As immediately as they relished in the Prince’s death, they heard Phoenix yell for help. All four Apostles rushed to her side where the second Gore Prince had trapped her between two hulking boulders. She narrowly managed to fit herself in the gap their incongruent shapes formed, but the bloody brute had drawn a sword as long as it was tall, fashioned from crude, tainted metal. It was hammering down at her shelter like heavy rainfall, relentless and unforgiving.
“My form is useless against it!” she raged in frustration.
Lupus was the first to descend to the lower ground where she was imprisoned in her rocky cage. When he witnessed what happened next, he doubted he would ever be more proud, or more in awe, of his brother Samael as he dove and boiled the Phantom’s blade in gouts of purging flame.
The Gore Prince screeched a sound more showing of annoyance than injury, unable to get to Phoenix now that its weapon was little more than molten slag. It turned to face its attacker and lashed out at Samael with both arms, bringing the unsuspecting Apostle into a crushing head lock.
Without any arms to fight back, Samael beat his wings repeatedly with all his defiant strength until he escaped the hold. Flying away to a safer distance where he could attack his foe again, Samael was followed only by a shriek of challenge by the Gore Prince.
The Phantom’s wailing noise was short lived as a bubble of energy from Valkyrie smashed into its side, shaking it but only serving to distract the beast. Another was sent, and another, but the Prince merely staggered back as though assailed by a fierce wind. Gaia added her own powerful decoys, manipulating the very ground beneath its feet and making it shift to unsteady its footing.
It was all the help Lupus needed, however, and he launched himself into a run. Preoccupied and unfocused, the Phantom couldn’t see the Apostle coming as he collided with it so fiercely it sounded like a thunderstorm had erupted in the valley. They went sprawling backwards, the momentum of the impact forcing the creature backwards into the unforgiving slopes of the vale.
It yelped as rocks, razor sharp and armour piercing, were coupled ruinously with its back. Lupus reeled away, unwilling to join the same deadly fate of the Gore Prince. There was a loud pop and a quick flash as its shield generator, embedded in its armour but now smashed apart, failed. Undaunted by and saved from her adversary, Phoenix advanced from the safety of the boulders, glowing with an intensity she hadn’t known before.
“Now you’re stuck, aren’t you?” she hissed with vile. Reluctant to let the wretched monster exist any longer, she finished it with a ball of flame.
The Apostles turned as one, realising that there was still another Gore Prince out there yet to die at their hands. Behind them, the lifeless Phantom was nothing more than a burnt out husk.
They raced to join with the others and found Whitewolf and Nightingale fighting alongside Waterfox and Solitaire, two pairs of the deadliest soldiers in existence battling the most foul of ogres. All four were struggling to evade weapon-laden arms, some more deftly than others. With a rusty, blood-wet axe and a corroded sword, the last Gore Prince attacked without relent. For an instant Lupus wondered how the Phantoms always seemed to be drenched in ichor, even if they hadn’t made slaughter recently. What kind of foul magic clothed them so?
Waterfox dodged one arm, then the other. He laughed at his enemy’s pathetic attempts to wound him and even when the axe found its mark, it simply sailed through his liquid state. It was surprising to see Oz shaped like his bipedal human self when he was in his Apostle form, but Lupus suspected it meant his brother’s name referred to more than just the animal he normally resembled.
“You can’t hurt me you stupid, worthless beast!” Oz yelled at it. Despite his angry mockery, his voice seemed to be blended with a hint of secret misery at the fact.
The Gore Prince was smarter than its brethren though and was feigning its bouts of mindless strikes from the start. Calla approached its right leg from behind, stalking her prey in her Whitewolf form. She leapt up to snap at the gap between its armour plates, but the Phantom had anticipated her action, planned for it even, and threw its right elbow backwards to smash into her side with jarring force. She crashed to the ground in a defeated heap.
Solitaire took the opportunity of its laughing satisfaction to roll between its legs, slicing her sword upwards at its exposed groin. Its shield saved it though, jarring her arm away in a shower of white sparks as the blade met the energy field. She cried out her frustration as she tumbled away from its vengeful rebukes and went to help Whitewolf.
Nightingale sailed past them, her ghostly form invulnerable to the Gore Prince’s attacks much the same as Waterfox was. She parried the Phantom’s blows time and again with her own curved steel, but every time she managed to land a strike it failed to do any damage.
Gaia, can you bind it? Lupus asked as he and the other Apostles moved in to attack.
“I was just about to, brother” she replied. Though she was in her form, a green mother nature, she had no need to use a psychic voice. For all its alien colour and earthly decoration, her body was still so similar to a human’s.
Standing back, Gaia opened her arms and closed her eyes, focussing on her task. Seconds later, the ground began to shift under the Gore Prince and thick roots began to spring up from the ground. The Apostles withdrew from their assault on their enemy, unwilling to get caught up in what their sister was about to do to it.
How is this possible? Cerberus asked aloud to anyone able to answer, getting clear of the scene in a single leap of his massive body. This place is barren rock, where is the earth and the tree that would fuel this assault?
“I am the mistress of Nature; no element is beyond my power, no root beyond my grasp!” Gaia said, opening her eyes. The dark green orbs glowed with an otherworldly force as she manipulated her control over the very fabric of Noiran’s ground.
The Gore Prince hacked away as the vines began to circle around its limbs, snaring its armour joints and dragging it down helplessly to the floor. It raged and bellowed in a language so disgraceful it had no name, but it was no use. In humiliation it was brought down by Gaia’s ferocity.
Unable to control her disgust at the Phantom’s life, she closed both of her fists tight until they hurt and it crumpled in a sticky mess of death. Dark ichor flooded out of the cracks in its armour and spilled onto the valley basin as if to pay respect to its ugly name. Gaia sighed resignedly, content at her work.
“Is it done…?” Calla muttered, staggering in her human form towards the other Apostles. She had one arm slung around the shoulder of Solitaire and it seemed at odds that such powerful individuals should appear so troubled. Lupus could tell the injury wasn’t serious and that she would heal soon enough, but he felt part of him sink at the thought that he could have prevented it had he acted in her place.
Before any of them could reply, she had her answer in a psychic-scream. IT HAS ONLY BEGUN! It was ear-shattering, heart rendering, echoing through their minds and threatening to overwhelm them with its evil.
A fourth Phantom jumped down into the valley next to its dead kin, but the familial resemblance stopped at its allegiance. It was twice the size of the Gore Princes, its armour more rounded and complete. Where the others were soaked in blood, this seemed to be made from the life force of a thousand victims, its skin blotchy and scarlet. It wore no helmet, for none could fit its distorted face where red bone and black flesh overlapped. There were two orange, deep pits for eyes and a snarling, thrice-jawed mouth to issue its wicked voice.
Held between both hands was a larger cousin of the pole arms the devii carried, but this was far more deadly thanks to its exaggerated size, if not its brutality and ability to rip through a hundred bodies a time. Lupus doubted that any of them could wield it, but in its haft was imbued an aura so depraved that they would have been dissuaded from any attempt anyway. He looked on in disgust at the new Phantom as blood seemed to run freely and without cessation over its body. A collection of skulls, all frozen eterna
lly in silent screams, hung across both its shoulders.
What is that?! Valkyrie screamed, stumbling back under the psychic presence of the massive brute.
Where there is a Prince, there is a higher sovereign…Lupus answered, digging his claws into the ground and readying himself for the hardest fight of his life. It is a Blood King. He didn’t know what was more terrifying; the Phantom creature before him, or the whisper in his mind that had told him what it was.
THE BELLOW THAT the giant, hellish nightmare gave nearly overwhelmed them all. Even Cerberus was dwarfed by it, now on his hind legs resisting the noise and grudgingly being pushed back by the sheer force of it. Ever since his encounter with the first Gore Prince on Dystopian, Lupus was doubtless that there were worse things yet to be confronted. Now, his suspicions were vindicated.
Without pausing for breath, the Blood King thumbed a switch on the shaft of its weapon and swung the halberd at Oz. It passed through the Apostle’s liquid body, the action itself harmless, but the now-heated blade was devastating. With his midriff vaporised, Oz collapsed into a puddle, his molecular structure disturbed and the bonds of his watery flesh broken.
Brother! Lupus yelled, unable to believe what he had seen happen in front of him.
Get back, he will rise again, Valkyrie assured him, impossibly calm given the situation.
Lupus felt compelled to trust her, despite her unwillingness to ever return that faith to him. He found himself circling around the Blood King in a wide berth, his instincts and anger moving his legs before his conscious mind could. As he fixed his gaze to the Phantom, sensing the others withdraw in uncertainty, he heard a defiant voice scream back at the foe.
“Face me next, Blood King, I promise you a better fight!” Phoenix yelled as the halberd sought to cleave her in two the same as it did to Oz.
She had retained her form of pure fire and the weapon simply sliced through a hotter flame, its heat doing nothing to impede her. She began to glow brighter to match her increasing rage, but something in her eyes told Lupus it wasn’t just disgust at the Blood King’s being, but pain at what it had done to Oz. Her feet left the ground, hovering above the floor in effortless flight. She held out her arms, her right flat and straight forward, her left pulling back as if to form a balletic movement. Instead, a fiery bow appeared in her grasp and an arrow, white as a sun, notched itself into her new weapon.
The Blood King, taken aback at its failure to wound her at all, simply stared in curiosity at what she was doing. It was amazed to see that anything less than its own kind was capable of withstanding it, let alone having power of this degree.
Phoenix flexed her arms, pulled her shoulders back and unleashed the projectile. She was no more than a few metres away from the Phantom, dauntless before such a horrible creature. Yet, when the missile struck home, there was nothing but a spark and fizzle of energy as the armour of the thing held true, as if only to mock her, protecting its bloated, bloody chest.
It threw back its head and let out a loud, unimaginably perverse sound. Lupus realised with revulsion that it was laughing at her. He was about to launch his assault when, to his left, Gaia growled her own disdain at the Phantom and focussed her power again to use the force of nature against it.
Before the vines and roots could wrap around the Blood King’s limbs the same way she had used them to slay the Gore Prince, it slashed its halberd through the air, cutting them to pieces like a scythe to wheat. At the same time, it lashed out at them all with a psychic shockwave. It burned through the minds of the Apostles, sending them reeling back in agony and confusion. The last thing Lupus saw being it hit him was Valkyrie being thrown to the ground violently like a rag doll, her attuned mind more vulnerable and overcome than the others’.
PAIN. UNIMAGINABLE PAIN. He hadn’t known the feeling in an age, not truly and it felt paralysing. His skin might have been impenetrable, but his mind was not. As he fought against the psychic invasion and forced back the energy enveloping his mental strength, Lupus struggled to his feet and surveyed the scene.
He was the first to recover, his body still invulnerable to physical damage, but his head was a mess. It felt like a grenade had gone off inside his skull, but he had to collect his thoughts. When he heard the sound of frantic wing beats, he looked to the sky and saw Samael plummeting through the air to the ground.
Brother! Lupus yelled, but it was no use. The Apostle hit the valley basin seconds later, unconscious from the mental attack unleashed by the Blood King and landed in an awkward pile. He looked broken, a sight Lupus could never have thought possible for an Apostle so mighty.
Even the Blood King itself seemed weakened by the assault and Lupus took the opportunity to check on the rest of them. To his right, Calla was sprawled over a tangle of rocks and gravel. She had been too slow to change back into Whitewolf after the Phantom’s strike had stunned her into returning to her human form, but the result was miraculous. Her white armour was speckled with blood, a graze cut into her head, but otherwise she seemed unharmed. Still, Lupus remembered the wound that the Gore Prince had dealt her from before and he nudged her cheek gently with his nose.
Wake up, Calla. It isn’t safe to sleep, he said to her urgently.
Slowly, her eyes began to open. They fluttered at first, her energy drained from the fight. He cursed himself for not being in control of the conflict, for not having prevented her injuries. When she saw him looking over her she smiled warmly as though he were a burning sun come to save her from the frozen depths of a lost world.
She could find the strength only to mutter to him. “Lupus…the others…” she looked around lazily until she saw their damaged forms. “They have been undone. We are…too weak for it” she confided. She inclined her head to indicate the recovering Blood King shaking itself like a confused canine.
Lupus looked around the valley, the only light coming from weapons and promises of death and took in the truth of her words. She was right; every one of the Apostles had been injured and immobilised by the psychic attack. Only he had survived the backlash of the assault unscathed. Even Cerberus, his biggest brother, was stumbling across the rocky landscape he tried to rise up on, his footing betrayed by his damaged mind. His trio of heads seemed to be in conflict with each other, disagreeing over the right movement to take.
He winced as he saw Oz desperately try to reassemble himself, constructing his water based form one droplet at a time in painstaking fashion. Nightingale was in disarray, her ghostly essence threatened by the Blood King’s onslaught. He couldn’t see Solitaire anywhere.
A terrified scream came from near the Phantom and Lupus turned to see the most heart-breaking sight yet. His sister Phoenix had reverted to human form, her proximity to the Blood King making her take the brunt of its mental barrage. Her energy drained, she was barely able to retreat from the monstrous Phantom. But the scream did not come from her; it came from Gaia. And the scream wasn’t one of pain, but courage.
The earthly Apostle sprang forward, a spear that Lupus hadn’t known she possessed in her hand, ready to intercept the Phantom’s impending mortal blow against Phoenix. The Blood King, now salivating at its prey, brought its halberd across to cut through his prey’s throat, but with a confused look on its twisted face, the weapon never reached its target.
Gaia had reached them in time, now kneeling under the weight of the Phantom’s blade striking against the length of the spear she clutched tightly in both hands. It laughed derisively again, as though entertained by such an effort to prevent its mission to kill. With a simple instruction from its base brain to its right foot, the Blood King kicked out with an armoured boot and struck against Gaia’s chest with bone-shattering force.
Gaia flew back into Phoenix, colliding with her sister with such force that both of them tumbled over each other again and again, but away from the Phantom. When they finally stopped, bruises and blood covering their bodies, Lupus felt helpless and dismayed. He abhorred the Blood King’s very existence and yet he felt
powerless to destroy it on his own, but his brothers and sisters were too weak to help him now.
“Lupus…” Calla whispered at his side, placing a hand on his left hind leg to draw his attention briefly from the enemy.
He looked down at her, urging himself to think of a plan of attack. He hoped she had an idea for him because he was just as desperate to make her safe as he was to end the Phantom’s life.
“You are the First…you have to defeat it…only you can” Calla told him, her breathing shallow and her voice faint.
And if I am not enough? He asked, doubtful as ever of his own abilities.
She managed to smile up at him lovingly and assuredly. “You have always been enough, and you always will be…you are stronger and tougher than any of us in so many different ways…” she said and he knew she was talking about more than just his status among the group of demi-gods. As she stared at him, pressing him to finish the fight, he felt emboldened by her words and her love for him.
Turning his head to the enemy, determined to save his brothers and sisters and the one he cared for above all else, he fixed his gaze on the Blood King. Letting out the loudest, longest roar he had ever issued, he warned the enemy of its looming death. With his friends in need of saving all around him, and his companion hurt and in need of his protection, he felt a conviction and belief in himself flood through his mind and heart.
With a challenge that only a beast could offer to another, he charged.
ON THE BRIDGE of the Luminon, Captain Orion gathered with the officers of the 617th and the Stormfalcon pilot that had barely managed to escape the surface of Noiran alive.
“What happened down there, Tiars?” Sabre asked. He’d heard the news of the pilot’s return as soon as the legionnaire had docked with the Blackstar. Along with Olympus he rushed to the bridge, knowing the captain would request the presence of them all.
Tiars, who was being welcomed back by Orion and the deck crew at the captain’s throne, met his gaze with honest uncertainty.
The Deian War: Vermillion's Apostles Page 29