by Hunter Blain
From somewhere in the house came a muffled, startled cry from Ludvig. Hayley and I glanced at the house before locking gazes again, shifting to professional in an instant.
I got to my feet and strode to the back door while Hayley’s hands began to waver with unseen power as she went around the side of the house to flank from the front. She knew I would be the most likely target in any sort of attack, and I could easily center any focus on me. Not only that, but I could take most attacks at this point without much fear...or so I told myself.
Opening the back door, I walked inside—letting my eyes go predatory—and I saw Ludvig on his knees in the living room. He was clutching at his chest and struggling to breathe.
I couldn’t see what he was trying to look at from my vantage point, and rushing forward, I stopped as if I had run into a brick wall when I saw Ulric standing just inside the open front door. He had one finger raised and pointed in Ludvig’s general direction.
“ULRIC!” I screamed before summoning my gladius and Mjolnir in either hand. My armor shimmered to life at the mental command that it was game time.
“Not now, child. I am having a conversation with Thor Odinson,” Ulric said dismissively, reaching his free hand up to clutch at the air in front of him and between us. I froze as if the sonofabitch had hit pause on the movie that is John.
In the act of being frozen, I was briefly left alone with my thoughts. Then it registered what name Ulric had used in regard to Ludvig; Thor Odinson. My mind flashed to the vision the raven had shown me, and all of a sudden, it became painfully obvious who the large bearded man who had fled from Samael after the Lord of Hell had decimated the entire Norse pantheon was.
I became dizzy as all the past events with Ludvig and me—the vampire who wielded his rightful weapon—played through my mind like a flip-book.
A fireball smashed into Ulric’s face from somewhere behind his head, coating him in violent flames that rushed over his entire body. What was odd was that the timing felt...off. Then it hit me, and I focused.
Though I couldn’t move, I was still aware of what was happening, my brain having to frame-jack to a higher level of perception in order to keep up. It was as if the world around me was moving at an impossible speed while I was stuck, frozen in place. Luckily, with my preter-brain and celestial armor, I was able to move at incredible speeds while the scene around me felt normal, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to keep up with what was happening.
The fire engulfed Ulric, who didn’t even scream—or seem to notice, for that matter. Then the general of Hell’s army was flinging his wrist, and Hayley came crashing through the living room window like a cannonball. She smashed into the couch, destroying it with a loud cracking of wood.
Ulric puffed his cheeks and let out a long blow as the fire around him began to flicker and then die, leaving my maker unmarked.
Something must have caught her during the throw because blood started pouring from a long gash on her lean forearm.
After seeing the wound, the professional warden placed her free hand over her arm, and a blue light shone between her fingers. She ran her hand down the gushing forearm, and ice formed over the wound, serving as a field tourniquet until it could be properly attended.
Seeing how quickly the warden was recovering, Ulric rolled his eyes and lifted an open hand toward her. As he quickly closed his fingers and made a fist, obsidian chains shot from all over the room toward Hayley. They were tipped with serrated hooks that pierced my friend’s flesh at several points from head to toe.
I had never heard a cry of agony like that from the extremely tough Hayley, and it made my stomach turn into a bubbling sludge of tar and dread.
Hooks ate into each limb before stretching her out like a dead starfish on display at a museum. For good measure, Ulric also pulled at her cheeks and the skin over her torso, shredding her clothing. Where naked flesh was exposed, a bright sheet of blood flowed, covering Hayley in her own gore.
The high-pitched cry was one of unimaginable agony and sorrow as the warden sobbed with eyes squeezed shut as if it were all a bad dream.
“Stop! Please!” Ludvig cried out.
Ulric seemed to notice him again, and lightened his focus on the defiant warden.
“Will you come, quietly, to embrace your destiny, Odinson?” Ulric asked with a malicious smile.
Thor, who had fled from Satan, breathed heavily as he contemplated his options.
To make sure he understood how limited they were, Ulric flicked his eyes to Hayley, commanding the obsidian chains to pull the warden’s pierced flesh further.
Hayley let out a long shriek—a combination of despair and unrelenting agony—which evaporated into a long hiss before her lungs were empty. Her diaphragm continued to constrict, but there was no air left with which to scream.
“Stop!” Thor barked out with one hand extended toward Ulric. “I’ll...I’ll go wif you. Just don’t hurt her anymore, I beg of you.” He slumped onto his haunches and dropped his hand as his chin lowered to rest on his muscular chest.
Something tickled the back of my mind like a fingernail barely gliding up the back of my neck, and I focused on it. It was the armor, and it was telling me I could counter the spell Ulric had thrown at me.
Concentrating, I felt my right index finger twitch.
Ulric let the chains pull a little tighter, causing the battle-toughened warden to faint.
Content at his absolute victory, Ulric lifted his chin, and the chains vanished in a puff of black smoke. Thor rushed to catch his grievously injured bride, and gently set her on the floor, a single tear slipping from his eye.
Thor placed his hands on Hayley’s torso, closed his eyes, and a bright light flooded the room as he healed her many, many wounds.
My right hand collapsed into a fist, causing Ulric to glance my way while narrowing his eyes. I froze, wanting to let Ulric believe I was completely helpless, which wasn’t a far stretch.
I focused on feeling what the armor was trying to convey to me, and I vaguely understood that I was stuck in time.
The fourth dimension! I cried out inside the control room of my mind to the empty couch. Baleius was gone, leaving me to figure out solutions to my problems on my own. My angel friend with countless eons of existence couldn’t offer me guidance any longer.
Then an idea came to me.
I dove into my information city, oriented myself, and took flight. Within moments, I was above my manifestation of collected information, and soaring higher.
The angel, Baleius, had a country compared to my simple city, with more information than I could possibly fathom.
With a mental command, I teleported to the very center of his collective, and mentally willed a clerk to assist me.
“Hello, John,” an old friend greeted.
“Baleius!” I cried out, rushing to embrace the one who had been with me since the beginning. My arms passed right through him and I lost my balance, falling to my hands and knees.
I got up and turned around, confusion etching my features.
“I’m not actually Baleius,” the man said. “I am merely your mental projection of him.”
“Oh,” I said, nervously wiping my hands on my jeans. “But you can still help me, right?”
“I will do my very best.”
“Can you help me figure out how to get out of the fourth dimension using my celestial armor?”
“I will see what I can find,” Baleius answered. “Wait here, please.”
The projection glitched away like some sort of computer program before reappearing after a few moments.
“Soooo...you found it?”
“Affirmative,” Baleius stated, even sounding like a computer program after making the comparison. It was disheartening to have the fact that this wasn’t my friend verified.
“Um, how do I, like...learn it?”
Baleius stepped forward and placed a hand on my head. Bright light shot out, blinding me, and I gasped as a surge of information fl
owed into my conscious thought.
The light dimmed and Baleius pulled his hand back, returning to a neutral stance, almost like a butler.
I blinked, letting the snow globe of information whirling around my brain settle. Then I knew what I needed to know. It was kind of like in The Matrix, when Trinity needed to fly a helicopter and Tank uploaded the information directly into her brain.
“Thanks...Ba...you know what? You’re Alfred now,” I said, and Batman’s butler from the Tim Burton movies appeared. It made it easier not to see my friend who was forever gone.
“Very good, sir,” Alfred said. “Will there be anything else?”
“Yeah, give Knox a grant,” I answered before closing my eyes and appearing back in my body.
The victorious Ulric began confidently striding to the defeated Thor, a hand reaching out to grasp him and drag him to Hell, where he would surely face execution.
Time froze as I reversed the hold on me, stepping free from Ulric’s trap and into a higher dimension where time was malleable.
The world was frozen around me as I walked toward the still Ulric. Glancing at Hayley, I could see her skin was alabaster and her lips were blooming with a bluish hue. She had lost a lot of blood, but I would worry about that after the immediate threat was over.
Stopping just in front of the unmoving Ulric, I furrowed my brow, pulled back my lips in a snarl, and rocketed a fist into the side of his face.
The thing with higher dimensions is that it skews Einstein’s equation of mass equals force multiplied by constant, or in layman’s terms, at what percentage the object is moving in relation to the speed of light. When time is paused, moving an object from one point in space to another magnifies the resulting kinetic energy output by a factor that not even my celestial armor could precisely theorize. It only knew it was a lot.
So, as my fist smashed into Ulric’s face, it was as if my hand were moving at relativistic speeds in relation to light speed. Needless to say, it was glorious.
My armored fist—because apparently my gauntlet had manifested to keep my own flesh from being subject to theoretical physics—crashed into Ulric’s bare head, and there was a sonic boom.
I was thrown back while still in the higher dimension, though I was losing my hold and intermittently slipping back into the normal plane of time and space. The sonic boom blew apart the house like it was made from popsicle sticks and tissue paper, though it was like watching someone pressing buttons on the TV remote and switching between slow motion and regular speed.
The asphalt tile roof was sent flying in a million pieces as walls were reduced to brick dust. Appliances crumbled from the impact, reminding me of what it might look like if a car crashed into an invisible wall going a hundred miles an hour.
From where I was flying, I could see Ludvig diving on top of Hayley to protect her from the shock wave. On instinct, I mentally projected a celestial ivory shield to encapsulate them, and held onto that manifestation with all my might.
Where my celestial fist had connected with my maker’s face floated a bright ball of plasma, hotter than the sun.
To my dismay, Ulric’s head did not explode like a water balloon thrown into a cactus patch, though he was rocketed through the air, which was extremely satisfying.
Physics reminded me about the rules of the universe as I crashed through the back of the house and fully into the third dimension. I tumbled end over end, each impact jarring my neck and lower back while rattling my teeth. I think I might have bit my tongue at one point, as the metallic taste of my own blood flooded my mouth.
Lashing out, I shoved a hand into the ground and was rewarded by having my shoulder torn free from its socket. But at least I quickly came to a stop. I rolled on my back, yanking my arm free from the dirt and feeling my shoulder start to heal with audible pops that made me flinch.
“Ow. Ow, ow. Ow,” I eloquently stated before my mind all but shouted, Ulric, dumb-dumb!
Shooting to my feet, I turned to see a flaming meteor hurtling through the sky toward me. At its center was the enraged, indignant, and disfigured face of my maker.
Hellfire spilled around Ulric as the very air boiled in violent waves. Raw, unhinged power radiated off my maker as he tore through the sky, bending literal space around him.
As I watched, paralyzed with shock, I saw his face reforming from where I had clocked him good.
Battle robes flowed over Ulric as his obsidian staff tipped with the Spear of Destiny coalesced in his hand. His other was glowing purple and green, runes forming in the air around his outstretched fingers.
On instinct, I summoned Mjolnir and hoisted it to the sky with a battle cry right as a ferocious bolt of lightning lashed out from the sky and toward my weapon. Too bad Ulric was directly in the path of the elemental magic.
The Grand Master spun in the air, absorbing the attack with his own weapon, before righting himself again and pointing the spear tip toward me.
“Um...shit?” was all I could get out as the pure elemental magic of Earth was violated, manipulated, and infected with the power of Hell itself.
A blue bolt, stained with purple and green, rocketed out of the spear and toward me.
In answer, I slipped a toe into the fourth dimension while pushing my celestially enhanced preter-abilities to the max, drastically slowing time.
Dropping to a crouch, I juked to the left while staring up at Ulric with a tight jaw and focused eyes. His attack slowed to a crawl, leaving a chaotic system of multicolored forks of lightning that inched ever closer.
I leaped and started running through the air by condensing the water molecules all around me under each step for a moment and providing a brief foothold, like those Jurassic Park–looking lizards that can run across a lake.
Willing Mjolnir into my hand, I superheated the air around my weapon as I cocked my arm back to give Ulric’s skull another chance at cracking open like a melon under a freight train.
Only a few more steps and he would be mine.
Furious eyes snapped into focus, and my maker sprung to life, following me into the higher dimension with alarming efficiency.
Ulric dropped his attack, which hung in the air like some Las Vegas magic show, and started dissolving into smoke.
Seeing my window of opportunity slam shut, I threw Mjolnir with all my might at where Ulric was vanishing from sight.
The hammer flew through a black cloud, missing its target completely. Then I was alone, hanging in midair and utterly vulnerable.
I tried to will my weapon back into my hand, but I had put too much into the desperate throw, and felt it would take precious seconds to halt its massive momentum and then return to me.
“Shit!” I barked between gritted teeth as I let the weapon go and summoned my gladius as I willed my wings into existence.
The good news was that I only needed to flap intermittently to stay in the air because gravity was slow to catch on. Or maybe it was that time was running at a snail’s pace. Both, maybe? I wasn’t entirely sure how gravity, which greatly influenced time, affected the fourth dimension. Either way, it made it easier to fly.
White-hot electricity shot from my wings as I began falling to the ground in slow motion. It only took a fraction of a second to understand both of my manifestations had been cut off, leaving me to fall to the ground. As I fell, I became an easy target for the stupid masterful Ulric to attack at will.
As I neared the ground, I positioned myself to land on my feet in a defensive stance right as Ulric coalesced from the shadows and punched me in my freaking face.
Now I understood how he had felt when I had struck him while in the fourth dimension.
Everything went black as a popping sound reverberated all around me for an instant, and the feeling of tumbling at great speeds made it feel like my arms and legs were going to be ripped off.
Good thing my dear, sweet friend, Mr. Ground, was there to catch me. Always reliable, that one.
The air burst from my lungs as my bo
dy contorted and joints popped from the awkward angle in which I landed. I think I somehow smashed my own balls with my face from the sheer force of impact.
Every window I could see had been blown out, with hundreds of roof tiles ripped away. Boy, the neighbors would be pissed.
I flung my feet out, and my body straightened, painfully. Nerves were reconnected and my spine rebuilt itself as I lay still, dazed and confused. I wanted to make a joke about being able to reach my junk with my face, but just didn’t have the desire right then. That alone let me know how badly messed up I was.
“Have you had enough, child?” a wavering voice said from somewhere far, far away. It was like those dream sequences in movies where the screen looked like rippling water.
FOCUS! I screamed inwardly to myself. I did a quick check of my energy levels and saw I had used a large percentage while inside the higher dimension. Ulric was also beating me down and destroying my manifestations in an attempt to deplete my energies. That ass knew it was one of my major weaknesses.
Pop. Pop. Pop, pop.
My body was fully healed and my equilibrium reinstated, allowing me to hear the crunch of approaching feet on glass, dirt, and other debris from the exploded house.
I rolled over and pushed myself to my feet, taking a moment to briefly admire the hole I had made on impact.
Straightening, I brushed the dirt off my trench and turned to see a smiling Ulric, not a speck of dirt on him. It was then I understood we had returned to the third dimension. Sonofabitch had knocked me back into the now.
“Round two...fight!” I hissed, resummoning my gladius which I had lost in flight. I could feel it vanish from somewhere close by only to reform in my grip, already dripping with heavenflame.
I blurred forward, sword primed to cut this bastard in two.
Ulric rushed to meet me in a telegraph of catching my celestial blade with his demonic staff. Hope dared flash in me like a car’s headlights spilling through your window to illuminate your room. But just as with a passing vehicle, the hope dimmed as quickly as it had come as our weapons clanged together in a shower of sparks that were all colors of the rainbow.