Running the show. Their commander. His other training.
If they took him down the other side would lose a lot, even if they didn’t permanently neutralize the motherfucker.
This had to be a Ken thought. She didn’t ever use the MF bad word.
They stopped, high gee and nasty, just inside their full-power attack range. They let loose their teek and telepathy attacks, all modulated to wearing down Blind Tom’s mental defenses. As they became visible, all the world’s Paladins opened up on them, the ones surrounding Tom and dozens of others as well.
To no effect. Nessa had firmly grabbed herself a piece of Maria’s mind, and Maria these days was a quite useful apprentice battle God.
Maria’s anti-willpower defensive shell left them free to focus enough of their teek strength on the Paladins to keep them from physically closing with them. The Paladins couldn’t penetrate Ken’s teek shell. They couldn’t even come close to doing so.
Blind Tom screamed and turned to them, still functional despite their attack. “Fuck! You two, finally. Die!” He screamed the last at about 140 decibels, willpower tricks amplifying his voice.
Blood started to seep out of their bodies.
“Dubuque built up my power so I would be able to take you two fools out at once.” Blind Tom laughed. “He predicted this!”
“Monster!” Nessa said, shouting, voice unhinged. “Your. Evil. Stops. Here!”
“Both can play at that game,” Ken said. As one they sucked the air from around Blind Tom, leaving him in a vacuum.
Blood ran from Blind Tom’s ears and nose. He brought both hands together and pointed. Blood exploded from Ken and the vacuum around Blind Tom popped.
Dana flew past them and inserted herself between them and Blind Tom. She healed them both as she passed.
Nessa sensed Dana’s fear.
“That’s enough,” Dana said. Her angelic aura expanded to include Nessa and Ken, then Blind Tom, and then any Paladins foolish enough to stay close instead of flee. “You’re flawed and consumed by overwhelming hatred, but I can save you from yourself. Penance is always possible. But, hear me please, your death here risks all. If you die in this state, God Almighty will reject you. Nothing of your ilk is allowed in Heaven.”
They didn’t let up on their teek and telepathic attack on Blind Tom’s defenses.
“Whoever the fuck you are, get out of my way. I don’t have anything personal against you, save that you’re one of these opposition zombies,” Blind Tom said to Dana. “But these two here cost me a decade out of my life! They’re mine! There is no other answer!”
“You killed Alana and Zachary right before our eyes!” Nessa said. Amped by emotion, her and Ken’s attacks penetrated Blind Tom’s defenses for the first time and he screamed in agony.
Dana, momentarily panicked by Nessa’s words, pushed her mental presence back into the Lair to check up on the twins; both infants proved to be safely in Dave and Elorie’s arms.
“I did so much more than that, bitch!” Blind Tom said, as they dismembered his mental defenses. “I fucking killed your unborn child! I roused the devil inside your idiot husband to make him kill the puling infant in your womb. For me! I’m all over your damnation!” Blind Tom ended with a scream of rage and a pump of his fist.
Nessa lost her focus. “Liar! Murderer!” She screamed her denial at Blind Tom, but she couldn’t deny the truth of Blind Tom’s words about the explosion. Neither she nor Ken had realized Blind Tom had been behind the explosion, but they did now. Blind Tom had taken over her former husband, Ron, and forced him to attack Nessa. The explosion hadn’t been Nessa’s failure but Blind Tom’s success.
Nessa lost focus and dropped out of the oneness. She screamed, as did Ken and Dana, as her telepathic attack splashed across the world around them.
Crap! Nessa went to work, trying to fix what she had done, but she had never mastered any quick working mental healing tricks. She had blasted nearly all of Dana’s Natural Supported tricks out her ears. She had done the enemy’s job for them.
Her mistake pissed her off.
Blind Tom brought his fingers together again, pointed at Dana.
“Get out of the fucking way or die!” Blind Tom said to Dana.
Betrayer had sent the Angelic Dana out here to die.
“I am the Virgin Bride Reborn, an Angel, not a warrior,” Dana said to Blind Tom and to the world, throwing her entire essence into her Angelic aura, giving up on her protections. “I am a Living Saint. I am the essence of the City of God. I am Heaven on Earth. Destroy me and you destroy goodness itself! Harm me and you harm God. Kill me and a little bit of Heaven dies. Wherever I am, there the City of God is.”
Blind Tom hesitated. Dana had gotten through to him.
Dana chose not to protect herself with Angelic magic. Nessa and Ken wailed in agony, helpless to stop yet another friend and companion from dying for them.
“Quit stalling!” the air screamed. “Kill them all and get this over with, you damned worthless Telepath!” Santa Fe. He had been flattened and taken out of the fight, but it didn’t take much willpower to bellow orders or think.
“As you wish,” Blind Tom said, and turned to focus on Dana. “I’m the City of God’s sword! Shriven and ready for battle! You’re a pathetic woman; and bridal gowns are the essence of surrender! My will is the will of the City of God, and the City of God’s will is that you die!”
Blind Tom threw his entire power at Dana. Blood sprayed from Dana’s body and she screamed in agony. Nessa and Ken tried to protect Dana from Blind Tom’s whole-body-rape attack, but as always they couldn’t stop anything Blind Tom did to anyone else.
Dana didn’t die. As an Angel, there was far more to her than what appeared to the eye.
Betrayer’s targets. Amid this insanity and battle horror, Betrayer still played her own sick game.
“You can still save yourself from damnation,” Dana lectured Blind Tom, angelically pompous. Despite the damage to her body she didn’t die, and still didn’t protect herself. Radiating pain, she drew out Blind Tom’s attack, forcing him to work to kill her. The muscles of Blind Tom’s ancient body clenched in effort as he continued his exsanguination attack. Blood continued to spray out of Dana. “Stop this foolish attack and let me heal your mind and soul. Dubuque’s divine powers have abused you; and this abuse can be undone. I can save you!”
Blind Tom didn’t respond verbally to Dana’s Angelic hauteur, but Nessa sensed something inside him come unhinged. He lost himself in his temper and began to radiate hatred as an attac
k. He spewed his emotional sewage at Dana and doubled, quadrupled the force of his exsanguination.
Dana’s body fell limp, robbed of every drop of blood, desiccated, dried, preserved and nearly ready to blow away as dust. Her bridal gown dripped red, as did the veil.
Dana’s soul left her body and hovered around them, now a bodiless Angel in truth, fading in and out because of her inexperience. Ken grabbed Dana’s falling body. Dana’s death worked a second miracle, scrubbing the anger out of Nessa’s mind and the paranoia out of Ken’s mind, allowing them to relax back into the oneness and completely mesh their identities for the first time in the battle. All became logic and necessity; love and compassion became their soul. Their hatred of Blind Tom vanished, replaced by the necessity of action. Dana joined their oneness, and Nessa sensed Dana’s amazement, as Dana had thought she was beyond violence. To all of them, the holy spirit of God Almighty himself now joined the fight on their side.
“Bad move, bucky. Angelicide’s not going to play well for the City of God,” the Nessa body said. She and Ken approached Blind Tom as one. “Hands time.”
Even despite the exhaustion caused by his last temper-driven overexertion, Blind Tom smirked and sneered. “My pleasure, bitch, to finally slay you. I’ll lick your blood from my hands and taste your end in oblivion.”
“Forgot something?” the Ken body said. They teeked Blind Tom’s arms around behind him and forced his legs together, making him a statue. “We don’t have to hold you if we can hold the air. And this time you’re too exhausted to stop us!”
“No!”
Nessa’s body’s hand reached toward Blind Tom’s head. Their bodies started to gush blood again. As one, they realized for the first time what they had to do. What they never did.
“No!” Blind Tom said again.
“Say hello to oblivion yourself,” Nessa’s body said. “Goodbye, Blind Tom.”
“God’s will be done.” Dana’s voice, appearing from nowhere.
Nessa’s hand touched Blind Tom’s head. He spasmed, his bones shattering, his brain physically blown out his ears.
He died.
As the pressure from Blind Tom’s attack left them, they lost their oneness. Blood loss sucked down both of their minds. The air whooshed by her as she fell, as they both fell, falling to join Dana’s corpse on the ground and be corpses themselves. Death was all they deserved, as they had just killed.
Maria. Nessa slammed against one of Maria’s faux-teek platforms and stopped falling – ouch! Some things never changed, Nessa snarked to herself. Ken rolled up against her, moaning. The world swam around them as Maria flew them back to Betrayer’s lair, protected from all the world’s angry Paladins by Dana’s holy Angelic ghost.
When they reached the interior of Betrayer’s Lair, Dana’s holy presence left them, wafted off to heaven.
Nessa and Ken howled in each other’s arms at the shock of Dana’s departure.
They each felt a ghostly kiss on the cheeks.
“The mindset we adopt when we don moral spectacles is the mindset of the victim. Evil is the intentional and gratuitous infliction of harm for its own sake, perpetuated by a villain who is malevolent to the bone, influenced on a victim who is innocent and good. The reason this is a myth” (the myth of pure evil) “is that evil is in fact perpetrated by people who are mostly ordinary, and who respond to their circumstances, including provocations by the victim, in ways they feel are reasonable and just. … Yet to understand these outrages, we might be better off asking not why they happen, but why they don’t happen more often.” – Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature
“I refuse to belong to the Angel-slaying so-called City of God”
57. (John)
“They’re going to lose, and lose bad,” Reed said, watching John’s laptop computer, currently slaved to a satellite feed. The battle had barely started, but Reed was right. Too many Paladins. John knew, from helping in the defense of the Watchers, how potent just a few Paladins could be. “The Child of Morning won’t be able to escape. He’s going to die, and all hope of peacefully returning the Watchers to God will end. We’ve got to do something.”
“You have a scheme?” John said. Reed didn’t make speeches unless he got excited.
Cunning, who had taken up a dozing position on John’s bed, opened an eye to watch.
“Of course I have a scheme.”
John sighed. “Okay, okay. Telepath with hunches, got it. Itchy youth as well. What’s your big idea?”
“I think we can goad Lodz into attacking us.”
“Attack us with what?”
“Well, he’s got four Paladins, seventeen cast-off City of God Natural Supported, five ratty Telepaths who at best rival my power and a half dozen badly trained neo-Supported.” Lodz’s neo-Supported were an experiment of his, Lodz being the experimenting type. They appeared as armored giants, and unlike the Paladins, had real people inside.
“He’ll never attack,” John said. “What’s the purpose of this?”
Bais smacked her gamme weapon into her hand. “I know exactly what the purpose of this is. It’s time to teach these bozos a lesson, that’s what the purpose of this is.” The desires of the Fallen Angels must have gotten to her.
John had no desire to balk Bais, so he shrugged. At least the Fallen Angels wouldn’t be leading the way. At worst this would be only a minor disaster.
Cunning chuckled. “I believe in the fullness of Fate and Karma. Let us attack.”
“…don’t forget to teach your mother to shave,” Reed said. “Or did she have a Berber in a headlock last time I saw her?”
Lodz and his crew already shot at Reed because of his ‘your mother’ insults, most far worse than Reed’s armpit hair jape. Reed flew figure eights at the edge of Lodz’s camp, dodging attacks, lit up this night by the many magical tricks John and Cunning had put on him. Reed didn’t shoot back, allowing his radioactive luck skills, taught to him by Bais, to work.
“Of course you can understand me when I’m speaking in Russian,” Reed said. “It’s in your genes. Your great grandmother welcomed the Russians in her tent in the 1st World War, and later spit out your half-Russian grandmother from her loins. Then your grandmother welcomed Stalin’s liberators in her house for some extra bread and cigarettes, and later spit your mother out of her loins like a used tampon. Ever wondered how your family did so well in the Cold War? All those Russian spies your mother…”
Lodz lost his temper, screaming and flying at Reed.
John, watching this from a viewscreen of Cunning’s, couldn’t but laugh. Poor Lodz, poor very Polish Lodz. “Here’s hoping the improved battle defenses I put on Reed work.”
“He won’t need those,” Cunning said, chuckling. “We gave Reed all the speed gamme.”
Reed took off backwards, evading Lodz with his gamme-provided blurry impossible speed. Lodz’s troops followed after, carried by their Telepaths. Back toward the Fallen Angel’s village they flew, Reed continuing his unending barrage of scorn against Lodz’s mother.
Three minutes later, Reed landed just inside the Fallen Angel’s village. Lara and Grover, ensconced in an indigo colored sphere and protected by Glory, ran from a building too near where Reed landed, fleeing the fight.
“Here I am, bully boy,” he said, giving Lodz a jaunty raspberry. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Lodz landed fifty feet away, flattening houses and leaving the nearby trees in flames. Behind him, his troops fell from the sky as the Fallen Angels picked off the flyers. Lodz didn’t notice.
Before Lodz could focus his divine rage on Reed, Bais appeared out of an invisibility and bashed Lodz in the back with the Godkiller gamme.
Lodz splashed.
“99 Gods bedeviling Earth, 99 Gods are here, cut one off and smash one down, 98 Gods bedeviling Earth,”
Bais sang, as she capered about in glee.
“Pleasant to see that the three of you have learned to understand true pleasure,” Cunning said.
“You mean true evil?” John said. “Have you forgotten that I’m the Father of Darkness and these are my chosen companions? I don’t think the remaining 98 Gods will ever forget or forgive.” He paused and turned away from the display and the shrieks and screams of the various Paladins, neo-Supported and Telepaths in the process of dying. Brutal as always, but he had grown up in a brutal age. Mere death dealing rarely bothered him. The battle deaths of the enemy certainly didn’t now, not when their unwise attack morally opened them up to self-defense actions. If he didn’t have work to do, he could even revel in the victory himself.
However… “We’ve got work to do,” John said. “We need to dig up the last of the home defense gamme and destroy them. By my count, we should be able to finish today. Then we need to run for the hills.”
“Your suggestion is not going to be popular,” Cunning said.
“Running is the price paid for counting coup on the 99 Gods. We need to vanish. Even the neutral Gods are going to be enraged. Besides, we’ve now done our part for the Siege of Betrayer’s Lair.” Lodz’s projection and his twenty-seven Paladins involved in the Siege had gone spoof, if all was right with the world. Being dead he couldn’t support them anymore. “We need to prepare for the arrival of the battle hardened and now mature Child of Morning, assuming they win, of course.”
John had to end this, and fast, before the evil of the Fallen Angels led him and his well-corrupted companions into yet more egregious displays. They could easily become the enemy the good guys would have to fight.
Behind him, Bais continued her victory dance on the fallen.
58. (Dana)
Dana writhed in limbo, caught in the battle memories. She had stretched her Angelic nature protecting Nessa and Ken. She had allowed them to kill. Only…killing Blind Tom wasn’t a mortal sin for her or for Nessa and Ken. He had damned himself in ways recognized since before Christ. He had killed an appointed future Angel, her, while he served under the aegis of the City of God. He had, over more years than Dana believed, killed far too many. She had been right. While God Almighty might love every human being, Blind Tom had hurt too many whom God also loved, and left alive would hurt too many more.
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 61