by C. T. Phipps
“Demons and Nephilim collect the souls to mortals to use as power reserves,” Cloak added. “If you remove these bodies and send them off to their true afterlives, it will weaken it enough to perhaps send it on its way.”
“Is that any different from throwing fireballs at them?”
“...no?”
“Thanks, that’s really helpful.”
“I am the promised doom of all nations!” Magog shouted, its voice a hideous choir of a thousand dead. “All beings will know and rue my apocalypse.”
“The smell is definitely apocalyptic,” I said, blasting yet more zombies as they seemed to come faster and more numerous towards me.
“Why are you quipping in combat?” the Red Schoolgirl said, slicing through one, decapitating another, and then bisecting a third. I’d say she was cutting through them like wet tissue paper but I’m pretty sure that would have given more resistance.
“Don’t most heroes and villains?” I asked.
“No!” the Red Schoolgirl said. “Besides, they’re zombies! They don’t care.”
“Well I care!” If you’re going to do a fight with a hideous world-ending evil then the best thing was to do it right.
The Red Schoolgirl shook her head and sliced another through the head down to its groin. “Weirdo.”
Magog wasn’t a one-trick pony, however, and shot forth a storm of red lightning from its chest in every direction. The Human Tank was struck by one of these bolts and ended up falling from the sky, only for Bronze Medalist to propel himself through the air and grab her before settling safely down. That proved to be a trap, though, as another bolt struck them both in the back and caused them to fall down onto the ground.
I wasn’t sure if they were unconscious or dead but the difference was mostly academic to superheroes. As long as you didn’t get brain or entire body destroyed, the Society of Superheroes could revive you. It said something about the world the Society of Superheroes hadn’t been able to get that tech to the common man despite their best efforts to do so.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to deal with that as the numbers of zombies falling from Magog doubled, then doubled again. I had to throw far more fireballs just keep up and was rapidly running out of juice, especially since the moon wasn’t exactly a center of necromantic energy. General Venom didn’t last long in the air, either, getting struck by a whip-like appendage composed of the living dead. This knocked him from his horse right into one of the Black Witch’s spells.
“We’re not exactly covering ourselves in glory here!” the Black Witch said, summoning a host of shadow construct ravens which started tearing away corpses from Magog’s body and eating them.
“The society took a few hours to beat Magog alone last time,” the Red Schoolgirl said, her sword starting to glow as she grew faster and more brutal in her attacks. Her voice started to shake and change to something lower. Almost mannish. “Kill, maim, destroy!”
“Is that normal?” I called to Black Witch.
“No,” she responded. “That’s a bad sign!”
“I never would have guessed.”
A frightening berserker’s fury came over the Red Schoolgirl as she intensified her attacks a dozenfold, and started screaming in archaic Japanese Cloak couldn’t translate. Glowing red kanji appeared all over her body as she threw all caution to the wind. She did much more damage to the zombies but they started clawing at her, biting her, and weighing her down with their massive ranks. Not even my blasts were doing much to keep them off.
“She’s being possessed by her ancestor, Oda Nobunaga!” the Black Witch said. “Get her away from the horde before he gets her killed and absorbs her soul!”
“What kind of outfit are you running?” I said, going closer and throwing most of my remaining reserves at her.
“A mixed superhero/supervillain team, dumbass! I thought we established that!” Black Witch said, conjuring a shielded bubble as Magog transformed into, I kid you not, a gigantic dragon made out of linked together corpses. The thing spread out its wings, pulled its neck back, and breathed out a tidal wave of hellfire down on her. Everything around her was scorched to ashes including the building she was on but her shielded bubble held firm.
“I am way out of my league here,” I muttered, running up at Black Witch and dodging my way out of the zombies I’d done my best to keep a safe distance from while pitching flaming death at.
“Be careful, Ms. Ishikawa’s blade is capable of killing Reaper’s Cloak wearers even in their intangible form,” Cloak said. “I lost friends to the Mad Samurai in World War 2 when he wielded it.”
“That is such a racist codename.”
“He called himself Divine Warrior of the People but he killed hundreds of innocents so my response is screw that guy.”
Fair enough. I found myself dodging flying limbs, legs, heads, and worse when I got near the berserk and increasingly battered looking Red Schoolgirl. She had several bad bite marks and I was never more glad the whole ‘zombie infection’ thing was one of the few myths which was just that. I’d hate to face the Red Schoolgirl when she was dead, cannibalistic, and hungry.
That’s when I ducked under one of her wild swings. “I will skin you alive, gaijin, and nail your pelt to my door!”
“Okay, the racism here is just getting really annoying,” I said, blasting three zombies out of the way before freezing her sword in her hands. She growled as it suddenly lost its bisecting power. Ironically, she didn’t drop it but started using it like a bat to knock away zombies instead.
“Sayanora, Schoolgirl,” I said, grabbing her by the shoulders and causing her to turn intangible as we both fell down to the level below and landed in a maintenance closet. She promptly clobbered me with her iced over sword but while being hit in the face with an icicle wasn’t fun, it was a lot better than being decapitated by it. Besides, if there was one thing I knew how to do right, it was take a punch.
Falling backward into a pile of mops, brooms, and buckets, I iced over the door to the room to prevent her escape, then levitated, insubstantial as a ghost. The Red Schoolgirl screamed numerous obscenities at me in modern Japanese but was unable to catch me as I disappeared. I didn’t know anything about her powers but I figured being unable to kill anything would help her regain control over herself. She could worry about getting all of those demon zombie bites disinfected.
Coming back up to the battlefield, I found myself surrounded by a large number of demon zombies. They looked decidedly brassed off at having been denied their prey. Worse, I could see the Black Witch’s shields buckle under Magog’s zombie dragon form—shooting lightning from its eyes. That was, seriously, pretty sweet to look at, but bad for our tactical situation.
As the zombies around me descended, I prepared what little fire I had left to deal with them, only to see a gigantic Ultra-Force fan blade slice through them like a lawnmower moving around me. I was covered in demon-zombie bits and gore but never felt so relieved. Looking up, I saw an Ultra-force battleship was conjured in the air beside Magog and had started unloading with every one of its two hundred gun emplacements on the Nephilim.
Gabrielle had defeated Gog and come to reinforce us.
I’d never been so happy to be rescued in my entire life.
“No one takes out my friends, so says Ultragoddess!” Gabrielle shouted, not really being all that good at the mid-battle banter. I wasn’t about to call her out on it, though. Even if I wasn’t able to add much more to this battle than cheerleading, I was all for it.
That was when a gigantic Ultraforce, science-fiction cannon the size of a WW2 artillery piece appeared on the top of a nearby building. It had a gigantic telescope on the top of it leading to some sort of sniper’s scope occupied by a small individual. I, for a second, thought it was Ultragod, before seeing the prominent P.H.A.N.T.O.M skull and lightning bolts emblem on the side.
Tom Terror.
Shit.
“GABRIELLE!” I shouted, waving my hands.
; She didn’t hear me or just thought I was trying to flag her down. A bolt of Ultraforce energy fired from the canon, undoubtedly enhanced by the complicated circuitry and physics Tom Terror could visualize in his mind. The bolt struck against Gabrielle and caused her energy reserves to blast out of her mouth, arms, and legs. Gabrielle started falling like an angel from Heaven, only for me to throw the last of my energy reserves into levitating and cushioning our fall. Even so, we hit hard against a hover-car hood in front of a Chinese restaurant. In the distance, I saw Tom Terror flying off, not even bothering to see what had happened to Gabrielle. He was utterly confident his sneak attack had worked.
He might have been right.
“Stay with me,” I said, holding Gabrielle, ignoring the immense pain I felt from having hit it head on.
Gabrielle looked alive, a little singed but otherwise fine. The weapon had just drained her of everything she’d had left.
Leaving us both powerless before Magog.
“You will die, little human,” Magog grumbled as the dragon moved over me. “The Brotherhood of Infamy will destroy your hometown, murder your family, and bring the Great Beast into this world. I will enjoy the feast which my father will leave for this world. Now, though, you will go to meet your mistress in Hell.”
I stared up at Magog, clutching Gabrielle’s unconscious form against my chest.
I would give anything to protect her.
I loved her every bit as much as Mandy.
Even now.
Shit.
Why did I have to have these revelations now?
“Anything?” a voice whispered in my head.
It was not Cloak’s.
“Yes,” I agreed, immediately.
“Gary!” Cloak shouted, as if I’d made the stupidest decision of my life.
“Then take my power, champion, and know we will meet again. Then I will collect upon this favor.” The voice sounded like Mandy’s and Gabrielle’s synthesized together. I knew who it was I’d just made my deal with.
Death.
Samael.
The Reaper’s Cloak’s mistress.
Magog pulled his head back to breathe down another tidal wave of hellfire as I felt power within my hands like I’d never felt before. I could have broken my deal by not using it but I’d meant everything I’d said to death. Summoning flames in my hands, I whispered, “Burn, you son of a bitch.”
An immense amount of fire poured from my hands, a tornado of flame which struck the gigantic monster in the chest and caused the entirety of its massive frame to start burning. Thousands of souls were freed in an instant and thousands more joined in the ensuing ten minutes I kept burning it. A crowd of civilians, heroes, and supervillains gathered around to watch me as I focused my flame with an overwhelming hate.
And, eventually, Magog was no more.
Not just in this reality.
But any reality.
I’d killed the Nephilim permanently. Like Sauron after the One Ring had been destroyed or the Kurgen after his head was cut off.
It was a big deal.
Probably.
I couldn’t think about it, though, because all of that exertion came to hit me in an instant. My eyes rolled back into my head and I fell over—unconscious on top of Gabrielle.
I really hoped I wasn’t going back to jail.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Ghosts of the Past are the Hardest to Exorcise
I found myself with a monstrous headache, worse than when I’d regained my memories, and woke up.
To mist.
I was surrounded by an endless fog in a dark and foreboding set of surroundings. I couldn’t see anything beyond a couple of feet away and I wasn’t sure I was standing on the ground either.
“Okay, this is weird,” I muttered. “Am I dead?”
“No, just unconscious,” Cloak’s voice said in the mist. It wasn’t coming from my costume anymore. “You’re not even gravelly injured, just exhausted. If you were close to Death, I expect she’d be trying to speak with you now.”
That was when a handsome man in his early forties walked through the mist, wearing an older-style suit with a winning ring on his right hand. He had dark, well-groomed hair, white skin, and a pair of dark foreboding eyes. He was the sort of fellow who, if you were looking for the secret identity of a superhero, you’d look right at this guy.
I offered my hand to him. “Nice to meet you, Lancel.” It seemed wrong to call him Cloak here.
Lancel helped me up. “I tried for years to get people to call me Lance. It didn’t take.”
“Sorry,” I said, dusting myself off. “So this is my afterlife? Or yours? I can’t say I’m too impressed.”
“I don’t think its forever,” Lancel said, looking around. “I can feel the weight keeping me bound here weakening the more you come into your role. I thought Death would be mad at me forever for stealing the Reapers Cloaks but it seems she’s more forgiving than her reputation would suggest.”
“You stole the Cloaks?” I asked, surprised. “From Samael.”
“Persephone, Hel, Thanatos, Baron Samedi, or whatever name you want to call him or her. Death assumes the appropriate mythological form for her audience. She was always a terrifying female specter to me. The supernatural exists, no matter what humans like to label them and mythology is just their medium for communicating with us.” Lancel nodded. “I’m not proud of it but I didn’t begin my career as one of the good guys. I was the secret leader of an organization called the Brotherhood of Infamy. It was a cult devoted to the worship of the Great Beasts in hope of destroying the world so it could be remade into something better.”
Wow, that was like discovering Santa used to kill children in his spare time. “Wow. Why the hell would you do that?”
Lancel looked over at me. “Not everyone deals with their grief constructively.”
I looked at him. “I know something of that, myself.”
Lancel gave a half-smile. “In the end, when the time came to destroy the world for our paradise, I couldn’t do it. I still had too many friends and my brother to tie me to the world. I think, to really believe in a utopia, you have to hate the world. As angry as I was at the world, I wasn’t angry enough to take my revenge out on everyone and everything. So I spent the next eighty years trying to make up for my mistake.”
“The other six cloaks are still out there.”
Lancel nodded. “I’m afraid so. As entertaining as this diversion with Tom Terror is, I can feel whoever possesses them are misusing them. They also all bear the curse Death placed upon them to bring the dead back to life to scourge the living. That has the potential to destroy the world if it’s not stopped.”
I remembered Gog, which was probably still messing up Avalon. “So does a lot of things. You can’t just look after your own mess, Lance.”
Lancel looked down. “No, I suppose I can’t. Does this mean you’ve decided to come over to the side of the righteous?”
I looked down. “I don’t know if I can.”
“That’s surprising, given you almost just sacrificed yourself to save Gabrielle.”
“Ever see Return of the Jedi?”
“I may have caught it in theaters,” Lancel said, chuckling. “Is this going to be one of your extended references?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Just a short and sweet one, like me. I always thought the Force was overly forgiving letting Vader into Jedi Heaven. Darth Vader was willing to kill the Emperor for the love of his son and die to save him. Which is great and all but, what about all the other millions of people he helped the Empire kill, like the Alderaanians? It’s easy enough to die for the people you love. It’s hard to do it for the rest of the world. Gabrielle is, Mandy is, but I’m not.”
“That is, perhaps, a bit much to ask of anyone. Sometimes we forget that heroes are not meant to be the standard by which we should judge others, but those people who go above and beyond.”
“What you said, chief.” I’d been
mulling over this stuff for the past few days. “My powers feel really good. I like using them. I loved the money, the fame, and the respect. I like Cindy and Diabloman, to be honest, and I imagine I’ll like plenty of other supervillains who are as far from Psychoslinger as humanly possible. I hate the people like the Extreme and those bastards who employ them. If you’re asking me if I’m going to give up a life of crime, probably not.”
Lance looked down.
I took in a deep breath. “But maybe there’s a spectrum to these sorts of things.”
Lance looked up, surprised.
“On one end of the rainbow, you’ve got guys like Ultragod and Gabrielle. The people willing to sacrifice everything in order to do stuff,” I said, trying to force down my anger over the fact my girlfriend had chosen the world over me. “At the other end, there’s the Extreme, but maybe there’s something similar with supervillains. Heroes and anti-heroes. Yet, if there’re these, why not Anti-Villains?”
“I’m not sure that’s a word.”
“I’m pretty sure I read it on TV tropes.”
“Again, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I looked at my hands. “Or maybe the line between heroes and villains is just imaginary. A construct of where you’re looking and what you support.”
“Most people learn that when they’re fourteen.”
“My life got skewed at that age.”
Lancel placed his hand on my shoulder. “There is still Tom Terror’s riot going on outside. It’s dangerous. You need to wake up and deal with it.”
“I will,” I said, staring. “Then I’m going to use Ultragod’s teleporter and get the hell out of here. I’m also going to help myself to anything which is going to keep me and my friends out of jail.”
“That is a dangerous self-defeating road, my friend.”
“Only if I lose. Next time, I won’t.”
Lancel frowned, his voice softening. “It is a long, hard, and dangerous road you’ve set yourself upon, Gary, but I suppose we both knew that. I can only offer you my support and friendship. Also, my dear hope you never have as much to atone for as I do.”