Shooting Eros - The Emuna Chronicles: Complete Boxset: Books 1 - 3

by Benjamin Laskin

  Captain Volk saw this, and so after he had taken care of Hermes and the last spleen gun sniper, he set off to even the odds.

  The captain had one major advantage. He could fly with better agility than the Vengeance Yetzers. The demons could not make hair pin turns, or stop suddenly and ascend vertically like a rocket. Volk could.

  He used this to his advantage by drawing two of the yetzers and their riders into a chase. Circling around, he caused the beasts to collide into one another, sending the dazed monsters plummeting earthward. Knocked from their saddles, their riders released their parachutes. Volk, ruby-edged kodachi short sword in hand, flew at them and sliced through their parachute cords. The riders plunged to their bone-crushing deaths.

  From there, Volk flew beneath the next yetzer, and holding his sword over his head with both hands, he shot corkscrewing upward, driving the blade deep into the beast’s belly. The monster let out an ear-piercing screech, and wings flapping madly, sped away, its spilling guts trailing beneath it.

  Seconds later, Vengeance Yetzer and rider began a tailspinning nosedive. The soldier didn’t know that his yetzer had suffered a mortal wound, and so tried desperately to pull up by yanking on the beast’s reigns. Seeing the ground fast approaching, he pulled the cord on his parachute, but he was too late, and crashed moments after the yetzer.

  Having recognized the peril they were in, the remaining two Vengeance Yetzers and their riders set chase to Captain Volk. They soared higher and higher, until they were dots in the sky. The yetzers closed in, their riders firing their splicer rifles as they flew.

  Volk came to an abrupt halt, paused in midair, cloaked, and vanished. As he couldn’t fly and maintain invisibility at the same time, Volk dropped like a rock, but the Anteros soldiers couldn’t have known that. They flew right past him. Volk was high enough that he had plenty of time to uncloak and regain flight.

  When the captain went visible again and pulled out of his descent, he was far below them. He whistled to get their attention. The riders pulled back on their reins, split up, and began long arcs through the sheets of rain to turn around.

  Volk used this opportunity to get behind one of them. He soared upward, landed on the back of the yetzer behind its rider, and snapped the soldier’s neck. He grabbed the rifle out of the rider’s hands and shoved him overboard. The yetzer cranked its long neck around to see what was happening and looked straight into the barrel of the gun.

  “Hello, ugly,” Volk said. He shot the yetzer in the eyeball and blew off the back of its vulture-like head.

  Volk bounded from the saddle as the creature barreled towards earth like an asteroid. The yetzer smashed into a squad of Anteros soldiers that was rushing into the fray below, crushing five men beneath it, the beast’s putrid guts splattering and incapacitating the rest.

  The final Anteros rider, suddenly feeling very alone and vulnerable, concluded that chasing the quick and evasive cupid freak was not going to work. He parked his yetzer midair, and waited.

  The giant Vengeance Yetzer flapped its big, leathery wings in a holding pattern, slowly rotating to keep Volk in view as the captain circled at a safe distance, moving steadily higher. The wind and rain had picked up considerably, but rider and yetzer expertly rode the gusts. The soldier aimed and shot at the moving target, but missed. Then Volk vanished again.

  Recalling what had happened the last time the cupid had disappeared into thin air, the Anteros rider calculated the captain’s descent and pursued, firing off splicer rounds ahead of his target, hoping to nail the captain while he was in cloaking mode.

  Only Volk wasn’t cloaking, and he wasn’t plummeting. Instead, he had gone into hyper-spin, and was hanging adrift in fifth dimensional space. He couldn’t physically interact with the yetzer and its rider from there, but he could observe them. He followed the yetzer and then pulled up alongside of it, keeping pace until the rider once again slowed and hovered, looking around frantically for the magical cupid.

  Volk ‘popped’ back into four-dimensional space just a few yards away from the Anteros rider and said, “Boo!”

  The rider jumped in his saddle, and then turned his splicer rifle on Volk. But before he could fire, Volk thrust out his palm and shouted, “Eat it!”

  He delivered such an awesome burst of internal ruach that the rider was blasted from his saddle as if shot out of a cannon. The soldier soared fifty yards through the air before gravity took hold and he began his horrifying plummet.

  The wallop of ruach that the captain delivered was so powerful that it also pitched the Vengeance Yetzer into a tumbling roll. The beast struggled to regain equilibrium, but the smack had broken its left wing. The yetzer screeched and flapped desperately to keep airborne, but it was hopeless and the creature plunged earthwards.

  The Anteros rider, meanwhile, had managed to release his parachute. He drifted earthward and blew a huge sigh of relief. His feeling of deliverance was short-lived, however, as moments later the floundering yetzer came slamming down on top of him. Yetzer and soldier smashed into the ground in a messy, life-ending heap.

  As Volk dueled above, Ophion, the cadet recruits, Abishai, and the SWAT guys engaged in fierce battle with Anteros forces and their trained yetzers below. Anteros backup streamed in from all sides.

  A terrific explosion caught Abishai’s attention. A plasma grenade had been lobbed into the gazebo, sending the entire structure bursting into flames.

  “Ophion! Nisus!” Abishai hollered. “Cover me!”

  He sprinted to the blazing gazebo and began pulling off the burning timber. He heard groans and cries of help from underneath the fiery debris. Abishai dug his way through and saw the judges, but not his wounded comrade, Corporal Orion.

  The first judge he reached was Minos. Abishai snatched his arm and dragged him out. The judge coughed and gasped for air.

  Abishai dove back in. “Orion,” he yelled. “Hold on. I’m coming!”

  “Here,” Orion groaned.

  “Help me!” cried Judge Busiris.

  Abishai couldn’t get to them as the corpulent Judge Pelops was blocking his way. “Pelops!” Abishai hollered. “Pelops!”

  There was no answer. Pelops was either unconscious or dead. Abishai seized him by the foot, and with great difficulty, hauled out the beefy judge. He was dead, speared through the belly by a metal pole. Pelops out of the way, Judge Busiris managed to claw himself out of the rubble, hacking and whimpering.

  Abishai crawled back into the furnace. “Orion!”

  “Here,” he groaned. “Under Danaos.”

  Abishai flipped the lifeless Danaos away and grabbed the corporal by the belt, dragging him to safety. Seconds after clearing the gazebo, it collapsed into the shallow pit, turning it into a bonfire. Raindrops splattered and sizzled on the gazebo’s burning wreckage.

  With nowhere else to hide, Abishai shoved a demon duster into Judge Busiris’s shaking hand. “Just point and shoot, got it?” he said. “But not at us!”

  Busiris nodded and held out his jittering arm.

  Abishai turned helplessly to Orion, angry there was nothing he could do for him.

  Then he heard a familiar voice in his head. It was unmistakable. It was the voice of Captain Volk, and it was the first time Abishai had ever experienced such a thing.

  The voice said: “Put your hand on the wound. Concentrate. Summon up your ruach. See it in your mind’s eye. A cool-blue healing energy. Focus it on the wound. You are an angel of God. This is one of your gifts. Know it, and deliver!”

  Abishai looked around. Where was he? He gazed heavenward, where, far in the distance, he saw four specks darting about. One was different than the others. One was an angel of God. That one was Captain Volk.

  Lieutenant Ophion and the cadet recruits fought like tigers. Not only had their training kicked in, but so had their emuna-generated ruach. As the battle raged on, all of the recruits, SWAT and cadets, became aware of the difference between themselves and the Anteros soldiers.

  The
Anteros fighters were well-trained and fierce warriors to be sure, but all of their actions appeared to the angels as slow and clumsy. It was as if the Anteros soldiers moved about with weights tied to their arms and ankles. This, the recruits knew, was not the case; rather, that it was they themselves who were lighter, faster, and more agile.

  Operating at an enhanced level, however, didn’t mean they weren’t in danger. The danger was deadly real. The Anteros forces greatly outnumbered them for one, and although they seemed to move slowly, the rounds fired from their weapons did not.

  And then there were the yetzers. The cadets had never encountered so many at once, as well as species that they had never seen before, other than in Academy textbooks. The real thing was a thousand times more terrifying.

  “Ophion!” Cadet Troy called out, having just run through an Anteros fighter with his wakizashi short sword. “There are too many of them! Where are Sett and Volk? We can’t hold them off much longer!”

  “They’ll be here, son. Just keep going. You’re making me proud.”

  “Ophion!” Nisus shouted. “Behind you!”

  Lieutenant Ophion turned just in time to see charging right for him a snorting, pinch-faced, black-eyed, wooly Ego Yetzer, something like a cross between a fat rat and a buffalo. Ophion leaped flipping into the air a moment before the creature would have mowed him over. The yetzer skidded to a halt, turned, and charged again.

  Corporal Nisus ran up beside Ophion and emptied his demon duster into the big rodent. The rounds sank into the creature’s buffalo-thick hide, barely fazing it. The yetzer snorted a voluminous wad of disgusting snot and snapped its needle-like incisors. Simultaneously, intuitively—the two angels thrust out their right palms and hollered, “Back!”

  The yetzer shot tumbling backwards, head over tail, squashing four Anteros soldiers who were trailing the creature, using it as a shield. Its ringed, whip-like tail swept away a dozen more soldiers in its path.

  Ophion and Nisus exchanged puzzled looks. They weren’t sure what they had just done, or how. It had come instinctively, as second nature. It wasn’t anything they had yet been taught, or even thought they were capable of doing.

  The dazed yetzer rolled, kicked, struggled back onto all fours, and let loose a ferocious, high-pitched, squeaky roar. The creature was some twenty yards away, but Ophion and Nisus could still feel—and smell—its hot breath.

  Nisus thrust out his hand again, and shouted, “Back!”

  The yetzer didn’t budge. It didn’t even blink. Lieutenant Ophion tried to replicate what they had done too, but nothing. Not so much as a breeze. They turned to one another, baffled.

  The Ego Yetzer charged towards them even more madly than before, its beady black eyes having changed to fiery, garnet red. Unable to run or spin out of the situation, the two angels again thrust out their palms; this time in unison and using both hands at once. They blew the beast from its feet and sent it soaring through the air. The rodent yetzer landed crashing into another squad of onrushing Anteros soldiers, scattering them like a pile of autumn leaves.

  Ophion and Nisus turned searchingly to one another, perplexed by their own powers. “What’s going on?” Nisus asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ophion answered.

  Then they saw more yetzers and Anteros soldiers go tumbling across the battlefield, as if being swept by a gale-force wind.

  Ophion pointed and said excitedly, “There’s our answer!”

  26

  Breakfast of Champions

  I watched Captain Perseus start down the hill to resume his command. I had been standing behind him, cloaked in invisibility, observing his thoughts.

  Below me to the left and to the right burned the home I had grown up in. I was thankful that the Anteros barbarians knew nothing of the yeshiva and hidden sector of Heaven that was just a realization away on the other side of the spiritual curtain.

  “Kohai, can you read me?”

  “I read you, Virgil.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just above the Anteros camp. They are assembling now. They plan to attack in three formations. Perseus will approach from the west, Jason and his troops from the east, and Ajax will strike head on from the south.” (A lake bordered the northern side of the Academy.) The armies are armed with mostly light weapons—splicer rifles and demon dusters—but each battalion has a couple of shoulder-launching photon rockets, and at least one photon-emitting Vulcan Gatling gun.”

  “That’s not good,” Virgil said. “We’ll have to target those first, but locating them before they fire on us is going to be a problem.”

  “Way ahead of you, Virge.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I spun over to the yeshiva and grabbed a can of red, fluorescent paint that I recalled seeing in the same shed where we got our uniforms. The paint is invisible in this dimension, except to those who have the eyes to see, which are only you, Grace, Hera, and me. I slopped the paint on the rocket launchers and Gatling guns, and marked a big, red ‘A’ for Anteros on the front and back of the soldiers who are carrying them. Inform Grace, and tell her that those are her initial targets.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Are you with her now?” I asked.

  “Just got here. Hera was in trouble and there were some old scores that needed settling. Are you coming?”

  “No. You and I are going to attack from behind. They won’t be expecting anything coming from that direction. Grace and Hera will man the spleen gun. But first I want you to organize the cupid forces.”

  “What’s left of them, you mean,” Virgil said.

  “How many are we talking?”

  “About fifty, nearly all cadets, plus a dozen or so celestial apprentices.”

  “That’s it? Where are the others?”

  “Hera said most were murdered during the first skirmish at the disgronifiers. Some switched sides. Others were killed protecting their homes and businesses. They were caught completely by surprise and were never able to organize a defense. The surviving cadets were in the Academy dorms when the invasion came.”

  “Who among the cadets can lead?” I asked.

  “It’s slim pickings, but I’d have to say Cadet Theo is the best of them.”

  “All right. Speak to him. Help him organize some sort of defense. There’s not much time. Anteros will be there in less than thirty minutes, probably sooner. Set up blockades and place the best snipers in the windows.”

  Virgil said, “I checked the Academy armory. We have one Gatling gun and a couple of RPGs.”

  “Better than nothing. You know what to do. Afterwards, spin over behind Jason’s eastern battalion, and I’ll take Ajax’s southern. The cadets will have to hold off Perseus’s western army.”

  “Kohai,” Virgil said. “Don’t take this personally, but give me Ajax. I know you’re a badass now, good buddy, but I’m badder.”

  “I’m not afraid of him, Virgil.”

  “I know you’re not. It’s not about that. I’ve sparred with him before; you haven’t. We have a history; you don’t. If we’re lucky, neither of us will have to take him on. But if we have to face him, it’s gonna be me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Your call. Now get cracking. I see them pulling out. Take care of yourself, Virge, and may HaShem be with you.”

  “You too, Kohai. You too.”

  Until now I had been whistling in the dark regarding the gravity of our situation. In speaking with Virgil and comprehending the overwhelming odds we were up against, I realized that false bravado was not going to get me through this. For the first time in my life I felt a real sense of hopelessness and dread. Would I never see my best friend again?

  Calm down, Kohai, I ordered myself. Get a grip. Take it one step at a time. You are not the first angel or man to face overwhelming odds. HaShem did not bring you this far just to abandon you at the last minute. Snap out of it!

  I scolded myself for my lack of emuna, and shook off my apprehension. I was determined to do my
best; the rest would be in HaShem’s hands. ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me…’

  Virgil turned to Grace and Hera and explained the situation as he double-checked the spleen gun to make sure everything was operational.

  “Hera,” he said, handing her a pair of binoculars, “you are Grace’s eyes. You know what to look for.”

  Hera nodded.

  “Grace,” Virgil continued, “there is only enough condensed venom for about twenty rounds. You have to pick your targets very carefully and be as precise as possible.”

  “I understand. And after we run out of ammo, then what?”

  “If I had it my way,” Virgil answered, “I’d say you both beat it as quickly as possible to the safety of the yeshiva.”

  Grace smiled. “But you don’t. So what’s your second recommendation? If we make it that far, that is.”

  “The cadets will need all the help they can get.”

  “Understood,” Grace said.

  Virgil paused uncomfortably, not knowing what else he could say. He wished he could stay and help protect the two celestials, but they all knew that wasn’t what the situation called for.

  Hera broke the awkwardness by leaning in and kissing Virgil on the cheek. “Go, brave angel, and may the Lord of Hosts be with you.”

  Grace stepped up and embraced the young warrior angel. “You heard the celestial,” she said. “Go. We will meet again soon.”

  Virgil nodded and whirled off.

  On the ground below the clock tower, the few dozen remaining cadets, celestials, and cupid stragglers were in a state of chaos. Only hours before they were celebrating the promise of hope and change like everyone else. Then, suddenly, their world went up in flames. Instead of a delegation, they got invasion. They knew that their best commanders were down on Earth, and that if the rumors were true, they were never coming back.