by Mike Truk
There was no weapon in those massive hands.
Emma let out a scream and skidded to a stop, crashing back onto her ass as the stranger loomed over her, grin all sadistic amusement.
“Hey!” I slashed Shard at him, sending an arc of golden light flying at his head. A band of crimson light appeared between us, perfectly matching my attack, blocking it neatly.
Fuck. Advanced ward.
Emma skittered back, eyes wide.
I had to get his attention, had to distract him. So I hurled a levenbolt his way, thick as my waist, channeling up a huge torrent of power from Muladhara.
The lightning bolt split the air and flew at him, only to be met by more of his crimson ward. His mastery was such that crimson blossomed wherever my levenbolt leaped, wherever the thinner tendrils plunged at him. A dozen spots, each expertly blocked, absolutely nothing getting through.
It was my turn to skid to a stop.
The man turned to look at me sidelong, wolfish grin subsiding into a sneer, his brows lowering over his burning golden eyes.
“I’m disappointed,” rumbled the stranger, voice deep and cavernous. He turned to square up with me. “The last Savior, and this is the best you can do?”
I glanced at Brielle. She was out. Little Meow lay still. Neveah was barely visible under the rubble.
“Still, there is glory in delivering the universe to Lilith,” continued the man, “even if you’re unequal to the moment. I must admit, however, that I’m disappointed.”
“Who the fuck are you?” I managed, at a loss for cutting quips.
His eyes narrowed in annoyance. “You’ve not heard of me. Cute.”
“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve been mowing down so many bad guys that it’s hard to keep track. You important or something?”
“Am I important?” He canted his head to one side as if trying to understand my temerity better by looking at me from another angle. “You could ask one of my four million subjects. Ask the Nithing-Lord, who summoned me first to this shit-hole realm. Ask Lilith, who sent me forth to conquer Gomaliel in her name.” His smile grew wicked. “Which I did. Which I delivered to her over the countless bodies of those who thought to oppose me. Ask most anyone across the universe or Tree of Death if they’ve heard of Emperor Asmodeus, and I dare say they’ll shit their pants.”
“Gomaliel,” I said, trying to buy time. “That the sphere of eternal fucking?”
He laughed, a sharp bark. “It’s eternally fucked, if that’s what you mean. Now that I’ve made it my playground.”
I shook out my left arm, lifting Shard back up so its point was aimed at his face. “Emperor Asmodeus. But you know, for all you’ve done, it sounds like you’re still being ordered around like some minor servant.”
His eyes narrowed once more. “Ordered? No. This opportunity was offered to me, and I took it, thinking I’d find some sport. I was warned about this one here” - he kicked Neveah in the side - “but even she was easy prey.”
I tightened my fingers about Shard’s hilt. “You’ll regret that.”
“No, I won’t.” He began to march toward me. “Because nobody here is powerful enough to stop me. Not her, not you, not all of you together.”
I held my ground, but holy shit, his stride toward me, all six-foot-seven and doubtlessly weighing over three hundred pounds of pure muscle, was damn intimidating. I wanted to back up, to delay the inevitable.
“I’m going to take you apart, little man,” he said, golden eyes gleaming. “No weapons. Just my bare hands. I’m going to break you down to your constituent parts, then turn my attention to your companions. To your pretty, pretty companions.”
I brought up my ward, slammed down the Vam, and engaged the First Prism to refine the potency of my magic further.
Even so, ready as I was, the Vam allowing me to read his movements, his intentions with supernatural foresight, I wasn’t ready.
He blurred.
There was no other way to put it.
One moment he was striding toward me, the next he was gone, Manipura maybe helping him go so fast.
Only to appear to my left, looming right over me, slamming his fist into my ward.
It cracked beneath the blow, the impact causing my boots to slide back several feet across the dirt floor.
My reaction was instantaneous. I began to bring Shard around, an upward stroke, its edge glimmering with fell power, but before I could, he was gone.
Then appeared on my far side to hammer another blow home.
My ward warped, distending under the force of the attack.
I shifted my weight, arrested my attack, and reversed Shard so that instead of swinging it back around I could stab it back, slam it into Asmodeus’s chest -
- but he was gone already.
I couldn’t keep up with him.
A third punch from behind me. A fourth, fifth, sixth in rapid succession. All within the first second, coming so fast I caught only snapshots of his looming over me, unable to track his movements.
My ward didn’t know which way to go, how to warp and deflect the energy behind the assault.
He was appearing at precisely the right place to strike my ward where it couldn’t compensate for the last attack.
He paralyzed it, building up the tension, overloading it with precise attacks that prevented it from recovering.
I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised when my ward shattered from the seventh blow.
I was not overpowered, but dismantled like he’d promised, undone through some application of physics and magic that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
My heart lurched, panic worming its way in despite the Vam.
All creation in a -
Then he was there, right before me, a wall of muscle and leather, grin nearly splitting his face in half, fist the size of a watermelon raised over me.
Shard was still reversed, ready to stab where he’d been five blows before.
I barely had time to bring my head around, to look up at him, before he brought his fist down.
Not at my head like I’d expected, but my left shoulder.
The point where my clavicle, humerus, and scapula came together shattered. I felt ligaments tear free of bone, felt muscle rip, felt bone pulverize.
I’d never been hit with such controlled, localized power.
Though my shoulder was immediately wrecked, the extent of the damage was limited to that precise location.
I screamed, more with rage than pain, and willed a levenbolt to burst from my chest, not even bothering with an upraised palm.
There wasn’t time for that.
The levenbolt was as broad as I was, pure white shot through with veins of gold, and it slammed right into his crimson ward. It appeared at an angle, deflecting my assault in precisely the way he’d prevented my ward from deflecting his.
The levenbolt bounced off his partial ward, and he stepped in from behind it, launching a sharp kick at the inside of my right knee.
The joint bent sideways.
My fibula, tibia, and femur came apart, the ligaments that held them together snapping, my kneecap sliding free. My leg folded outward, the pain total, paralyzing, my leg bowing out to a right angle, absolutely ruined.
Somewhere, Emma was screaming.
I was still unleashing my levenbolt uselessly at his ward, a levenbolt that was tearing a chasm across the wall and doing nothing to stop Asmodeus.
He stepped back and away, allowing me to collapse to the ground. I caught myself with my right hand, Shard still gripped tight, and fell into an awkward, side lunge kind of crouch, my wrecked leg mangled beneath me.
“You’ve plenty of power,” said Asmodeus. “I’ll give you that. Then again, as a Savior, you’ve access to absurd reserves; the Source attempting to compensate for your lack of skill and talent through sheer power.”
My face was slick with sweat, my pulse deafening me, the agony sweeping through me in curdling waves from my pulverized knee and shoulder.
I ground my teeth, tapped Manipura, and flew up into a blindingly fast spin, revolving around so quickly the cavern blurred, letting a scream tear free from my core as I brought Shard whipping around.
At the same time, I opened Muladhara wide, golden light and electricity both lining Shard’s edge as it came screaming toward Asmodeus’s head. It was a blow such as I’d never launched, powered by Manipura’s strength and speed.
I gave it my all so I might steal a moment’s surprise, a moment’s advantage in which to defeat this monster.
Asmodeus didn’t try to get out of the way.
Instead, he brought both hands up and caught Shard, stopping it cold.
It felt like swinging a steel baseball bat as hard as I could against a stone wall. The shock rippled through me, stirring my ruined shoulder into fresh hell. My teeth bit almost clean through my tongue.
I hung there, elevated by Manipura, and stared in disbelief.
Shard, rippling with golden light and alive with a continuous levenbolt, had failed to cut through Asmodeus’s massive hands.
They glowed with the crimson of his ward.
A ward so finely manipulated that it fit within the folds of his fingers and thumb like a taco shell - absolutely no more or less than was needed.
Beyond the light show that was Shard’s stymied attack, I saw Asmodeus grin.
“That’s more like it,” he said, then tore Shard clear from my grip.
I hurled the blade aside, and even as I righted myself, I tried to dive after it. He clapped both hands as hard as he could on either side of my head, cupping my ears and deafening me with the blow.
The world became strange. Darkness pressed in from all sides. The pain that lanced through my head was such that I thought my skull was crushed. Manipura kept me aloft, but now without any control; I began to spin, only to have something detonate in my chest.
It felt like a bomb going off in another country.
Everything shifted, and I realized I’d slammed into the ground.
I couldn’t even tell what was broken anymore.
But there was one thing I could hear.
Over the crackling, my harsh breathing, the pounding of my pulse, through the sheets of agony that danced over the landscape of my mind.
One sound that gave me strength, that forced me to press my right palm to the dirt and strain myself, through sheer effort, to try and get up again.
Emma was screaming my name.
Chapter 20
With extreme effort, my whole body shaking, I managed to raise my head, to push myself up onto my remaining good knee, my right hand planted in the cavern floor’s dirt. Asmodeus approached me slowly, nonchalantly, his expression betraying nothing more than weary contentment.
Emma was crying out my name, the sound of her voice desolate.
“What I don’t understand,” said Asmodeus as he stopped before me, a ball of balefire beginning to coalesce within his palm, “is why you thought you ever had a chance. Why you thought someone so pitifully weak as yourself could stand against Lilith’s true elite.” He considered me, head cocked to one side, then shook it sadly. “Incredible. No matter. Time to end this charade.”
He raised his hand, balefire spinning quicker.
I gritted my teeth, trying to raise my ward. Something.
Anything.
But the pain was too much.
My heart arose within me, filled to bursting with denial, a complete and utter refusal to die here, to succumb to this monster’s contemptuous might. But the most I could do was raise my good hand and try to rise on my one good knee - then collapse onto my side.
“Goodbye, Savior,” said Asmodeus.
“No!” Emma’s cry rang out, but this time it was different - her voice was a whipcrack, layered with resonances that added depth and power I’d never heard before.
Asmodeus frowned, looking past me where Emma had climbed to her feet.
With great effort, I turned my head as well.
Emma’s eyes were burning with white fire. Her blonde hair was whipping about her as if she stood within the heart of her own private gale; arms outstretched, one hand clutching Victor’s blade, she lifted off the floor.
She rose, one knee raised, other leg extended straight, floating a yard, two yards off the cavern floor.
“What’s this?” sneered Asmodeus. “You going to beg for mercy?”
“No,” whispered Emma, and her whisper filled the cavern. “It won’t be me that begs.”
An explosion of power flew out from her in an expanding torus, a burning white ring of fire that flashed over my head, passed through Asmodeus, and set the vast mushrooms to swaying.
Despite the pain, the despair, I felt something within my reservoir shift. I felt it both within me, as well as from without.
Emma was transforming.
Asmodeus narrowed his eyes as he sensed it, too.
Victor’s blade blazed to life. For the first time, I saw it manifest magical potential. Despite Emma’s every attempt, it had remained little more than a sword thus far, but now, at this moment, it lit up with a bluish-white light that matched Emma’s own corona, a light that speared up into the far reaches of the cavern, dispelling the darkness above us.
“You’re going to pay for hurting him,” growled Emma, and there was such ferocity and passion in her voice that my pain became a distant thing, banished by my wonder and admiration and love.
I heard Asmodeus snort, then he crossed his arms and muttered words of power. A dozen, a score, a hundred blasts of balefire flew from him to where Emma hovered, only to impact harmlessly against her now blue-white ward.
It didn’t bend before the assault; didn’t crack nor shatter. Each attack registered across its perfect surface, showed as expanding ripples where they impacted, but failed to penetrate like a storm shower fails to break through the surface of a lake.
Emma’s face had grown hard and cold in its perilous beauty, like a classical statue; her eyes blazed with white fire, mouth pressed into a hard and unmerciful line. For the first time, I saw her not as my best friend from back home, as the woman I’d always loved, but as a true warrior in her own right - someone who deserved to be part of our group as much as anyone else.
At that moment I saw her come into her true power, watched her manifest that potential that had always lain hidden beneath her doubt and humility.
Emma lowered Victor’s blade so it pointed directly where Asmodeus stood.
He vanished.
Emma immediately swept Victor’s blade to the left and a pulse of coruscating light flashed from its tip, slamming into Asmodeus mid-sprint and lifting him off the ground. He was cupped by his crimson ward but hit with such force he flew a dozen yards, then crashed onto his side and slid through the loam, leaving a furrow in his wake.
“What the fuck?” he hissed, staring at the white fire which died away, his crimson ward fading with it. “Heavenfire?”
Emma didn’t respond. She flew forward like the personification of Justice, her hair still whipping about her head, whole being radiating power.
Asmodeus snarled, flipped up onto his feet, and disappeared once more.
Emma whipped her sword to the right, blasting another bolt of heavenfire, and caught Asmodeus again, knocking him out of his invisible state and smashing him to the ground.
Again, his ward stopped the attack from reaching his skin, again he slid a dozen yards through the muck and filth. This time he climbed slowly to his feet, wiping dirt from his arms, furious, his movements now barely controlled. “Who the fuck are you?”
Emma continued to float toward him, Victor’s blade a glowing brand by her side. “Don’t you know?”
“Are you the real Savior?” Asmodeus pressed his palms together and drew them apart, seeming to pull a huge crimson blade from his right palm. It was a
yard long, more a massive butcher’s blade than a sword, and crimson light dripped from its edge.
“No. I’m not the Savior. I’m Emma Heaney of Ruddock, Ohio. Your time’s up, Emperor Asmodeus.”
His lips pulled back from his perfect teeth in a silent snarl. He crouched, huge blade at the ready, then launched himself at Emma, again moving faster than I could follow.
Emma pointed Victor’s sword directly at him, and unleashed a torrent of heavenfire, a veritable cavalcade of power that brought Asmodeus back into view a mere yard from her.
He parried with his crimson sword, but the attack carried such potency that his blade melted before the white light in seconds. Asmodeus screamed, bringing up his crimson ward, and for another few seconds he managed to stand there, arms crossed as he leaned into her attack. His crimson ward grew thicker and more concentrated by the moment until it flickered out and was gone.
His death was instantaneous. Emma’s beam of heavenfire washed over him, disintegrating his torso and head, removing them from existence.
She cut off her attack, and in its wake, the cavern seemed hopelessly dark, plunged into shadow. I saw Asmodeus’s legs topple over, their tops cauterized. Then Emma was by my side, kneeling like some visiting angel, hair and clothing still whipped by some private hurricane, eyes yet burning with heavenfire.
“Emma…” I managed to croak, lost to wonder and amazement.
“Shh,” she whispered, and placed a hand on my brow.
White light flooded my mind, suffusing my wracked and torn body. It flowered through me, mending all that it touched; restoring my shoulder, the countless contusions and cuts, knitting together my knee, washing away the pain, healing me in moments.
It was unlike any healing I’d received before. Where Anahata would force my body to heal itself, bringing about a prickling, burning pain of its own, this simply soothed, easing my aches and washing away the agony.
In moments I was able to sit up, restored, energized, feeling as if I’d spent a weekend at a health spa instead of coming within an inch of dying.