It swung its other hand down, and instead of going for Mia, brought its palm down onto Adron. Adron dodged half of it, but his right side got caught under the fingers, and he spun out of control. Sword still in hand, he landed on his back, and scampered to get to his feet, but the monster caught up with him.
Kas spun around and jumped on the creature’s leg. He sunk his claws into it, and the creature’s leg turned invisible a moment later, leaving Kas to hang on nothing but empty air for a split moment before falling. The leg reformed, but flickered in and out, and the giant monster fell to a knee, only to swing his hand out and slam it into Kas’s body, sending the shark demon flying. He splattered in the black mud, got up, but fell to a knee the moment he took a step forward. Hurt.
“Vin, help them!”
Vin said nothing, charging ahead away from Adron, Kas, and the semi-invisible semi-corporeal monster out of Mia’s nightmares.
“Vin!”
Still nothing. Not even Julisa said anything.
“Vin, if you do not go back and help them, I will turn this leash on and leave it on! Go!”
Vin growled, but sure enough he turned around, sinking his talons deep into the muck and spinning around so momentum nearly threw Mia off. He did that on purpose, the asshole.
“Vinicius!” Julisa yelled. Well, fuck her, she could go run off and die for all Mia cared, right now.
Once Vinicius got close to the monster, Mia hopped off. Splat, knees and hands in the black gore, and nearly her face, too. Free of his passenger, Vinicius leapt over Adron, onto the giant creature’s arm, and got all four sets of claws into it, teeth included.
His spikes glowed, lines of amber lighting up along the base of each tail, back, spine, and head spike, until they almost looked like they were on fire.
“Vin!” Mia yelled. “Be careful!”
Vin roared into the creature’s arm, and with his teeth still sunk into its alien flesh, he unleashed hellfire. Flames poured from his mouth straight onto the creature, flowing over it in that special way only fire with a purpose could. It came out with such force, none of it singed Vin, gushing over the creature and into the black fog beyond.
The creature screamed. It aimed its alien face upward, and screamed, mouth tentacles flailing. The scream made no sound, but it ripped through Mia’s bones. Her ears didn’t notice it at all, but her stomach boiled. It was not a sound, but a lack of sound in a way that didn’t fit. It was like getting her brains sucked out through her ears by the vacuum of space, times a thousand.
Mia screamed, but no one heard her. She might as well have screamed into a black hole. It was nothing. It was less than nothing. And the vibrating strings that flowed through the world didn’t just stop, they disappeared. For one single second, the strings were gone, and only a void was left behind.
The strings sprang back into existence, and a new roar filled the dead air. Vin’s roar, still ripping into the alien creature. It swung its arm out, but Vin held on, unleashing more flame until it lit up the fog, replacing the fire sky that couldn’t penetrate the Black Valley. More and more flame, until the fire latched onto the monster. The creature caught the flame, and Vin finally let go.
The sound of his landing in the muck was almost comical, but again it disappeared under the void shriek of the monster as hellfire took its body. It raised its arms as the flames mixed with flecks of lava, spread along its body, and drowned it. It backed away, arms flailing in that slow way giant creatures moved, and chunks of heavy flame fell into the muck. Its limbs changed shape and lost color, mutating as much as losing physicality to the point the hellfire fell through the creature and burned on the black gore underneath it.
It went poof. Hellfire burned on nothing but air and fell onto the swamp, heavier than it should have been. Maybe burning on the creature’s blood? Mia had seen no blood, but in the black fog and amber explosion of hellfire, the whole scene looked like a World War II movie at night. She hadn’t seen shit.
She ran to them, ignoring the squish of her sandals in the muck. Okay, not completely ignoring, but enough she got some speed and ran to Adron.
“Adron!”
“I’m fine.” He sat up, groaning and shaking his shoulder. “Nearly broke my arm.”
“Kas!” She shoved off Adron’s good shoulder and ran in Kas’s direction. He was standing again, in his usual leaning-forward kinda-squatting way, and she reached up and grabbed his jaw. “You okay?”
He clicked once. Good enough. She ran back, toward Vin this time, waving her arms.
“You did it! You killed it!”
“I killed nothing,” Vin said, snarling as he got up. He’d landed hard, and the splash of muck had soaked him. Something black, long, and rope-like rolled off his arm.
“Are… you sure? Because, I mean, it’s gone.” She gestured around to the hellfire that still burned. Normal fire would have been put out instantly by the wet mess of the swamp, but hellfire was special. It burned in a way nothing else did. It’d die eventually, but for now, it provided enough light for everyone to stand around and see… nothing. Absolutely nothing. The creature was gone. Only its footprints remained.
“It’s gone,” he said. “But I know death. I didn’t kill it.”
“It?” Julisa asked, finally joining them, four black swords in her hands. “What even was it? It was invisible at first, and then it gained a shape.”
“I’d hoped that was a trick of the fog,” Adron said, finally getting up. Groaning, he shook his hurt shoulder, used his good arm to get his sword back on its hook behind him, and wiped off as much gook off as he could. “It was sort of… coming in and out of existence, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Kas said. “And its flesh was… smooth.”
Mia raised a brow. “Smooth?” Julisa said it too, in tandem. Annoying.
“Smooth,” Vinicius said. “Like…”
“Like it was too simple,” Kas said. “Creatures have… texture, and flesh, and blood and bone. It didn’t feel like it had anything like that.”
“A plastic monster?”
Vin and Kas both shook their heads. They weren’t saying no, they just didn’t know what plastic felt like.
Sighing, Mia walked beside Kas and checked out his leg. It didn’t look broken, but even if it was sprained, it wasn’t like Kas would say so.
“What was with that scream it made?” Julisa asked. “I didn’t hear it. I felt it.”
“You felt it, too?” The crazy stuff wasn’t just happening to Mia, this time. “I felt it, too, but really… really felt it. The scream, it… cut me off from the strings.”
All four demons went silent. They weren’t aware of the strings, didn’t feel them, and couldn’t play them. Demons and their sins were more like someone wielding a literal weapon at a music concert, while wearing earplugs. But they knew about Mia’s strings, and knew she’d played them to stop the angels.
“I feel fine now,” Mia said, “but for a second there, it was… it was so weird. It…” Stepping closer to the strands of burning fire sitting on the black swamp, she held up a hand and scanned for any signs of the monster. Not a single one. “When I looked into its eyes, it… it looked right back at me, and… and it was like…” Just like last time, ice ran down her spine, and she hugged herself. “It was like when that canyon opened up underneath the spire. I looked down into it, and… and… the thing down there, in the black? It looked back up at me, and… and just now, it felt the same way.”
More silence. The demons looked between each other, but Julisa looked confused, while the others looked heavy with realization, even eyeless Kas.
“So this has to do with whatever caused the canyon to tear open?” Julisa asked. “I have not seen the canyon from close, but I have heard other demons speak of the living blackness underneath Hell. You’re telling me that monster”–she gestured to where the giant creature had been–“came from there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?” Mia spun around and looked in all directions. “I don’t see another unmarked. I don’t feel any of those earthqu–hellquakes that tore everything up when David and I were close. This thing just showed up, no announcement, nothing.”
“And it began to change,” Julisa said, snarling as she hooked her swords along her back. “It adopted a form?”
“I guess. I–Can we get moving? If Vin’s right and that thing’s not actually dead, I don’t want to be here.”
The tetrad shrugged. “He coated it in hellfire. Nothing survives hellfire. Not demon. Not angel.”
They went silent again and looked to Vinicius, but in predictable fashion, the child of Belial said nothing. He walked close and low enough for Mia to grab some of his spikes, and she settled on his back again as the group returned to trekking across the swamp.
“I know you’ll hate me for this, Vin,” Mia said, putting her chin on his shoulder. “But thank you.”
“You threatened me.”
“And you know that I know that you’d rather just take the pain than do what I want.” She thumped his shoulder. “This leash can stop you in your tracks, but it can’t make you do anything you don’t want to. Stubborn asshole.” And of course, calling him a stubborn asshole was the perfect compliment, something he’d appreciate more than saying thank you. But it was important she thank him, anyway.
“The shape,” Adron said, walking beside them. “I’ve seen that shape before. I mean, kinda? In the scrying pool.”
“I have, too,” Mia said. “It’s… I mean, it’s the sort of shape you see on the surface all the time. In real stuff, you see it on ocean creatures. Squids, octopuses, things like that, just… not on humanoid bodies. But, in fiction… you see it… on…”
There was no way. Sure, angels and demons seemed to have affected the surface world and their representation of stuff, or maybe it was vice versa, and Hell and Heaven were evolving to reflect the surface’s impressions of them. Maybe both. But that thing had changed into such a specific shape, there was no way it wasn’t connected to the surface, and how the surface viewed things. Or maybe to how Mia did?
A shrill, silent scream hit them all, and they froze. Slowly, they turned and looked into the black fog behind them.
“Is it back?” Adron asked. Silent, alien noises erupted from the depth of blackness beyond, and it drowned Adron’s voice underneath a blanket of suffocation.
No one moved. No one breathed. Everyone stared down at the muck, waiting for another footprint to appear.
A hundred footprints appeared. Small things, no bigger than Adron’s, but a hundred of them tore up the muck, and came for them like a pack of running dogs.
In the single moment it took the group to realize what was happening, the creatures chasing them gained bodies. More colors shifted across their skin, dark navy, dark green, shimmering onyx. Limbs came into view, each creature running on all fours, bulky bodies with thick arms and legs. No tail. Two black, deep, eternal eyes.
Each of the creatures looked as large as a vrat, with a human-ish shape, but just like the first creature, nothing looked solid. And unlike the first creature, they ran on all fours, bodies warped to make their human forms fit into the unnatural position. The size of their limbs changed. Their claws changed. The amount of fingers on their hands changed. Their bones changed.
And they screamed, each unleashing a muted death shriek that drowned everything.