Snarling, Julisa dashed out from between the walls of blackstone, and disappeared into the madness of the battlefield.
“Is Galon alive?” Mia asked.
Livian crouched over the body of the unmoving angel and checked his wounds.
“Barely.”
Mia would have snarled, screamed, ground her teeth, something. But all of that was lost to the song, caught in its waves. All that existed was the flowing strings she played, and her connection to them and the other thing in the song, mirroring her, amplifying her. Mind buried and flowing in the rapids, it took effort to summon anything other than the most basic thoughts.
Rescue Yosepha. Save Galon. Stop the angels. Escape. Escape? How were they going to escape? More demons joined her horde, but the song wasn’t strong enough to reach far, or summon the strongest demons nearby. And demons, running as fast as they could to join the fight, couldn’t join her as quickly as she needed. She needed an option, and she needed it now.
A voice in the song spoke to her.
Hellfire.
Mia stared at the blackstone that surrounded her, only barely aware of her own voice, screaming at her from above the surface. Don’t. You’ll kill hundreds. There has to be a better way.
Mia looked down at her staff, at the hellfire that swirled in the ruby upon its tip. Fire. She needed true fire.
She played the song, and the thing in the ocean, the thing that pulled her along through the currents, the thing that listened to her, spoke to her, it mirrored her. The song carried a thousand emotions, feelings that moved through Mia and drowned her in them, feelings beyond words. Rage, frustration, anger, but also mourning, moroseness, aching, longing, and a million other sister emotions. Whatever it was that listened to Mia’s song, its emotions were too large and complex for her to understand, but slowly they coalesced from emotion into a single action: destroy.
And fire was how she, how… Hell, destroyed. Hellfire.
Mia’s mind and thoughts, lost to the ocean and its currents, paused on a memory. A single memory from her childhood, from the movie The Prince of Egypt, and a particular scene with a tornado of fire. Even as a child, that scene had mesmerized her. It’d been… glorious.
“Vinicius,” she said. “Defend me.”
A growl confirmed he would.
The holy beams came to a stop, and Mia took her chance. She shattered the barriers she’d summoned, each splitting apart with a mighty crack that thundered through the mountains. Raising her staff high, she summoned fire, and this time, it would not come from the sky.
The mountain trembled. The ground quaked. Hell screamed.
The distant tornadoes of fire paled compared to the terrible roar of the flame that erupted from the ground. It came quickly, a spiraling array of embers that cut through the rock and stone of Hell, and threw hellfire into the sky, amber mixing with specs of lava, and carried upward by the shrieking flame. It was wide, far wider than the walls she’d summoned, and she drew it up directly in front of her close enough the flames came within a dozen feet of her.
The other tornadoes ebbed and flowed with the chaos of the wind. But this new tornado that burst through the rock was grounded, controllable, and with a wave of her staff, she guided it forward. Its top, a giant funnel that dwarfed its sister tornadoes, ripped the wind out from under the angels, and their wings betrayed them, dozens of the warriors yanked into the sky and into the flames.
Their screams joined the chorus of destruction.
More than angels were lost to the tornado of hellfire. Demons on the battlefield, lost to their own bloodlust, only avoided the fire as much as needed to continue pursuing battle with the angels. They did not expect the spire of hellfire to tear across the field, ripping up through the ground as it carved a path, and to dance between clusters of combat. They roared into the madness, even as the hellfire reduced them to ash.
The enormous ramp of rock Mia had summoned ripped apart as the geyser tornado moved through it, splitting the ground and leaving a trail of lava in its wake. Blackstone, stained stone, meera metal on demon corpses, all of it was sucked up into the hellfire, doomed to swirl around the edges of the tornado before eventually getting pulled into the deadly flame. Soon, the small mountain, the ramp Mia had summoned to let the demons reach the angels above, shattered entirely, collapsing under its weight as more and more of the stones of its base were ripped away by the hellfire destroying the ground wherever it moved. The myriad of rocks tore upward, broke apart in a mess of collisions that echoed through the battle, and melted as they joined the hellfire.
Mia stared out onto the field, staff aimed ahead, her focus to guide the hellfire. Romakus. Yosepha. Julisa. The names echoed in her mind, and she held onto them, anchors that stopped her from flowing away with the ocean. Save Yosepha. Do not kill Romakus and Julisa.
Black and red wings moved in the distance. Romakus, surrounded by death and angel wings, pushed through the battle, past the fire tornadoes summoned from the sky, past the falling rocks of the destroyed ramp, and around the geyser of hellfire Mia guided. Julisa followed beside him, her four small swords out and slashing at any of the angelic warriors that came too close. She could not defeat an angel, not like this, but it was enough to stop them from blocking Romakus.
Yosepha was in his arms.