by Sean Davies
A grey-skinned woman with a neon-green Mohawk, surrounded by red and black flames, crashed down beside Karamo like a meteorite. The fiery Mage was dressed in a pair of leather hot pants and a black bikini top that showed off countless colourful tattoos littering her body, and a short leather jacket marked in several places with some kind of logo; two diagonally crossed purple axles on a light grey rectangle.
The Vampire Nightclaw somersaulted out of the way and landed on the back of his Raptorkor mount, as the Mage launched a barrage of fire after him.
The Justiciars and their mechanical mounts sped out of the way, towards the brick building where the hairy, purple-eyed Desem Patriot Mage was still calling them over. Chloe raised a hand and negated most of the fire, while Alice instinctively siphoned the rest into her body and then unleashed a lance of lava-like energy out of her eyes, back towards the female Mage who had sent it in the first place. The glowing beam cut the fire-loving female in half, and the man beside the office screamed wildly as her body fell to the ground in two pieces.
“Misty! You fucking killed Misty!” the hairy biker roared at Alice as she approached, and he lunged towards her with his fist raised.
Karamo was on him in a flash, pulling the man’s arm back behind his body. “She tried to kill us,” he began calmly.
“It wasn’t her fucking fault!” the biker sobbed. “That robed prick did something to her—it was like blood magic, but it wasn’t!”
Alice felt a pang of guilt but suppressed it quickly, knowing that duty had to come first; the screams, shouts, gunshots, and explosions echoing throughout the area were a constant reminder to the Lord Imperator of that simple fact.
“I’m sorry, but you’ve got to tell us what happened, quickly,” Alice commanded.
The Desem Patriot biker gave her a savage glare, but his fire soon burnt out when his reason overpowered his remorse. “We were patrolling the area when we noticed a ton of workers surrounding a trailer. We didn’t think anything of it until that Theodore guy from the posters walked out… Misty confronted them, and then the shit hit the fan!”
“So all the workers here are crooked?” Chloe asked.
The Mage shook his hairy head. “Not all of them—the decent ones are hiding in here,” he said, thumbing towards the building’s wall. “I’ve been trying to keep it safe, and was trying to keep Misty at bay without killing her…” He trailed off, and his face turned sour.
“Spread out and detain the work force, kill them if you have to,” Alice ordered her people. “If you spot Theodore or Darkheart, call me immediately.”
Everyone—including Chloe—saluted and quickly spurred their mounts on.
The Lord Imperator left the grieving man to guard the office building, and charged further into the shipping yard and its towering cargo containers. She turned one corner, watching as Karamo and Chloe floored at least five workers with a combo of force magic and lightning-fast melee attacks, and then turned another corner to see her Justiciar troopers assisting the militia in a firefight, but stopped sharply on her third turn when she spotted a little auburn-haired girl in a green dress, sobbing beside a red container.
Alice cursed under her breath and wondered what to do with the kid, before addressing the child awkwardly. “Hey, little girl, what are you doing here?”
“My daddy!” the girl cried. “I lost my daddy!”
Alice frowned. For a moment, she debated whether or not to take the girl with her, until she concluded that it would be far too dangerous for the child to make it to safety on her own, and with a sigh the Lord Imperator abandoned her chase of the elusive Daedrian Darkheart.
“It’s okay,” Alice said in the most comforting tone she could muster. “Come with me, I’ll take you to safety. There are some people hiding in a building a little way back. Your dad might even be there, too.”
The auburn-haired girl wiped away her tears and looked at Alice. The Lord Imperator sensed something strange from within the child, and it felt faintly familiar.
A big red truck turned the corner, swinging its loaded rear end so sharply that it almost hit a wall of stacked containers, and headed towards Alice and the girl, beeping its horn in a cheerful tune.
“Daddy!” the girl cheered as she turned and pointed at the truck.
The truck stopped, and the girl ran off before Alice could even mutter a response. The stout driver opened the passenger side door and the little auburn-haired girl clambered inside, slamming it shut.
Alice sauntered forward and went to spur her Raptorkor on, but the chubby driver leant out of the window as he passed.
“Howdy, stranger! Thank the stars you found my Daniella!” he said in a relieved tone. “I picked the wrong day to bring my daughter in to work, huh?!”
“Just get her to safety, fast,” Alice said abruptly. She’d already wasted enough time.
The driver nodded, and Daniella gave her a slow wave and a coy smile. Alice shivered as though someone had poured ice-cold water down her spine, but waved back regardless.
The Lord Imperator charged onwards, putting the encounter with the girl behind her, and ordered her Raptorkor to fire its machine gun at some rebellious workers armed with assault rifles as they leapt for cover behind a fork truck loaded with wooden crates. Alice couldn’t tell if she’d hit them or not, and she didn’t have time to check, as a forty-foot container smashed front-first in the dirty ground ahead of her.
Luckily, Alice’s Raptorkor had sensed the shift in movement from above and deployed its wings. The mechanical beast’s hover-field radiated forward, knocking both Alice and itself backwards and out of the way just in the nick of time.
As a tide of gravel and dirt plumed outward from the impact site, the Raptorkor sprinted up the container and leapt off towards its original targets. The mount brought its feet down on the Darkheart loyalists, shattering their bodies as easily as the wooden crates that had been hiding them, as Alice looked behind her fearfully to see where the container had fallen from.
The sky in the shipping yard was full of floating cargo containers and large pieces of debris, hovering like falcons ready to swoop down on their prey, and Alice could make out the silhouette of a man in dark clothing and a trench coat levitating them against the overcast sky. She pushed her senses to the limits to try and grasp at the magic holding the massive rectangular containers aloft, but couldn’t get her head around the foreign sensation. Alice wasn’t sure how, but she knew that it was Daedrian Darkheart.
The figure waved slowly, and Alice felt her skin prickle with chills before the man made a swiping movement with his arm, causing more giant metal boxes to rain down onto the yard below.
Judging by the number of containers crashing in and around Alice’s position, the Lord Imperator was certain that the mocking wave had been for her benefit, and that her gut feeling about the mysterious figure was correct. Alice’s Raptorkor veered sharply to one side, just as some enormous yellow crane struts pierced into the ground like oversized javelins, kicking up showers of shingle and muck.
Alice fired wildly into the air as her Raptorkor headed further into the yard—taking care of any enemies in front, thanks to its excellent programming and intuitive enchantments—but the floating figure used its strange powers to tear a container into pieces and proceeded to use the thick metal plates as a shield against the Lord Imperator’s plasma bolts.
Karamo, in his bat-swarm form, flocked to the heavens to engulf the strange unidentified Supernatural. For a short time, the dark figure was covered in a mass of bloodthirsty bats, but a hail of gravel swirled upwards from the ground and created a sandy tornado that forced the Vampire Nightclaw to retreat.
The Lord Imperator arrived at a clearing that led towards the grey-watered docks and came upon where Darkheart’s followers had fortified themselves around a single-storey hut, marked as a canteen by a rusty knife and fork sign stuck on the centre of its flat roof. They were using overturned vehicles and metal barrels as cover as they slowly lost the fi
ght against the NDR militia, Desem Patriots, and newly arrived Justiciars; however, a fresh rain of monstrous metal soon levelled the playing field again.
Alice was thrown from her mount by a wave of upturned dirt and smashed into a stacked container, leaving behind a hefty dent before she fell to the floor.
Chloe, still mounted on her Raptorkor mount Biscuit, sprinted through the dust cloud and willed her steed to offer Alice a helping claw.
After several more devastating container strikes, the floating figure whipped up an unnatural storm of dirt and debris to shield his pinned comrades below.
The redheaded Book Wielder Chloe raised a hand above her and summoned the strongest barrier that she could against the barrage of earth and stone, and Alice dusted off her magical knowledge and did the best she could to assist. Soon they were joined by Karamo and some others who were still shooting at the rebels, regardless of the lack of visibility.
“Are they psychic powers he’s using?” Chloe shouted to Alice from her mount.
“I’m not sure, but I couldn’t stop it,” Alice ground out, struggling to lend her powers to Chloe’s barrier whilst talking.
“It feels kind of like a Bloodmage’s telekinesis, but way more intense!” Chloe added.
Karamo dug a golden hipflask from his trench coat and took a swig of blood to assist his body’s self-healing. “It’s Darkheart, I’m sure of it. He matched the description. It sounds weird, but I’ve never tasted blood like that before in my life,” the Vampire Nightclaw added.
“I love how a Supernatural is leading an anti-Supernatural organisation,” Chloe said, expanding her barrier noticeably. “That would be as crazy as a Book Wielder running the Inquisition, huh, Alice?”
“How you can joke at a time like this, I’ll never know,” Alice grunted as beads of sweat ran down her brow, “let alone maintain a defensive barrier!”
“You need more practice, ma’am, and that’s nought compared to this…” Chloe winked before showing the Lord Imperator her free hand; it was covered in a black web-like substance that sparkled with stars, as if it were a three-dimensional picture of the cosmos.
“What the hell is that?” Alice asked with a voice full of dread. The more she looked at the twinkling dark substance, the more she feared that the space-scene was less for effect and actually some kind of tear in the fabric of reality.
“A special move I’ve been saving for Corriztis,” Chloe said faintly. Her skin was slowly becoming paler than usual, extenuating her scattered freckles. “Once Dick-head Daedrian stops his storm to attack again, I’m going to hit him with this. Then he’ll be ripe and ready for interrogation.”
Even though Alice was often impressed by the young Book Wielder’s powers, she was unwilling to put her faith in one custom-made spell, and quickly organised a plan to charge the rebellious defenders with the other forces sheltered in the magical bubble. Her hope was that their proximity to the traitorous yard workers would stop the rain of telekinetic terror and force Darkheart to come to them.
The gale of dirt and gravel died down just as Chloe had anticipated, and she shoved her hand towards the figure in the sky, flinging her spell at Darkheart. The mystical black web covered the man, making it seem like someone had punctured a hole in the cloudy sky right through to the star-studded void of space behind. Chloe cheered as the darkness around her target faded, leaving an immobilised figure suspended indefinitely in a timeless prison, and she collapsed off her mount in exhaustion.
“Did it work?” Chloe wheezed as Biscuit nudged her with his metallic mouth, and the sound of gunfire and explosions let rip once more. “Did I get him?”
“Nah, honey,” Karamo said sympathetically. “It was a decoy made of torn metal.”
“Fuck my life,” Chloe groaned. She clicked her fingers, dispelling her amazing yet completely wasted magic, and the decoy fell to the ground as she passed out.
Most of the hi-vis wearing workers had flocked inside the canteen during the psychic storm, leaving Darkheart to shield the remainder as they exchanged gunfire with the Justiciars and their allies, and slowly filtered inside. No amount of magic or gunfire could penetrate the unknown magic, and Darkheart smirked confidently as his enemies burnt through their ammo and energy.
Alice, armed with her war-hammer, took a good look at the man as she sprinted fearlessly toward the canteen, trusting in her comrades around her to follow her lead, but she struggled to get a clear interpretation of the man. At first, she thought it was her adrenaline-fuelled mind playing tricks with her vision, but as Alice got closer, she could definitely see Daedrian filtering through appearances and clothing in quick succession.
The Lord Imperator’s mount leapt into the fray from the side, rushing to protect Alice, and viciously sliced, crunched, and shot the rebels with merciless mechanical efficiency.
Darkheart, settling his appearance as an auburn-haired man in his sixties dressed in a dark green suit, gave the blood-drenched mount a filthy look and tore it into chunks of scrap-metal without lifting a finger, and then directed the bulk of it at Karamo who had materialised nearby.
Alice was within striking distance when she saw the inside of the canteen. Beyond the flimsy door was a filthy alleyway lined with dumpsters and yard workers who were rapidly removing their luminous apparel.
With the last of his people safe, the male version of Daedrian Darkheart hopped inside and gave Alice a coy smile and a slow wave, before slamming the door in the Lord Imperator’s face.
The Lord Imperator’s momentum took her careening into the door, shattering it into a million pieces under the bulk of her power armour, where she was confronted by an empty staff canteen caked in muddy footprints and littered with half-eaten fried breakfasts, newspapers, and dirty magazines, hundreds of miles away from her elusive shape-shifting adversary.
✽ ✽ ✽
Inside the Tumbleweed Inn, in the sandy town of Barraham located in northern Desem, two men with aged suntanned skin watched in disgust as another Justiciar troop truck whizzed past.
“Cid, gimmie another refill,” one of the men said to the silver-haired barman.
“You sure, Brent?” the barkeep replied in a whisper. “You’ll want your wits about ya for later.”
“Cid’s right,” the other tanned skin man added, pushing his empty beer bottle away from him. “We don’t want to let Darkheart down.”
“Pfft, give me a break, Nuck,” Brent replied, rolling his eyes. “We’re not hitting ‘em ‘til nightfall.”
“No, you’re attacking them in about ten minutes,” a voice said from behind the bar.
Cid and the other two men quickly drew their pistols, but then lowered them fractionally when they saw it was the robed-man who sometimes accompanied Daedrian.
“Darkheart was very clear about the bombing schedule—” the old barman began.
“There’ll hardly be anyone around at night,” the robed man interrupted. “That won’t be any good for my tests, now will it?”
The men in the Tumbleweed Inn said nothing and stayed on guard, giving each other confused looks.
The robed man chuckled and lowered his hood, revealing a long, gaunt, grey-skinned face with black and red eyes, smart black hair, and a set of pristine white teeth including two protruding fangs.
“Theodore Miller!” Brent shouted, tugging at his friend Nuck’s arm. “The one from the poster!”
“C-Corriztis!” Nuck gasped, paralysed with fright.
Cid, the barman, unloaded his revolver at the Demon host, but the bullets passed right through the grey-skinned man and sealed shut seconds later, like he was made of water.
“Now we’re going to have to start in five minutes,” the Demon sighed, looking at his watch. “The Justiciars probably heard that,” he added disapprovingly.
Corriztis commanded Theodore’s body into action, sending dark red and grey wisps shooting from his fingertips. The corrupted blood magic wriggled into the three humans’ heads, altering their minds and exposing
their bloodstreams to extreme Gloom exposure, and putting them completely under the corruption Demon’s cruel control. Brent, Nuck, and Cid’s eyes turned black, and their skin turned pallid as their veins and arteries bulged and darkened, carrying their new black blood through their changing bodies.
“Line up please,” the possessed Vampire Bloodmage, Theodore, said calmly. “It’s time for your medicine.”
The altered humans lined up by the bar in-between the wooden stools and waited as ordered. They quivered and shook all over, and Brent began to dribble uncontrollably.
Corriztis went behind the bar and lined up three shot glasses. He produced a white rectangular device from his robe and clicked a wide button on the side with the palm of his hand, before filling each glass with a thick liquid that looked like metallic purple paint before tucking the dispenser away again.
“We’re going for infection rates rather than dispersal range this time, gentlemen,” Corriztis said, commanding his puppets to drink. “I’m afraid that makes you the bombs,” he added, pulling a sad expression on Theodore’s face.
The three altered humans drank the solution and returned their empty glasses to the bar simultaneously.
“Good, good,” Corriztis said, clasping his hands together and smiling warmly. “Now, Brent—clean yourself up and call your friends. We’ll need a decent distraction, so tell them to attack, immediately.”
Brent wiped the drool from his face with one hand and dug out his mobile phone with the other. “Hey, Iain. It’s Brent,” he began, as though nothing was amiss. “Tell your men it’s time. DH wants us to act, right now!”
Corriztis grinned and hoped that Lord Imperator Alice Eve wouldn’t be too far away from the fun.
✽ ✽ ✽
The Werewolf couple, Lynette and Kavarne, arrived at yet another ghost town and stared in confusion at the sight before them. Even Lynette’s Gloom bike, Merv, made an uncertain whining sound from its powerful engine.