit was really tall and getting the book wouldn’t be easy. Nope, he was done here. Time to run.
It wasn’t any better on the outside of the cathedral. Enough Cainites had stopped going in and out to give him the room to push past, but the reason became abundantly clear once he was outside. Bodies were everywhere, cleaved in two or missing limbs. Others were clawed up, ripped open, eviscerated. Giant boulders had fallen, and the ground was now uneven, tilted by the breaking stone twisted from the violent hellquakes. Blood and weapons covered the ground, and bubbling trickles of lava leaked up from the cracked stone, roasting flesh and boiling blood.
Two angels. Eight demons. Dozens of Cainites. It was a madhouse. The humans came at the angels, screaming and roaring with the same indifference to their own lives as the ones in the cathedral, and the two angels cut them down. A woman, wearing the same armor as the male angel from before, hovered above before making dive bomb attacks on the Cainites, only to pull up again before they could catch her. But the other angel stood upon the ground, wielding a spear and a shield so tall it was almost as tall as they were. Their armor was so thick, there was no easy way to tell the sex of the angel inside. Even their helmet’s t-slit opening was so small, only the barest hint of their emerald eyes pierced through the darkness.