FSE

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formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter 10

Dressed again in his enchanted and armored leather jacket, his very-comfortable and very not-hospital issue denim jeans, and a fresh white t-shirt, John Silverstone strode right out of the hospital without anyone thinking twice. Since he wasn't limping and didn't look like a patient, nobody bothered to check the log of furs that should be prevented from leaving if possible. Not that they could. He hadn't done anything wrong, so could check himself out at any time. Though, strictly speaking, it wasn't a very good idea for a variety of reasons.

Mack, likewise, had no cause to hide. He wasn't even a patient any more, having been checked out and cleared of any lingering issues three days before. The big golden lion in his rumpled khaki slacks, button-up white shirt, and college letter athletic jacket just walked right on out the front doors.

Kolter, though, knew his boss would be called in a hot second if the hospital staff noticed he'd disappeared. So the wounded snow leopard had to sneak through the building, sticking to shadows, limping along at his best speed to find any way out of the building. That his absence would be discovered was inevitable. He only hoped he could get far enough from the hospital to affect a rescue for Jeff Castillas and the old priest Father Dover before his brother cops could shut him down.

Finally, after what felt like hours of sneaking through the still-active night time hospital, driven on by that strange almost manic feeling that had motivated him to suggest the course of action in the first place, he found a rear service entrance and pushed it open, thanking whoever was watching over him that no siren started up, despite the 'alarm will sound' sign painted above the push bar.

Illinois summer heat hit him right in the face as he stepped outside, leaving him instantly feeling as if his fur was dripping with the wet. A fog had rolled in, thick and cloying like the arctic leopard was trying to swim in a stilled hot tub filled with chalk dust, blinding him to anything more than a few feet from the tip of his muzzle. All that was visible in the hospitals' rear parking lot were glowing ephemeral balls of light, floating like will-o-wisps above darkened earth beneath.

Careful, he told himself with an exhausted inward laugh, legend says they lead you to danger. His gut, held together by sutures and bandage, pulsed angrily, despite the heavy-duty painkillers he'd been shot up on just before slipping out of his room.

_ _

Then two new wisps winked into sight, those of an approaching car's headlights. Kolter limped toward where he guessed the curb might be, and waited, hoping they were his particular ride and not a hospital staffer coming on-duty an hour late. The clammy fog stuck to him like a sodden cotton blanket, and for a moment he wondered if the lights were just sitting there, never coming closer, all sense of distance obliviated by the darkness and obstructing mist.

For a moment, a throbbing sense of panic rose in the veteran detective's chest. Those lights were never getting closer, and neither was the end of this investigation. They had nothing to go on, no lead to follow. All he could do was go to where the fight had happened and hope to find some scrap of evidence that would lead them in the right direction.

Then odd certainty came over him. He did know where to look, somehow. All of a sudden, his nerves calmed, and the snow leopard's eyes rose of their own accord. The car had pulled up, and John Silverstone was fiddling with a bit of dark-colored metal, looking a bit perplexed with his tongue half stuck out of his maw. Mack Franklin unlocked the car with a thunk of automatic doors, and rolled the passenger side rear window down.

His voice was gruff, aggravated.

"I know it's not fucking pretty, okay? Get in the damn car and let's get moving before someone notices us!"

With a grimace of pain as he held his stomach with one paw, Kolter opened the door and slid inside, hearing crumbly seat cushioning in the 20 year old vehicle crunch under his rear while he settled in place and hunted for a seat belt.

"It's fine, Mr. Franklin. I've ridden in much worse."

Snapping the seat belt into place almost made him vomit from the surge of drug-dulled pain. The snow leopard just leaned his hot face up against the cool of the window glass, and made a gesture with one paw, telling them to start driving.

John Silverstone's voice, sounding a bit perplexed, sounded up as the car engine started to rumble.

"This metal thing just sorta...Appeared in my pocket. I'm guessin' it's Doc Theorem helping us out. Weird...He usually calls. Uh. White dot on the north side of it. Go north?"

"I'd love to. We're not moving."

"What the ...?"

Kolter blinked, at the confused statement from Silverstone, and that matter-of-fact statement from Mack, and looked around. Sure enough, though he could feel the engine revving beneath their feet, they weren't moving at all. With a grunt, he pointed at a darker spot in the fog, drawing the other two's attention to it. John rolled down his window with a crinky-crank of the old twist handle, likely in case he had to use that gun of his.

Out of the fog emerged a small, pallid figure, ghostly and waifish-thin, wrapped up in what Kolter for a moment thought was a white burial shroud. Reddish fur looked dimmed to grey in the washed-out distant lights that burned out their luminescence struggling to emerge from the choking fog.

For a moment, he thought she might be a doll, so small and pale and unreal-looking in that strange lighting. Then he realized she was holding out a paw, paw-pads up like she were lifting something, and the leopard looked down at the ground beneath them. He could hear the wheels of the car spinning through John's open window. Whoever this was, she'd lifted their car up off the ground.

Mack barked out at her in a leonine growl that hurt Kolter's aching head.

"Eve?! Goddamnit! Go back to your room!"

"No," she said, in a whisper, as she took the rear driver's side door handle in paw. In a few seconds, the tiny slip of a vixen was on the back bench seat, bent over forward with her arms hugged around her middle. Kolter could see she was shaking, though not from fear or cold, despite the fact she was wearing no more than a simple paper hospital gown.

Her eyes were too wide, too staring, for fear. She was angry, obsessed, driven to do...Something.

Suddenly, as she finished clasping her seatbelt primly in place, the car's wheels touched ground and the whole vehicle surged forward. Eve spoke in a tone so soft Kolter could barely hear it over the engine noise, though even so it chilled him deep down inside.

"We're going to save Jeff. It's my fault the team wasn't there to help him in the first place. I'm not letting you go without me."

The Iron Horse had been a legend in the superhero community for many, many years. The name was a mantle of sorts, passed down from one paw to another, one worker-hero to the next, borne upon the old and work-pitted hammer that Patricia 'Tish' Henry now swung with gusto and taunting laughter as she waded through a tide of shrieking, warbling foes. Her father had been the Iron Horse before her, and his adoptive father before that, back to the time of half-mythic John Henry and his celebrated battle with the Inkypoo.

Sometimes, when Tish took a second to relax between all the hours spent as a high school freshman studying, or as a superhero heavily involved in strength and combat self-training, she thought the hammer might in fact have been older still. Though it gave her all the strength, steam, heat and invulnerability of a mighty steam-train engine, not all the vibrant images it fed to her in her sleep, memories of battle and heroism from its previous wielders, seemed nearly so modern.

None of that meant much though at that moment, as she whirled the mighty sledgehammer all the way around her body in a looping strike, and delivered a crushing blow to the side of an oncoming monster's skull, scattering its brains and teeth halfway across the street before she spun to face the one that was impotently clawing at her back, shredding her shirt and pretty pink backpack.

"Oh, motherfucker, NO YOU DIDN'T!" the teenage girl bellowed, before clamping her jaw shut. The steam boiling through her core began to thicken and pressurize, as she stoked the coals in her furnace of a gut to a roiling blaze. The monstrosity, taken aback by the sudden change in its enemy's behavior and her utter lack of wounds from its savage assault, took a cautious step back, warbling at her and lashing its tentacles around as if seeking for a weapon, as more of the black-skinned fang-covered things began emerging from alleyways to reinforce the dozen or so she'd already crushed and splattered across the block.

When she opened her maw, furnace-hot red light blazed forth, limning the darkened street in a hellish scarlet light. Then, with the bellow of a great rail line's engine roaring its triumphant passage, like the shrieking howl of Hell and escaping steam horn pressure, she belched forth a cloud of whirling water that exploded forward when it struck air, passing over the howling monster and its brethren behind it.

The steam shrieked nearly as loud as the monsters when it touched their flesh, broiling skin into sizzling, scalded fat that slid slimily off their bones, heating their eyes to bursting from their skulls, and sending them howling silently with fried throats to the pavement, clawing at their molten faces.

Letting out a little post-attack burp, Iron Horse looked around, wiped water that coated her face off with the back of her shirt sleeve, and gave a self-satisfied nod. At the moment, her area was clear, but for the twitching, gurgling remains of a dozen or more of the monsters she'd so enjoyed crushing and swatting about like flies. And the barely-breathing bulk of an overweight older cop, who she'd laid up against the wreckage of his police cruiser.

From inside, she heard a second survivor, a gasping voice filled with pain as the tigress inside regained enough consciousness to feel agony once again.

"Hold yer horses, ya pussy," she grunted gutturally, grinning at her own joke, and stomped her little feet as she strode over toward the crumpled-in driver's side door. It was crushed in, positively smashed by impact from the fanged horror that had driven the two officers off the road. With fingers hard as forged steel, she dug into the metal, hearing it shriek and screech as she grabbed ahold of something solid inside the door. When she yanked back, the ravaged door groaned as if in terrible birthing pain, then wrenched free, smashing her across the face with the suddenness of its release, sending Iron Horse onto her ass on the broken pavement.

"Hah, fucking car," she grumbled, rubbing at the steely skin under her fur as she kicked the wrecked door away. Inside the squad car, which still glimmered with one functional, flashing blue and red light, a crumpled and bloody tigress lay listlessly groaning in the driver's seat, the multiple airbag system having saved her life if only just.

Having little knowledge of first aid that would do any good for normal furs, Tish reached past the bloody, mumbling, shocky girl, and grabbed at the dangling, curlicued cord of the radio car's handset, and brought it to her muzzle, futzing with the buttons a moment before squeezing one down that got her the crackle of static.

"Hey uh...Officers down I guess?" she said, uncertain of the lingo and going largely off what she'd seen on TV. "You better come get 'em. Uh. Because there's a lot more of these tentacle fuckers where those came from."

After a few more seconds listening to crackling static and strange sounds that would have unsettled most, the filly snorted and dropped the transmitter.

"Well okay, fuck that then...I'm gonna carry you two outta here. Tentacled assholes'll getcha otherwise. Hope you don' mind Hell's Kitchen a bit..."

In a sky brilliant with streamers of energy visible only to his pure-energy eyes, Tokamak swooped down atop a column of thrust emitted from the converters in his armored suit's feet. The creatures swarming out of Dr. Theorem's home detected to his energy sense as billowing masses of entropy, denizens of the netherworld, and thus his rules against killing the occupants of the Earth dimension were null.

Both shining silvery fists extended, the alien juggernaut plowed into a mob of the creatures, scattering them like bowling pins struck by a flying cannonball, many of them flying away in scattering carpet of gory bits or burned to a seared crisp by the column of plasma fire that propelled him. Still more streamed from the now-burning domicile, hissing and warbling out the sound waves he registered as energy movement rather than noise.

All around, as he leveled out and rose a few stories into the air, Tokamak saw the roiling terror of students and staff in the form of cast-off body heat and pheromones, as the college's fleshling inhabitants fled the scene of carnage and violence. Dr. Theorem's home was just past the edge of campus, so close the old lynx often opened his windows to leisurely listen to and enjoy the sounds of mingled voices and laughing youngsters on the quad nearby. To Tokamak's alien eyes, that susurrus was a rainbow of colors and wave-forms beyond the human capacity to perceive, colors beyond indigo in an infinite magnificent rainbow fabric of interwoven patterns.

Once, long ago, he had spoken to his own people of the beauty he perceived outside the glowing ball of their world. He had argued passionately, in terms of science and magnificence, beauty and color, of the glory that was to be beheld without. For that argument, which broke with their principle of isolationism, he was exiled. To protect that beauty, that pattern which was the furries of his adoptive world, he would give anything of himself. It would not be the first time he had accepted that trade. Now, seeing that pattern beginning to warp, sinking towards the devouring, foul energies of the pit that was opening in Theo's own home, Tokamak felt the surge of unstable energy that indicated he was feeling wrath billow forth within the energy matrix that was his very being.

If he did not stop the infestation that had begun there, and soon, there was no knowing how much of his precious adopted world could be sucked in. Or worse, corrupted, torn and warped into the festering, entropic and foul miasma that was the demon realm.

Everything his suit showed him now spiked from the billion myriads of colors in the reds straight into the ultra-violet ranges as the energy field around him intensified, venting through his armor's many converters and buffers designed to shield the world from the intense radiation that emitted from his natural form. Un-contained, his own body would be lethal to these delicate, beautiful creatures.

Now, he ignored the safeties, emitting from his energetic pattern a titanic surge of power, an ever-increasing storm of radiation and pure unadulterated energy shedding off his real body, through the suit's capacitors and pathways, and out into the monstrosities he faced. Some screamed, falling away from him with their faces slagging away, bone underneath blackening from the heat and radiation. Others swarmed toward him, howling out their wrath and agony as if energized by the sensation.

He plowed into the hell-spawned monstrosities yet again, flying so fast that broken glass shivered and danced on the ground, a concerto of vibration to mirror his thrumming assault. Tokamak burst straight through one massive abomination that towered twenty feet tall, ripping through its chest and leaving it a smoking wreck of flesh and demon-essence on the ground. A dozen more he disintegrated, atomizing them instantly with a furious blast of gamma radiation and solar plasma.

A glance toward Doctor Theorem's home and sanctum told him he would not be able to stem the tide by slaying its product. Like holding back a rampaging river, he had to somehow repair the dam, and let others worry about the flood waters. The energies within had twisted and smashed together, Abyssal darkness and scintillating wizard-light locked in an energetic commingle, a struggle of magic and power and death.

He could see that the darkness was overwhelming the light, filling the area within that home with a growing patch of devouring black. Tokamak whirled, turning in midair in a way that made his suit groan with the strain, and plunged through the building's outer wall, straight into the dimension-ripping fray within.

Gyro's computer-enhanced neural processing could handle many times what would overwhelm a normal person's mind and reduce them to a confused and overstimulated stupor. It was for his absolute loyalty to a set of scientific principles that Obliterator could easily predict and conform to that made him a good and desirable partner for the enigmatic mercenary. However, his ability to multi-task came in a close second.

As he administered another 300 cc's of neurovenom to the nameless black jaguar in the Faraday Cage shown on his view screens, that multitasking alerted him to a dozen other feeds of information. He watched four news channels at once, noting that one had gone off-air entirely, that another had an empty news room with nothing but flickering lights and a badly-damaged stage. The other two seemed frantic, speaking of sudden attacks from an unknown enemy across the city, centering mostly on public places and police and fire stations.

While one skein of his consciousness slithered like a spider through the never-ending weave of the internet hunting for source images or specific data on the threat's nature, other parts of his processing power devoted themselves to hacking red-light cameras and monitoring his own security equipment.

While his eyes watched Spotter pick up a foam-padded stick and gently touch it to the back of the black jaguar's testicles, sending him into a spasm of shrieking, twisting, and wetting himself, his paws danced on the instrument controls for his many electronic devices. Simultaneously, his many-tasking mind admired the melanistic jag's utter intransigence, analyzed his personality for reasons why the creature hadn't given up yet, came to a conclusion on how to proceed with the planned brainwashing and recruitment, plotted how to prevent Maric's moralism from driving a wedge between him and the team, and analyzed the on-going chaos in the city.

He likewise watched Spotter grow predictably tired of tormenting the jerking, pissing jaguar, and set down her boffer stick to wander off into the hall. At least, he mused, she was intelligent enough to lock the door behind her.

Then Obliterator's bulk entered the doorway to his lab, and he had to divert a dozen ongoing neural tasks to analyzing his long-time partner.

The massive cougar's measured, clipped gait indicated he was strongly interested in something. His always-measured breath was a sign he still retained total iron vice control of his emotions. However, the wavering storm of electromagnetic energy that surrounded his demonic half-mask and equally devilish Void Gauntlet scintillated in a pattern that indicated anger and conflict between the two competing entities.

The mask and the gauntlet were not, in fact, simple magical devices, Gyro knew. Years ago, Obliterator had been an archaeologist specializing in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian excavation, right up until he'd happened upon the Mask of Bloody Tears. The moment he'd opened that stone sarcophagus, it had leaped to his face, binding to the shocked academic's flesh before he could so much as yell for help. Then it had tried to take over his body, looking for a host through which to work its alien chthonic will.

It hadn't predicted that it's first apparently convenient host would be so strong of will, able to resist its maddening urges and psychotic dreams through sheer stubbornness and refusal to submit to its insane demands. Instead, Obliterator had abandoned his archaeological team and trekked days across the desert, orienting only discerning which direction most infuriated the entity grafted to his mutilated face.

For even demons had enemies, and oftentimes they were other demons. When he'd found the heart of the Mask of Bloody Tears' hatred and increasingly desperate rage, the dehydrated and dying cougar had dug with his bare and bloody paws until he'd found an ancient tomb not dissimilar to the one that had begun his terrifying journey. Within it, he'd discovered the Void Gauntlet, pried it from the paws of the animated mummies that guarded it, and forced it onto his paw.

To this day, some two decades later, he maintained control by carefully managing the neverending stalemate between two greater demons that possessed his body, stealing their powers as he needed them by the use of carefully worded agreements they pursued in the course of seizing any advantage over the other.

Unfortunately, the power did come with a price. No matter how ingenious and insidious Obliterator was in crafting his deals, inevitably there were a few prices that actually needed to be paid. All of this occurred to Gyro in the span of a few instants, as multiple processes collated information and came to understand the current context. Before Obliterator even needed to speak, Gyro answered his question.

"There appear to be demonic entities entering the city through unknown modes of transit. Likelihood is high that a portal or multiple portals have been opened. The mask and gauntlet are demanding you kill the minions of their enemy?"

Obliterator stepped past Gyro, and looked down on his monitors with a baleful countenance, storm clouds building to the tornado point behind his intensely staring eyes. One bright red, glowing with maleficent intent, seemed almost gleeful. The other, a deep grey-brown, held all the calculation and coldness of a serpent of legend. His voice came out smooth, bass, and baleful.

"We are about to be attacked."

Gyro's eyes and processes swiftly swept the sensors that festooned all four floors of their skid-row flop house. "I see no sign of an enemy," he responded, all cameras showing clear approaches to their fortified building, not so much as a sleeping hobo to set off his alarms or booby traps.

They had worked together too long to waste time on arguing. Obliterator walked past Gyro, past the empty bed that had housed a resting Maric until just an hour ago, and spoke a simple statement in his gut-vibrating basso voice. Even Gyro, whose body was more machine than fur, felt a little thrill of motion in his gut that he realized was an adrenal response.

"Be ready."

Gyro was reaching a paw towards the console that would activate their building's defensive perimeter when a black shape appeared in the camera looking directly above their building. It plummeted with such speed that Gyro's very analogue paw was still in transit despite his electronic mind's speed of analyzing threat.

The impact came as a sudden shudder of the building, hard enough to knock concrete dust from the ceiling and jostle Gyro up against his control panels as his silent alarm systems started lighting up. The camera, somehow still functional despite being knocked at a kilter, showed clouds of blackness converging in that first larger blot's wake.

The defenses would not prevent enemy entry, with such a sudden and overwhelming breach. Instead of the activation buttons, he touched the intercom unit, even as Obliterator strode out of the chamber to wade into the fray. The switch to activate his claymore mines came immediately thereafter.

"We are under attack from above. Maric, to the basement. Prepare to evacuate our principal and his guest. Spotter, please retrieve the prisoner. Remove him if you can. Euthanize him if you cannot."

"The jag?" her accented drawl came back, by way of clarification.

"Yes."

"On my way!"

"Holy SHIT!" Mack yelped out, as he jammed his wheel hard to the side. His beaten old jalopy let out a terrible moan, as his footpaw slammed the brake, going immediately into a slide half a second before the Dumpster flew right over the top of his low-slung beater and bounced away down the street spewing detritus. It had been on a collision course with the car a moment before.

Eve growled reedily, a high-pitched noise of menace, as her eyes bored into the shadowy mass that had emerged from an unlit alleyway ahead of them. The monster was between them and Jeff, and she'd had enough of its garbage. A second ago, she had slapped its projectile aside by decreasing its gravity and thus weight, throwing its trajectory completely off. Now she focused on the offending monster, and slammed it with the full brunt of her power, feeling like she'd just clenched a muscle to its fullest tension.

It imploded almost instantly, as her gravity well appeared just behind its breastbone, sucking in on itself like an inflatable clown being vacuumed empty, then burst like an overripe pear being struck with a baseball bat as the pressure suddenly escaped in messy, final fashion.

"Good one, Eve!" John yelled, as he smacked Mack on the shoulder in exultation, laughing and holding up that black patch of metal they used as a compass. "Keep going, Mack, we're almost there, I can feel it!"

Letting his foot off the brake, his car coasted a moment, wheels catching road again before he accelerated with a roar of the engine, as if his car champed at the bit to be loosed upon their foes, just like its driver, who now growled in aggravation and focus. They'd just nearly been killed, he thought to himself, yet Eve and John seemed to be utterly unaffected. He couldn't let himself fall behind, either.

Kolter was looking a bit green, there in the back seat next to Eve, as he loaded individual bullets into a fresh magazine for his pistol. Maybe it was a trick of the light, or maybe a distortion brought on by gasping adrenaline, but the bullet's tips looked blacker than night to Mack's brief glance, as he checked the rear-view mirror before taking a hard turn onto a street filled with old burnt-out cars and empty of life.

Empty until he looked up, eye caught by a sudden flash, as something up in the pitch dark nighttime sky was hit, hard, by a lancing beam of scarlet. That devilish light reflected off thousands of shapes, like a horde of gigantic bats, that swooped in a great stream towards what he knew with gut-sunken certainty was their target.

"What the FUCK?" he exclaimed, by way of question, as the others just stared. John, the grizzled veteran, smacked him in the shoulder.

"Watch the road, not the demons!"

"DEMONS?!" The footballer felt his intestines clench up, like he was about to crap himself.

Kolter's voice, gruff and harsher even than John's, gave a quiet order that chilled Mack and fluffed the tuff of his tail.

"They're just simple winged fiends. We'll fight our way through them to your friend. Have some faith in your team, kid."

"The hell do you mean 'simple?!'" Mack demanded, voice filled with a thunderous growl as he twisted the wheel again, zipping around a tentacled beast that burst from the shadows in a vain attempt to stop them. The steering shaft of his car groaned, the old muscle-age beater's solid steel construction the only thing that stopped him wrenching it into the shape of a banana. "What does a cop know about demons?!"

Kolter just stared at him, through the rearview mirror, his eyes dark and strangely distant, as he intoned words that sounded so utterly wrong that Mack felt his fur fluffing up again even as he was trying to concentrate on dodging yet another tentacled beast.

"Everything, my dear boy."

The lion wondered whether it was just the bad, fast-moving lighting that made Kolter's eyes look so black, like never-ending pits of night buried in his pale white-furred face. Then he had no more time to wonder about it, as his steaming car roared up alongside a six-story tenement structure, and John yelled out, arm extending over the dash to point out the windshield. Mack pressed the brakes, pumping his leg to correct for his lack of antilock brakes.

"The compass is pulsing, we're close! He's in that place somewhere!"

"Oh fucking great," Mack said, as he looked up toward the sky. It was invisible, concealed behind the swirling tornado of wings and tentacles, shadows and scarlet beams lancing through them. "We're gonna fucking die."

As if that was their cue to attack, the front doors of the crumbling, condemned structure exploded outward in a shower of dry rot, and a slithering swarm of tentacled beasts came shrieking forth, many of them already bleeding ebony gore from holes and burns and cuts as they came, reaching out with their tendrils like zombies from a Romero flick.

Eve shoved her door open and unceremoniously slid out of her seat before anyone could grab her, or decide on a course of action. As her white hospital gown fluttered in the wind like a reverse cloak, she threw her paws wide and did something she'd never done before. Two gravity wells burst into existence, invisible but for sudden warping of the air that seemed to draw color and light toward them as she set the two bubbles of darkness on either side of the swarming horde.

With the suddenness of a slamming door, easily half the coming wave flew in either direction, or in both in the case of the unfortunates at the very center, torn in half by the sudden gravitational shearing force of two microscopic gravitic singularities being generated by Gravity Girl. The sheer weight of oncoming foes caused the holes to collapse upon themselves, crushed by their own mass, and blasted their recently-gained and gravity-scrambled contents back into the center of the coming demon-creatures with all the force and sound of a dozen detonating claymore mines.

One moment, all had been shrieking mayhem and warbling monstrosities. Now, the only sound to be heard was that of wings far overhead, the distant fszzAT! of Obliterator's blasts towards the sky, and a pitter-patter of falling gore and flesh chunks. Then Eve turned toward the car, stamped her bare foot against the pavement, and yelled shrilly at her team.

"Stop staring at my ass and get out here! We have a fight to win!"

The first to hit pavement was John, who sprinted around the coughing, dying car with his pistol already drawn. Two more demons emerged from the darkened entry hall, and met their end in the staccato pop-pop! of his Mark 1911 pistol and the sizzle of its enchanted ammunition. They fell with holes in their foreheads that burned with a silvery light, the effects of a ward meant to hold out demons being quite different when shoved inside a demon's body.

"Two teams!" he yelled, gesturing at the building in front of them as he ran. "We can't fight them all, we gotta find Jeff and the priest and run! Mack, you and Kolter together! Eve, you and me!"

The black jaguar couldn't even remember his own name, at that moment. The pain had lasted so long and been so all-pervasive, seeping through every root of his body, that all matters less necessary than breathing and screaming had vanished behind a veil of thought-obliterating fugue. Still, a strange sense of stubbornness reappeared every time that paw came back, caressing his ears, wiping sweat off his back, telling the pain to stop and asking for his name. Even if he'd remembered it, he wouldn't have given it, though the jaguar no longer recalled why he was so determined to give these bastards nothing, or even why he hated them so very much.

He'd tried every trick he'd ever read to resist. He'd tried making up mantras in his head, but they shattered every time he was shocked with new and horrific pain. He had tried thinking about good memories, but found himself empty of them more and more as his body struggled and grew exhausted to the point of total slackness. He hadn't had many to begin with. Soon all he had to focus on, all that kept him going through the agony, was a stubborn refusal to give in, a refusal whose source he couldn't fathom.

Even he knew, in that terrible twilight between mind-shattering suffering and unconsciousness, that any sane creature would have given up a long time ago just to make the hurting stop.

Somehow, he managed to remember one other thing, whenever the paw came and the pain stopped. He remembered he had power, an ability to control the lights he saw dancing all around him in a cage of brilliance reflecting off the black metal that held him in this horrid hell. At first, in the short breaks he was given while that deep, dark, voice praised him, he could make nothing happen. The Faraday Cage he was trapped within had been built to channel all current away and out, and the simple strength of its physical laws were enough to overpower him.

Then, as time went on, as the breaks went beyond his ability to consciously count, he began to forget successively more and more things. He forgot what a Faraday Cage was, what its name meant, what his own name was, where he was, why he was here. Deep down within himself, he remembered only that he was a person, a powerful person, a person who was being wronged. Soon enough, all he could feel was pain, exhaustion, and anger. Any ideas about the workings of physics or electricity were long gone.

Finally, he had silence. It lasted only a few moments, or perhaps hours as he hung in that darkened room, lights gone, his only sight being that of the glimmering white that streamed down through the Cage around him. Electrovision, he realized, though the provenance of that word eluded his notice entirely. He could see the charge moving, the streams of electrons swapping atoms, moving in an endless downward streaming dance. Dancing over one another, ionizing air, leaving the ozone scent that spoke of thunderstorms and industry.

He breathed in that scent, an old and comforting friend from days of experimenting with his powers, months and years spent alone in dim places lit only by the glow of arcing currents, spurred on by the potent thrumming scent of thunderstorms and heavy rain. The ions danced to his call, and pulled away from the bars of the Faraday Cage in tune with the susurrus of his breath.

I am not a generator, he thought to himself, in a moment of delirious clarity, as the pain faded away into the death-black that surrounded him, I am the lord of lightning.

_ _

Everything had gone silent in the room, then, all but the sounds of electricity arcing on metal having vanished into a nighttime cloak of unimportance, with the gravity of what he had just unveiled.

And a Faraday Cage won't work if it's not shaped right.

_ _

First, he inhaled again, and watched the blistering electrical current warp and writhe on the iron bars that surrounded him. Then he exhaled, pushing it away, and quickly breathed in another time, as if he were huffing to blow out a cake or push a paper boat across water. When the electricity touched him, it felt like a string of heat and light, pleasant and familiar. Taking hold of it with his muzzle, he exerted his will, and thrust the arc of current downward, until it struck the padded cuffs holding him to the Cage.

With a crackle, the metal of the cuff began to heat up, its material channeling the current he arced out of his body. However, it was not made to be a near perfectly-resistance-less material, and began to heat up as the electricity found its path obstructed by non-conductive inclusions in the metal and had to force its way around or through them. Within moments, he smelled the hot metal beginning to singe his fur, and yanked hard against both chains at once.

A soft crackling sound told him he'd warped the metal just as he'd intended, and that sudden application of force had popped the hasps of his cuffs free. He then grabbed at the cooler parts of the cuffs, holding the smoldering edges away from his skin, and began manipulating the things with his fingers, creating a crude double-helix shape by holding the cuffs together just so.

Working swiftly despite a wave of dizziness, as he was uncertain how long it would be before his vicious captors returned, he first forced current through and around the cuffs, causing them to float free of paws held parallel to one another. Then he pushed up the amperage, intensifying his voltage as he did, exhaling all over the cuffs to force the lightning that brewed in his heart to enact his will.

In moments, the sizzling pop of superheated steel and the smell of burnt impurities regaled him with the success of his creation. He'd successfully created a coil, a metal piece that would heat up at a controlled rate when current was run through it. If he was lucky, it would heat up just enough for what he needed before it turned to boiling slag.

Just as the glowing white-hot metal coil touched the bars of the Faraday Cage, he heard a strange noise; a harsh metallic 'click,' that he suddenly remembered was the sound of a door unlocking. It had presaged so many of the torture sessions, and his heart leapt into his throat as horror rushed, morbid and nearly all-consuming, through his body. He felt his bladder give again, hot wetness running down his leg as his muscles tensed and his whole body started to shiver in an earthquake of terror. They were back, the pain was returning, they would demand to know his name and burn his nerves to cinders again for his stubbornness.

He curled into a ball, arms tight as steel bands around his knees, as the door began to open. That sliver of light drove a shaft of ice through him, as he lost track of time and space, and stared into his father's leering brown-grey eyes. He'd always opened the door like that, with a flashlight showing his way, that foul smile of his reminding Jeff that his mother wouldn't be home for another hour, work keeping her late every day as it did. He wasn't even sure it was real memory, or just one of the lurid nightmares he'd suffered for years after his father's death. His skin crawled, as if it were going to slither off his body, and he wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball so small he'd never be seen again.

This time, though, he knew the truth; where once he'd been a small child, frightened and powerless, now he had the strength, the power, the control, to change things. Contrary to the desire to hide, it roiled in his gut, demanding to be used, angry that it was not already cooking the things that hurt him. When the door yanked itself open and the black-backed golden jackal entered with her side to him, he flung the white-hot coil of metal at his cage's bars with a massive surge of electrical charge, shoving it forward with its own induced electromagnetism.

The jackal was looking back down the hall, that long, menacing rifle of hers raised to a shoulder. Jeff didn't realize she was firing, not at first, though the 'CHOOM-CHOOM' of its high-velocity reports battered his dizzied inner ears ferociously.

With a clink and a hiss, his coil hit the bars, warped around the harder metal, and then flew through in a blast of fast-moving molten bits, hitting the unsuspecting super all along her left side like a burst water balloon. It also tore a hole through the Faraday Cage's lock. Jeff had already reared back by then, grabbed the bars behind him, and threw his body out straight, insensate to the pain in the bones of his footpaws when they slammed with all of his strength into the wrought iron of the cage's door and sent it falling to the ground with a resounding boom.

The keen of iron bars ringing on bare concrete inured his ears for just a moment to the shrieking. By the time the naked, filthy jaguar crawled from the now-inert cage, though, he saw just what his ears were failing to tell him. Spotter, the black-backed jackal female who'd so enjoyed smacking his balls with a padded foam bat, was lying on the floor screaming, her rifle having fallen to one side as she clawed at her body armor, which smoked and hissed in a dozen places where his impromptu grenade had hit her. The molten metal had seared through cloth and ballistic fiber, pushed through by the force of his induced electromagnetic thrust, and now was against her skin, boiling and cooking it all up her side.

Her eyes were wide with terror and agony, as she arched and writhed, clawing at herself, tearing a strap off her armor in the futile attempt to get the complex suit opened. Then she saw him, standing there, fur all mussed, body coiled in the predator's enraged pose, stinking of piss and thunder. He took a step toward her, with every intent to finish her off if she attacked and to help her get the suit off if she didn't, when she simply vanished, activating her teleportation power to effect an escape.

Then the warbling, shrieking, gibbering calls of some unknown enemy echoed down the halls in the absence of her screams. The naked jaguar stepped out onto the spot where Spinner had been a moment before, flinching hard as his right footpaw came down and sent a lance of pain up his body that barely registered after the torments of the previous hours. It refused to hold his weight as well, and he sagged against the door frame, exhausted and realizing his foot was likely broken from kicking that iron door. Before he had time to worry about that, though, he saw the source of the hellish screeching, as a dozen tentacle-covered beasts rounded a corner, some sporting fresh bullet wounds that gouted blackened blood.

They saw him, and as one their mouths opened wide, full of shark-like teeth, screaming as they came. Xolotl grinned, as Jeff closed his eyes and let the power flow.