~~Mia~~
The horde of creatures screamed, and all sound disappeared under the silence, crushed by the void. Not real sound, but the hidden sound, the vibrating strings that permeated everything. For a second, they were gone, and Mia almost squealed with whiplash when the screams died, and the strings returned.
“W-What do we do?” Mia asked.
“You’re the one with special powers,” Julisa said, hissing as she drew her four blades. “Do something.”
“I can’t! I’m trying to play the strings, but it’s not working!” Her inner fingers ached, and every attempt to pluck a string failed. Worse, trying to hear and feel them was like trying to listen to music through a concrete wall with what the weird squid monsters were doing, drowning everything in… nothing.
Adron brought out his sword. “Do we fight?”
Vin took a step forward toward the creatures, but Kas spun and hit the ragarin on the side with his tail.
“We run!” And with a heavy snort, like some sort of grunting starter’s pistol, Kas took off. If Kas wanted to run, then running was a good idea, and no one questioned it. Everyone turned and ran.
Problem. The new dog-like squid creatures were fast, and their weird hand-like paws didn’t sink into the muck more than a few inches with each bounding leap. They closed the distance, thick limbs growing thinner until they had the proportions of tailless wolves, and they didn’t hesitate to throw themselves at the group’s heels.
Adron jumped and spun, bringing his sword around and nailing the creature in the side. It split in half, and something white splattered over the sword, Adron’s body, and the black muck, only to disappear a moment later, along with the creature. Its skin shifted color, and drops of its own blood fell through its body before shifting into nothingness.
Another dove for Vin’s tail, and Mia squeaked as it got its tentacle mouth on the giant demon. From so close, the changing color was more clear, navy and dark green blending over black, with glistening skin like something that’d crawled out of the ocean. Pockets of see-through flesh remained, phasing in and out, colors bleeding over and off them, exposing the nothingness that lay beyond.
No, there was something in the nothingness of its flesh. White blood, pulsing, disappearing and reappearing, the same as the rest of it. And through the invisible, shifting parts of its flesh, Mia saw teeth hidden behind the tentacles, a beak with teeth, and they tore into Vin’s tail. Red blood poured into its mouth, some falling through the see-through parts of the creature, some going into its gullet.
Vin swung his tail and sent the creature into the air. It landed deep in the swamp, but the soft layer of black guts meant the impact was borderline harmless, and it resumed the chase a second later, along with a couple dozen of the strange, tailless, vaguely human-like creatures. They closed in on Vin, some going for Adron, some for Kas and Julisa, but the majority came for Vin.
Not Vin. They came for Mia, and their obsidian eyes stared at her with the vast emptiness of the void. Black holes.
“Maybe we should just give them the girl?” Julisa asked between her running pants. Before anyone could answer, she snorted. “I jest! But we need an answer to the situation and we need it now!”
One creature jumped, this time onto Kas. As big as the giant human-wolf-squids were, Kas was larger, and he spun and rolled with the monster. In the muck, he ripped his claws down through the creature’s guts, and sent the white blood across the black swamp. It had guts now, pieces of intestines coming into existence for only a moment, and only in random places, before disappearing again. The rest of the creature followed right behind it, fading away, along with the blood.
“We fight ghosts,” Kas said. “These are not creatures. Not hellbeasts, souls, demons, or angels!”
He was right; they weren’t normal living creatures. And if they came from the same place that thing in the canyon showed, the endless black oblivion, then… then what? What the fuck were they? Why were they coming after Mia?
Right now, it didn’t matter. Swords and claws stopped them, and so did hellfire.
“Vin,” Mia yelled into her bodyguard’s ear. “Can you breathe more hellfire?”
“Yes, but it would hit nothing right now. They are fast.”
“Then we get them lined up and bottlenecked. Get them stuck! Get them–”
He turned his head enough to raise a dragon eyebrow, and Mia gestured at the giant trench beside them.
If Vin had one awesome, perfect, exemplary trait, it was his complete lack of hesitation. The moment he knew what she meant, he jumped into the trench, a mighty leap that sent Mia’s heart down into her stomach, and up into her throat on the way down. He landed in the ditch, and sure enough, the black muck of the swamp nearly reached his knees. It wasn’t enough to stop him from running forward, sheer weight and power enough to crush through the gore, but when everyone else followed them into the trench, they struggled, Julisa included.
With silent howls, the creatures jumped into the trench with them. The black gore of the trench was thinner than on the flat ground, enough the alien creatures couldn’t walk on it with their weird half human, half paw hands and feet. They didn’t sink deep, but sinking up to their elbows and knees was enough to slow them down.
Vin turned, and again his spikes glowed.
“Everyone, get down!” Mia screamed.
Julisa, Adron, and Kas threw themselves face down into the gore, and Vin unleashed Hell. Again, as before, fire poured out of his mouth, but not regular fire. Hellfire. There was something special about hellfire, about the way flecks of amber danced in the orange, red, and yellow flames. The runes in her mind told her hellfire was some strange reaction between resonance and essence, something that didn’t fit everything else, where resonance and essence permeated the world. Hellfire had them rip each other apart, a fission reaction of pure destruction.
She’d summoned it before, the climax of her firestorm. And Vin summoned it inside him, only to unleash it as a wave of carnage that rushed down the trench and onto the creatures. They screamed as before, and the hellfire crashed against both them and their silent cries, as if a bubble enveloped and protected them. But it lasted only a second before crumbling, and all the creatures that’d jumped into the trench succumbed to the flame. Like the others, they fell to their wounds, some screaming, others shuddering, and they all melted from existence, leaving behind nothing, not even their corpses. Only hellfire.
Vin turned to face a few of the creatures that stood on the edge of the trench, looking down at him and Mia, but they turned and vanished, leaving Mia and her bodyguard standing in the burning muck, waiting for the next attack. But none came.
The others climbed up out of the black gore, and Julisa groaned like an indignant cat.
“You couldn’t wait four seconds, Vinicius?”
Vinicius grunted. Mia would have laughed at how gross Julisa looked, the pretty royal bitch now covered head to toe in black guts, but she couldn’t find any laughter to summon. Just panic.
“Adron! Kas!”