by Aaron Crash
The demon robot drunkenly retreated back from the edge of the ruin, staggering and weaving, dropping vampire parts as it fled.
Blaze, Elle, and Ling pressed forward. Fernando sped around behind them. All four were ready for the final battle.
The crimson holographic head flickered on and off. “You hhhave…you hhhave done remarkably well. I never would hhhave guessed. My lord and master, ohhh, hhhe is in danger because if you could do so well against me and my forces, what chhhance does hhhe have?”
“Elle,” Blaze said, “I don’t want to hear this pinche cabron say another word. End him.”
“End me?” Xerxes roared. “I was there at the beginning of time. I will be hhhere to devour the very last remnants of life when the universe begins its death rattle. End me? End me???”
Raw Onyx power poured out of the archduke. The tatters of the vampire suit melted away, gone in an instant. Xerxes raised his hands, and they went from metal to living claws, two-foot-long blades of razor-sharp black bone. One held the glowing fusion scimitar. The demon robot doubled in size, his goat legs growing and his hooves sprouting hooked spurs. Pieces of metal from the dead vampires’ weapons whizzed through the air and attached themselves to him, creating a dozen new mechanical arms.
Blaze’s ax and shotgun were ripped from his hands, as were Ling’s nunchakus, Elle’s katanas, and Fernando’s spear. All the weapons were incorporated into the growing robotic octopus Xerxes was becoming. Xerxes plucked the bike from under Fernando and created a giant stinger on his back.
The holographic jackal head burned brighter.
Above them, the colonizer monster was coming, reaching for them with huge spacecraft hands a mile wide.
From the tentacle forest of the Etrusca ruin, five hundred cybernetic vampires emerged, running across the platform toward them. A vast army of undead bloodsuckers armed down to their bones.
And Blaze and his demon hunters were weaponless.
Ling sighed contentedly. “Well, I am very interested to see what might happen next. I just might get to explore death today. How very exciting.”
Blaze had to grin at the Shaolin sloth. “Ling, man, you are one mellow Meelah.”
Fernando clicked, standing over them. “My friends, Bill and I came up with a contingency plan. It is rather rash, but we are trying to think more creatively…no…not creatively…more chaotically.”
“More Human,” Blaze said as he stared down death.
“More Human,” Fernando agreed.
Bill flew the Lizzie Borden down between the surface of the Etrusca structure, where Blaze and his crew were about to die, and the oncoming colonizer monster reaching out to crush them in its spacecraft fingers.
Chaos didn’t quite capture the complete insanity of what the Clicker did next. And that was sane compared to what Elle did.
That girl, she was the queen of poor decisions.
TWENTY-EIGHT_
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The colonizer monster man completely blocked out the swirling debris being sucked into the neutron star through the siphoning cone at the heart of the Etrusca structure. Most of the ruin was slashing and slithering in huge rolling tentacles of all shapes and sizes. The sea-creature-like metal things with Humanish faces—slits for eyes, noses, and mouths—maneuvered around the coils like sea otters in kelp or clownfish in an anemone.
The hundred-foot plane, where Blaze and his crew stood, remained safe, however, for the moment.
The Lizzie Borden rolled past them, turning belly to back, back to belly, venting something. What was it? What was Bill doing?
Xerxes didn’t pay the Lizzie any attention. The archduke wheeled on them. “I believe I will use your weapons on you in a more personal fashhhion. Hhhow delicious it will be to sever Blaze’s limbs with hhhis own ax. The Meelahhh will feel his own nunchakus…and the Onyx witch will meet hhher fate by hhher own katanas.”
“That sounds like a great plan,” Blaze said.
“Yes.” Ling nodded. “The irony will not be lost on me.”
“Fuck this!” Elle took her remaining syringes and drove them into nanotech housings on either leg. She plunged the Onyx mojo into her veins.
Blaze watched her VHI immediately climb to one hundred and fifteen percent, and then the reading errored out. She wasn’t Human anymore. She was something else.
Black energy burst from her eyes, nose, and mouth like she was a dragon with a fire burning in her belly and the smoke was escaping any way it could. “Give me a second, fellas…” she growled.
They didn’t have a second. The cybernetic vampires raced toward them. Xerxes stomped forward. And the colonizer monster loomed.
The Lizzie spun, continuing to vent…what? Blaze adjusted his display. What he thought was some of kind of gas wasn’t anything of the kind. No, swirls of demonic energy, wisps of glowing spectral power, ghostly Humans, hellish figures, all were being left behind in Lizzie’s wake.
“Nombre de Dios,” Blaze swore. “He’s clearing the cellar. Which means…”
Not a second later, a lupine shape burst forth. Cali wasn’t just on her paws in space—she had wrapped herself around a starcycle. Even from a distance, they could see her claws glowing with fusion energy. She was fully armed and speeding toward them.
When she got close enough, she bounced the starcycle off the plane of Etrusca metal. Flying through the air, she ripped through the vampires, shredding them with her fusion claws and ripping off their heads with her vicious fangs.
Xerxes paused. Wordless. He turned to see the werewolf barreling through his vampire army. “Ohhh no… Hhher… Shhhit.”
Then Cali hit the fully armed archduke. Too bad none of his weapons would really hurt her. Her golden fur had already grown back, and she was coming in glowing and more powerful than ever. Unlike before, the admiral wasn’t there to mess with her head, and the other vampires’ telepathic abilities were too weak now that their alpha vampire was gone.
As for the ghosts and demons freed from the starship, they disappeared into the colonizer monster, tearing off pieces and disrupting the mystical Onyx energies that glued the necrotechnological beast together. The arm came loose above them. Comets of ghost energy shoved it to the gravity well, where it was sucked away.
The other arm was pushed into the tentacles of the Etrusca structure. The grasping, seemingly mindless forest of living metal grabbed onto the colonizer’s spaceship limb and pulled it down. Between the gravity well and the tentacles, the colonizer monster man was being pulled apart easily.
Blaze stood motionless, dumbfounded. “How is this possible? Why are the ghoulies attacking the colonizer monster? How can Cali have new hydrogen shells in her bracelets? And why isn’t Xerxes closing them?”
“It is not the time to be asking questions,” Fernando said. “It is time to fight.”
“And give Elle time to finish her spell,” Ling added.
Cali went and cleaved through the P13rce unit, sending weapons and arms skittering across the plane. Ling and Fernando dashed forward to collect them.
Plasma and fusion fire from the remaining armament on Xerxes smoked Cali’s fur and blistered her skin, but did nothing other than piss her off.
The vampiric cyborg army rushed toward them.
Elle stood, hands fisted, face raised, the black dust of the Onyx energy blurring her face as she growled in Onyx speak. What spell was she preparing? And what could possibly stand up against her?
Nothing. Blaze grinned. Nothing was going to stop his sister. As long as she had a few more seconds. Blaze glanced up. The colonizer monster’s roars were silenced as the head was lost in a sea of Etrusca tentacles. Its legs were devoured by the gravity well. Bill continued to launch fusion torpedoes into the thing’s body. Its miles of starship stomach was coming apart, haunted by the hundreds of specters released from Lizzie’s cellar. Blaze thought of Trina, in her hibernation pod, at the center of it all. He had to get to her.
Glancing left, he saw Cali chomp
off Xerxes’s slender cylindrical head and send it flying.
Ling tossed Blaze his ax.
Like Fernando said, it was time to fight. The gunnery sergeant, the Shaolin Meelah, and the Clicker doctor all met the oncoming horde. They circled around Elle as she continued to growl her spell.
Blaze chopped with his ax, Ling wheeled his dual glowing nunchakus, and Fernando struck with his spear. These cybernetic vampires weren’t as well armed as the dozens they’d already fought but seemed thrown together shoddily, with whatever scraps Xerxes had left around.
One male vampire was armored with silverware stuck in his skin. Another big vampire had hands augmented with sharp iron spikes, which Blaze chopped off before they could scratch his armor. A few teenage vampires had old-school assault rifles stuck into their arms, but the bullets pinged harmlessly off Blaze’s nanofiber plates.
His ax cleaved their skulls or hacked through their hearts.
Xerxes howled and pulled body parts and scrap metal to him, rebuilding his head and body even as Cali chomped on him over and over. When the archduke managed to throw her off, she would take out vampires by the dozens until she made her way back to the demon-possessed robot, who was repairing and growing his body, utilizing his seemingly endless power.
Blaze’s arm ached as he hacked and chopped and slashed at the oncoming vampires. Ling and Fernando seemed tireless, but they were slowing down as well. And still, the vampires came for them, gnashing their teeth, wanting their blood.
“Elle!” Blaze yelled. “Whatever you’re going to do, you need to do it quickly!”
Then it was Elle’s turn. She tossed out another pair of handcuffs and shrieked the Onyx spell. The hundreds of remaining vampires froze in their tracks. She had used the stasis magic as an area of attack spell.
Blaze saw that casting such a spell took her VHI to thirty percent. But then she reached into a pouch and took out a fistful of something. She scattered them in front of her—they were Human teeth, a lot of them. She then howled a spell. What kind of spell needed Human teeth?
Blaze got his answer a heartbeat later.
The spirits and demons that had escaped from the hold swept down into her, the mystical force slamming her body this way and that. All those pieces of coalesced Onyx energy merged with her spirit.
That couldn’t be good for her. And yet, her VHI spiked back into infinity, or so it seemed. Her vitals were all over the place. Blaze remembered his sister talking about a consume spell, where she could transfer Onyx energy from spirits into her own core. Well, she seemed to have learned it and learned it well.
Xerxes didn’t pause but pulled the statues of paralyzed cyborg vampires to him, slamming their bodies into him, again fashioning vampire armor to try and keep Cali’s claws out of his metallic body. He finally was big enough to latch onto Cali with his huge metal hands. She yelped in frustration, twisting, but caught. “Thhhere, girl. Thhhere, I have you now. I can’t kill you. But I can hhhurt you. And close those damn bracelets.”
Ling was ready. He had an extra nanofiber gauntlet.
Vampire hands closed Cali’s bracelets with a click, and the girl immediately transformed back into her Human form. Ling rolled past clutching clawed hands sprouting from around Xerxes’s slap-dashed body and forced a glove onto Cali’s arm. The nanofiber armor covered her in seconds. She let out a gasp, a cry, and then she was unconscious. She’d been in werewolf form for nearly two hours. She would pay for the energy expenditure by sleeping for days.
The starcycle stinger on Xerxes’s back snapped forward and pierced Ling, transfixing him in place. The Meelah let out a hurt cry through comms then was still, hooked and motionless.
Fernando lifted his spear to throw it, but Xerxes fired a blast of fusion energy, from pistols he’d secreted away. The star energy riddled the Clicker, who clacked in agony and fell.
Next, Xerxes hurled living, gnashing vampire heads at Elle. Blaze leapt in front of her. The heads struck his legs and arms, and they immediately tore through his nanofiber. He was going to get nipped, he was going to get the vampire infection, and nothing could stop it.
Elle threw a silver cross. This time, she didn’t use Onyx speak to cast her spell. No, she used old-school Latin.
Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omni satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica, in nomini et virtute Domini nostri Jesu Christi, eradicare et effugare a Dei Ecclesia, ab animabus ad imaginem Dei conditis ac pretioso divini Agni sanguini redemptis.
The words tumbled from her lips. The Onyx energy covered her, head to toe, in a cloud of malevolent energy, and yet she was using that evil to do the greatest good.
Severed vampire parts tumbled from Xerxes’s patchwork quilt of undead armor. The spiked fleas stopped moving. The starcycle stinger fell from his back, and both it and Ling crashed down onto the metal. Blaze used his ax to cut off vampire heads, but a few, like those on his back, he couldn’t reach. And they continued to gnaw.
And yet, he still watched Elle as she began the process of pulling the demon out of the robot.
Like before, Xerxes’s fearful howls broke through comms. “No! I am this body! Fused. Fused. Hhhow much power hhhave I used? What unspeakable acts hhhave I committed to win thhhis day? No, victory must be mine. It must be mine!”
“Victory is mine, motherfucker,” Elle spat.
The silver cross in front of her exploded like a supernova, blasting across the plane, disintegrating any evil it touched. The vampire heads on Blaze dusted away. The paralyzed cybernetic vampire horde vanished in an instant, all traces of their diseased, translucent flesh gone.
The P13rce unit fell to its knees. The cylindrical head bobbled for an instant and then fell and rolled across the plane. Next to the robot stood the scarlet-skinned demon in his raw form, but only for a moment. The cloven hoofs turned to powder and crumbled away. The demon’s legs folded, and his long-clawed hands reached out in supplication.
Next to the archduke’s true form, the right steel arm fell off the robot, followed by the left.
A goat horn crumbled from the demon’s head. A donkey ear fell off. The jaw on the jackal face came loose to dangle.
Destroyed robot and tattered demon knelt before Blaze’s sister, both bent over and obsequious.
Before in Pearl’s Jewel, when Xerxes had been at full power, seeing his true form had filled Blaze with revulsion. But now, trapped in the exorcism spell, Xerxes seemed sad and pathetic, like a kicked dog.
“I know your true name,” Elle said. “You chose Xerxes because you thought you were a king, but you are nothing but a mewling servant of the Unholy Master, the Lord of Abomination. I take you, Iz. I take you, and I break you.”
Then she eviscerated the scarlet apparition, dumping spectral entrails and a ruby-red pulsing heart out of the thing’s hairy body. Blood sprayed across the metal plane before bubbling away into space. The robot came apart next. Bolts, springs, and spiked fleas bounced around until no two parts were attached.
“It is finished,” Elle said. “Father, into your hands, I commend his spirit. But not my own. My soul is my own, forever more. Touch it, Lord God, and I will pull you from heaven and crush you underfoot.”
She turned on Blaze. Her armor drifted off her in pieces, the nanotech destroyed by her outpouring of dark energy.
He glanced at her VHI. It was negative fifty percent. Then it dropped to a negative hundred, and then it was just an impossibly large negative number ticking away towards negative infinity. Ling, Fernando, and Cali, lying in her spacesuit on the ground, were below ten percent, but they were stable.
But his sister. What had his sister become?
“Elle, are you okay?”
She regarded him. She wasn’t breathing, and her skin wasn’t being affected by the deadly freeze of open space.
She raised her hands.
The rest of the colonizer monster came apart above them. The tentacles ate through the head a
nd torso, and the gravity well sucked away the legs and lower back. Only the belly of the monster remained, but it was being drawn toward the neutron star.
As was the garbage and derelict ships that remained, all being sucked down and crushed into nothing by the star corpse.
“I have to get to Trina,” Blaze said. “And if there are any demons and ghosts from the cellar, we need to collect them.”
Still, his sister didn’t speak. Well, she could have her moment of evil and victory, but he had to save Trina. He started to run toward Ling’s cast-off starcycle.
Then he couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.
“Simple. You are such a simple thing, Ramon,” Elle whispered. “Kill the bad guy and save the girl and get her in the end. Ride off into the sunset and leave her with a broken heart. Simple. Cliché. Laughable. But you know about family now, the tragedy of family, the love of family, the ties that bind. Perhaps you can transcend your cliché after all.”
The words hurt. He’d been proud of being a simple kind of man, so what she said stung. And the way his sister talked about their family scared him a bit.
While his sister held him paralyzed, she took out a honeycomb and tossed it. With a guttural cough of Onyx speak, she healed Ling, Fernando, and Cali. The first two popped up, but the werewolf girl slept on.
Bill clicked in their ears. The Lizzie Borden landed next to them and the cargo bay lowered. His beaten-up ship looked like someone had taken a hammer to it. It was going to take a lot of welding and duct tape to fix her.
Fernando and Ling approached cautiously. “Bill says that though he saved you, he still hates you. And that the neutron star is becoming increasingly more unstable. It’s going to consume the Etrusca ruin within five minutes. We can create a spacetime wave to get away, but we need to do it now.”
“Spacetime. It’s a quaint notion,” Elle murmured. “But I see it now. I see it all now.”
Fernando left the silent Meelah, who seemed troubled, and approached Elle. “Come, my darling, my sweet Elle. Come. The battle is over. You can be Human again. You can let go.”